True Crime Campfire - Cradle to Grave, Volume II: Two More Killer Kids

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Adults like to think of kids as the embodiment of innocence—and in a lot of ways, they are. But…remember what it was like to actually be a kid? Did other kids seem innocent to us then? Not so much. The playground could be a battle zone. Gym class could be Lord of the Flies. Kids have strong, complicated emotions just like we do, but without the impulse control that comes with a fully-developed prefrontal cortex. Most of the time, the worst thing that comes from that is a tantrum in the middle of Costco, or a loud, teary breakup in the middle school cafeteria that ends up going viral on TikTok. But for some kids, just like some adults, the outcome is much, much darker. Case 1: The story of a 14 year old aspiring serial killer who murdered his unsuspecting best friend. Case 2: A greedy young man took the lives of his entire family just to inherit some cash.Sources:A&E's "American Justice," episode “Millions of Reasons to Kill”Court papers: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-caed-1_06-cv-00186/pdf/USCOURTS-caed-1_06-cv-00186-7.pdfLA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-may-13-mn-49271-story.htmlChicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/1997/05/19/2-cops-work-5-years-to-prove-son-had-family-killed/Investigation Discovery's "Signs of a Psychopath," episode "I'm Not the Monster I Was"Medium, Rivy Lyon: https://medium.com/the-crime-center/14-year-old-lures-friend-to-a-gruesome-death-in-middle-school-bathroom-b5ee8df8e915The Ledger: https://www.theledger.com/story/news/2004/03/20/state-releases-teen-slaying-suspects-journal/26105617007/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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome 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. Adults like to think of kids as the embodiment of innocence. And in a lot of ways, sure, they are. But remember what it was like to actually be a campfire? kid? Did all the other kids seem innocent to us then? Not so much. The playground could be a battle zone. Gym class could be Lord of the Flies. Kids have strong, complicated emotions just

like we do, but without the impulse control that comes with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Most of the time, the worst thing that comes from that is a tantrum in the middle of Costco, or a loud, teary breakup in the middle school cafeteria that ends up going viral on TikTok. But for some kids, just like some adults, the outcome is much, much darker. This is Cradle to Grave, Volume 2. Two More Killer Kids. Case 1. Because we're such good friends. The murder of Jaime Goff. So, campers, for this one, we're in Miami, Florida. February 3rd, 2004.

The kids and teachers at Southwood Middle School were just getting their school day going. On his way to his first period class, one student realized he needed to take a quick bathroom break first. He rushed to the boy's room on the second floor of the building. As he pushed the door open, another boy was just leaving. It wasn't one of his friends, so they didn't speak to each other. The other kid just brushed past him and out the door. Now alone, in the big, echoy bathroom, the boy noticed something. strange. There was a backpack sitting on the floor near the sinks, and all over the tiles,

little drops of blood, still wet. The blood drops made a trail to one of the bathroom stalls. The stall door was shut. Maybe somebody was hurt in there. The boy leaned down and looked to see if he could spot any feet, and he did, but they weren't planted flat on the floor. They were hanging, awkwardly, and underneath them was a growing pool of blood. Worried, the boy ran back out of the bathroom and into the hall. Spotting one of the school security guards, he ran up to him. Somebody's bleeding in the bathroom, he told the guard. Get to class, the guard said, go on.

But the boy was shaken up by what he'd seen. He knew something was badly wrong, so when he got to class, he told one of his friends about what he'd found in the bathroom. And as soon as class was over, the two boys were, went back to the second-floor boys' room together. Nervously, they pushed open the door and went in, walked back to the stall with the blood pool and the hanging feet, and pushed open the door.

Draped face down across the toilet was 14-year-old Jaime Gough. He was covered in blood, motionless, with his head hanging almost down to the ground. His glasses had fallen off his face and into the pool of blood underneath him. Their hearts pounding, the two friends ran from the bathroom and practically collided with the same security guard the first boy had tried to talk to earlier. This time, the guy could tell that these two kids were absolutely terrified. He rushed into the bathroom and a moment later rushed back out again to radio the cops and go find the school principal.

The guard was gone for maybe five minutes. When he and the principal got back to the bathroom, the guard realized that in the time he'd been gone, somebody had come in and messed with the crime scene. Heimegov's body was no longer draped across the toilet. Now he was lying on his back on the floor. The poor kid had been brutalized. Someone had viciously slashed and stabbed him in the throat. He'd bled out right there in the bathroom stall.

There was nothing they could do for him now. The killer's identity didn't stay a mystery for long. Within hours, the first boy who noticed the blood had identified the kid who'd brushed past him on his way out of the bathroom that morning. Fourteen-year-old Michael Hernandez. And when they spoke to one of Michael's teachers, they got more interesting information.

Michael had come to class with blood on his shirt that morning. From a nosebleed, he told her. But he'd been acting a little strange. He'd asked to leave class to go to the bathroom three times during one class period. So detectives had Michael Hernandez brought to an empty office so they could question him. How'd you get that blood on your shirt?

They asked him. Michael said he'd been roughhousing around with his friend Jaime earlier that morning, and he got hit in the face with a door. But looking at his face, there weren't any injuries at all. It doesn't look like it to me, the detective said. Michael didn't miss a beat. Oh, well, actually, here's what happened. I went to the bathroom earlier, and this other guy was in there.

He told me there was somebody hurt in one of the stalls, so I bent down to look under the stall door, and my shirt kind of dipped into some blood on the floor. Did you see Jaime in the stall? The detective asked. I did, he said. And you just went back to class at that point? Yeah.

Okay. Makes sense, I guess. The detective asked if Michael would give him permission to search his book bag. To his surprise, he agreed. And inside the bag, they found a treasure trove of evidence. A pair of bloodstained surgical gloves, a jacket also stained with blood. It was time to take Michael Hernandez in for formal questioning in the murder of Jaime Goff. On paper, Michael Hernandez didn't seem like the kind of kid you'd have to worry about.

He was smart in the gifted and talented program at school, interested in computers. He was an honor roll student. His parents were loving and financially comfortable. His dad was a local business owner. His mom was an occupational therapist. But some of the kids he went to school with had a different picture of Michael. He could be a bully. He liked chasing people around with a screwdriver and poking them. Jesus. He'd say the most vicious, taunting shit to the girl sometimes. Sometimes he hit them, too. And he had a reputation for edginess. If it was gory or morbid or violent, Michael was probably into it. In the computer lab, his screensaver was a bloody, gnarly-looking monster that freaked the other kids out. At the police station, Michael sat down with the tech.

for an interview. In Florida, at the time, at least, parents didn't have to give consent for police to interview a juvenile, and they didn't have to do it with the parents' present, which is pretty bonkers to me, given that Florida also allowed kids as young as 14 to be tried as adults, subject to the same sentencing as adults, everything except the death penalty. I think that's bonkers, too, that you don't at least have to have somebody there for a 14-year-old. That's bonkers. It's crazy. Michael made an effort to get away with it, sure, but now that he knew he was caught,

he was more than willing to talk about the murder. In fact, he told the detective he'd actually planned on killing his two best friends, Jaime Gough and Andre Martin, the day before. He'd wanted to kill Andre first, strangle him with a belt, then stab him, to make sure. The previous morning, he'd met up with Andre and Jaime by the fence like he usually did, and he told them he wanted to show them something in the bathroom. Andre and Jaime were used to Michael sort of bossing them around. Every friend group has that one friend who calls the shots, and that was Michael. So they followed him to the second floor boy's bathroom.

Okay, Michael said to Andre, I've got something to show you in the stall. He's gestured for Andre to go into the stall at the end of the row. But Andre felt uneasy. There's just something off about this, something he didn't like. Why can't Jaime go first? Andre said, because I want you to go first, Michael said. Jaime will go second. Andre wasn't buying whatever his friend was selling.

He took a step away from the stall and right at that moment, the bell rang for first period. Michael was fussy about punctuality. He hated being late. He looked at Andre. Okay, we have to get to class. Will you cooperate tomorrow? Terrible phrase, like awful phrasing. Oh my God, I know.

Yeah. Andre said, sure, probably relieved to be off the hook for the moment. The three boys went off to class. Andre had agreed to cooperate with Michael the next day, but when Michael arrived at the teacher's parking lot fence before the morning bell on February 3rd, Andre wasn't there. He hadn't shown up for school that day, but Jaime Gough was there. So Michael told the detectives the plan had to change.

Andre wasn't there, so Jaime alone would be plan B. Just as he had the morning before, he told Jaime to follow him to the second floor boy's bathroom. He had something to show him. So why did you talk Jaime into going into the bathroom with you this morning? The detective wanted to know. Because I was planning to murder him, Michael said. In the same tone of voice you might use describe what you just had for breakfast. This confession is something you have to see to believe.

You can find it online, and I highly suggest you watch it because, A, it will make your blood run cold, and B, it's a lesson in what early psychopathy might look like, even though we don't diagnose people with it until adulthood. But it is chilling. He's very calm for most of the interview. The only time he seems to get a little bit worked up is when he's describing the actual murder. And he peppers the whole confession with words like

the victim and witness, as if he's an FBI profiler describing a crime scene, not a teenage killer confessing to the brutal stabbing of his friend. You can tell this kid has done his homework on the vocabulary of murder. Why did you pick Jaime, the detective asked. Did he do something to offend you? No, Michael said. I just knew he would be the easiest one out of anybody

because we're such good friends, and I knew he would have followed me in there and done what I would have said. Jaime Goff was a bright, talented young man with glasses and a sweet, open smile. He loved to play his violin. His family treasured him. He and Michael Hernandez had been good friends for years.

They met up every morning at the first. fence by the teacher's parking lot before class to goof around and chat. It wasn't that weird to him that Michael had something he wanted to show him before class. So just as Michael expected he would, he went into the bathroom stall when asked to. Michael followed behind him, first sliding on a pair of latex gloves, then slipping a folding knife out of his jacket pocket. All right, Michael said, now I'm going to have to put my hand over your mouth. He came up behind Jaime and covered his mouth, tilting his head back at the same time. He brought his other hand up quickly and slashed the knife blade across Jaime's throat. Jaime whirled around and started to fight. Michael

told the detective, he asked me not to kill him, so I told him, okay, I'm not going to if you cooperate, okay? Which was a lie? Realizing the stall door was ajar, Michael reached back and locked it. And then he attacked the boy he'd been friends with for years, stabbing him more than 40 times in the neck and face before finally realizing that he'd stopped moving, stopped breathing. How did you know he was dead? The detective asked. I made sure by taking my knife, the point of my knife, and poking him in the face, and I checked his eyes, and they were motionless. At this point, Michael shifted into cover-up mode. He flushed his bloody latex gloves down the toilet, tried to clean the worst of the blood off his jacket, slipped the knife back into his pocket. He

washed his face, folded up his blood-stained jacket and put it in his book bag. He had another pair of latex gloves in there that ended up catching some blood transfer from the jacket. The investigators would find those later. He'd been back to the bathroom a couple of times, once because he realized he'd dropped his ring during the struggle, and he knew people would recognize it as his, and once to move Jaime's body off the toilet. Do you think what you did today was wrong, Michael? The detective asked now. No, I don't, Michael said. He knew it was wrong, but he didn't feel it was wrong. He said he didn't know why he'd done it.

Later, intended victim André Martin would tell investigators that Michael had mentioned wanting to become a serial killer a few months earlier. He just didn't think he was serious. But serious, he was. The investigators found Michael's secret diary in his bedroom, and it was a bombshell, piece of evidence. This kid had planned his friend's murder with precision. Planning, Michael wrote at the top of the page, date, February 2, 2004, the date of the first attempt when he'd failed to talk Andre into the bathroom with him. Interestingly enough, it was also Michael's 14th birthday. Apparently, he was planning a little present to himself.

Victims, he wrote. Martin, Andre Devon, Gough, Jaime Rodrigo. Materials. Hat, jacket, knife, gloves, tape. What followed was a neatly written list of steps numbered 1 through 8. 1. Lead Andre to bathroom, he wrote. Stab in neck. Number 2. Make his corpse sit on the toilet. Several of the steps had to do with disposal of evidence. Michael clearly didn't want to get caught.

Take off hat, gloves, tape, put jacket off, put in book bag, be quick and make sure to get my blood off clothing. Do nothing unnecessary. The last item on the list was the strangest. Thank God for success. That is so bizarre. I think this might actually be the first time I've ever seen that. Outside of maybe a cult, that weird focus on thanking God for your success with a murder. Yeah.

It's really strange. It's so weird. Clearly, Michael had been preoccupied with violence for a while now. The whole journal was full of it. Alongside a list of horror movies and video games, he'd made a list of potential victim. The first name on the list? His own sister. Wow.

On one page, he'd written out bomb-making instructions he'd found on the internet, a recipe for a Molotov cocktail. On one page, he'd drawn a swastika and written white power underneath it. Ech. There were disturbing drawings, a hangman's noose, a stick figure inside of some kind of James Bond villain-style murder machine where a sawblade was spinning down about to cut through the victim's face. Yikes. Michael wrote about his plans for the future, too. You will be a serial killer and a mass murderer, he printed in his small, neat handwriting. Stay alone. Never forget God ever. Have a cult and plan a mass kidnapping for a new world.

Be an expert thief, etc. Have many weapons. Do killings around the world. The world will be as it was meant to be after this. Okay, kidd, you're all over the place here. You can't be Jim Jones and an expert cat burglar and a kidnap. and a serial killer, you got to pick a lane at some point. This is just all over the map. Yeah, it's just exemplary of how he, how young he was. Like, when I was little, I wanted to be a marine biologist and a dancer and a singer and a professional horse rider. Like, he got to pick one. But it's all horrible, dark, nightmare as shit. Yeah. I like that he said, be an expert thief, etc. Like, we're supposed to be. We're supposed to know what the et cetera. Yeah. What does that mean? Like, what's after that?

right? He'd also printed out information about serial and spree killers from websites. In red marker on the bottom of one of those pages, he'd written, We'll become a serial killer. Okay. Just driving it home, I guess. And young Michael had already given a lot of thought to what his special calling card would be. Take right eye, he wrote.

Years later in prison, he'd elaborate on this in a phone call with his girlfriend on the outside. Always nice, isn't it? to find out these guys have girlfriends fawning all over them. I know. Gross. Anyway, he told her, I was going to take the right eye and carve a cross into their foreheads. That was going to be my signature.

He would want credit for murders, he told her. Wouldn't it suck if you killed all those people and somebody else got all the credit? He and his girlfriend had a good chuckle over that. Oh, isn't that nice for them? And by the way, that's not how signatures work, you twat. You don't just pick one. because you think it's cool. Yeah, it's, it's like he's a, he's a poser serial killer.

You know what I mean? Like, well, he's figuring it out, you know? Like, it's the fantasy is there, but, and the impulse is there, but it's, it's still in that early stage. It's very creepy, actually. Well, and it's very, like, it's very twitchal-esque where, like, it's very twitchal. They want the, they want the notoriety of being a serial killer, but they don't have, like, they don't have the juice, if that makes sense.

Like, that sounds dark, but it's like, you know, signatures are pretty ritualistic, like the eyeball killer. Like, that was, that was like a fetish of his. That wasn't, you know, just. That's deep psychological stuff. You don't just pick it because it sounds cool. It took four years for Michael Hernandez to go to trial. He pled not guilty by reason of insanity, but that's always a tough sell, especially in a state like Florida. Home of the, home of the insane.

That's a joke. It's a, no, it's actually. So, fun fact, the reason that Florida man and Florida woman is a thing is because of Florida's, like, laws about journalism. Yeah, it's a sunshine law where, like, everything is open to journalists, so they can, they have access to, like, records as soon as they are written, basically. So that's why. Because there are crazy people everywhere. We just find out more stuff. It's not that more crazy stuff happens in Florida.

It's just that it's very transparent there, so we get to find out. There's a other states keep their crazy shit underwreck. perhaps a little better. There's a Florida ban and a Florida woman inside all of us. Ready? Just ready to break out. The jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and for the attempted murder of Andre Martin. Now, 18, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. However, the story wasn't over for Michael Hernandez. In 2012, the Supreme Court made a landmark decision, one that I mostly agree with, by the way, with a handful of exceptions, that it was unconstitutional to sentence juvenile offenders to life in prison. This meant that Michael was entitled to a resentencing hearing,

and in 2018, he got it. Now pushing 30, Michael took the stand on his own behalf. He was full of remorse for what he'd done to his friend Jaime, he told the jury. I had to learn over the years how wrong it was what I did, he said, talking directly to Jaime's parents, and how much pain I caused you. And I'm sorry. And if you think I was a exaggerating that fake crying voice there, watch the actual video, okay? It's literally the worst acting performance I've ever seen, and I've seen Tommy Wazzo in the room, okay?

Yeah. Obviously, there were no actual tears streaming down his face. He was barely holding back a smirk. Jaime's parents must have wanted to vault over that witness stand in Pommelam, I know I did. Michael obviously had no idea how unconvincing his apology was to everybody in the room. You could tell he thought he was just crushing it. But the prosecutor had an ace up her sleeve.

She'd had the presence of mine to get hold of the audio recordings of some of Michael's prison phone calls with his girlfriend, and let's just say they painted a very different picture than the one our boy was trying to paint on the witness stand now. On the stand now, Michael said, I feel terrible about what I did. But before the hearing, he'd said to his girlfriend, I'm going up for my resentencing in August.

It just seems like such a needless formality to put me through another psychological interview. I've been interviewed by so many psychologists, psychiatrists, it's ridiculous, you know, what more do you want from me? On the stand, he spoke to Jaime's family, saying he realized now how senseless the murder was that Jaime was always such a good friend to him. But in prison, on the phone with his girlfriend, he'd said,

my judge, who happens to be a former prosecutor, by the way, is totally on the state's side. It's really bad. he's a piece of shit. Well, why don't you practice your weekend learning how to cry, his girlfriend said. Michael laughed. Oh, my God, I may have to stab myself. I better bring a sharp object to the interview.

Do you have something in your hand, Mr. Hernandez? No, stab. See, I can cry. He and the girlfriend were both laughing their asses off at this point. I'm human, I swear, she said, giggling. Look at these tears. Like, talking to her boyfriend, like she's, his henchman in a bad superhero movie.

Yeah, boss. You need to learn how to feel human empathy. He, he, he. That's exactly what it was like. It's creepy. Now, as Michael sat on the witness stand listening to the audio recording of this call, he glared at the prosecutor. I don't see any tears, she said.

She also played audio of Michael telling his girlfriend all about serial killer Ed Gein, that he was making a skin suit, that he was the inspiration for Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, which sort of Buffalo Bill was actually an amalgam of three real-life killers, but I'll give you one point. The animation in his voice while he was talking about Gein was such a stark contrast to the matter-of-fact way he'd

spoken to detectives way back in February of 2004, when he described how he'd murdered Jaime Goff. In the end, the piece of shit judge, as Michael called him, upheld the original sentence of life plus 30 years. He hadn't wanted to do it, he said, but

after listening to the testimony, he just felt he had no choice. He'd reached the inescapable conclusion that Michael Hernandez was still the same killer he'd been in 2004 when he stabbed his best friend in the neck. That same year, the city dedicated a street in Palmetto Bay to Jaime Gough, Jaime Gough Way. Jaime's family were at the ceremony, and so was Andre Martin, now all grown up and a police detective. He says he was inspired to become a detective by his narrow escape from Hernandez. A few years later, in April of 2021, Michael Hernandez collapsed in his prison cell, dead of heart failure. He was just over 30. Kind of poetic, that such a cold heart just couldn't keep on beating. So what was the deal with this guy? As far as we know, there was nothing in Michael

Hernandez's background to create the kind of rage he must have had bottled up inside. This kid didn't have the kind of neglectful abusive childhood that a lot of serial killers have. Both of his parents testified passionately for him at his resentencing, and they clearly loved him a lot and wanted him to, in his mother's words, get help. But at the tender age of 14, he was already planning a life of violence, already fantasizing. And here's the kicker. As an adult in prison, he was still fantasizing, still reading everything he could find about serial killers, having long conversations with his girlfriend about his favorites. I want to believe that everybody can be rehabilitated,

especially if you commit the crime when you're that young, that there's something good in all of us. But a guy like Michael Hernandez makes me wonder, are some of us just a tiny, rare number of us, just born without some essential element of empathy, goodness, whatever you want to call it, are some of us just born bad? This next case makes you wonder, too. Case 2. The Golden Child, the story of Dana Ewell.

For this one, we are in Fresno, California, Tuesday, April 21st, 1992. Rosie Evatia showed up for her regular house cleaning gig for Dale and Glee Ewell at their sprawling ranch home on Park Circle Drive. There was somebody else already waiting outside. A neighbor had gotten a call from Dale and Glee's son, Dana Ewell. He was a student up at Santa Clara University in San Jose, and he'd gotten worried when his parents wouldn't answer the phone. A couple days' worth of newspapers were sitting on the front step, uncollected. Rosie had been the Yule's housekeeper for over a decade, and this all seemed really strange to her. They weren't the kind of people to skip town without letting anybody know.

She went to key in the code for the security system so she'd go inside, but discovered it wasn't even activated. That was weird, too. They went inside. The house looked like it had been ransacked. Drores yanked open, stuff thrown all over the floor, and then in the kitchen they found the Yule's 24-year-old daughter, Tiffany, lying face down. Blood had pooled on the floor beneath her. She'd been shot in the back of the head. Rosie and the neighbor rushed to call 911. When the police arrived, they discovered that things were even worse than they first appeared. Dale was dead too, also shot in the back of the head. They found him in a hallway from the garage, a newspaper dated the 19th close by, like it had fallen from his hand.

And in an office off the hallway, they found Glee Yule, also dead. Unlike the others, she'd been shot multiple times. She'd fallen with an arm held up in front of her, like she'd been trying to shield herself from the killer. There was no sign of forced entry, no obvious physical evidence, no shell casings or unexpected fingerprints. It looked like the family had been caught in the middle. middle of a burglary, or more specifically, it looked like someone's idea of what that might look like. Cops don't start out as homicide detectives. They do a lot of things first, and that often means they see a lot of real, actual burglaries. This one looked to fake from the get-go, a stage

scene. The house had been ransacked too much, with the goal clearly to make a huge mess rather than to find anything valuable. To the detectives, this didn't seem like the famous robbery gone wrong. It looked like, it looked more like deliberate planned murders. Who would want to kill Dale Ewell in his family? He was a wealthy man, a multi-millionaire with a business selling small planes, and like a lot of rich people, he'd trodden on a few toes to get where he was. But enough for someone to assassinate him and his family, that didn't seem likely. Not all of the Ewell family had died, of course. 21-year-old Dana was in school 200 miles away, and he'd been with his girlfriend's family at the time when investigators thought

his family had been murdered. He flew down to Fresno that afternoon for what detectives had decided would be a sympathetic interview. It seems kind of weird in the non-police world, but homicide investigators go into every interview with a plan. Dana didn't really seem to respond to sympathy. He sat ramrod straight in his chair and answered questions in a calm, matter-of-fact tone. He'd learned a couple of hours ago that his parents and sister had been brutally killed, but he showed about as much emotion as if he were talking about a parking ticket. The next day, detectives walked him through the house and once again were struck by how little he reacted. There was a taped outline on the floor of where his mother had died, a big bloodstain still in the middle of it.

Dana just walked right over it. What he was really interested in was getting the police to give him an itemized list of everything stolen from the house. so he could start insurance claims. Of course, people react to grief in different ways. Some people do just kind of freeze up, but Dana was a colder fish than any of the investigators had ever dealt with before. Detective Chris Curtis said to himself, Right then and there, this kid's dirty.

Dana Ewell had always been kind of an odd duck in a really 80s kind of way. He loved being a rich kid and would wear tailored suits to high school. sometimes would even take a limo there in the morning, basically living his life like he'd just been cast as the douche heel in an 80s teen comedy. You know, we all know that guy, right? It was usually James Spader, who played him as well. Taking a limo to high school.

That's the dorkiest thing I've ever heard. I don't care what it says about your personal net worth. It's unbelievable. If you tried that shit at my high school, you would get your ass handed to you. It's just, it's just, it's just, I, I have, listen, if that isn't the most new money thing I've ever heard, I was friends with a very wealthy, a girl with a very wealthy family. And like, like, she drove, like, a luxury car. Okay. That's how, that's how rich she was.

Never in a million years would her dad lay down the dash for her to take a, he would say that was cringe. Because it's cringe. It's also not even that frigging expensive kids do it for prom. every spring like oh wait you have a hundred old dollars congrats it's only first of all limos aren't impressive you know what it's impressive black cars with a chauffeur that works directly for you that's their only job a limo driver is basically like a slightly more expensive taxi and it's only slightly more expensive okay so yeah so you're getting a sense of who our boy was here right he was a straight-a student and would tell anyone who would listen about his plans to become Mr. Super Businessman as fast as he could.

This kid, how about you pull the stick out of your ass for just a couple minutes? You're in high school, for God's sake, grow your hair, get really into a couple of bands, write some exquisitely bad poetry, instead of cosplaying Boss Baby the teenage years, for God's sakes. Dana's yearbook tagged him as most likely to succeed, which I've always kind of suspected it has a strong correlation with has richest parents, but anyway. I also feel like it's another way of saying, like, he has no redeeming qualities. We don't have anything nice to say.

At his family's memorial service, just four days after he'd learned of their deaths, Dana was glad-handing and cracking wise like a politician at a fundraiser. Like, the whole thing was just a big party. His relatives were shocked. It's one thing to be a cold fish. It's something else altogether to be completely. oblivious to how people are likely to react to your behavior. Have you ever met any human beings, Dana? It's a networking opportunity, Whitney. ABC. Always be closing. Everything was. And apparently he just

didn't care what people thought. The day after the service, he went out on a boat with a bunch of his buddies and a keg of beer and just partied all day. This wasn't grief. This was frank, unabashed celebration. His only consistent reaction to his parents' deaths was to keep bugging people about how soon he could get his hands on his inheritance. This was a considerable amount of money. Dale and Glee Yule had been worth $8 million in 1992, which could be about double or so today, but Dana didn't like the answers he heard from his parents' lawyers. A trustee would give him payments until he was 25, when he'd have access to the interest on his parents' investments. When he was 30, he'd inherit at half their total estate, and the rest at 35.

Now, for anybody halfway normal, this would be an incredible windfall. In the booming 90s, the interests alone would put Dana on Easy Street at the age of 25, just four years away, and then at 30, he'd effectively have infinite money. But Dana was furious to learn that he wouldn't get all his parents' wealth right away. In fact, until the trust payments were organized, all he got was a measly, pathetic $300,000. life insurance payment. And again, for a normal person looking at all this from a purely

financial point of view, he was set for life. What kind of 21-year-old in 1992 could not live on 75K a year for four lousy years until the big money started coming in? My God, I would have been over the moon. That's obviously a rhetorical question because the answer

is clearly the kind of kid who takes a limo to high school. When he was told about his parents' Will, Dana hammered his fists on the table like a toddler and said, How could my father do this to me? Oh, my God. His actions after the murders were so cold and strange that his uncles, Dale's brothers, wrote letters to the Fresno police telling them they might want to take a close look at their

nephew. But of course, the police were born at night, but not last night. He was already on their radar. They had that shit covered. He seemed to be the only person. who would benefit directly from his family's deaths, and as far as anyone could tell, he hadn't shown a shred of real human grief so far. Problem was, Dana Yule had a rock-solid alibi.

He'd spent the weekend with his family at their beach house out at Paharo Dunes, and on Sunday his girlfriend, Monica and her parents had come down for dinner. Dana had left with Monica and her family when they headed back to Morgan Hill, just south of San Jose, leaving the Yule safe and well. Investigators believed they'd been killed later that same day when they got back to Fresno and when Dana was unquestionably hundreds of miles away. And while investigators might look sideways at a girlfriend's alibi, Monica's dad also backed up Dana's story

and he happened to be an FBI agent, not very likely to stick his neck out for the punk his daughter was dating. When investigators took a closer look at Dana, they found something weird. Up in San Jose, being the son of wealthy parents, clearly hadn't been enough for him. Instead, he told everyone that he'd made millions himself while he was a teenager by playing the stock market. There were even local newspapers about the brilliant self-made business boy living on campus. When his dad had found out about this, he was both embarrassed and convinced that Dana needed to learn how to stand on his own two feet. Dana had one

semester of college left. His parents would keep supporting him through that, but afterwards he'd be cut off. So Dana Yule might as well have had a flashing neon sign hovering over his head that said motive, but he hadn't shot his family himself, who might have. Students at Santa Clara University soon gave detectives the name of his best bud, Joel Radasich. Dana and Joel were like peas and carrots, if peas were a preppy rich kid and carrots were a greasy loner obsessed with cars and guns. A weird pair, but they were tight buds, pretty much joint at the hip. When detectives went up to San Jose to ask about Dana around campus, pretty much everyone they spoke to brought up how close he was with Joel. And detectives knew that if Dana had been involved in his family's deaths, then his complete lack of reaction was unusual.

Most inexperienced killers don't do so well in the immediate aftermath. Right after the Yules were killed, Joel had left town and moved into his parents' basement down in Los Angeles. When police interviewed him, Joel gave a different story to what they were killed. they'd heard on campus. He and Dana knew each other, but they weren't all that close. He said they didn't communicate at all outside of school. As for the night of the murder, Joel said he was hanging out in an auto repair place close to his parents' home, just watching TV. That's not quite as good as having an FBI agent as an alibi, especially when the owner of the repair shop said, nope, kid wasn't here that night. So detectives had a working theory that

these two twerps work together to kill Dana's family, but they were short on actual evidence. They put Dana in the Fresno home under surveillance, and just a few weeks after the murders, Jol's I barely know him schick, crumbled to dust when he moved in with Dana. Guys, you've both been interviewed by police. Do you think they've just stopped investigating? They hadn't stopped. Like, oh my God, they were roommates. For example, they were checking the Yule family bank accounts. Like, oh my God. Apparently, they don't have object permanence when it comes to please. Oh, okay.

It's all gone now. Dana's grandmother lived in a nursing home, and his dad had set up a separate account to hold the money for her care. There was nearly half a million dollars in there. Or there had been, anyway. As the sole surviving family member, Dana had been able to get access to the money,

which he treated as his own. He bought an airplane, and also paid for Joel to have helicopter flight lessons. Dana got him health insurance, too. He frequently gave him cash, which would wind up totaling over a hundred grand. Sure looked like he owed Joel Big for some reason or other. Oh, and, you know, if Grandma needed a new hip or something in a hurry, well, sucks to be her, am I right? By the end of the year, detectives publicly announced that they weren't ruling Dana out as a suspect in the killings,

which startled Tweedles dumb and dumber into realizing they had not in fact committed the perfect crime after all. Oh, no! Joel moved out and back to L.A. Investigators surveilled both of them, which in Joel's case must have been pretty depressing. He was more or less living in his car and would spend all day just cruising around the city. Gas was just about a dollar a gallon back then, so I guess this was a viable, if probably unwise, lifestyle choice at the time. If he had to make a call, Joel would stop in at a 7-Eleven and use one of the payphones in there. Most 7-Elevens had at least two pay phones right next to each other,

So whichever cop was following Joel would pretend to use the phone next to him and surreptitiously record what he was saying. In one call, he said he wanted a quarter million dollars right now so he could travel around the world. Investigators tracked that call to another payphone on the Santa Clara University campus, where Dana was back at school. So Joel had figured that as long as they were using pay phones, they could say anything they wanted,

apparently oblivious to the fact that there was a dude standing right beside him with his earball wide open. Honestly, how hard could it have been to find a private pay phone in the early 90s? You just had to have that lime slurpy, didn't you? The boy geniuses coordinated these calls with the peak of 1992 communications technology, the pager. Police got a warrant to clone Joel's pager and decided to test it out. They went to speak to Dana in San Jose, and as they were leaving, said, we think Joel Radovstitch killed your family. Dana went white as a ghost, and sure enough, as the detective sat in their car,

their cloned pager, beep, beep, beep. Dana's reaction to hearing his buddy might have killed his family was to call Joel right away. That's not suspicious at all. Some people have a sixth sense when it comes to spotting cops, but Joel definitely was not one of those. He never seemed to notice that nearly every single time he used a pay phone, there was some neat, short-haired dude on the phone right next to him.

They heard highly suspicious lines from his side of the conversations. Well, you never know what they hold. You know, evidence. I'm worried. Can they arrest me? They don't have evidence. They'll try to catch you in a lie. No smoking gun, but weird things for a completely innocent person to say. In June of 1993, though, they got close to that smoking gun

when a detective recorded Joel asking that a package, be sent to Jack Ponce. Now, who the hell was Jack Ponce? Investigators hadn't heard of him at all until now. As it turned out, Jack was an old high school buddy of Joel's older brother. Police brought him in for an interview where Jack claimed he had nothing to do with the Ewell killings. He barely knew Joel. He had nothing to do with anything.

But investigators weren't convinced, and they were also confident there were limits to how much heat Jack was willing to take on behalf of his buddy's weird kid brother. They brought him in again and again for questioning until finally Jack gave him something. The Yule's had been killed by 9mm bullets. Jack said he don'ted a 9mm rifle, an AT9, but it had been stolen. The bullets recovered from the scene had marks that were both distinctive and weird. Forensic scientists thought someone had made changes to whatever gun they'd been fired from. A little later, detectives found out that Joel had ordered several books on how to make home. homemade silencers. You know, for all those completely legitimate reasons you might need a homemade

silencer. Some of these needed a hole to be drilled through the barrel, and when the forensic scientists had replicated these, they found a close match to the strange marks on the bullets from the scene. And they found an even closer match when they used an 18-9 rifle, like the one Jack Ponce said had been stolen from him. They were confident now that an 18-9 with a homemade silencer had been used to kill the Yules. This wasn't a super common gun, and it would have to be one hell of a coincidence for the murder weapon to be anything other than the gun Jack Ponce claimed to have had stolen from him. Of course, investigators didn't believe the gun had been stolen at all, an opinion that solidified even further when they got in touch with the rifles manufacturer and learned Jack had

bought it just before the murders. They now had a working theory of the shape of the crime. Completely unwilling to be cut off from his family's wealth and furious, that they would even try such a thing, Dana hired his friend Joel to murder his parents and his sister, promising him a fortune when the deed was done. Dana, remember, was expecting to receive his entire $8 million inheritance right away. Joel had Jack Ponce buy a rifle for him and then fitted a homemade silencer to it himself. When the eules were out at their beach house with Dana, Joel had slipped into their house using the key and alarm code Dana had given him and waited for them to come home. God, that's creepy.

Investigators thought he probably shot and killed Dale and Tiffany from behind, without them knowing anything about what was happening, but that Glee had seen him shoot her daughter and tried to run, forcing Joel to shoot her four times. God, that's awful. Then Joel had carefully picked up all of his shell casings and staged a burglary. While Dana was having dinner with his girlfriend and her family, he knew exactly what was happening down in Fresno.

That must have been a hell of a thing for that FBI agent to realize later that somebody had used him, of all people, as an alibi. It's the audacity. Like, I just, the, oh, my God, unbelievable audacity. Yeah, not to mention that now you're having to deal with, that this is your daughter's boyfriend, like his poor daughter. In March 1995, police put into action what they called, I love this, Operation Three Stooges.

Dana, Joel, and Jack were all arrested and charged with first-degree murder. There was an obvious weak link here. Jack Ponce had no emotional connection to the other two, and he was neither the instigator nor the executor of the murders. Was he really going to risk life in prison for Pinky and the Brain over here? I think not. Everything about his involvement in the case screamed pleadial, and that's what he got, immunity in exchange for his testimony.

Jack said that Joel had confessed everything to him as the two of them sat on Malibu Beach and then said, I hope there's no God, if there is, I'm screwed. Wow. They ditched the barrel of the rifle in a vacant lot out in Recita. Detectives drove Jack out there, and after some digging around, sure enough, there was the barrel, buried in the dirt right where Jack said it would be. Forensics tests showed it was a match to the bullets used to kill the Uels. Jack claimed that when he bought the rifle for Joel, he had no idea to be used in a murder,

which I have serious doubts about. You know, his friend wanted a semi-automatic weapon bought in someone else's name, but geez, who could have imagined he was going to commit a crime with it? But Jack's testimony was worth letting him dial down his own involvement in the killings. Dana and Joel's respective attorneys went to trial with very different goals and strategies. Dana's team went for flat-out denial of the charges. Joel's attorney had, I think, a more realistic view of the evidence and just wanted to try and avoid the death penalty. predictably Dana's attorneys had their own theory of what had happened. Joel and Jack, on their own, had tried to rob the Ewell's house and killed them when they'd come home unexpectedly.

It was a theory about as watertight as a submarine made a Swiss cheese. Why all the weird secret squirrel business with the pagers and pay phones between Dana and Joel then? Why did Dana buy so many things for Joel? Give him so much money. Even after police told him Joel was a suspect in the murder of his family. And the way the Ewells had been killed, two of them shot unaware in the back of the head. These were assassinations, not the kind of panicky shooting you might get from burglars interrupted in their work. And that in itself would have been incredibly uncommon. I mean, we've talked about this before.

Almost all thieves in that situation would just run. There was also the question of motive. Would Joel and Jack really go all the way to Fresno just to rob some rich people? especially the Yule's who, except for Dana, lived pretty modestly. They were millionaires, but there wasn't a lot of, like, millionaire stuff in their house. There certainly wasn't any shortage of mansions in L.A., but Dana's motive, of course, was $8 million thick. There was a lot of evidence to go through, and its connections to Dana Yule were in some ways kind of tenuous.

The jury deliberated for 11 days, and at the end found Dana Yule and Joel and Joel Radovich both guilty on three counts of first-degree murder. They both came really close to getting sent to death row. The jury voted 10 to 2 in favor of the death penalty for Joel and 11 to 1 for Dana. The decision had to be unanimous. So instead, they each got three life sentences with no possibility of parole to be served consecutively, which is one of those legal quirks that makes less sense the longer you look at it. They're both still inside, of course. After his conviction, Joel came clean about the killings, saying Dana had promised him half of the $8 million inheritance to kill his family. Yeah, he was never going to get that. I don't think Dana would

have ever given him that much money. Dana still claimed to be innocent. Instead of being Mr. Superbusiness, he now has a job cleaning plates in the prison cafeteria and has, surprise, surprise, found religion behind bars. How do I know this? From his prison personal ad, of course. So that was a wild one. A pair of wild ones, 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

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