True Crime Campfire - Caustic: The Murder of Timothy Schuster

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

Anger is a double-edged sword. When it’s justified, and properly channeled, it can be a powerful force for positive change. But often, anger is like a strangling vine, winding its way around us, choking us with rage until we can’t see straight, can’t think straight, can’t tell right from wrong. It’s powerful stuff. And when anger flames out of control, it doesn’t matter how smart we are, or how much good we may have done in our lives up til now. If we let it overtake us, we’re going to leave ashes in our wake. Sources:Investigation Discovery's "Sins and Secrets," Episode "Fresno"Lifetime's "Deadly Wives," Episode "Acid Lady"Oxygen's "Snapped," Episode "Larissa Schuster"https://www.nydailynews.com/true-crime-justice-story/ny-acid-queen-murder-larissa-schuster-20201203-l3sgjjhjf5htnj3ponl2k76zva-story.htmlhttps://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1557281.htmlhttps://murderpedia.org/female.S/s/schuster-larissa.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]: 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. Anger is a double-edged sword. When it's justified and properly channeled, it can be a powerful force for positive change. but often anger is like a strangling vine, winding its way around us, choking us with rage until we can't see straight, can't think straight, can't tell right from wrong. It's powerful

stuff, and when anger flames out of control, it doesn't matter how smart we are or how much good we may have done in our lives up till now. If we let it overtake us, we are going to leave ashes in our wake. This is Kostick, the murder of Timothy Schuster. So, campers, we're in the pretty little town of Clovis, California, July 10, 2003. Tim Schuster was supposed to meet up with his friend and co-worker Mary Salis, and her husband Bob for breakfast. Tim and Mary were both nurses at St. Agnes Medical Center,

and the week before, they'd both been laid off. They both had their exit interviews scheduled with HR that morning to talk about severance packages and all that kind of depressing stuff, and afterward they were going to meet up, have pancakes, and commiserate over their mutual misery. Mary and Bob went to the restaurant, got a table, sat down and waited, but Tim didn't show. He didn't call either, and that was totally foreign to Tim's character.

The suit was almost irritatingly punctual. He'd never leave his friends hanging. And when Mary and Bob called the hospital and found out that Tim had missed his exit interview with human resources, they started to get worried. So they called Tim's best friend, Vic Uribe. Vic had a key to Tim's house, so he decided to go over and check on him. He let himself in, calling for Tim. The place was eerily still and quiet. There were dirty dishes in the sink that looked to be from dinner the night before, which struck

Vic is odd. Tim was a bit of a neat freak, so he didn't usually leave dishes out. Vic went from room to room, looking for any clue he could find to where his buddy might be. He didn't find Tim, but he did find Tim's truck in the garage, and his watch, wallet, and cell phone in the house. The cell phone in particular was a big red flag. Tim took that thing everywhere, even when he went jogging. He wanted to make sure he was always easy to get hold of if one of his kids, 13-year-old Tyler or 18-year-old Kristen, needed him. All this added up to big confusion, and big worry. And when they still hadn't heard from Tim 24 hours later, Bob and Mary Salis called the Clovis police and reported him missing.

They tried not to think the worst. I mean, maybe he'd just dropped everything for a weekend in Vegas or some time alone up in the mountains. He had a lot going on in his life. But they couldn't help but wonder if he'd gotten so despondent. He'd just lost his job, he was going through a divorce, that he'd taken his own life. and scariest of all

Tim's divorce with his soon-to-be ex-Larissa was getting ugly, like about as ugly as it can get. Larissa was calling him up all the time, leaving voice messages that had to be heard to be believed, just dripping with venom and F-bombs and threats.

Recently, she'd practically had an aneurysm over a set of mixing bowls she thought were rightfully hers, freaked out to the point of threatening to call the cops if he didn't give him back to her, which good luck with that Wouldn't you love to see the look on the cop's face? He has four of my mixing bowls.

Whoop, whoop, whoo, you know, call out the cavalry, get the sirens going. Like, you kidding me? And, funnily enough, not long after that phone call, somebody had broken into Tim's house and stolen, among a handful of other things, the mixing bowls. So it seemed like an awful big co-winky dink, right? Tim couldn't prove it, but, like, obviously it was Larissa. Like, if she'd lose her shit that badly over mixing bowls, what else might she be capable of? This is what his friends were wondering now.

Now, Larissa herself hadn't bothered to report Tim missing. This, despite the fact that their custody sharing schedule had him set to pick up Tyler on the afternoon of the 10th and he hadn't shown up. They usually exchanged Tyler at the nail salon, where Larissa got her manny petties. And on that afternoon, her manicurist said Larissa seemed unusually upbeat. lately all she'd wanted to talk about was that bastard Tim and how much she despised him and how he was trying to screw her over in the divorce and take half of what she'd worked her ass off for 20 years to build and blah blah blah blah blah but on this day Larissa was all smiles she said I have a feeling the divorce is going to go my way Tyler had waited outside for his dad for a while and then given up and come back in uncharacteristically very uncharacteristically Larissa didn't seem angry that Tim had seen stood them up. Hmm.

It hadn't always been so venomous between Tim and Larissa. They'd met at university when Tim was in nursing school and Larissa was doing a graduate program in biochemistry. Two smart cookies. Other than that, though, they were pretty much polar opposites, personality

wise, at least. Larissa was a classic extrovert, gregarious, funny, as fizzy as a glass of champagne. And she was laser focused on her goals, determined to be a roaring success in every aspect of her life. Definitely a type A personality. On the other hand, Tim was shy, tender-hearted, laid back, and totally devoted to Larissa.

He seemed almost in awe of her sometimes, and he was happy to sign on as her sidekick. They got married in 1982. A few years later, they had Kristen, then Tyler. And in 1989, Larissa landed a dream. dream job at an agricultural lab in Clovis, California. Tim took a gig as a nurse administrator at St. Agnes Hospital in Fresno. He was good at it, caring, soft-spoken, respected by the other nurses, but it soon became clear that Larissa was the rock star in the family. A few years after they moved to California, she started her own lab. She was, as always, determined to succeed,

and she was willing to put in the time and effort to make sure that happened. She worked grueling hours, and while she was doing that, Tim picked up the slack at home. He was still working, but he worked normal human hours. At home, he was the kid's main caregiver, and he was happy to do it. He was the one who cooked dinner, helped the kids with their homework, read them their bedtime stories, tuck them in at night, and of course, that's what made it possible for Larissa to do what she needed to do to grow her business. Before long, Larissa's lab had grown into a multi-millarice. million-dollar concern. Her employees loved working for her. She was a brilliant scientist and a

fair boss, and they all learned a lot from her. She was the boss at home, too. According to Tim's friends, Mary and Bob Solis, Tim didn't seem to mind letting her drive the bus. Larissa made all the major decisions. If Tim didn't like it, he'd kept that to himself. For the most part, anyway, he was a psychic, just like he always had been. That was okay for a while. As long as she got to be the unquestioned dictator for life, Larissa was happy. Tim didn't have a problem with that. But once she hit her teenage years, daughter Kristen decided she did.

Uh-oh. And she went for that teenage rebellion thing, full force. Suddenly, somebody was daring to challenge the boss lady. Oh, dear. Kristen snuck out of the house to meet up with boys. She ignored her curfew, and she sass the hell out of her mom. Her dad may have been scared to stand up to Larissa, but Kristen was not. So no, the piece that had come from an uncontested power structure shattered like cheap glass.

And Larissa did not take it well. I know. I know you are just shocked to hear that. campers. Yeah, I figured she'd be cool with it. She sent Kristen to Missouri to live with her grandparents. Tim didn't want to do it. He didn't think packing their daughter off to a different state was the solution to the problem. He went along with it because that was the long-established pattern in their marriage, but he didn't like it and he couldn't pretend he did. Yeah, and that was probably the first thread that started their marriage unraveling.

To Tim, it seemed like Larissa just turned on a dime, became a totally different person. And that actually can happen sometimes, as weird as it sounds. I'm sure some of y'all have experienced it. It was like that with one of my exes. Like, we had this great year and a half. And then it was like he got possessed by an asshole demon who, like, wasn't happy unless he was telling me I was brushing my teeth the wrong or sifting the flower wrong for the cake I was making or whatever. Like, literally this man told me I brushed my teeth wrong. And I was like, well, I brush him like my dentist.

showed me when I was a kid, and he was like, well, your dentist is wrong. Like, that's, that's a narcissist. Wow, right? It's pretty bonkers. Of course, it may have been that Larissa had been changing for a while, and Tim just didn't see it. Doesn't sound like they spent a ton of time together. But whatever the truth, Larissa's attitude shift was a huge blow to Tim, and he felt completely blindsided by it. His formerly loving life had turned into this mean stranger, always putting him down and find him fault with everything he did. She'd lost all respect for him. She started trashing him constantly at home and in public in front of their friends. And I got to say, if you ever have a partner who does this campers, I cannot stress this enough.

Shut it down. That is just the shittiest thing you can do. Not only to your partner, but to the poor buggers you're out to dinner with, too. Just torture. Like nobody wants to see that, right? But Larissa seemed to enjoy embarrassing Tim in front of people. She just loved it. She'd say stuff like, you're not a real man. Charming, right? And unsurprisingly, this, you know, kind of cooled Tim's ardor a little bit, and their sex life dwindled down to nothing. Because funnily enough, you don't want to have sex with somebody that's just been humiliating you publicly. But Larissa was furious about it, which just baffles me.

It's like you think so little of this dude that you've made a sport out of tearing him down in front of his friends, but you still want to bump butt. with him? On the regular? I don't get this. It just makes no sense to me. Why do you want him if you think so badly of him in the first place? So anyway, Larissa finally told him she'd had an affair. And when Tim got really sad, instead of like flying into a mad rage, she told her friends that his quote, passive aggressive reaction disgusted her. It was just more proof that he wasn't a real man, whatever the hell that means. I guess a real man would have like gone over there and like beat the guy up or something is that what she wanted i don't know it's like how dare he have real human emotions i just men aren't supposed to do that i'm just confused because she married this man she chose this man

she knew who he was apparently yeah and he was he's he had a soft heart right and you're suddenly shocked that he's acting in character i think she picked him because she knew he was willing to to be her sidekick. Oh, absolutely. I think that's why she picked him. But, like, her complaints about him are just, they're not based in reality. Nope. It's just crazy.

She was really starting to unravel, and she'd never been one to keep her mouth shut about anything. She was the type of person who treated everybody she knew to a live broadcast of her inner monologue all the time. So all her friends soon knew every depressing little detail of her and Tim's crumbling marriage. Tim won't have sex with me. Tim's useless in bed. Tim's a wimp. Blah, blah, blah. She just won it out. And I'm sure that was a treat for them. You know, because who doesn't want to hear that all day

every day? Her poor manicurist had to hear it over and over and over again, as did her best friend Tammy Belchay. And for his part, Tim just seemed sad and lost. His friend started worrying about him. And he eventually convinced Larissa to go to marriage counseling with him. And for just a brief little moment he kind of perked up, thinking this meant they might have a shot at fixing things. But Larissa just seemed to view the counseling as part of her exit strategy. And before long, she told him she wanted a divorce. She filed for it in February 2002, and it got nasty pretty much from minute one. And this was because at some point in the process, Tim decided, bless him, that he was done being a doormat. He was willing to bend on some stuff, but Larissa had made it

clear that she didn't think he was entitled to a damn dime of her money or assets. And Tim just wasn't going to back down on that. I mean, this man had supported her every step of the way in her career. He had concentrated less on his own career so he could spend time with the kids and let her put in those crazy hours at the lab. And if he hadn't done that, no way could she have built that multi-million dollar business. So he felt like he deserved his share of what they'd built together, which damn right he did. And by the way, the state of California was likely to agree because it's a community property state.

But to Larissa, Tim's refusal to back down on this money stuff and literally basically just take nothing of what he had helped create was a declaration of war. Of course, let's be honest. If Larissa wanted to go to Jack in the box for dinner and you said you wanted pizza, she'd probably consider that a declaration of war too. That's just the kind of person she is. This bitch cannot handle defiance. but something this major, like it was a war. Yeah. Unsurprisingly, money wasn't the only thing they fought about.

They also battled it out over custody of Tyler, the younger child. For the time being, the court awarded Larissa primary custody and allowed her to stay in the house. Tim would get Tyler every other weekend, but Tim wasn't going to be content with that arrangement. He had been Tyler and Kristen's main parent all their lives. He wanted more than that. And the more Tim stood up to her, the more unhinged Larissa became. They lived together in separate bedrooms for a few months after Larissa filed for divorce. Can you imagine how freaking miserable that would be?

I've known people who've had to do this too. And your attorney will tell you to do it. Because if you leave, then you're like, quote unquote, abandoning the residence. Yeah. Which allegedly means you don't want. the house or part of the house, which I think is just absurd, but that's what divorce attorneys will tell you to do. And it's just a nightmare. Can you imagine living? Like, just the tension must have been like palpable every minute of every day. It just sounds awful. And that kind of

advice gets people killed. There's a case we have been playing with covering for, since we started the podcast, since before we started the podcast. And something like that happens and somebody gets hurt and it's just there's got to be a better way you know absolutely yeah so then while she was on a trip to missouri to visit christin and her parents tim moved out and when he did he took stuff with him because of course he did you need furniture and dishes and stuff like that in the new home but when larissa got back and saw what he'd taken she hit the fucking roof He took some furniture she wanted to keep. He took some of her wicker baskets.

He took her light-up Christmas reindeer for the front yard. Oh. Campers. Campers. He took four of her mixing bowls. Oh, my God, not the mixing bowls. Call the FBI. No, right?

But seriously, y'all, you'd have thought he was a cat burglar who, broken and stole her grandmother's priceless heirloom jewelry or something. She was that pissed off about the mixing bowls and the plastic reindeer. She told her manicurist Terry Lopez one afternoon, I want him dead. When Terry laughed and said, oh, hush, you don't mean that. Larissa said, you don't understand. I could do it and get away with it.

Yeah, always make sure you keep your manicurist in the loop about your murder plots, campers. Jesus Christ. Just a free tip. Yeah. By now, it was summertime, and the court battle was raging. In August, Tim decided to go on a little trip to try and clear his head. And when he got back, he found his house totally ransacked. Not much had been stolen, and it wasn't the kind of stuff you'd normally expect to get nicked in a burglary.

He was missing some wicker baskets, for one thing, and a set of mixing bowls. and some paperwork for the custody fight. Yeah, that's a thinker. I wonder who could have been behind all that. I mean, you know, we've all heard of the great wicker basket heists of the 1990s. Maybe it was one of those famous criminal gangs or the mixing bowl mafia. Could have been them. Yeah, you really never know.

And those custody papers go for a high price at pawn shop. So you really should lock those up. Well, actually, and we know this because Larissa is physically incapable of shutting the fuck up. And she told a whole bunch of her friends, it wasn't the mixing ball mafia or the wicker basket gang or the child custody troupe. It was Larissa. And she hadn't done it alone. She'd enlisted the help of one of her employees, a 21-year-old lab assistant named James Fagone. James was kind of a personal assistant for Larissa, too.

He babysat Tyler, ran errands for her, stuff like that. Larissa told him he could have some of Tim's electronics in exchange for his help. She laughed her ass off when she told her friends about it. Said she's been back a few times since, too. She said the feeling she got when she and James ransacked the shit of her. of Tim's perfectly ordered house was, quote, better than sex. Gross.

Can you imagine being the friend reacting to this? I feel so sorry for a poor manicurist. Like, what? Lord of nursing. You know, she can't have had any friends like us because we would have been like, what the fuck? Like, she had to have all the yes. And we're calling the cops.

Yeah, all the yes people. surrounded to her by then because she's the kind of person that would not appreciate our humor. But no, no, no, no. She also keyed Tim's truck, she said, and every time she saw that big gouge mark

on the door, she felt a warm glow. Torturing Tim was Larissa's happy place. Jesus, Jones, this lady's a treat, isn't she? Reminds me quite a bit, actually, of Dante Satorius, and Tracy Richter, too. So, in Tim's mind,

there was no mystery about who'd broken into his house, and it freaked him out. Because, I mean, obviously, Larissa was sounding increasingly unhinged in her voice messages, so here's just a small sampling of what we like to call Larissa's greatest hits. Tim's answering machine eventually filled to capacity with stuff like this. This is Larissa. Call me at the house, asshole! You pathetic, bastard asshole! I tell you what, I am so glad I'm getting divorced from you because I can't stand. your fucking guts. I swear to God I'm not making this up.

Okay, this is my favorite one. Answer the phone, you fucker. Start using that one. You know what? Those mixing bowls are mine. So I expect to find all four of those return. And if you don't, I'm going to call the fucking cops, and I'm going to come and get it. Do you hear me, you fucking homophobic slur

that starts with F that I'm not going to say? And that one was obviously before the break-in. you materialistic materialistic fucking bastard that's what you are that's all you give a shit about is what you're going to get out of this which I'm assuming this meant the divorce you rotten

homophobic slur I'm not going to say that's what you are you're such a wimp you have no spine I hope to God you burn in hell one of these days because you will you and your bitch mom I'll tell you what this is going to come back to haunt you You talk about me alienating your kids. You're doing a damn good job yourself.

And you just wait. It's coming, sweetheart. Have a great day, you son of a bitch. Woof. Not good. Not good to come home from a hard day and find that on your answering machine. She also left an unhinged message about wanting her grandma's doilies back. And if you could have heard the tone of her voice, like, let me tell you, anybody who gets their blood up that high about a bunch of doilies is going for the goalies.

gold in the Nut Bar Olympics and should be avoided at all costs. I feel like if you get your gorge up about some doilies and you're not a Victorian chambermaid whose professional rival is trying to sabotage you, you may be entitled to some therapy paid for by you because you need help. Yes, yes, she most definitely did. So between that and the break-in, Tim was starting to worry for his safety. He went out and bought a gun. He moved into a house with a sophisticated alarm system.

At one point, he said to a mutual friend of his and Larissa's, you know, if anything happens to me, it won't be an accident. You know what she's capable of. And how many times have we seen this now, campers, people so often predict their own murders. And it really proves what we've said so many times about the value of intuition. And now Tim was missing. And the people who cared for him were getting a sick, sinking feeling.

So the Clovis PD's first step was to head over to Tim's house. And they knocked, they peaked in the windows, but got no response. There was no obvious sign of foul play at first, but then something caught one of the officer's eye. A briefcase was sitting open by the front door, and close by, there was an empty gun holster. And when the officer looked more closely at this, he could see the butt of a handgun sticking out from under one of the couch cushions nearby. So, hmm, that was a little odd. So they went ahead and got a search warrant, and soon a forensics team had descended on the house, they were going over everything with a magnifying glass.

It looked like Tim had taken his gun out of its holster and brought it to the front door with him. Now, why would he do that? Did he think he was in some kind of danger? And then, as they rifled through that briefcase that they'd found by the front door, the detectives discovered a little handheld tape recorder. And when they pressed play, oh boy there were Larissa's greatest hits which I shared with you a moment ago one message in particular stood out from all the others said

I will tell you one thing if that ever happens again you're dead now at this of course the detective's eyebrows hit the ceiling and when they checked Tim's landline phone records they discovered that the last incoming call Tim had gotten before he disappeared was from you guessed it, Ms. Manners herself, his soon-to-be-ex Larissa. At 2 o'clock in the morning. Now also, the fact that there were no signs of forced entry made it seem pretty likely that if somebody had come into Tim's house and done him some kind of harm, it was probably

somebody he knew and willingly opened the door for. So clearly, it was time to have a wee-chat with the misses. Larissa came into the station willingly. No attorney. seemed happy to help. and the investigators quickly realized that they weren't going to have to do much to get Larissa talking because this bitch could not shut up like pretty much from the minute she sat down in the chair

she treated the detectives to a stream of consciousness ramble through the ends and outs of her and Tim's life together and the reasons for the divorce she wasted no time in letting them know what a stand-up gal she was she sang in the church choir at Hope Lutheran and everything oh well give her a friend

free pass, right? Yeah, I don't know how she managed to set foot in a church without bursting into flames. I'm just impressed with that. I don't know why the bar for a good person is so low that somebody can be like, I sing in the church choir, and people are like, oh, she's a good person.

That's true. It was obvious. Larissa was nervous. Her rambling monologue drifted from her and Tim's sex life. I'm not embarrassed to talk about this, and I hope it doesn't embarrass anybody here, but for the last 10 years, there's been no sex in our marriage. He became, I would say, impotent.

Gosh, I forgot where I was going with this. To bitching about her daughter Kristen for some reason. What does she do? Piers her belly button. Get tattoos everywhere. Okay. To bagging on Tim. He's a very passive-aggressive person, and passive-aggressive people have a hard time accepting anything they do wrong. They usually blame someone else. Project much, Larissa?

No kidding. And at one point, I love this. She said, Tim and I have been going through a divorce, and we have had a hard time communicating verbally, so we don't do that. By then,

the detectives had heard those phone messages. Hard time communicating, you say. Didn't sound like you were having any trouble. Yeah, she was not having any trouble communicating her feelings. An hour into this weird word soup, Larissa seemed to realize that she wasn't coming across super well. So she made a stab at explaining herself. She said she'd been on some prescription pain meds the past few days.

Her mouth was dry. She might be a little loopy. Finally, the day. detectives managed to get a few words in edgewise. They asked her if she thought Tim was the kind of guy who could just pick up and walk away from his life, leave his minor son behind and not tell anybody where he was. Larissa said that her gut told her no. Tim probably wouldn't do that. And then they asked her, Larissa, are you the type of person who could have anything to do with him missing? Oh no, Larissa said. There may have been problems and she might not like Tim much,

but she could never do that to her son. Her son. Not her daughter. Her son. Yeah, and also her son. Not their son. Mm-hmm. They asked her for her best guess at where Tim might be.

Is he alive or dead, do you think? Larissa said she didn't know. Suddenly she was a lot less talkative for some reason. And the lull in conversation gave the detectives a chance to look a little more closely. at Miss Larissa, and they noticed something interesting. On one of her legs, they noticed three small crescent moon-shaped scabs. They looked fresh, and they looked familiar to one of the investigators. He'd worked a lot of domestic violence cases, and he'd seen a lot of injuries like that.

They looked to him like fingernail marks. When he asked Larissa about them, she said, oh, I did that gardening. Yeah, I guess she must have had some pretty aggressive bologna's in her yard. Yeah, wow. Mean plants are the worst, right? Those North American fighting daisies especially, those things will fuck you right up with their human nails. Yeah.

Larissa hung in there, though, until the detectives confronted her with Tim's phone records in the 2 a.m. call she'd made to him the night before he went missing. Oh, that? Oh, well, I had to take a nap on the couch that night, and I think I may have butt dialed him in my sleep. He's one of the numbers on my speed dial. Okay, real reasonable, right? Could happen. But the detectives weren't just going to take Larissa's word for it. So they asked her if she had her cell phone on her, and, oh, shucks, wouldn't you know what she didn't? It was at home. One of the detectives had a little hunch, so while his partner kept talking to Larissa, he slipped out

of the interview room and went out to the parking lot. Found Larissa's car and lo and behold, there was a cell phone right there in the center console. Mm-hmm. So he flipped open his own phone and dialed Larissa's number and a couple seconds later he heard it start to ring. So he strolled back to the interview room and told Larissa the good news. And as I'm sure you can imagine, she was just thrilled. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I'm kidding. She looked at the detective like he had just taken a live snake. out of his pocket and eating it. She was just completely like went white. I bet he really enjoyed standing there with her and going through every single number on the speed dial to prove that Tim's number was not among them. So no, you didn't butt dial him, darling. Try again. So the detectives left the room for a few minutes to give Larissa a chance to stew. And because I guess this allegedly brilliant scientist had never seen like any episode of any cop or true crime show ever. and didn't realize that the interview rooms are constantly under surveillance, Larissa immediately started messing with her phone,

like frantically trying to put Tim's number on the speed dial. Just, oh, honey, bless your heart. Y'all can't say she wasn't trying, even if she wasn't doing a very good job. So Larissa finally admitted to calling Tim that night. She said she just wanted to iron out a few details about the next custody exchange with Tyler. No big deal. And she assured them she wasn't lying about. anything else. Swear to God. Pinky swear. Now, this was a pretty spectacular performance of

I'm Guiltiered and Hot Buttered Sin Theater, but it wasn't enough for an arrest. Without a confession or something more concrete than what they had, they had to let Larissa go. For now, anyway. Oh, and you're going to love this. On her way out the door, she assured them she'd been praying for Tim. Aw, she just a doll. So there are a few different accounts out. there about how the detectives caught on to the name James Fagon. I think they probably realized they needed to talk to him for a couple of reasons. One, when they spoke to Larissa's manicurist, that poor long-suffering soul, she told them James was the one who helped Larissa break into Tim's house to nick those mixing bowls. And two, y'all are going to love this, Larissa brought him up

herself during that first police interview. Like, oh, well, you could talk to my babysitter James. he can verify X, Y, or Z. Wow. So, Camper's, in addition to making sure to share your murder plots with your manicurists, also make sure that if you're ever under suspicion, mention your accomplice to the police so they'll be sure and go chat with him. You know, got to make sure he's on their radar, right? Just what are you doing?

Oh, Larissa. Also, when the police checked into her phone records, they made a tantalizing discovery, which was that at 1.30 a.m. on the night 10. went missing, just half an hour before she'd quote-unquote butt-dialed Tim, Larissa had called James Fagone. Now that is suspicion. James Fogone was about as unlikely a killer as Larissa herself. He'd never been in trouble before in his life. He was a smart guy, came from a tight-knit, loving family. He'd held a 4.0 grade point average in school, and even been a candidate for

West Point, the elite military academy in Annapolis, Maryland. And now he was pursuing a career in biochemistry. So this guy was not exactly one of the usual suspects. In fact, somebody who knew him well described him to Dateline as a gentle spirit. So when the police found out he'd been the one to help Larissa burglarize Tim Schuster's house, they wondered, what the hell is going on with this guy? What is his relationship with Larissa? So they brought him in for an interview and they really couldn't have asked for a more cooperative dude. He copped to the burglary pretty quickly, tried to kind of half-heartedly lie about it at first, but then when the detectives asked him if he could think of any reason why his fingerprints would be

all over Tim's house, he must have realized, you know, there's no point in lying anymore, and he was like, yes, fine, okay, I did it. I was just trying to help out a friend. He said they got in through the garage, he'd used a screwdriver to open Tim's door, and before long, he was writing out a two-page statement, telling him all about the great mixing bowl robbery of 2002. But when they steered the conversation around to Tim's disappearance, James clammed up. He said he had no idea about any of that. But the investigators weren't buying it.

If this guy was willing to rob Tim's house for Larissa, it seemed likely to them that he might also be willing to help her kill him. But for the moment, they had no proof of that. They had no body, no crime scene, no nothing, except a growing list of suspicious circumstances. They had to cut James loose, at least for now. But not long after they sent James on his way, the investigators received a humongous gift-wrap break

in the form of Larissa's friend and employee, Leslie Fichera. Leslie had been agonizing about Larissa's weird behavior over the weekend. On Sunday, a couple of days after anybody had seen or heard from Tim Schuster, Larissa had called her up and asked if she'd do her a little favor. She needed to move a rototiller, she said. Could Leslie do her a solid and rent a moving truck with a lift gate for her? and, uh, could she rent it in her own name? Not Larissa's?

Leslie was puzzled, but she was like, sure, no problem, boss. She rented the truck, delivered it to Larissa, and didn't think anything else of it. Until, later that day, she saw Larissa driving the truck way over on the other side of town from where she said she'd be. Weird.

Larissa had kept the truck out for hours and hours, way longer than Leslie expected, based on the little errand she claimed to need it for. And when she finally brought it back and Leslie checked the mileage for the rental company, she noticed it had been barely driven. Based on what Larissa said she was planning to do with the truck, there should have been way more miles on it. Hmm. When Leslie compared notes with her coworker Tammy Belchay, who was also, Also, a good friend of Larissa's, that little bad feeling got badder. Tammy told her that on Friday the 10th, Larissa had shown up at the lab several hours late, which was really odd for her. She was complaining about sore muscles from working out too hard the night before.

Days later, when the police investigation in Tim's disappearance was the talk of the lab, Larissa had seemed preoccupied and worried about the possibility of a search warrant. She'd asked Tammy to watch Tyler while she went to the office to, quote, take care of some bills. And she was gone for hours and hours, far longer than they'd agreed. Why was Larissa so worried about police searching her stuff? I mean, surely. She had nothing to do with Tim going missing.

But Larissa was sweating harder than a politician on a polygraph machine. She told Tammy, this is probably the end of everything for me. Well, why is that, Larissa? You're not guilty of anything, are you? As she and Tammy talked, Leslie realized that Larissa had asked for that moving van with the lift gate right around the time she'd started really freaking out about the possibility of an upcoming search of her lab. Not only that, but when she'd asked her to rent the truck, she also said, oh, and if the police talk to you, don't mention anything about the storage space. Oh, Lord. The storage space, the lab had rented to hold on to some excess materials.

Now, why wouldn't boss lady want the cops to know about that? Oh, and it gets worse. The day after the truck thing, Leslie went into the lab to find that somebody had been in the back room at the lab over the weekend, moving stuff around. A big blue barrel was missing. It was all adding up to something unpleasant, and it was making Leslie's stomach hurt. She decided it was time to talk to the police. Good for her. I just thought of something, by the way,

diming out your boss to the cops is probably on like a lot of people's bucket lists. Like, not mine because my boss is lovely, but I've got a lot of people pay damn good money to have this kind of primo dirt on their bosses. So anyway, when the detectives heard all this, well, I mean, you can imagine, right? Alarm bells clanged, spidey senses, tingled, hair stood on in.

This was hot stuff. They asked Leslie to tell him a little bit more about that storage unit Larissa hadn't wanted her to mention. Well, she'd rented it at Larissa's request about a year earlier, and like the moving truck, Larissa had asked her to put it in her name. Why? Well, to hide stuff from Tim, of course. Stuff Larissa didn't think her soon-to-be-X was entitled to in the divorce. More mixing bowls, probably. So, of course, after hearing all this, the investigators hauled ass over to that storage place as fast as they could haul, and as soon as they got to Larissa's unit, they knew they were most likely about to find Tim Schuster. The smell was horrific, even outside the

unit. When they opened the door, it hit them like a semi-truck, so bad that they had to put on the kind of protective breathing gear you'd used to walk through gas. Inside the storage unit, they found a collection of odds and ends, just sad little remnants of the Schuster's life together. Including, by the way, some of the stuff Tim had reported stolen during that break-in. Wicker baskets, the infamous mixing bowls, and in the back corner, under a pile of Christmas decorations, they found a big blue barrel. And when they opened it, oh my God. So content warning on this next part, if you're squeamish, campers. So skip ahead 30 seconds or so if you have a sensitive tummy. Inside the barrel was the most horrifying, most nauseating thing, any

of these experienced homicide detectives had ever seen. The barrel was full almost to the brim of a thick liquid, and floating in it? Human body parts. They saw a leg bone, a foot. It wasn't an intact body, and the reason it wasn't, was because someone had dissolved most of this person in hydrochloric acid. They just couldn't believe it. Obviously, they couldn't identify the body in the barrel by sight.

There wasn't enough left of it. So they transported the whole barrel back to CSI headquarters. And by the way, as they were doing all this, processing a crime scene that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, Larissa was partying it up at Disney World on a pre-planned vacation. As she sunned herself by the pool and rode the teacups with the kids, Fresno detectives made preparations for the habeas gravis, drawing up an arrest warrant and an extradition order. Live it up, Larissa, they're coming for you. Damn Skippy.

And in the meantime, they brought in Larissa's good friend and lab slash burglary assistant, James Fagone, for another little chatty chat. They were interested to find out what he knew about that storage unit and what they'd found inside. It took some doing, in fact it took several interviews over the course of a couple days, but finally James cracked. Larissa had been sick and tired of Tim, he said.

She'd enjoyed the hell out of that burglary, but it wasn't enough to steal a few of Tim's bowls and baskets. She wanted him gone, dead. She wouldn't stop talking about it. On the night of the murder, Larissa asked James for his help. Now, he claimed that he thought they were just going over to Tim's house to retrieve more of Larissa's stuff. Yeah, sure, man. You know why I'm skeptical of that, Camper's?

Because according to James, Larissa had asked him a few days earlier to buy a stun gun and some zip ties. And on the night of the murder, she asked him to bring them along. supposedly she told him Tim had installed a new alarm system so they couldn't rob the place while he was away like they had before they'd have to do it while he was home so they needed the stun gun and whatnot

just in case he put up a fight yeah I'm pretty sure James knew exactly what Ms. Larissa had in mind that night and it was not another piddly ass little doily heist Larissa baited the hook with a phone call to Tim she said she needed his help with Tyler

that was always Tim's week weakness, his kids. He had ample reason to be wary of Larissa by then, and he was, but he loved those kids enough to put himself at risk for their sake. If Tyler was sick or in trouble, Tim had to be there to help. Larissa had gone to the front door, James said, and as she rang the bell, he crouched in the bushes by the porch, out of sight. We know Tim must have been nervous because he brought his gun to the door with him. But when he saw Larissa and outside the door, alone and looking upset, he stuck the gun between two couch cushions and opened the door to let her in. He thought she needed help. And even after everything she'd put

him through, he was willing to help her, because that's the kind of guy he was. Oh, man. As soon as Tim opened the door, James Fagon lunged out of the bushes and forced his way in. Tim yelled, what the hell is going on? And James took him down to the floor with the stun gun. All three of them struggled for a few moments. Tim scratched Larissa's leg as she reached down to put a chloroform soaked rag over his nose and mouth. The chloroform had been James' idea, by the way. Found it on the internet. Which is yet another reason I don't buy his, oh, I just thought we were going to take back some more wicker baskets, bullshit.

Mm-hmm, me neither. So the chloroform knocked him out. Larissa tied a plastic bag over his head. and she and James bound his wrists and ankles with zip ties. Then they loaded him into the car and drove him to Larissa's house. In the garage, Larissa lugged out the big 55-gallon blue barrel she'd taken from the lab. She and James picked up Tim's unconscious body and dumped him in head first. Another content warning here, Camper, is because this is one of the worst ways we've ever seen someone murdered. Skip ahead 30 seconds if you want.

We don't blame you. And then, with a callousness, I wouldn't have thought possible, they started pouring jug after jug of hydrochloric acid into the drum. The stuff was so caustic that it burned their noses and throats. They had to stop pouring after a while so they wouldn't scald their lungs. And the worst part of this, by far, James told the police that when they lifted Tim into the barrel, he was still breathing. He made a little moaning sound.

He was unconscious, but he was still alive. still alive, when the woman he'd loved and cared for for more than a decade began pouring acid all over his body. It's just unbelievable. And I hope to God he never regained consciousness. And I don't think he did based on James Fagone's statement, but it's just monstrous. I mean, I've never heard of anything this bad, I don't think. It's one of the worst murders I've literally ever heard of in my life. It's a nightmare.

A nightmare. Yeah, it is. It's a horror movie. The next day, as Larissa and James relaxed in her hot tub with a couple of drinks, Larissa realized she couldn't keep Tim's body at her house. They'd have to move him. They decided on the storage unit, so there you go with the call to Leslie, the rented moving truck, and y'all already know the rest.

Yeah, and then she flew off to Disney World. Yep, she is a piece of work. Mm-hmm. To corroborate James' story, the investigators asked him what he and he and Larissa had done with the stun gun they'd used to incapacitate Tim. Tossed it down to Port-a-Potty, he said, at a construction site, so some poor bastard had to go paw through the yuck in a port-a-john to find it, and find it they did. Seemed like James Fagon was telling the truth.

The investigators realized with the chill that the whole time they were interviewing her that first day, Tim's body was in that barrel, slowly disintegrating. in Larissa's garage, and she'd looked them right in the eyes and told them she was praying for him. Disgusting. So campers, it was grab-us time for both our little co-conspirators. James, they already had, and they grabbed Larissa as she was getting off a plane in the St. Louis airport, where she'd just arrived for a visit with her folks. When they put the cuffs on her, Larissa didn't ask why. She didn't say, you found my husband's body? What happened? How did you die? didn't say any of that, because, of course, she already knew.

James and Larissa went on trial separately. James went first in November of 2006. His defense tried to pin the whole thing on Larissa, of course, painting her as a sort of Sven Gali, a manipulative criminal mastermind who had James in the palm of her hand. They tried to claim that James only got involved as an accessory after the fact, and even then, only under extreme duress, from this woman who obviously had a tight, sociopathic grip on his psyche.

And they did manage to find plenty of witnesses who testified about Larissa's forceful, controlling personality, and the larger-than-life presence she had at the lab, but here's the thing. The prosecution had James's confession on tape. So, yeah. I mean, here's a direct quote from his interrogation, for God's sake. I held the barrel for her, put him in, poured all the solution, and she, like, couldn't stand it. So she said, put it on, the lid on. So I helped her put the lid on, and she put it in the shit.

I mean, come on, you know. He even admitted she paid him two grand for his help. So, shocking, I know, the jury didn't buy what he was selling. They convicted him a first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison without parole. Larissa's trial began about a year later in October of 07. The publicity was so intense that her defense attorney got a change of venue. The press were calling her the acid lady, and nobody thought she'd have a chance in hell of a fair trial in Fresno, which is probably true. So they moved the show to L.A.

And in another bit of good luck for Larissa, the judge ruled James Fagone's video recorded confession inadmissible in her trial. James was appealing his conviction and refusing to cooperate in Larissa's case, so that meant her defense wouldn't be able to cross-examine him. No cross-examination, no confession. Yikes.

So that meant the prosecution was stuck with a pretty circumstantial case. But it was a strong one, nevertheless. and Larissa, like many narcissists before her, didn't do herself any favors. She, of course, took the stand in her own defense, and there was just something wrong about her. She was casual, joking about her bracelets, aka handcuffs, and kind of clumsily trying to charm the jurors. Just didn't sit right. She, of course, tried to pin the murder on James Fagone, said he'd come to her in a panic, told her there was an accident and Tim was dead. She admitted to helping James move the body, but she said,

said she had nothing to do with Tim's death. Uh, yeah. Her defense also trotted out a psychologist to claim Larissa suffered from battered spouse syndrome, which is just a load of absolute steaming horseshit, according to anyone who'd ever, like, met the two of them. And the psychologist, the psychologist didn't even claim that Tim had abused Larissa per se. Like, his argument was that Tim was so passive-aggressive that it traumatized Larissa. Like, are you fucking kidding me? That is not how that works. Basically, his argument was that because Larissa was still obsessed with all the alleged

wrongs Tim had done her over the years, like she's still really mad at him, so that must mean she was suffering from the lingering effects of abuse. Just what? Okay, no. That's ridiculous. Just because she's still mad at him, it was such a stretch. You all have no idea. It was just such a reach.

That's the narcissism, love. It's the narcissism. Yeah. It's like she's still mad because she holds a grudge like a mafia don, okay? Not because he was an abuser. He's passive-aggressive, maybe. She's aggressive, aggressive, right? Right. Just know. So anywho, the prosecutors made a lot of great points about Larissa ordering a butt ton of hydrochloric acid shortly before the murder, her sketchy behavior before and after, her $2,000 payment to James Fagone, her constant talk about how she wanted him, dead, wanted to kill Tim, totally knew how to kill Tim and get away with it, etc. But at the end of the day, I suspect it was all over for Larissa as soon as the prosecutors played those poisonous voice messages she'd left for him. Specifically, the you're dead one and that, just you wait, it's coming, sweetheart. Because, oy. Oh, and by the way, the manicurist took the stand to tell the jury that Larissa had prayed every night that Tim would drop dead.

what like does god like answer prayers like that because i wouldn't think so that just seems a little counterintuitive to me that you would pray that like your enemies would drop dead that's not how that's supposed to work larissa right i feel like i feel like i still wouldn't be sharing air with somebody like uh rosemary west if god answered prayers like that right right very good point So, needless to say, Larissa was convicted of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of financial gain and sentenced to life in prison without parole. And her sentencing hearing, her daughter Kristen stood up and gave a victim's impact statement. She said, you've given up all rights as a mother, wife, daughter, friend, and woman. You're a disgrace to this family, a pitiful excuse for a human.

I pray you're continually haunted at night by the sight and sound of my father fighting for his last breathing moments on this earth. I hope you toss and turn and have horrible nightmares visualizing the horrific act of violence you have committed. Bless her heart. She said Larissa had given up any right to be her mother. She said, Someday I might be able to forgive you, but I highly doubt it, so this is goodbye. God, that's sad, isn't it? Yeah.

Look at what you did to your kids, you fucking horror show of a human being. Mm-hmm. And it gets even sadder. The younger child, Tyler, went to live with Larissa's parents after her arrest. And according to Kristen, the grandparents restrict her contact with him. Probably because she believes her mom is guilty, I assume. So that's one more casualty of this awful, awful case. Larissa didn't only take away her children's father.

She took them away from each other. God, that is so awful. And, you know, she could help them start to heal a little bit if she wanted to. If she would just come clean and admit what she did and explain to them why she did it and show some remorse. Like, maybe it would help them to start to heal. But instead, she's letting at least some of her loved ones believe she's been wrongfully imprisoned. Which, can you imagine the pain that they're going through thinking that? and not only that but she's robbing her son of his sister it's just disgusting but of course

that's a narcissist for you nobody matters to larissa but larissa gross so katie before we go we got to talk about james fagone a little bit or i'm just going to pop because this suit is a complete mystery to me i mean this has got to be the oddest couple since harold and maud like were they involved like romantically sexually the obvious answer would be yes because why else would Madud involve himself in this? Yeah, like, they said they weren't, but you don't usually help somebody kill a guy unless you're either blood-related or banging.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, we know they were, like, in the jacuzzi together, drinking wine the day after the murder. I mean, that's pretty suss, but it just seems so improbable. I mean, look at the pictures, campers, yourselves, and tell me if you agree. I mean, he's like this good-looking guy,

she's old enough to be his mom, for God's sakes. And like you said, I think they both claimed they weren't romantically involved, but who knows if that's the truth? I mean, they both have ample reason to lie about that, so I don't know. I mean, maybe the obvious answer is like, yeah, they were together and James did what he did out of love for Larissa, as hard as that might be to wrap our heads around. But just for the sake of argument, if they weren't together romantically,

then what the flippin' fuck was going on? Like, does he just have really severe mommy issues? Did he just have, like, did she just have a really tight psychological grip on him because of that? Was he just desperate to please her? Did he just want a promotion at the lab? Like, what the hell? There is no other answer aside from hormones. Like, there's none.

Yeah, I know. Because, like, even if she thought of him as, like, a son and he thought of her as a mother, that seems like a big jump. But. Yeah. Hey, pillow talk, if you get rid of my husband, we can be together and I'll have all the money. Like, that's, that's a tale as old as time, you know? It is, but like, look at the two of them. I'm just saying it's, I just don't get it.

Yeah, we're not body shaming. It's not that. No, it's the age difference. Yeah, I mean, he's just, he's young enough to be her kid. Yeah. I don't get it. In fact, I think he was maybe a little younger than Kristen or a little older than Kristen at the time.

Yeah. It's weird. It's weird. I don't, Campers, listen, I do look at the Reddit. I know you're all on there. Campers, we have a Reddit.

Yeah. Please theorize for us. I'm dying. I saw somebody post an emo picture. This is an aside. I saw somebody post an emo picture of themselves from like 2008, and I was delighted. Oh, that's awesome. But regardless, I want a poll on.

on Reddit to know what you guys think, because it is bizarre. But I don't know, man. In court, Larissa's attorney said James was an awe of her intellect and her prowess as a businesswoman and taken in by her charming personality. Uh-huh. Yeah, I can see the logical trajectory from, wow, you sure do run a terrific lab to sure I'll help dunk your X in an acid like a bad carnival game makes perfect sense oh wait no it doesn't it really doesn't it really doesn't so I don't know I feel like it's got to be

mom issues but that just still doesn't satisfy me and I think of all the bizarre elements of this case and God knows we've got plenty to choose from he's the most baffling for me so tell us what you think because we would love to hear it 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

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