True Crime Campfire - Designing Murder: The Disappearance of Billy McGrath

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

Everybody has a skeleton or two in the closet, and most of us are able to leave it right where it is, cover it up with old coats and mothballs and forget all about it. But some skeletons are bigger and meaner than others, and for the man at the center of this story, it would be hard to imagine one worse. And he was living in fear that it was about to come busting out of there and trample all over his life. He thought he was doing everything he needed to do to prepare for it. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t his past he had to worry about. It was a threat he never saw coming. Join us for a twisting story of greed and betrayal, and a missing persons case that turned into a truly heartbreaking murder. Sources:Court paperwork, State v. Tocker: https://www.leagle.com/decision/inazco20121002008https://mylifeofcrime.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/william-mcgrath-murder-august-2009-phoenix-az-bradley-tocker-convicted-of-his-murder/https://disappearedblog.com/william-mcgrath/Investigation Discovery's "Disappeared," episode "Murder by Design"Oxygen's "Buried in the Backyard," episode "Living in Fear"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/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. Everybody has a skeleton or two in the closet, and most of us are able to leave it right where it is. cover it up with old coats and mothballs and forget all about it. But some skeletons are bigger and meaner than others, and for the man at the center of this story,

it would be hard to imagine one worse. And he was living in fear that it was about to come busting out of there and trample all over his life. He thought he was doing everything he needed to do to prepare for it. But at the end of the day, it wasn't his past he had to worry about. It was a threat he never saw coming. This is Designing Murder, the disappearance of Billy McGrath. So, campers, for this one, we're in Phoenix, Arizona, August 26, 2009.

Financial advisor David Barnett arrived at his office at Merrill Lynch to find an unsettling voicemail waiting for him. Hi, David. This is Bill McGrath. I'm not feeling very well today. I think I've got flu. So I'm going to have to reschedule our appointment today, but I'd still like to talk to you if you have the time. Give me call back. Barnett was immediately confused and worried. The voice on the message was kind of whispery and husky, like you'd be if you had a really sore throat. But even so, he could tell it wasn't his longtime client, successful interior designer Bill McGrath. Billy had a distinctive voice and kind of a slow, careful way of speaking, and there was just no way in hell this was him. Not only that, but the callback number the caller had left wasn't the number he had on file

for Bill. Now, this would be a weird call under any circumstances, but the reason why it hit the panic button so fast for David Barnett was because Bill McGrath had been worried for some time now about his finances. Specifically, he'd been worried about fraud, convinced somebody had been trying to get hold of his banking information to drain his accounts, which were beyond healthy since the guy was a millionaire. Bill had been so weirdly fixated on this lately that Barnett had thought he was being paranoid, but he had done a few things to shore up the security on the accounts anyway. Security questions, passwords, that kind of thing. Now, he had this bizarre voicemail from somebody clearly pretending to be his client. So he thought, all right, well, I'll be damned. Bill was right,

somebody is after his money. Can't wait for him to come in for his appointment at one today, so I can tell him he was right to be concerned. But the appointment time rolled around. But the appointment time rolled around and no Bill McGrath. And when Barnett called Bill at home, he got no answer. He was starting to get a sinking feeling that something was badly, badly wrong. And after running the whole scenario past his colleagues at Merrill Lynch, he decided to call the police. For the Phoenix PD, it was the first time they'd ever had a financial advisor call in a report on a client. But they could hear the urgency in David Barnett's voice, so they agreed to do a welfare check on Bill McGrath. They sent a couple of officers over to the gorgeous big house where he lived,

And when they got no answer to their knock, one of them crawled through the doggie door to let the other one in. The officers roamed around the house, calling Bill's name and checking room by room to make sure he wasn't like lying unconscious on the floor or something. But they didn't find anything concerning. The house was neat and clean, and it seemed like wherever Bill was, he'd taken his dog Roy with him, because there was no sign of that little guy either. David Barnett had told them that Bill owned a gold Toyota Tacoma truck, and they noticed that it wasn't in the driveway. So to the officers, nothing really seemed to miss. It looked like Bill McGrath had just taken his doggo and gone out somewhere, maybe on an impromptu vacation. Maybe he'd just forgotten about his meeting at Merrill Lynch.

At any rate, there was nothing in the house to suggest that anything sinister was going on, which is what they reported back to David Barnett. But that didn't do anything to ease Barnett's mind, and it really shouldn't have eased the police's minds either, if you ask me, I mean, great, you didn't find a giant pool of blood in the house, but what do you make of the fact that his financial advisor says somebody just tried to pose as him on the phone? And isn't that suspicious enough for you? Because it would be for me, but whatever. So David Barnett was like, fine.

I am going to do some investigating myself. As Bill McGrath's financial advisor, he had access to his bank accounts and whatnot. So he decided to take a peek at what was going on there. And right away, there were flaming red flags. First of all, there were some big ATM withdrawals, not typical for Bill, either in amount or frequency. And then there were some really weird credit. card charges. Everybody who knew Bill McGrath knew that he wasn't what you'd call a clothes horse.

My dude was the kind of guy who lived in shorts and flip-flops, which is pretty typical, especially for Phoenix. Despite the millions he'd made with his interior design business, he wasn't a flashy person, like, at all. It was part of what his friends loved about him, that if you didn't know him, you'd never know he had money. But now there were a bunch of extravagant charges for designer clothes and shoes, stuff that in all the years he'd known him, he'd never seen Bill buy. So Barnett put a freeze on the account. He figured, if there was fraud going on, as he suspected there was, this would nip it in the bud. And if there wasn't, if this somehow was Bill McGrath after all, then this should bring him out of the woodwork pretty

quickly. The next day, Barnett got another creepy voicemail. In the same husky voice, the caller said, hi, this is Bill McGrath. My bank account is restricted, and I just want to talk to you. Is this because I canceled my appointment yesterday or what? Call me back. When Burnett called the number back, the scratchy voice answered. The bank says I have to come in in person before they'll release my accounts, he said. But I can't come in right now. I'm in San Diego. I'm on the way to Mexico for a few weeks. So there's just no way I can do it. Isn't there something you can do? Talking to the guy in real time, David Barnett was even more convinced that it wasn't Bill McGrath.

Their voices were just totally different, way more than a sore throat could explain away. Barnett was starting to freak out. To charge what he'd already charged, this guy had to have access to some of Bill's account passwords. What if he had Bill tied up somewhere? Barnett decided enough was enough. He was going to file an official missing person's report. The case was quickly assigned to a detective named Melissa Pulver, and one of the first thing she did was reach out to Bill McGrath's brother, Brian. Brian lived in California,

but he usually kept in pretty good touch with Bill. And when Detective Pulver contacted him, he was eager to talk. He'd actually been getting pretty worried about Bill, he told her. He hadn't talked to him on the phone in a couple weeks. As Melissa Pulver would later tell the oxygen network, Brian told her, listen, you have to believe me. My brother is meticulous. He's a planner. He would not just leave town and not tell someone. And the more people she spoke to in Bill McGrath's wide circle of friends, the more detective pullover heard that same thing. Nobody had heard from in weeks, and no way in hell would he just take off on his own.

And she heard something else, something that made her spidey senses twitch. For the past couple months, Bill had been terrified that his life was in danger. But let's put a pin in that for a minute and back up the train. get a little background on Bill. Bill McGrath or Billy, as his friends called him, had come to Phoenix years ago to escape the long winters in Pittsburgh where he grew up. And man, can I ever relate to that? I hate winter with a deep, passionate, smoldering ardor. Like, one of my main goals in life is to escape to somewhere where it can never again run its horrible, clammy fingers over my face. So I get it. Anyway, Billy's best friend Patty Durante told

disappeared that his design talents were obvious even when he was a kid, when he'd build amazing stuff with his Lego sets. The two of them bonded in kindergarten and stayed friends for life, and that wasn't unusual for Billy. He'd made Bank as an interior designer, started his own company when he moved to Phoenix, and started flipping houses on the side. But you'd never know it if he didn't know him well. He didn't have an ostentatious bone in his body, and he was generous with the people he loved. He loved a lot of people, and they loved him back for his easygoing personality and sardonic sense of humor, and the fact that he'd go to the moon and back for his friends. He was usually pretty quiet about his love life, though, possibly just because growing up gay in the

50s and 60s wasn't the easiest thing. So his friends were excited for him when in 2005, he went home to Pittsburgh to visit some family and met a guy named Mark Fleckenstein. Sparks started Sparkin the minute they met, and when Billy got back to Phoenix, he invited Mark to come out and visit. Or at least, it was supposed to be a visit. But Mark never really left after that. According to Billy's friends, he and Mark were kind of an opposites attract success story, at least at first. Bill was more understated and calm, and Mark was a classic extrovert, always bouncing around and making everybody laugh. They complimented each other. Mark moved into Billy's big gorgeous house. They adopted a dog together named him Roy. They threw parties. Billy introduced Mark to all his friends. But the honeymoon didn't last.

First, there was the age difference. Not a huge one. Mark was 29 and Billy was in. his mid-40s, but it was enough to cause some tension. They had different priorities. They were at different stages of their lives. Add to that, the fact that Mark was really bad with money can always cause problems. Billy was super careful and meticulous about financial stuff. I mean, dude was on a first-name basis with his Merrill Lynch guy, you know, so this was a major bone of contention. And before long, what had started as a really fun, lighthearted relationship started it turning stormy, and a whole another side of Dr. Fleckenstein

reared its creepy little head. Mark had a temper on him. He could fly off the handle in truly scary fashion, and having seen a picture of this dude, I don't have any trouble imagining it. Because Mark Fleckenstein has full-on Stanley Kubrick villain crazy eyes. Like, I physically went, yeah,

when I saw the picture. He looks like he's thinking about, like, peeling off your skin and eating it. Like, you can just see that there's bad ideas percolating behind those eyes. And one of those bad ideas was a doozy. One night, during an argument about money, Mark wanted some and Billy didn't want to give it to him, Mark went ballistic. He went after Billy with a tire iron, then zip tied him to a chair, sprayed mace into his eyes, and basically tortured him until he wrote him a huge check.

And then Mark just left Billy there. His own boyfriend, bloody and bruised and half-blinded by caustic chemicals, and just went off, la-la-la, to spend some of that money. After he left, Billy managed to get himself free of the chair, and he kind of half stumbled and half crawled over to a neighbor's house to call for help. Poor guy. I can't even imagine somebody you love and trust doing something like that to you. That's heavy trauma. So the police put the habeas grab us on Mark, and he ended up with three and a half years in prison for kidnapping, aggravated assault, and various other charges. So few, right? But here's the thing.

One of the first things they learned when they started digging into Billy McGrath's disappearance was that about six weeks before he dropped off the map, Billy had been informed that Mark Fleckenstein was due to be released from prison any day now, and he had been upset about it. Yeah, and he'd done all kinds of stuff to prepare for it. Billy knew his dog wouldn't be much protection because he and Mark had adopted Roy together. He knew Mark. So he beefed up security around his house.

He had cameras put in, bought floodlights, and changed the locks on every door in the place. He was thinking of buying a gun, too. He'd even taken a handgun class where the instructor said he was way out of his depth, which, God, how terrible you're terrified and you're looking for a solution. The instructor's like, this isn't for you. I know, that was probably not what he wanted to hear. No. This is hard. His friends had tried to talk him out of the gun, not only because Billy was a bad shot,

but also because he was kind of small in stature, and definitely a lover, not a fighter. His friends were afraid that if Mark Fleckenstein came after him, he would just wrestle the gun away and use it on Billy. Right. Some of his friends said Billy had even been talking about leaving Phoenix once Mark got out, maybe just for a little while, maybe for good. To get out of the little bastards line of fire for a while, Something like what Mark put him through can cause serious, lasting trauma.

Anybody in Billy's situation would be scared. Yeah, what kind of bullshit is that three and a half year sentence, by the way? In three and a half years, a torture survivor, and that's what it was, would have barely had time to start healing from the trauma, and now you're going to let this asshole out again? So his victim has to wonder all day, every day, if he's safe. It's just unbelievable.

Whatever the rationale for that piddly-ass sentence was, I would love to hear it. Yeah. I think it sucks. Mm-hmm. Billy didn't get much time at all to feel safe. No. No.

No. He was just gone. So once they found out about Mark Fleckenstein, the investigator's first thought was that his ex-boyfriend slash torturer had gotten out of prison and gone after him, that he'd kidnapped him or killed him, and now he was going after his money. That is, until they checked with a prison where Mark Fleckenstein had been sentenced to serve his time and found out he was still serving it.

He wasn't out yet. As you can imagine, this threw everybody for a loop. But of course, this didn't necessarily put Mark Fleckinstein in the clear. As we've seen before on this show, people have been known to hire hitmen from prison. Of course, the hitmen often turn out to be undercover cops, but hey, that can't be the case every time, right? Mark wasn't in a prison gang, and as far as the investigators could tell, he hadn't been cozy with any organized crime types before he got in Carson. He didn't exactly run in hitman circles. He didn't have Jeff's phone number in his wallet or anything.

No, he didn't know the only true hitman alive, Jeff, as far as we know. But that didn't necessarily mean he couldn't arrange something from jail. And of course, there was one other possibility the investigators were considering. Could Billy be in hiding? Could he have just decided to pack up the truck, take Roy and go? Maybe he thought if he told anybody it would just put them in danger too. Maybe he'd taken off to protect himself and everybody else. His friends were all hoping that's what it was,

even though it would be way out of character for him to just up and leave without telling anybody. Billy was a planner to the core. He was the type of guy who wouldn't go to lunch without hemming and hawing about it for an hour or so and calling two or three friends to talk out all the options. but when the investigators looked into Billy's bank accounts, they didn't see any of the kind of charges you would expect to see if he was traveling. No gas, no food, no hotel rooms. So on September 2nd, almost exactly two weeks from the last time anyone spoke to Billy McGrath,

they decided to go back to his house, this time for a much closer look. They noticed right away that the Toyota Tacoma still wasn't in the driveway. This time, so they didn't have to go through the doggie door, they got a key from Billy's friend-slash contractor Brad Talker, who'd been helping him make some of the security renovations. And as they went through the house, a sense of foreboding came down on them like a storm cloud. The bed was unmade, definitely not the norm for Needed to Pin Billy,

and they noticed a small blood stain on one of the pillows. In the bedroom closet, Billy's luggage sat empty. On the bathroom counter, they found his glasses, his toothbrush, his razor. In the fridge, a pint of strawberries was rotting along with other food, and in the freezer they found a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights. Why would you buy fresh produce if you were going to take off? And why wouldn't a chain smoker take his siggies?

Plus, there was still food in Roy's dish, and his favorite blankie was still in his little dog bed. Billy's friend said Roy never went anywhere without his favorite blankie. If Billy had taken his dog and gone off somewhere, that blanket would have gone off with him. No question about it. Y'all dog parents out there, I know you know what we're talking about. That baby's got to have his binky.

Mm-hmm. And last but not least, the investigators found a calendar in the kitchen full of plans for the next month in Billy's distinctive handwriting. Dentists, Merrill Lynch, Cheryl's pig roast. The guy hadn't been planning to go anywhere. Not right away, at least. So they put a bolo out on Billy's truck, and his friends started posting missing persons flyers around town, with a picture of Billy and one of the truck. And the detective started going door to door, asking all the neighbors if they'd heard or seen anything strange around the time McGrath went missing.

It did take them long to find a witness with an eerie story to tell. She said that on the night of August 18th, the last day anyone had heard from Billy, she'd been startled awake by the sound of two gunshots, one right after the other. It was so loud, she told him. It just echoed all down the canyon. Gunshots. On the night, Billy dropped off the map. This was not looking good.

And neither was this. Billy's brother Brian had gotten some really weird emails in the days immediately after Billy went missing. supposedly from Billy himself. Of course, Brian didn't know his brother was missing yet, not at the time he got the emails. He was just kind of confused at why he couldn't get hold of Billy by phone, and he and his cousin had left a couple messages. But he'd still found the emails really strange.

And now, when he read them again, they made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. First of all, Billy wasn't a big emailer or texter. He was a phone guy. In fact, he was one of those people who you can't pry off the phone with a crowbar. Like when you had to go, you practically had to just hang up on the poor guy, because otherwise he's just going to keep talking.

You know, we all know that person. The guy loved talking on the phone. So if he had something he wanted to talk to you about, email was just about the last way he'd think to do it. So that was weird all by itself. And then there was the tone of the emails. Billy had his own voice when he wrote emails, just like we all do, and he typically used correct grammar.

But these emails had weird abbreviations and misspellings all over the place. Stuff like, I'm closing the house up. I've got to get the hell out of P-H-X, meaning. Phoenix, I guess. One misspelling struck Brian as especially bizarre. It was Pittsburgh, ending in G, no H. Now, Brian and Billy had grown up in Pittsburgh, and as anybody who lives there will tell you, Pittsburghers fucking know how to spell Pittsburgh.

You leave that H off the end at your peril. Ain't no way in hell Billy McGrath was going to misspell the name of his hometown. Oh, God, I did that once, and I got a fucking lecture. And I was like, okay, can you just chill out and answer my question? Like, it was for work, and I was like, come on. Yeah, they're serious about that age. You know what I meant. It's a silent age.

It doesn't matter. Now all the Pittsburghians, Pittsburghers? Yeah, you're alone in this. I don't put that age on the end. We're going to get hate mail from Pittsburghers. Pittsburghers. I'm sorry, I don't know what the name for people who live in Pittsburgh is. No, that's it.

I looked it up. It's Pittsburghers. What do you have against Pittsburgh? Jesus. It's just a funny, it's just a funny name for, it sounds like it'd be like a type of burger you'd get at a hole-in-the-wall place. You want a Pittsburgh? Let's go get a Pittsburgh. Anyway.

It's vegan. It's made of cherry pits. Oh, geez. I swear it tastes like real beef. It's delicious. Now we're going to get it. hate mail from vegans. So not only was the wording and grammar all off,

but somebody had managed to call in and sweet-talked the bank into unfreezing Billy's bank account. He had passwords, answers to security questions. He told the bank he was heading to Mexico on a trip and he'd given, quote, someone else permission to use his checkbook and ATM card. Somebody had also changed the contact information and address on one of Billy's investment accounts. And the cell number they'd given

matched the new number the mystery caller had given financial advisor David Barnett when he called him posing as Billy. So the investigators went back for a more detailed look at Billy's bank account activity since the day he went missing, and immediately hit paydard. Two checks written on August 19th and 20th, one for $3,500 and one for $12,000, both made out to Billy's friend and contractor, Brad Talker, and both with signatures that didn't seem to match Billy McGraths. The investigators knew Brad Talker. He was the one who let them into Billy's house the day they searched it. So they called him up. Asked him if he'd be willing to come in for an interview. Talker was cash.

Oh, sure, absolutely. Whatever you need. Billy met Brad Talker on a dating website about a year and a half earlier. It turned out they didn't really spark romantically, but they did discover that they had a lot in common. talker was a contractor and billy was just getting into real estate flipping houses so they became buds and billy hired talker to work on some of the houses he flipped billy seemed to really like the guy but at least one of his close friends michael assavado got bad vibes from talker he later told

oxygen that he thought he was quote creepy but he was congeniality itself when he showed up at the police station for his interview and this is always important for detectives he didn't seem nervous at all. When they showed him the suspicious checks, Talker was chill about it. He was like, oh, yeah, he left me some checks for the remodel we're working on together, just to buy materials and stuff. He does that a lot. He said he figured his friend had taken off to make sure he wasn't around when Psycho X got out of prison. Billy likes antiques, he said, and he's been talking about going to Mexico to buy a few pieces. In the meantime, Tucker said, he wanted to keep working on the remodel. He didn't think Billy would want him to stop.

Makes sense. Yeah, it really kind of did. And Brad Talker's demeanor didn't scream guilty. He seemed pretty legit. But Detective Pulver was intrigued by the house Talker was remodeling with Billy. Maybe they could find something there, some clue to where Billy had gone. So they drew up a search warrant for it and went out there to poke around. And it was disappointing. Nothing just a bunch of stuff you'd expect to see in a house that's being worked on. Dang. They went room to room, checked out the yard, peaked into buckets, and under dropcloths,

and finally realized they weren't going to find anything they could use. But then, just as they decided to head out, one of the investigators noticed something. It was one of those little addicts, more of a crawl space than anything, with a teeny little narrow staircase you could pull down to climb up to it. It was the one place they hadn't. checked, so one of the detectives went up and poked his head into the cramped little space and found a fucking gold mine. It's the most goosebumpsy thing about this whole case, I think, the hair's breadth of chance that led them to find this just as they were walking out the door. Tucked away in this

little attic were two black hefty bags full of bits and pieces of Billy McGrath's life. In one, they found his wallet, his driver's license, his checkbook, his credit cards, financial records dating all the way back to 1995, and a notebook full of Billy's account numbers, username, security questions, and passwords. Not to mention, the prepaid cell phone that matched the number of financial advisor David Barnett's mystery caller. And in the other bag, 45 caliber ammunition, extra magazines, and a Glock 45 handgun, smeared with what looked a lot like dried blood. The Glock was in a mailing box addressed to Brad Talker's mom. Holy shit, right? Not looking great for Mr. Tucker.

They sent the gun off to be tested. They already had DNA samples to compare the blood to from that little blood stain on Billy's pillow and the razor and toothbrush they'd found in his bathroom. And in the meantime, they dug into Brad Talker's background, and whew boy. Turns out our boy Brad had a record. For guess what? Arson. He'd had like a car mechanic shop a few years earlier, and when the business started to tank, he just set it on fire. not what most of us would do so that's a bit of a red flag yeah and when they looked into talker's own finances they found more of them he was in a shit ton of debt way behind on his mortgage behind on payments to his elderly mom's care facility up to his eyebrows and gambling debts and man

if there's one thing that pops up as regular as the sunrise in these murder cases it's flipping gambling debts like that is just like a direct line to badness the guy was way way underwater they were about to foreclose on his house. And here's his buddy and business partner, Billy McGrath, with money coming out his ears. What did all that add up to? A pretty plausible motive for murder. And it gets worse. Right around this time, one of Talker's neighbors saw the missing persons flyer with the picture of the missing Toyota Tacoma and called the police. He'd seen Brad Tocker with Billy McGrath together in Brad's driveway on either August 17th or 18th. He wasn't sure which. But he said that over the next few days, he'd heard a bunch of annoyingly loud banging coming from Talker's

place. And then, in the garbage area behind the house, he noticed a big pile of auto parts. He didn't think too much about it at the time, and then he saw the missing flyer and realized they were the exact same color as Billy McGrath's Toyota Tacoma. Luckily, for the investigators, the neighborhood actually picked up the car parts, I guess thinking maybe he could sell them or something before he saw the flyer and still had him in his garage. When they went over to look at them, they found not only the truck parts, but something else that was worth its weight in gold, a cigarette butt. Marlborough Light, Billy McGrath's favorite brand. The DNA on that would later come back to match Billy's, and phone records on that prepaid cell would later reveal a call to

a scrapyard, where detectives soon found the stripped out husk of Billy's missing gold truck. While all this was going on, Brad Talker was just going about his life, no idea about all this red-hot evidence the detectives had come up with on him. As red-hot, As it was, though, it wasn't enough to arrest him. They didn't have Billy McGrath's body, and they didn't have the results from those DNA tests on the gun. So, for the moment, the investigators were sitting tight, and Talker was blissfully oblivious to the invisible target on his forehead. A few days after that bombshell discovery at the Remodel House, Detective Pulver got a call from financial advisor David Barnett. There's been a few big ATM withdrawals, he told her.

Maybe we can get the security footage. Man, he's a born camper this Mr. Barnett. He really is. And it shows that, like, in missing persons cases, you have to, like, stay on the investigators constantly. I'm calling him every day if you go missing Whitney. Don't worry. Thank you. And what's, you know, even better is that Barnett was right, too.

When Detective Pulver got a hold of the ATM camera footage, there he was. Our boy, Mr. Tick-Tick-Tocker. helping himself to some more of his missing friend's money. And it wasn't just the ATM withdrawals. Mama Talker had popped up again in one of the latest charges to Bill's bank account, a $9,000 transfer to her bank account, and there was a $7,000 one-two to the company that held the mortgage on Brad Talker's house. But when Detective Pulver called him for another interview to confront him with the ATM withdrawals,

Brad was still cool as can be. come on I told you Billy gave me the card and the PIN number I've got to keep working on the remodel while he's in Mexico By now of course Pulver knew that Billy McGrath wasn't in Mexico For one thing he hadn't used his passport

For another Everything about the evidence they were finding screamed murder Okay she said to Brad If you used all this money to buy building materials Let's see the receipts You got receipts? I imagine you've just been burning up the aisles at Home Depot

So let's cough it up buddy boy that seemed to rattle him a little bit he didn't have any receipts on him he said he was sure he could get them though this didn't convince anybody obviously and the atmosphere got even tenser when they casually asked Brad how to spell Pittsburgh and guess what he left off the age by now clearly detective Pulver had had enough of this Tom and bullshit. It was time to pull the trigger. So, Mr. Talker, she said, who else has the key to this house you and Mr. McGrath are remodeling? Oh, just me, Brad said. Nobody else can get in. Okay, well, let me show you what we found in the attic. You want to explain why? If you're the only one that can get into this place, we found your business partner's checkbook and credit cards and

financial statements and a Glock 45 in the attic? For the first time since she met him, Brad Talker had nothing to say. He just sat there, looking at Detective Pulver as if she'd just taken out a live moth and eaten it. His eyes were the size of quarters. Aw, I didn't know they had all that, did you? Poor puppy. But, you know, I can see why he was surprised. I mean, an attic, that's like an ironclad hiding spot, right?

For your two giant bags of everything they'd need to arrest you. Who'd ever think to look there? Yeah, it's a common rumor that cops are allergic to attic, attic spaces. Oh, right, right. Yeah, it's like, it's like the rumor that if you ask somebody if they're a cop, they have to answer you. I know, that's one of my favorite things ever. People always do it on Hitman's Things. Now, you know you have to tell me if you're a cop.

Oh, yeah, I do. I'm not a cop. But, yeah, you know, his plan really, should have been foolproof. So they still didn't have enough to arrest Brad for murder, but they did have plenty to arrest him for fraud. So that's what they did. And while he cooled his heels in jail,

they served a search warrant on the house where they'd found more evidence of his financial shenanigans, including receipts for some of the pricey designer stuff he'd bought himself on Billy's dime. Yeah, one of the things they found in Mr. Talker's house was a Zappos receipt. you know the online shoe store and that caught my eye because years and years ago some shit heel stole my credit card number and charged of about 500 bucks worth of sneaks from guess where flipping zappos y'all need to beef up your damn security just saying it was years ago and you're still

holding it was like it was like 15 years ago like literally i'm still pissed about it it's like 2003 years ago they also had a look at brad's computer and campers oh lord brad had been a busy Little B online, Googling such things as how to commit murder and get away with it. Quick kill. How to kill someone. How to clean up crime scenes and dead animals and cement. Just, I can't anymore with these people, y'all. I just, I can't.

Mm-mm. Genuinely a pathetic showing. Yeah. You know, though, it's almost heartwarming, this like eternal human optimism that leads people to Google shit like this and expect it to work. Just bless your hearts. Bless your hearts. Surely nobody's ever thought of this before.

I'm going to skate away Scott Free. Like there's a fucking forum of like successful murderers offering hot tips. Exactly. Well, I mean, there is Jeff's TikTok. But he mostly does renegade dance now. The murder tips have really taken a backseat. They also found evidence that Talker had rented a storage unit in the days after Billy's disappearance. and stored the Toyota Tacoma there until he'd sold it to the scrapyard.

And this dude was just decimating Billy's bank accounts. There were wire transfers at the yin-yang, a pile of cash. It looked like he was planning on taking every penny the man had. But despite a thorough search of Talker's house and yard, there was still no sign of Bill McGrath's body. And as y'all probably know, no body cases are hard to win. The defense can just say, prove he's dead. You can't, can you?

And no matter how much strong circumstantial evidence they've got to, show there was a murder, the jury might just buy it. Fortunately for the investigators, though, forensic science came to the rescue. First, they did a luminal test on Billy McGrath's house, and it lit up like noon in July, just blood everywhere, and evidence of a meticulous cleanup. Plus, the DNA on that Glock 45 finally came back, and even though they still hadn't recovered a body, it gave them the final piece they needed to charge Brad Tocker with first-degree murder. The brownish red stuff on the gun was indeed Bill McGrath's blood, and the DNA on the grip was all Brad Tocker. Add that to the ear witness account of two gunshots the night of August 18th, and you've got a warrant for habeas gravis.

But Talker wouldn't budge, and when the case went to trial, he pled not guilty. The trial lasted 12 days, and I suspect his defense attorneys were single-handedly responsible for an uptick in Pepto-Bismol stock during all 12 of them. They only put on two witnesses, like the guy was just, guilty as shit, and I'm sure his attorneys knew it. And at the end of that time, the jury needed less than two hours to find him guilty. He was looking at spending the rest of his natural life in prison. Billy's loved ones tried to take some comfort in that. This guy could never hurt anybody else. But when you lose somebody without knowing where their body is, that's a tough thing to handle. Any kind of unknown is hard for the victims of crime. There's some degree of peace,

at least for a lot of people, in knowing the what and the where and the how. And for Detective Pulver, it was just infuriating. People were telling her, look, you're never going to find his body. Just accept that. But she didn't want to, damn it, and amazingly enough, she didn't have to. Because staring down the barrel of a natural life sentence, Brad Tocker had had himself a little change of heart. Or at least a change of the desiccated little malignant raisin that sits where his heart should be.

Yep. One morning, he called up his attorney from prison with an offer for the prosecutors. If they'd let him take a plea deal and knock some time off that natural life sentence, he'd tell them where to find the body of Billy McGrath. The coward still wouldn't admit he'd murdered McGrath. All he'd say was, I buried him. And then he drew them a map, and it was a shock to everybody. Most people had assumed that Talker had dumped Billy's body somewhere way out in the Arizona desert.

But nope. The map he had drawn them was a map of his mother's old. house. At the time of Billy's murder, the house was sitting empty in foreclosure proceedings. Talker's mom was in an assisted living facility. Since Talker's arrest, somebody had bought the house and rented it out to tenants. Tenants who had no idea that as they sat at their kitchen table, having dinner or chatting about their day, the body of Billy McGrath lay below the tile floor beneath. Remember, Brad Talker was a contractor. And until now, it was a contractor. And until now, it had never occurred to anyone that he might have put those skills to use to dispose of his

victim where nobody would ever find him. And you'd never know it in a million years. We've seen pictures. It's just a flawless tile floor. But as they carefully pulled up the tiles and dug into the dirt underneath it, CSIs uncovered the body. His toes were the first to appear. It was a somber moment for everybody. Even worse when they uncovered Billy's head and realized it was totally encased in duct tape, the act of a coward who couldn't stand to look at what he'd done. Interestingly enough, the cause of death wasn't a gunshot. It was blunt-forced trauma to the head. The investigators think Tocker may have shot at Billy and missed, then beat him to death, possibly with the barrel of the gun, which, as we know, was covered in Billy's blood.

You know, I really hate to say it, but I wonder if the shots were for Roy. Poor sweet doggo. Because as far as I know he was never found. piece of shit. I fucking hate this guy. He's awful. So, finally, the huge circle of people who had loved Billy McGrath had something resembling closure. As for Talker, we had some trouble finding out exactly what the plea deal got him, but I assume it was life instead of life without parole. Hopefully he'll stay right where he is until the earth melts into the sun, but this is one of the we'reder cases I think we've covered. I know.

poor eye. Like, why was he such a lightning rod for evil? I mean, what are the odds of having one person go after you with a tire iron and pepper spray and then have an entire, entirely other dude? Do almost the exact same thing four years later. I mean, here he was living in fear of his ex-boyfriend getting out of prison, keeping his eye train right at that threat, doing everything you're supposed to do, trying to prepare for it. And at the end of the day, the danger was coming from a totally different direction. It's just terrifying. 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.

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