True Crime Campfire - Episode 33: Try, Try Again: The Murder of Frank Rodriguez, Part 1

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

We believe people are basically good. We realize that sounds far-fetched, because people can also be a-holes on a truly epic scale, but hear us out. We think most people have good intentions most of the time and will do the right thing when called upon. However. There are people in this world who are predators, every bit as much as the black widow spiders that sometimes haunt our nightmares. People whose gears are always turning, whose minds are always scanning about for an advantage. A way to come out on top, often at others’ expense. This is the story of a pure predator, a woman with a heart as cold and empty as space. A woman who will likely be a danger to those around her for as long as she draws breath. Sources:A Taste for Murder by Burl Barer and Frank C. GirardotInvestigation Discovery, "Epic Mysteries," episode "A Taste for Murder"https://writeaprisoner.com/inmates/angelina-rodriguez-x-02712/penpalFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes 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] 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. I believe people are basically good. I realize that sounds far-fetched because people can also be a-holes on a truly epic scale, but hear me out. I think most people have good intentions most of the time, and will do the right thing when called upon. However, there are people in this world who are predators, every bit as much as the Black Widow spiders that sometimes haunt my nightmares. People whose gears are always turning, whose minds are always scanning about for an advantage, a way to come out on top, often at others' expense. This is the story of a pure predator, a woman with a heart as cold and empty as space,

A woman who will likely be a danger to those around her for as long as she draws breath. This is Try Try Again, the murder of Frank Rodriguez. So, campers, we're in Montobello, California. about 10 miles outside Los Angeles. September 9, 2000. It was about 3.30 a.m. when a 911 call came into the local dispatch. A woman was sobbing. Please help. My husband is in trouble. I don't think he's breathing. So first responders arrived at the house to find a man lying dead on the floor of the master bedroom. The paramedics didn't notice any obvious signs of trauma. You don't know, stab wounds or gunshot wounds or bruising or anything like that. He was just lying there. Dead. The guy on the floor was

Frank Rodriguez, a teacher and former Navy man. He was only 41 years old, and he looked like he was in good physical condition. The officers sat down with Frank's wife, Angelina, who was the 911 caller, of course, to ask what happened. Angelina told them, Frank's been sick all week. They'd been to the emergency room a few days before, in fact. He'd had awful abdominal pain, sweating, uncontrollable shaking and vomiting and diarrhea and all that awful stuff. And the doctors had examined him then and told him he'd probably contracted a bad case of food poisoning, which is, you know, if anybody's ever had it, not fun. So they told them to go home, get plenty of rest and drink plenty of fluids,

the standard sort of GI distress playbook. And this, by the way, Campers, is your annual reminder that hand sanitizer doesn't kill off the stomach bug. Did you know that, Katie? I did not. Yeah, only bleach kills it, like neurovirus. It's got to be bleach or just wash your hands. Wash those hands, folks.

but Frank hadn't gotten any better Angelina and her nine-year-old daughter Autumn who loved her stepdad as if he were her real father had been praying for him all week to feel better but he had only gotten worse and it was just such a tragedy I mean here we have a man in the prime of his life only 41 like he's a year younger than me

just terrifying and he and Angelina had only been married for about five months so Angelina has lost her brand new husband autumn's lost her stepdad Frank's sisters lost a beloved brother and everybody was just desperate to figure out why before he died Frank had been in perfect health or so he thought so Frank Rodriguez grew up in a tight-knit

Mexican-American family immigrant family his dad had been a doctor in Mexico but he couldn't pass the U.S. boards so after that he kind of went off the rails he started drinking a lot he started cheating on their mom and eventually he pretty much split and just left Frank's mom

to raise the family by yourself which must have just been incredibly hard and shame on him for that like I can imagine how frustrating that would be that you've been a physician and now you can't do the job that you love and we're trained to do anymore I mean that's got to be a hard pill to swallow

but it does not justify you just abandoning your family what the hell Frank's dad right but Franks' dad Frank immediately stepped up to help take care of his five siblings who viewed him his entire life as a role model and protector. So he was a stand-up guy. And he was a handsome guy and a practical joker who loved goofing around. He was just a fun-loving guy. And right out of high school, he joined the Navy. And after his tour, he married a young woman from his hometown. They were

together for 14 years, but never had kids and eventually just kind of grew apart and divorced. And this was hugely depressing for Frank because he'd always wanted a family of his own. I mean, he grew up in a family of, you know, six kids. And so I imagine people who grow up in big families, you know, probably usually want that for themselves. So he started looking for a new love right away. One of his sisters describes him as kind of a lost soul around this time, which is sad, but also, which probably made him right for the pick-in for somebody who perhaps did not have the best of intentions, right? It's one of the reasons why I think people say you'll find true love when you're not looking

for it. Sure. Because when you're desperate for it, you can give off those desperation vibes. And sometimes that just attracts people who are kind of desperate in their own way and it ends up being kind of toxic. But sometimes it can attract a predator. Yeah. And what's that?

There's a saying. And I don't remember where it's from where it says that if you're wearing rose colored glasses. Red flags just look like flags. Oh, dang, I like that. I've never heard that, but that's a great saying. Yeah. So anyway, I think that's why when you find true love, it's when you're not looking for it. That was certainly the case for me anyway. Sure. So anyway, very sad. I mean, it sounds like he was a guy who really valued family, so it must have sucked for him to pour 14 years of time and effort into a marriage and just kind of have it piddle out with, you know, family to show for it or anything. Not that you got to have kids.

I mean, I don't, and I'm thrilled to bits about it, although, please don't get me wrong. I love kids, especially your kids, if you're listening and you have kids, yeah. So don't hate me. I'm sure your kids are the best kids in the world. I just don't want a mother any. You know, I have my cats, and I'm happy to pump my niece full of cookies and then hand her back to my brother and say, okay, now you deal with the sugar fallout. I'm done. I'm cool, auntie.

So anyway, Angelina, Frank's widow. grew up in the projects of Queens, New York. And she had, by anybody's estimation, a rough childhood. Her dad wasn't around from a young age, and her mom had to work long hours to keep the family afloat. And I'm going to put in a little content warning for this next part. Now, I'm not going to go into any detail whatsoever, but there's going to be a little bit of discussion of child sexual abuse.

So if that's rough for you and you don't want to hear about that, you can skip ahead 60 seconds or so, and that should be enough, I think, to get us past that. at. So, because Angie's mom was always working, this left her and her siblings vulnerable to sexual abuse at the hands of Angie's grandfather. And Angie, sadly, soon became the main target of his disgusting attention. And this went on from the time she was eight, well into her teenage years, which I can't even fathom the trauma that that would bring into your life. And several times, Angelina told family members what was going on. First, she told her grandmother, and her grandmother listened with every indication of sympathy

and Angie felt like she was planning to do something about it but within just a few days of that conversation the grandmother died which is so sad and then later Angie told one of her uncles about the abuse and soon after that the uncle died wow yeah now tell me if you agree

this seems to me like an astounding coincidence and I don't know if the grandfather was ever like investigated in connection with either or both of those deaths. But I mean, holy shit, that's just at a bare minimum. That must have given Angie the impression that like when I try to tell someone what's happening to me, just terrible stuff happens. Yeah. And it sucks because I'm sure to a child, it seemed like this was all destiny or something. Yeah. Like one time, it's bad luck, right? Like it was her grandmother, she was elderly, whatever. Sure. But the second time, fate is conspiring. Right. Yeah.

And, I mean, presumably her uncle wasn't elderly. I mean, it's just, I think it's creepy as hell. But, I mean, I don't know if anything ever happened with it. So, unsurprisingly, Angie took her first chance to get out of that quagmire. And at 19, she married a neighborhood kid named Hector Gonzalez. And it got her out of the house, but in a pattern that she would follow for all of her romantic relationships, that marriage only lasted a year. And after the divorce, she joined the U.S. Air Force.

And there, in 1990, she met her second husband, a handsome, athletic fellow Air Force cadet named Tom Fuller. And she got pregnant really quickly, and within three months, she and Tom were married and settled in in the Santa Barbara area of California. And they had two little girls, one after the other. And they were out to dinner one night when the waitress told Angie that the pacifier that her 13-month-old daughter Alicia was sucking on had been recalled and that she should throw it out. She was like, look, you don't want that. And she said, you know, a baby died sucking on that pacifier. You need to throw that out.

As it turned out, that was incorrect, and the baby hadn't died. There was just like a choking incident. But the pacifier had been recalled, and as far as Angie knew, it had resulted in a fatality. Despite this, though, Angie didn't throw that pacifier out. In fact, she stashed it at a friend's house and said she'd come pick it up later, which is just a weird thing to do. Like, who says, hey, man, can you hold on to this pacifier? for me for a while. I'll come get it later.

Like, what the hell is that? And shortly after this, Angie began a new career as an insurance agent with Prudential, selling life insurance. One of her first and definitely her largest sales was to herself. She bought a $50,000 policy

on baby Alicia with herself as primary beneficiary. All right. Y'all, I just put myself on multiple watch lists. With the research I did for this case, again, so you're welcome. Because I could find zero reasons that require that large of a life insurance policy on a child. Yeah, it's bizarre.

At most, maybe it would cover a funeral in a month or two of bills, but 50 grand, that's obscene. The purpose of life insurance at its core is to cover your dependence in the case of your untimely demise. A 13-month-old has no dependents. Right. And I know that there are life insurance policies for children, like there's the Gerber life insurance where it can contribute to their college fund, but this was not that. I want to make that clear.

Yeah, this was just straight up, she was a beneficiary, like, for 50 grand. So insurance agents, by and large, are very honorable people. Their licensing requires a certain number of ethics classes per year, and it's precisely because they have so much power. over large sums of money. Right. When insurance agents are good, they're great, but when they're bad, they're horrid. A couple cases come to mind. First of all, you've got insurance agent Brian Winchester, who wrote his buddy Mike Williams's $1.75 million life insurance policies when he was giving it good to Williams' wife, Denise. I know that case. You guys probably do too. It's been

covered on several true crime shows, and it took years and years to resolve. The case with the little lady with the pigtails who fought so hard to get the case resolved. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. So if you're not familiar, Denise and Winchester plotted to kill Mike. And they were, and he killed him while they were fishing, I think. It was duck hunting. Duck hunting.

That was right. They were in a duck hunting boat. So they were finally caught a decade later because Mike tried to kidnap Denise due to their relationship falling apart. Yep, he sure did. Are you surprised that a relationship based on murder didn't last? I'm stunned, frankly. I've given up on hope and love. I thought those two crazy kids were going to make it, honestly.

They almost got away with it, and then they couldn't keep their traps shut when they were brought into the cops. That case is bonkers. That case is definitely the kind of case we would cover. Maybe we will at some point. Maybe we will. It's crazy. And second, we have a man named Gregory Morgan in Georgia. who wrote a life insurance policy for a woman named Angela Frazier.

He named her three children, as she asked, as beneficiaries, on her $190,000 policy in 2007, but secretly added himself as the contingent beneficiary. And this is in a case where, you know, everyone else is dead and that he could collect if the children weren't available. So the company, this guy worked for, prevented agents from being named a beneficiary unless they were members of the policyholder's immediate family. But don't worry about it because he just lied and told them he was her uncle. Jeez. And Angela was murdered in 2017 and he promptly collected the payout. Oh, man.

Her murder remains unsolved, but Morgan is facing 20 years in prison for insurance fraud. Yikes. Well, yeah, that sounds real mysterious as to who probably killed her. That's a thinker, right? I mean, geez, vet your insurance agents, campers. Dang. Yeah. Just check out their Yelp reviews. Definitely. Google them a little bit. Come on. So not long after, Angie took out this life insurance policy on her baby daughter on September 18, 1993. A 911 call came into the Santa Barbara dispatch about a child not breathing. Angie was waiting on the curb for the first responders when they arrived, which they thought was odd, because most moms in that situation wouldn't leave their baby's side. Yeah, and I think actually one of the paramedics said that it was the first call like that in his entire career that that was not the case. And he was a very experienced paramedic.

Yeah, and I can't imagine a mother not trying to do life-saving. Absolutely. Like, you wouldn't be just standing out there with your arms crossed. Like, it's over here. You'd be frantically leaning over that baby and trying to do rest. ski breathing or chest compressions or something, you know, or you'd just be hysterical. Right. So when the paramedics got to the crib, baby Alicia was unresponsive.

Cole, cyanotic, and not breathing in her crib. They transported her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. Oh, man. They found the rubber tip of the pacifier lodged in her throat. Doctors and investigators noticed that Angie showed no emotion upon being told that her daughter had died, but got very animated and worked up when demanding that the investigators returned the broken plastic backing from the pacifier to her. Oh, my God.

The paramedics had found it on the floor, and she was just, like, screaming, they're going to pay for this. Oh, my God. Angie didn't mention the $50,000 life insurance policy to anybody who investigated her daughter's death. Interestingly, she hadn't mentioned it to her husband either. He was stunned when a check arrived from the insurance company. And something to keep in mind, the policy had taken effect the day before Alicia's death. This is a theme for life insurance scams. Why do they act so quickly?

It's so baffling to me. Yeah, it is astonishing, but here's the thing. Again, we can't diagnose anybody, but we're going to power through that. I'm pretty sure Ms. Angie qualifies as either a psychopath or someone who at least has some psychopathic traits. And if you don't agree with me by the time we're done with this, then, you know, I guess that's your prerogative, but dang. And one of the characteristics common to these folks is an inability to put off short-term gratification for long-term gain. And there's actually recent research out there that shows that psychopaths have a lot of activity, I think this is what it says, in the part of the brain that deals with reward and

pleasure. So basically what it means is that when something feels good to them, it feels really good. They get more of a buzz off of pleasure than a non-psychopath would, which makes me kind of want to just spend one day as a psychopath so I can just eat a lot of really good stuff. Right. And, you know, like, what does cheesecake taste like? I don't know if it's like that or if it's more like experiential stuff like you know you get a large windfall of money or something like that but they get a better reward than most people for pleasure so now you've got a situation in a psychopathic mind where a you have this additional reward for stuff that brings pleasure and b you have a problem with impulse control and a tendency to not be afraid of risk or consequences which i imagine is a

recipe for wackiness right all those things together Yeah, wackiness indeed. Yeah. So after the life insurance money comes in, Angie and Tom then sued the pacifier company and got a $750,000 settlement. Jeez, Louise. And at the time, it was a big news story. And according to Tom, who was just a heartbroken about his baby girl's death, Angie clearly enjoyed the media attention. He was confused by how she'd smile.

and laugh during the interviews about what happened to Alicia, Angie and Tom's marriage fell apart pretty quickly after this, which is a theme when any time a child dies. They were out of the military by now, and Tom was working as a traveling salesman, selling vitamins and supplements. When he was out of town, Angie would cheat on him. And she started snorting speed and taking pain pills. So clearly a recipe for a strong marriage. Yeah, absolutely. Angie was the one that filed for divorce in 1994, and she fought for a bigger share of the pacifier settlement money than Tom.

Because, she said, she was grieving harder because she was the mom. Jesus. All right. Poor, poor Tom. Yeah. Now, Angie lived high on the hog for a little while on her 60% share of that settlement money. She bought a fancy car, a nice house, designer clothes, and a boat. She liked showing off to her friends.

And it's interesting how her friends talk about her. One friend told true crime writer Burrell Bearer, Despite her friendship, I never really trusted her completely. She was very impulsive. I prayed with her, I counseled her, but to tell you the truth, I didn't know that much about her. Another one said, she and her husband went on a cruise with Angie and said,

I didn't dare leave my husband alone with her for five minutes. For fear, she'd be having sex with him by minute number six. Okay. If you are in that situation, by the way, may I say, here's the thing. You have definitely got a bad friend, for sure. Fair point. But I would argue you've also got a bad husband because I am quite confident that I could leave my husband in a room full of naked superman.

models and he would come out of there not having stuck his wang in a single one of them because you know he loves me and that's not how we roll so this lady needed to have a talk with her husband too for god's sakes right like that's this bizarre like i can't leave her alone like he has no responsibility in this whatsoever she's perfectly fine to be married to this guy that she absolutely feels confident would bone her friend if she was out of the room for five minutes just because said friend like waggled your boobies at him or something, you know? No, no. Bad husband.

So anywho, somewhere in here she married again, a guy named Combs, but she divorced him after literally just a few months. So I know almost nothing about Combs because it was just like zip, zip done. And by 2000, that pacifier settlement money was long gone because Angie apparently is not a good money manager. And she was working as a counselor at Angelsgate Academy, which, was a boot camp for at-risk boys, and this is where she met Frank Rodriguez. And Frank, bless his heart, he fell hard and fast for Angie. I mean, she's definitely beautiful, but she also appealed to him because she had a nine-year-old daughter, so Insta family for Frank, and because she seemed to be as deeply committed to her

religious faith as he was. She seemed as smitten as him as he was with her. Here's the thing, though. According to others who worked at Angelsgate, and this is something that several of Angie's friends have said about her too, Angie was a chameleon. First, she showed interest in a different co-worker at Angelsgate, and this guy was kind of a cowboy-type dude. So when she was interested in him, she started showing up with like cowboy hats and Western wear and stuff talking about country music. And then that dude found a girlfriend, and Angie immediately just turned on a dime and turned her attention to Frank. Yeah, I think we all know someone like this, like somebody that just is never single.

And it's really amazing to watch if you're not one of their targets. You don't matter to them so they don't care about keeping you fooled. It's like watching a play from backstage. You're there for all the costume changes. That's a good analogy. And when she realized how religious Frank was, she started carrying a Bible. She started talking about Jesus a lot and quoting scripture and stuff. So does this remind anybody of Tracy Richter from our season two premiere?

She was another chameleon who turned herself into a little. whatever the guy she was targeting wanted her to be. Creepy. Bless his little heart. Frank didn't see it. Apparently other people did see it and like tried to talk to him about it and he was just so smitten. He was just into her and she was turning the full force of her charm on him. And just a month after they met, Frank proposed to Angie and she accepted. Oh, Frank.

Okay. Campers. We have said this before. I'm pretty sure we're going to say it again. Please don't marry somebody you just met. Please don't do it. Please don't do it. There's none of that when you know you know in that situation. When you've got leftovers in your damn fridge that are older than your relationship, you don't know shit.

Okay? You haven't even seen that person with the flu yet. You haven't seen anything. You have seen the carefully constructed best version of themselves that they have chosen to show you. In one month, you do not know yet, okay? please listen to Auntie on this. I'm begging you. Just do not marry somebody you just met.

Maybe one time in a million it'll work out great. But the other 99,99,999 times is going to be a shit show. Trust me. So, Frank thought he was husband number two for Angelina, case in point. But he was actually, I think husband number four, it was actually kind of hard to dig that up. Like, it gets hard to keep track with Angie. and Angie started bitching and moaning about Frank to her friends from day one. Like he wasn't attentive enough and he didn't want sex often enough and he worked too much,

et cetera, et cetera, and we'll get to more of that in a minute. But one of the most interesting things about this case to me is that the murder investigation was pretty much completely Angie's own fault. She instigated that on her own. Like the coroner was actually thinking natural causes, probably, maybe. He wasn't really sure, but see, Angie needed a definitive cause. cause of death or the insurance company wouldn't pay out the $250,000 life insurance she had on Frank. So she needed the coroner to come up with something more specific than unknown but

probably something natural. Yeah, as a rule, insurance companies hate question marks. Yeah. Because, yeah, if they don't want to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars if they don't have to. Right. So if you want that money, you better be writing with periods. Yeah. And so she was determined to get the police in the corner to dig in and figure out exactly what had killed her husband. So Angie immediately started insisting to police, detective Steinwand and Holmes, that Frank had been murdered, specifically that he'd been murdered by a former Angels Gate co-worker. Poisoned, she suspected. Now Frank wasn't working at Angels Gate anymore at the time of his death, but he'd gone up there a few days before he died because

they'd invited him to come up and help chaperone a field trip. And Frank had been perfectly healthy until he'd come back from that trip. And he'd mentioned someone at Angel's Gate, giving him Gatorade and cookies, according to Angie. And she said she hadn't wanted him to go and they'd argued about it. She said she didn't want him to go because of some trouble that he'd had with this former co-worker, a guy who, according to Angie, had been molesting some of the boys at the camp. Frank had supposedly found out about this and confronted the guy. and the co-worker had threatened him. Angie said the guy had said,

Sergeant Rodriguez better watch his back and made a gun motion at Frank. Like, bang, bang, with his finger, like a finger gun. So the detectives went up to Angel's Gate to find out whatever they could about Frank's recent visit there. And they talked to this coworker that Angie had, you know,

accused as her prime suspect, and no lie, he did come across as a bit of an odd bird. But he seemed genuinely shocked at what Angie had told them that he was molesting kids, that he and Frank had had words about it, and especially that he could have done anything to hurt Frank,

because, you know, Frank was his friend. So this guy, whose name was Peter, I believe, denied all of Angie's accusations, and what's more, he said he had tried to warn Frank off of Angie from the get-go. She struck him as a huge phony. He told them what I already told y'all about her chameleon stuff, but, you know, like I said, Frank hadn't wanted to listen. He was just too far gone at that point.

And other co-workers said the same kind of stuff about what a chameleon Angie was. It seemed like the only person who didn't see it was Frank. Several people said, Angie, just didn't strike them right, which you hear that so much in these cases. That's another theme that comes up again and again where people will say there was just something off about that person. So it's yet another reminder to listen to that little voice because we damn well know a lot of the time when somebody's off, you know. And soon the cops discovered the life insurance policy and the fact that the company wasn't going to pay out until the coroner gave up a definite cause of death. And they talked to Angie's insurance agent, and he said that she had called, like, immediately

after Frank's death. Like, he had died at 3.30 in the morning or whatever, and she was, like, on the phone with him at, like, 8 a.m. the next morning, like, hours after the man died. And totally unemotional to the point where it creeped out the agent, and he told his wife about it. Like, it was that striking for him. Wow. Yeah.

So now the detectives were suspected. of Miss Angie. And by the way, so were Frank's mom and sisters. Two weeks into their investigation, Angie got what she wanted. Sort of. Officials ruled Frank's death of homicide. What Angie didn't know was that she was the prime suspect. Womp, womp, right? Angie had told the detectives that she wanted to do everything and anything she could possibly do to help them. So they decided to take her up on that. Steinwand and Holmes decided to use Angie to nail herself for Frank's murder. And boy, did she do a great job. She sure did. Suckas playing themselves, y'all. Suckus playing themselves. We see it time and time again. Their plan was to let her think they were buying her

big bag of bullshit about Frank's co-worker and give her Gina Detective Angie badge. I hope she made some boneheaded mistakes in the process. Yeah, and she delivered like dominoes on that. You'll see here in a second. And does this remind anyone of Liz Gawleyer from the twisted case? Mm-hmm. So now, campers, the cops, unless they want you to wear a wire, are never going to ask you for help like this.

Now, this is generally, I'm sure there's a case out there where they did this and somebody was caught, but generally they're not going to have you investigate a fucking crime. Yeah, like they might tell you, you know, keep an eye on somebody and report back to us or something like that, but they're not going to, like, deputize you, you know? They're not going to be like, hey, help us catch this guy. They don't need your help. Yeah. So it didn't take them long to find out about the death of anti. his baby daughter, Alicia, and they realized there very well might be more to it than an accidental death. These were seasoned detectives, but this floored them. They started to wonder,

did Angie marry Frank with this in mind from the very start? A month into their investigation, the detectives discovered another juicy little bit of circumstantial evidence. Angie had been having an affair. And apparently, it had started really soon after she had married Frank. The guy's name was Daniel, and he was the nephew of her best friend, Palmyra. Ew. When they brought Daniel in for questioning, he told them that one afternoon after they just had sex, and he was getting dressed to leave, and she said something like, Oh, maybe I'll get lucky and Frank won't be there when I get home.

When Daniel asked her what she meant, she told him that she'd loosened a gas valve on the dryer in the basement before she left the house. Maybe the house will have exploded and killed Frank by the time she got home. And listen, you might have to turn down your listening devices for this because I'm about to get angry. Uh-oh. Because for the love of God, if you're someone's a fair partner, first of all, cut that out. Don't do that. Second of all, if they insinuate that they're trying to murder their goddamn spouse,

please, please call the cops. Holy shit, this is not hard people. I know. This again, it seems like people's standard reaction to this kind of stuff is to just be like, huh like oh oh you're gonna you're gonna try and explode your husband okay interesting and then just go about their day it's just unbelievable way to be a hero there daniel good job bud yeah and when they looked into it detectives discovered that lo and behold frank had smelled gas one afternoon a few months prior he'd called the gas company to come out and the guy had

found the loose valve what's more he told frank this was not an accident Somebody had to loosen this on purpose. And astonishingly, this didn't immediately result in Frank's packing up his stuff and leaving. Which, what the actual hell. Crazy. In fact, there are loving emails from Frank to Angie even after this incident. Was it just too crazy for him to accept? Did he convince himself that it was somehow an accident?

Or was he just in total denial? I don't know. And I've been trying to figure. it out all day. Like, what was his deal? I mean, here you've got somebody a professional telling you there is no way that this happened by accident. I can't think of any other reason why someone would loosen a gas valve other than to kill someone. He's the only one home. She's the only other one that lives in the house besides the nine-year-old. Maybe he convinced himself that the nine-year-old did it? I don't know. I'm so confused. Like, why you wouldn't just walk out the door

right then, Frank, what were you thinking, man? I don't know. Denial is super powerful, though. It is. And he was really in love with her. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Right. And you know that case with the, um, the parachuting murder? Yes. Oh, man, that's a hell of a story. We should cover that sometime. Yeah. So this guy tried to murder his wife twice, very similarly, loosened the gas valve of their stove. Yeah. And to this day, this woman does not believe that he tried to kill her.

Mm-hmm. She just can't wrap her head around it. And this is just, it's common, dude. I don't know. It is. I mean, love is blind, or so they say. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

But sometimes. I mean, Frank, bless your heart. I just wish to God he had taken that seriously. Yeah, that's just, ugh. I think maybe the inspector should have called the cops, I feel like. That's actually a good point. Like, you know, if you're that confident that this wasn't an accident, then isn't that an attempted murder most likely or doesn't somebody at least need to look in on

on that and you know ask some questions but again people just don't people are just like huh weird just trying to kill you interesting it's a mystery I've got other stops to make what are you doing oh god people are weird now I'm thinking maybe I was a little unfair to Daniel right I'm sorry and he was freaked out after the whole gas thing was a little freaked out Oh, good. Well, then I guess he's a better person than we thought. And, you know, he told Angie, he was the bigger person. He told Angie that he didn't want to hear about Frank anymore. Now, the sex thing, yeah, yeah, that's fine.

We can keep having sex. But I don't want to talk about killing your husband. I don't have any objection to you doing it necessarily. Just please don't tell me about it because it's killing my boner. As long as we can still roll around in the sex. So he before thought she was blowing off steam, but after the gas leak, he thought she might actually be serious. You think? You think? And eventually, though, it took a few interviews to get it out of her.

Angie's friend Palmyra started to give up some dirt. So we'll leave it there for part one campers, but because we release both parts, of an episode on the same day, you can go right ahead and listen to Part 2 now if you want, or save it for later, whatever floats your boat. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe. Until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page.

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