True Crime Campfire - Double Jeopardy: Evil Twins Grab Bag

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

According to the newspaper The Guardian, there are at least 125 million twins and triplets living today. Twins come into the world together, and they can have an almost supernatural bond. Most of the time it’s a beautiful thing, but it can go sideways, too. Take, for example, the Eriksson twins, Sabina and Ursula, who in the spring of 2008, shocked the United Kingdom by dashing out into traffic, and fighting off anybody who tried to stop them. Ursula was badly hurt and needed a hospital stay, but Sabina was released after a short police interview. The next morning, in the grip of paranoia, she stabbed a man to death. The Eriksson twins are one of the only recorded examples of folie a deux, or “the madness of two,” a fascinating psychological phenomenon where two close people share the same delusion. And that’s just one of the many ways in which the twin bond can go wrong. We’re about to show you a couple others. Case 1: Scammers Charlene Corley and Darlene Wooten. Case 2: The Han Sisters, Sunny and Jeena. Sources:Evil Twins by John Glatt Investigation Discovery's "Evil Twins," episode "Green-Eyed Monsters"CNBC's "American Greed," episode "Dr. Stokes/C&D Distributors"ABC News: https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5197739&page=1Medium: https://medium.com/truly-adventurous/the-han-twins-cb293ac0f554Court papers: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1299900.htmlOrange County Register: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/06/20/evil-twin-who-plotted-to-kill-sister-in-irvine-is-released-on-parole-after-20-years-in-prison/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. According to the newspaper of The Guardian, there are at least 125 million twins and triplets living today. Twins come into the world together, and they can have an almost supernatural bond. Most of the time it's a beautiful thing, but it can go sideways too. Take, for example, the Erickson twins, Sabina and Ursula, who in the spring of 2008 shocked

the United Kingdom by dashing out into traffic and fighting off anybody who tried to stop them. Ursula was badly hurt and needed a hospital stay, but Sabina was released after a short police interview. The next morning, in the grip of paranoia, she stabbed a man to death. The Erickson twins are one of the only recorded examples of foliadieu, or the madness of two, a fascinating psychological phenomenon where two close people share the same delusion. And that's just one of the many ways in which the twin bond can go wrong. We're about to show you a couple others. This is Double Jeopardy, your evil twins grab bag. Case 1. Double Down. Twin Scammers, Charlene and Darlene Shuler.

So, campers, for this one, were in Lexington, South Carolina, October 2, 2006. Darlene Wooten was missing. Her husband and son hadn't been able to get her on the phone for hours, and neither could her identical twin sister Charlene. Everybody in the family was confused, except Charlene. She knew why Darlene had disappeared, and she was getting a sick feeling in her gut. Without a word to anyone, she jumped in her luxury car and sped down a dark country road. Twins, especially identicals, can have a sort of psychic bond. One can sense when the other is in pain or trouble. And Charlene could feel it in her DNA that something had gone horribly wrong. Charlene and Darling Shuler grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Identical twins

you couldn't tell apart unless they let you, and they had your typical small town southern childhood. Church on Sundays, Girl Scout meetings on Tuesday evenings, singing in the church choir, the whole thing. By the time they hit their teenage ears, the twins were starting to step outside the whole twin thing a little bit and find their own identities, and some differences soon became clear. With identical twins, you often hear about one twin being the quote, dominant one, and that was definitely Charlene. She was sort of the brains of the operation. She was studious at school, big reader, good grades, and Darlene was kind of the social butterfly. She'd rather hang out at the drive-in movies than stay home and study. But they both had one thing in

common. They had dreams that were bigger than little Columbia, South Carolina, and the humble home they grew up in. Their dad ran his own plumbing business. He did okay, but not much better than okay. And as the girls got older, especially when they got to college and got to look around at all the rich sorority girls and their fancy stuff, they realized they wanted them a big, gooey piece of that too. They envied those girls, probably resented them too. Until they got to college, they'd never been so acutely aware of the divide between their family and the ones who had everything. Charlene majored in psychology, which always fascinates me how many of the people we cover on this show like to study psychology. My theory is they want to understand themselves and why they're not quite like everybody else, which just comes up again and again and again, so it just fascinates me.

Darlene majored in early childhood ed, and once she graduated, she got a job teaching third grade. Charlene didn't stick with psychology, though. started working for the state, helping keep an eye on the budget. And it was there where she met an accountant named Wayne Corley. Wayne had a pedigree. His family helped found the city of Lexington, South Carolina, and they had money and status to spare. He and Charlene hit it off hard and fast, and before long, she had a ring on it. Sister Darlene wasn't far behind either. She married a guy named Lee Wooten, a successful sales manager for a construction supplies company. So now, it would seemed to anybody who was paying attention that the Schuller sisters had made it, TM.

College degrees earned. Careers started. Well-to-do hunks met and married. Check, check and check. And for a while, the sisters settled into their new lives. Got involved in the Lutheran Church, started families with their husbands, worked at their careers, and started establishing themselves as part of capital S. Southern Society. They were hobnobbing with the right sort of folks, getting invited to the right kind of

social gatherings, the kind I'd rather have unesthetized dental surgery than spend 10 minutes at, but what do I know? They really had arrived. But the thing is, for people like Shar and Dar, enough is never really enough. They were comfortable, had some status because of their husband's financial success, but they still weren't the it girls. And there was something about relying on their husbands for social cachet that really chapped Charlene's ass. That part I can understand, actually. Yeah, you know, I think I can get that too. Charlene wanted to be rich and admired, independent of her hubby and his family. She'd been percolating a plan for how to get there, and of course she wanted her sister

to join her. So in 1991, a little less than a decade after getting out of school and getting married, Charlene pitched the idea to Darlene, a business they'd call C&D distributors. C&D for Charlene and Darlene, of course. Yeah, a little bit on the nose for me, but whatever. I'm just saying, I feel like they phoned in on the name. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Could have been Char and Dar.

That would be better, even. The idea was for C&D to ship hardware, stuff like light bulbs, nails, and screws and pipes and whatnot. And it did okay in the first couple of years, managed to turn a profit, which is more than you can say for a lot of new businesses that short of time. But it was nothing spectacular. Must have brought back memories from their childhood watching their dad work his ass off for unimpressive amounts of money. Before long, the sisters expanded, started a second business they called C&D deliveries. They bought a big warehouse, rented it out to an appliance company, and started delivering appliances.

Soon it became clear that the delivery business was doing a lot better than the distributor business, and Char and Dar were eager to find a way to get them both to flourish. It was right around this time, 1993 or so, when the sisters found out about government contract work and how deliciously lucrative it could be. Much to their surprise, they learned that becoming a supplier for the U.S. military was super, super easy. It worked like this. Companies like C&D would apply for government contracts through any one of a bunch of online bidding forums. Like, there's one called dibs, which stands for the Defense Logistics Agency Business System Modernization Internet Bid Board System. Say that one five times fast. I dare

you. Damn. You could go on dibs, look at what the government was saying they needed, and submit a quote. Like, we've got this kind of O-ring for 50 cents each, whatever. and then the government could decide which distributor was offering the best deal. It was as easy as that, and the sisters wanted in. They registered as government contractors with the Department of Defense and took off running. They got a fair bit of business from the military, but it was still nothing spectacular. The delivery business was doing much better, and the sisters were annoyed at how much work they were putting in on the distributor stuff. The profit just didn't seem worth all the effort.

There are moments in our lives where one small decision can change everything, for good or bad. You sleep through your alarm and end up taking a later train to work and you meet the love of your life. You decide to run out for a taco and you get into a car crash and break your neck. Every day is a series of thousands and thousands of little choices, and everyone has the potential to change the course of our lives. Probably shouldn't think too much about that now that I say it alone. Yeah. Let's not. But the point is, one afternoon our Wonder Twins, Charlene and Darling, we're doing some invoices for C&D to

distributors when one of them accidentally entered the shipping cost wrong. She didn't notice it at the time, but under shipping, she put down $5,000, for like a tiny little order worth a few bucks. Now, the sisters didn't realize this had even happened, until a couple weeks later when they sat down to open their mail and found a check from the government, five grand bigger than it should have been. The DOD paid the invoice. No questions asked. Five thousand smackeroons to ship a few nuts and bolts. Their first reaction was pretty much sheer terror. They assumed they were going to be in huge trouble, even though the invoice really was a mistake that first time. After having a many meltdown in the office, the sisters decided there was only one course of action. They'd write

a check to the government, paying the five grand back in full, and enclose an explanation and apology. So that's what they did. And it was no harm, no foul with the DOD. Nobody came swooping down on them. They didn't lose their status as contractors, nothing. And that, got Charlene thinking. Here they were, putting blood, sweat, and tears into this business, and it's not like they weren't making money, but it wasn't the kind of money they had in mind when they started the place. They got invited to fancy derby parties and Christmas gala's and stuff like that, sure,

but there was still a strata of wealthy Carolina society that was way above their reach. They still weren't the richest of the rich girls. That was a nasty thought. And Charlene couldn't get it out of her head. She just kept thinking and thinking about that $5,000 check. The government had just paid it, sight unseen, which meant these payments must process automatically. Nobody was minding the store. The implications of that were as dazzling as the rhinestones on a rich bitch's Kentucky derby hat.

And a few days later, Charlene sat her sister down for a chat. Now, we'll never know how hard she had to work to talk Darlene into this. Maybe not hard at all. Maybe Darlene was just all in for minute one. What we do know is that the ladies decided to test the waters a little. make another little oopsie on an invoice and just see what happened. So this time, on a small order of nails or something like that, they entered a shipping cost of $1,000.

And then they waited. They figured if anybody asked any uncomfortable questions, they could just pay the money back, the way they did with the $5,000, just another mistake. We're so sorry, blah, blah, blah. And lo and behold, in a couple weeks, there was a check with $1,000 tacked on for shipping. The sisters were over the moon.

They were so excited they left early that day, and went to the mall. Got a pretty new outfit each, plus a little pampering at the salon, and that thousand bucks was gone as fast as it got there. Now, if they just stopped there, you might be kind of like, way to stick it to the man, enjoy those new outfits, girls, but of course they didn't stop there. They were just getting started. They'd found themselves a flaw in the system, and they were going to milk it for all it was worth. It started smallish, $1,000 shipping fee, a $2,000, a $2,000, a $3. But soon enough, Shar and Dar were bilk in the Department of Defense for staggering amounts of money on a regular

basis. Over a three-year period in the late 90s and early aughts, they charged the government hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. And each time, like clockwork, the delicious green magically appeared in their bank account. They made sure they were the only ones who had access to the numbers, so they wouldn't have to answer to anybody at the company. Not hard to do when you're the owners, and they started spending money like their plane was going down. They bought boats, trips, cars, jewelry, designer clothes, a box at the football stadium at their old university, which set them back a quarter mill. Lake houses, at one point, they had like four or five vacation homes on the same beach. For what purpose I can't imagine, I guess just to let everybody know how filthy, stupid, rich they were.

Jeez, Louise. And then in 2001, the U.S. went to war, times two, in Afghanistan and Iraq. and with the military needing everything from hardware to uniforms and body armor, contractors like C&D were making money hand of her fist. It was the perfect excuse for Char and Dar to go absolutely apeshit nuts with the invoices. The twins had become straight up war profiteers. They were charging the Defense Department as much as $600,000 at a time to ship a $2 order of washers. As forensic psychologist Dr. David Clayman later to,

told investigation discovery, this is the addiction cycle. Each time they got a check-in, it was a reflection that they were better than they were before. The more money they had, the more important they were. That's what motivated them. Yeah, and if it put any kind of bad taste in their mouths, taken money from the American taxpayers during a time of war, they didn't let it stop them. In fact, they started getting competitive with each other to see who could blow the most money on the most ostentatious crap.

If Charlene bought a new car, Daroline would buy a nicer one. They bought a cookie store franchise too, which they ran into the ground by eating more than they sold and some cosmetic surgery for them in one of their hobbies and tons of gifts for their friends. Because despite all the nauseating conspicuous consumption, the sisters gave quite a bit too. They make big donations to local charities. They gave an 18-year-old employee a car as a birthday gift. Of course, they were making these generous donations with stolen money. This may be a controversial thing to say, but it's the truth. Not every generous person is doing it for altruistic reasons.

Some people like to spread their wealth around just to be admired for it. Not to mention the tax breaks. We've talked about it before, how some of the worst people we've covered on the show were known before they got caught murdering somebody for their kindness and generosity. Oh yeah. I mean, even Ted Bundy volunteered for years on a suicide hotline and he once saved a little boy from drowning. It's social currency, and everybody needs that. People like Charlene and Darling, I think, are extra aware of how important that kind of currency is and how far it can get you.

I think they love the spotlight, the status, and the attention they got from giving just as much as they love spending money on the cars and the speedboats. And to try and keep their big secret a secret, they opened a couple shell companies to help launder the money. All these businesses were a P.O. Box, a bank account, and a name. They were 100% created to help hide the theft. And of course, it was never going to stay hidden forever. What's the old saying? Pride goes before a fall. And the higher up you rise, the worst that fall is going to kick your ass.

They really should have quit while they were win-in. But I'm with Dr. Clayman. I mean, I think this had become an addiction for them. And I don't know if they could have stopped if they wanted to. By 2006, the twins had stolen a staggering $21 million. dollars from the U.S. government, most of which they'd blown on stuff. And it seems to me like they'd

long since stopped worrying about overdoing it and getting caught. In the fall of 06, they billed the Department of Defense for the wackiest amount they tried yet. Almost a million dollars for a couple of 19 cents parts. That might not have gotten them caught

by itself, bizarrely enough, but they made a little oopsie. They accidentally billed the government again on the same order for a similarly insane amount. Two, almost million dollar shipping charges on the same contract at the same time. And that was finally enough to get somebody's attention. And the DOD brought in an auditor whose face I would have loved to see when he started looking through the archive of those C&D invoices. God, that poor bastard. I imagine that was a bad day. So yeah, the game was up for our girls.

And despite their initial attempts to ignore the problem and hope it went away, that's literally what they did. Like, they just didn't deal with it for like a month. It's just crazy. So despite their initial attempts to just ignore it on October 2nd, 2006, some agents from the Defense Criminal Investigative Service popped in unannounced on Darlene at work when Charlene wasn't there. Hiya, could we talk about these invoices? Great. Thanks. We'll just sit down right here and wait. Now, Darlene, if you recall, was not the main cheese in this relationship and she immediately realized she was in way over her head. So, She basically just stalled them, asking for some time to get her records together and got the hell out of the office.

Which brings us back to where we started this story. Darlene missing for more than 12 hours with nobody able to find her. Well, nobody except her twin. When Darlene went MIA, Charlene knew right away where to look for her. She jumped in her car and sped hell-bent for leather toward the family lake house. When she got there, Darlene's car was in the driveway, but nobody answered the doorbell, and Charlene still couldn't get her sister to pick up the phone. She ended up breaking into the place through a window, and there, on the floor, was her twin

sister's body. Darlene had taken her own life, with a gun she'd swiped from her son that afternoon. Charlene was bereft now, standing in the wreckage of the awful mess she and her sister had created, which her sister had left her to deal with alone. A few days after her death, some of Darlene's family members got letters in the mail. Charlene got one, of course. In it, her sister begged her to tell the family that she'd taken her life because of terminal cancer diagnosis, not because she didn't want to go to jail for fraud.

Whether the family believed that, I don't know. One of the lingering questions in all this is how much, if any, the twins' husbands knew about what was going on. Did they think C&D had just become wildly successful on its own? Very possibly. Possibly they suspected something was off, but didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth. We have no way of no one for sure. At first, Charlene, always classy, tried to weasel out of consequences by blaming the whole thing on Darlene. I didn't even know what was going on at C&D distributors, she said. I ran C&D deliveries. This was all Darlene's doing. I just can't believe it. Uh-huh. Interestingly enough, just a few weeks after Darlene's suicide with the investigation ramping into high gear, there was a suspicious

fire at C&D headquarters. The investigators were horrified at first. Oh my God, all the evidence must have been destroyed, but as we've seen several times before now on true crime campfire, criminals have the most fascinating inability to burn paper correctly. I don't know what it is, but it's come up like three or four times now. Somehow, possibly because the god of consequences was glaring down on Charlene that night as she stood there with her book of matches, a ton of documents escaped the fire. They were soggy from the firefighter's hoses and little singed in spots, and the investigators had to blow dry them with hair dryers, but they were still in good shape.

good enough to prove that Charlene was full of more shit than a Coichella Porta John when she claimed she had nothing to do with the fraud. That's the most Southern you've ever sounded. Coachella Porta John. I get Southern when I'm talking about Southern cases. I don't know what it is. It just brings it out in me. So yeah, Charlene's name was all over those documents.

She was guilty or not but her shit. Charlene Corley pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering, And despite trotting out a bunch of character witnesses to talk about her amazing generosity with her stolen money, Judge Margaret Seymour sentenced her to repay almost $16 million in restitution and served 78 months, which is about six and a half years, in prison. The judge called it a crime against America, and most of the people the twins had tried so hard to impress, pretty much branded her a pariah and a traitor. Charlene got out of prison in 2015, and I think she's kept her nose clean since, but she'll never get to see her sister. sister again. And neither will anyone else in the family. No, worth it. So in Case 1, we had two twins teaming up to do a crime. In this case, we've got

twin versus twin. This is Case 2, Good Daughter, the story of Sunny and Gina Hahn. For this, we are in Irvine, California, November 6, 1996. One of the two intruders, the big one, started wrapping duct tape around Sunny Hahn's head. He'd already tied her wrists with twine. Sonny's roommate, Helen Kim, was already bound and gagged. But just as the big intruder asked his buddy to toss over more tape, Helen managed to yank her hands free of the twine and make a run for the front door of the apartment. The big guy caught her and shoved her back.

I should shoot you for trying that, he said. And he could. He had a gun, which he'd put down when he started tying up Sunny. They were two young men, boys, really. It would turn out they were just 15 and 16 years old. Not that that made them any less dangerous. The gun was real and wouldn't be any less deadly if it was a younger finger pulling the trigger. And they were both much bigger and stronger than their victims.

They tied Helen up again, then carried both young women into the bathroom and threw them into the tub. The woman sat there, bound and gagged, heads pressed together, shaking with fear. Each of them certain they were about to die. The boys left them there. The girls heard them start ransacking Sunny's bedroom, and then Sunny heard one of them say something that made her heart skip a beat. Go get Gina from the car so she can find her. finish her off. She only knew one, Gina, knew her better than any other person on the planet. Gina was the name of her identical twin. Sunny Han was born in South Korea in April of 1974,

just five minutes ahead of her identical twin sister Gina. And that five minutes made all the difference to their mother, Boo Kim Han, who, as we'll see, was a real peach. Sunny was the oldest, so she got the lion's share of the attention and affection and expectations. It was made clear to Gina right from the start that Sunny, all of five minutes older, was the special one. And Gina had to get used to living in her shadow. It's wild to me that they would do that with twins. Like, you know, I get that like that's a cultural thing in some societies, but five minutes? Like, that's just bananas to me.

Yeah, I think mom just sucked. Honestly, I think it's, I think she just sucked. Straight up. Because usually you have the opposite problem with twins where the parent assigns the same expectations to both of them, the same, like, oh, you have the same, you're going to play the same sports and do the same things, and you're going to basically be the same person instead of like letting them be individual people. Right, right. Their parents separated when they were young, and they each took one of the twins, which seems like both illogical and also completely ridiculous way to handle it. Hey, they're identical, so we'll just keep one each. That's fair, right?

Real parent trap situation. It is a parent trap situation, except like much, much darker and worse than more awful. Sunny stayed with their mom and Gina lived with their dad, and they were separated for five years until their parents divorced and their dad granted Boo Kim full custody uncontested. Why to make your girls feel special, dad? All right. When they were 11, Boo Kim moved to the United States, taking the girls with her. They went to Seattle first, where Bochem foisted them off on relatives for a year before bringing them south to live with her in Orange County. Boe Kim was cute and charming and had gotten work as a cocktail waitress at a local casino, and that was where things really started to go off the rails.

She developed an all-consuming gambling addiction that threw her life into chaos. She went from one job to another, usually bar work, and from one boyfriend to another, sometimes disappearing for days at a time to party and hit the casinos. This meant leaving her 12-year-old daughters alone at home with next to no food, still speaking barely a word of English and not knowing anybody but each other. For the next couple of years, Sunny and Gina were shuttled between various Orange County group homes and periods at home with their unpredictable, often angry mother. It was just a nightmare situation to grow up in, especially in a new country, but it did strengthen the bond between the girls.

All they had was each other. Eventually, Bukim realized she couldn't care for the girls and shipped them. them off to stay with their aunt Sonia and Uncle James and Campo, a little rural town to the east of San Diego, and this latest abandonment actually seemed to be what the girls needed. After a life of turmoil, they had stability and security,

and they thrived. They were smart girls and determined to succeed, and they were both the academic stars of Mountain Empire High School, where they would graduate as co-valedictorians. The identical twins had become pretty easy to tell apart by this time, and not just because Gina kept her hair short and Sunny's was long. Sunny was charismatic and popular and had tons of friends, whereas Gina was more.

more serious and intense. Years of your mom making it clear which of you is the special one will do that. One of the drivers of the twins' academic success was their competitiveness with each other, and hey, if all it does is get you good grades, there's nothing wrong with that, but it went a lot further with Sunny and Gina. They were as close as two people can be, but closeness doesn't necessarily mean everything sweet and easy. It can mean that this is the person you show your true self to, rather than the public front, and both of the Han girls had a lot of anger simmering just under the surface. They fought a lot in private from bickering and sniping at each other all the way up to physical altercations. When they were 15, one of these ended with Sunny stabbing

Gina in the thigh. Yikes. So there was a lot going on with these girls. I mean, I've never stabbed anybody, and I'm pretty sure most of y'all can say the same. After high school, the pattern of Sunny being the more blessed daughter continued when she got a full scholarship to the University of Laverne up in Los Angeles County. Gina could have gone to college, although not on a full scholarship, but she didn't feel she was ready for that kind of commitment. So instead, she signed up for a more serious commitment, enlisting in the Air Force and starting basic training in Texas. It was a dumb decision, and when she regretted almost immediately. It was a strict environment, and she had no freedom. Like, yeah, it's the military, Gina.

They're not real big on just taking it easy and letting people just let their hair down and do their own thing during basic training. I'm sorry that came as a shock to you. One month then, and she knew she'd made a horrible mistake, which was all the worst because Sonny seemed to be thriving at college. Gina felt like a failure, and she felt trapped. She was stuck in the Air Force for two years. Or was she?

Gina, crafty Kathy that she is, thought of a way out and discovered that when push came to shove, she was pretty comfortable with deception. These were the days of don't ask, don't tell in the U.S. military, which meant that non-heterosexual people serving were prohibited from disclosing or discussing their orientation under penalty of discharge.

Boo. It's so stupid. So Gina told her commanding officer that she was gay, which she wasn't, and was shocked and panicked to find herself potentially facing jail. Because, of course, she wasn't the first person to try this trick. And the military takes a dim view of people lying to avoid service. But with the intervention of a family friend, the Air Force eventually let Gina go, and she slunk back to Southern California with her tail between her legs.

Sunny, meanwhile, was driving to classes at Laverne in a BMW while sport and designer clothes and fancy makeup. She was popular and had a boyfriend. Everything for her seemed, well, Sunny. The Han family wasn't wealthy, but every week they sent Sunny a $1,000 check that she put into a joint account she shared with Gina. The idea was that they share the money equally, but seriously, if you want to do that, just send them $500 each, for God's sake. They're two different people. Yeah, that's wild, man. It's the twin thing, man.

We talked about this, but like, it's like they can't think of them as two separate individuals. This setup could have been custom designed to cause static between the two girls. Gina, fresh out of the Air Force and living in a crappy apartment in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, had always, complained to her roommates that Sunny took more than her fair share of the money. And Sunny did like to flash the cash. Plenty of rich kids went to Laverne, and like many of us would do at that age, Sunny befriended and tried to emulate them. Now, for most people who went to school in the 90s, a full scholarship and two grand a month

would have been a dream come true. It was beyond plenty of money for a comfortable college life, but it wasn't BMW and designer clothes money. And there are still some questions about just how Sunny paid for her LaVern. earned lifestyle. Dipping into Gina's half of the weekly family allowance would account for some, but her college friend started suspecting there might be more to it than that. Both the Han girls had moral compasses that were a little askew. One time, Sunny stole a credit card from a college friend and spent $1,300 on clothes and lingerie. When the police picked her up, she told them her friend

wouldn't mind because her family was so rich. If she wouldn't mind, if she wouldn't mind, then how come you didn't ask her first? And the friend did mind, of course, and press charges. Sunny got a $405 fine in three years probation, which was nothing compared to the black hole of trouble Gina was about to get sucked into. She had a job working nights as a blackjack dealer at the Lakeside Casino, and one night after she was done, she was waiting for some co-workers to finish up so they could all go out together.

To kill time, she decided to play a hand of blackjack herself. She was out of cash within a few hands, and so she ran to the ATM and took out $300, the maximum amount. She lost all of it and was furious with herself. She was not living a life where she could just throw $300 away. So to recoup her losses, she stayed awake all night and went to her bank as soon as it opened. She took out every cent of her savings, about $4,000. And, of course, lost it all.

No. Now, whether there's a hereditary predisposition to gambling addiction is still somewhat up in the air. I think you can also imagine some psychological reasons why Gina would mimic the self-destructive habits of her mom, which had hurt her and Sonny so much when they were young. Yeah, whatever the reason, though, she got the gambling bug hard, and it didn't take her long to turn to theft and fraud to feed her addiction, stealing cash and credit cards from friends and family, forging checks, in all, she'd steal nearly $40,000.

And it seems like the stress of that was more than she could take. Feeling guilty and alone and despondent, Gina took. a handful of sleeping pills and wash them down with vodka. Not enough to end her life, but enough to put her in the hospital. When her Uncle James picked her up and asked her why she'd done it, she told him she felt like everything was coming down on top of her. But even after hitting rock bottom like that, Gina kept on gambling and stealing to pay for her gambling, including over 10 grand from Uncle James. When he found out, he called the cops. Gina got 10 days in jail and three years probation and an order to pay restitution, and if you're expecting a gambling addict to pay

40 grand restitution, good luck with that. Don't hold your breath, is all I'm saying. A couple hours up the coast, Sunny wasn't doing great either. A breakup with her boyfriend led her into a depressive spiral where her grades slipped. She lost her scholarship, and she dropped out of Laverne. Again and again, people who knew the Han girls would say how terrible they both were at handling the troubles and difficulties of a normal adult life, how easily they could spin down into a deep, funk or terrible panic decision-making, most likely because they'd never been taught healthy coping mechanisms by either one of their parents, and their childhood was full of dysfunctional chaos. Sunny went back to class at a community college, but dropped out there too

and got a job as a receptionist in a new apartment. And that's where she was when Gina called, lonely and desperate and asking for help. Sunny agreed to let Gina move in with her, and the twins were both excited at the idea. They'd been apart for four years, each flailing through life in their own ways, and the thought of living together reminded them both of their high school years. The last time things had been really good for either of them. You know, minus the occasional thigh-stabbing, but hindsight can be like that sometimes. We can forget about the stabbings and the rosy glow of nostalgia. But very quickly, the thigh-stabbing side of their relationship reared its ugly little

noggin again. They argued all the time. Sunny would kick Gina out time and again for dumb shit like not doing the dishes or not making food right, high-handed nonsense that sharpened Gina's resentment of her five minutes older sister into a dangerous grudge. Later, she'd say she felt like Sonny was turning into their mom. Ugh, that didn't good. In May 1996, the sister's got into a full-on screaming, fist-flying fight,

which culminated and Sonny chucking a phone into Gina's face. Now, it's 1996, remember, so we're not talking about an iPhone here. We're talking a full-size, clunky, handset, and dialer landline. It broke Gina's nose and knocked her down. Neighbors called the police, and when they showed up, Gina, face still bloody, was shocked to see them put the cuffs on Sonny, who it turned out had an outstanding warrant for skipping out on her probation. According to author John Glad, whose book Evil Twins is one of our sources for this case, this was the first time Gina ever heard of Sunny's own brush with the law, a seriously toned down reflection of her own. Sunny got three days in jail. She called Gina from there and screamed, as soon as I get home, I'm going to kick you out. It rattled because she had nowhere else to go, Gina took her identical twins' wallet, ID, and car keys.

She emptied Sonny's bank account and sped the BMW down to San Diego, where she crashed at an X's place and burned through Sunny's credit cards. She stole some checks from the X, too, and he turned her in. By now, Sunny was out of jail and looking to press charges for fraud. Gina was ultimately sentenced to some semi-real time, a six-month stretch, and it was while she was incarcerated that, however, She started to focus in on Sunny as the cause of all her problems. Sunny had always come first. Sunny got every chance and lucky break that Gina didn't. Sunny had always won their fights.

Surely things would be better if Sunny was out of the way. Her fellow inmates recalled Gina becoming completely obsessed with her sister. And before long, Gina broke out of jail. Well, sort of. After serving three months, she was allowed daily five-hour work furloughs, and during one of these, she just called a buddy and had him drive her down. to El Cajon where she crashed with a couple of friends. Just, yeah, I'm just not going back. I'm just back. No.

Her second day on the limb, she called Sunny and said she wanted to come pick up some of her stuff. How'd you find my number? Sunny said. I throw out all your stuff and I don't care about you anymore. Don't ever call me again. God dang, man. That is harsh. Yeah. I mean, I get it like, you know, but damn. Right. For Gina, whose mind had already turned in a murderous direction, this was it. She was going to kill Sonny, and she wasn't very subtle about it either. She'd start asking people, she hardly knew whether they knew anybody who could help her kill her sister. And it's probably not going to surprise any of our regular listeners to learn that nobody called the police or tried to find out

who Sunny was and warn her. People either thought Gina was joking or they just didn't care. And apparently, aimlessly blathering about your murder plot will find you a hitman, just not necessarily one of the best. Gina landed 16-year-old Archie Bryant and his 15-year-old friend, Yoshi Sireth. Two kids from the tougher side of town who, bless them, don't seem super bright. I mean, they agreed to help Gina with her plan to kill Sunny for a lousy $100 each, plus an extra $10 for Archie as a finder's fee on a gun, a two-shot derringer you could hide in the palm of your hand.

$100 for a human life. In 1996, that'd get you a Game Boy and a Spice Girl CD, and not much else. Gina drove them north in a rented blue Mustang, telling them that she wanted to kill Sunny herself. She'd wait in the car while the boys bound and gagged Sonny, and then she'd come in and finish the job. Now, smarter hitmen might have realized this meant they were taking most of the risk if things went sideways, but then smarter hitman wouldn't have been there in the first place. On the way, Archie stuck a potato on the end of the gun as a makeshift silencer and fired it out the window to make sure it worked.

And it did, but he didn't notice the shell casing that rolled under the seat of the rental car, because, of course, he didn't. They stopped that a Ralph's on the way and picked up twine, duct tape, gloves, plastic bags, Lysol, and a few magazines. Their plan was to pose as high school kids selling magazine subscriptions and hopefully get invited in. Then they had lunch at Carl's Jr., and Gina drilled the plan into Beavis and Butthead's minds. At 1 p.m., they parked outside Sunny's apartment and Yoshi went up to try the subscription scam to get in. He was smaller than Archie, who was a star high school athlete and built like it. And they figured he'd be a less intimidating figure to find at your door. But he was also more nervous and awkward than Archie,

and after a few moments of listening to him stumble through his spiel, while he flashed Cosmos and Vogue's under her nose, Sunny's roommate politely shut the door in his face. After that, Gina went to the apartment complex office and tried to get get the super to give her the key, claiming to be Sunny and saying she'd locked herself out, but the super didn't bite. So after wait in an hour, the two boys tried the magazine bit again, and this time when Sunny's roommate, Helen Kim, opened the door a crack, they just shoved their way in. Archie pressed the gun against Helen's head as she screamed and sobbed. He told her to get down

on the ground. When she did, Yoshi started tying her with twine and put a strip of duct tape across her mouth. Sunny had just gotten out of the shower when the boys burst in and Helen started screaming. Heart pounding. She called 911 on her cell phone with shaking fingers and in a terrified whisper she told the dispatcher that men had broken into her apartment and were sexually assaulting her roommate. They weren't, thank God. It's just what Sunny understandably assumed was happening in the next room. When the dispatcher asked for more information, the line went dead. Archie Bryant had burst into the bathroom and Sonny, scared of what he might do if he knew. she'd called the police, hung up. Archie put the gun to her head and demanded to know whether

she'd called the cops. Sunny said, no, no, she'd just been talking to a friend. So Archie dragged her out of the bathroom and tied and gagged her, bringing us back to where we started the story. The boys threw the terrified roommates into the bathtub, then Archie sent Yoshi to go get Gina so she could finish off her sister. Waiting for Gina, Archie kept rooting through Sunny's stuff, grabbing 60 bucks in cash, a pager, and a condom, which really really, Really, dude? You're going to steal a condom? That's your priority in the middle of all this? I don't understand this kid. And then he heard the sirens of multiple police cars pulling into the apartment complex and knew the jig was up. He ran into the bathroom, swearing as he ripped the duct tape off Sonny and Helen and untied them.

Tell the cops it's a joke, he demanded. Sure. Sure, terrifying stranger who was just holding a gun to our heads. We'll help you out. You seem like a good guy. We got you, man. Don't sweat it. Like, what the hell, man? As if, as several officers hurried to the girl's apartment, another approached Gina and Yoshi as they sat in the rented Mustang. As cool as a fridge full of cucumbers, Gina rolled down her window like, Is there something wrong, officer? When he asked who she was, she told him she was Sonny Hahn.

She lived here, and she was terribly worried about her roommates. And when the officer headed for the apartments, Gina calmly told Yoshi to wait in the car and followed him. Girl, I just kidding not with this woman. Like, if it didn't work with the soup or two minutes ago, why you think it's going to work now? Just no, no. Stop trying to pose as your sister. You're an idiot. By this time, track star Archie had hidden the gun in a laundry hamper and made a break for it, but it didn't work out the way he'd hoped. A cop tackled him and he got a face full of asphalt for his trouble.

From Sunny's call, the cops knew there had been more than one intruder, and as Gina arrived, a bunch of them were outside the apartment door with guns drawn. They told her to get out of there, and Gina headed back to the muster. And a little while later, after they freed Sunny and Helen, an officer noticed that one of the victims bore an uncanny resemblance to the young woman they'd just sent back to the car, and he started to realize that something very weird was going on here. But by that time, Gina and Yoshi had already split and were hauling ass toward the Mexican border. But it was okay. As teenagers always, always do, Archie Bryant cracked like a cheap plate in a dishwasher, and police were immediately on the hunt for Gina and Yoshi. Using Sunny's ID, Gina stole $5,000 from her sister's bank account and pawned off some jewelry for gold.

Then she went to a Nissan dealer, and again, using Sunny's ID, tried to lease a 300 ZX sports car. Hey, if you're going to flee justice, why not do it in style? But it was near closing time by then, and the deal wouldn't go through until the next day. Gina and Yoshi took the Mustang back to the rental place. You know, you might be wanted by the police from attempted murder, but you still. still don't want to fuck with the Avis car rental. The police who were not idiots were waiting there for them and put the old habeas grab us on Gina and Yoshi while Gina screamed, this is all a mistake.

I'm not Gina, I'm sunny. Bitch, give it up already. This probably hasn't worked since y'all were in first grade. That's so crazy. A quick inspection of the Mustang turned up the bullet casing from when Archie had test fired the gun as well as the murder kit they bought from Ralph's. Yeah, that sizzling noise you hear in the background is the sound of goose is being cooked, and they sizzled even more when the cops found the gun in the laundry hamper back at Sunny's place,

loaded with the safety off. There was a twist as the case is headed towards trial, though. Sunny visited Gina in jail, where Gina told her the police had made the whole thing up, and she hadn't been trying to hurt Sunny at all. And Sunny believed her. Or at least Sunny said she believed her and would go on to claim the police had brainwashed her into accepting. Gina's guilt, which she now rejected. Now, both the Han girls have their flaws, don't we all?

But being dumb and gullible isn't one of them. What I think happened here is that Sunny knew damn well. Her sister tried to kill her, but decided she tried to keep Gina out of prison regardless. That twin bond is weird, powerful, and weird. Yeah. A case with two pretty young twins where one tried to kill the other was always bound to be a media circus. And it was, particularly after. what happened on the second day of Sunny's testimony.

On her first day, she'd shown up impeccably put together in a dark suit and heels. She looked like she could have been one of the attorneys, not a witness, and on the stand, she spoke calmly and cogently in defense of her sister. Day two, though, was very different. Sunny had no makeup on, and the suit had been replaced with a camo tank top and jeans. She had trouble walking, and she was slurring her words. When the judge questioned her on the stand, Sunny told her she'd taken an overdose of sleeping pills. She had to be helped out of the witness box as the judge called for an ambulance.

And while we can't get inside Sunny Han's head, I don't think this was an attempt to end her life. If that was the case, why show up to court at all? I think she was miserable and heartbroken and scared and wanted out of this awful situation. And probably wanted help, as anybody would in her place. Oh, yeah. But despite all the drama, Gina Hahn, Archie Bryant, and Yoshi Sireth were all found guilty. And despite Sunny's pleas for leniency, the judge gave him. Gina the maximum sentence.

26 years to life. Archie Bryant got 16 years and Yoshi Sireth got 8. In the aftermath, Sunny Hahn had a brief moment on the talk show circuit before opting for a life far away from the spotlight. Gina Hahn was paroled in 2018

at the age of 44, supported by a letter from Sunny in which she said Gina had grown up and should be allowed to be with their mom, Boo Kim, who had diabetes and still struggled with gambling, which to me sounds a bit like, please, let her out so I don't have to deal with my nightmare mother by myself, which is

understandable. To be honest. This was probably more persuasive to the board than Gina's evidence that she could support herself, which included letters from male prison pen pals offering her money and lodging, including one dumbass in England who'd already sent her 100 grand

after a year's correspondence. Bro, pal. My dude. Dang, 100 grand. Can you send me a hundred grand? God. I'll write you letters, dude.

Absolutely. I'll write you beautiful letter. They're the best letters you ever heard in your life. God. And this is a hell of a thing. Medium journalist Jana Misenholder chatted with the twins' mom, Boo Kim Hahn.

This is going to knock you on your ass. Who made it clear that Gina, not Sunny, was now the golden child, bragging that her youngest daughter had gotten an engineering degree and a good job up in San Francisco. I think Sunny's, dead, she told Misenholder, I think.

She thinks her daughter is dead. She's not dead, by the way, she doesn't keep in touch with her mom and Boo Kim, mother of the decade, has apparently not made any effort to find her. Holy shit. I'm just going to leave it at that because it's

staggering. 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 thank you katie for playing hurt this poor girl has an ear infection and is in loads of pain and decided to record anyway because she is a bad ass mama jama i couldn't let you guys down i gotta record for y'all yeah it's she's in a bad way and as always we want to send a grateful

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