True Crime Campfire - Explosive: The Benson Family Murders

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Money has never made a man happy yet, nor will it.” To which I think a lot of people would say, yeah, try being poor, Benny. A couple thousand dollars would make me plenty happy right now. But, once you’re beyond the stage of having enough wealth to be comfortable and free from fear of destitution, I think his point mostly stands. We’ve seen a lot of cases involving very wealthy people, and I don’t think you could say they were any happier than the average Joe. If anything, just the opposite. That’s definitely true in this week’s case, which involves a staggeringly wealthy family with a whole collection of messy, grasping lives that culminate in tragedy.Sources: Serpent’s Tooth Christopher Andersen https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/08/07/in-florida-murder-most-malevolent/3c1c9fb0-560b-4b40-8185-fc701724d936/ https://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/local/2016/04/01/medical-examiner-says-benson-was-stabbed-to-death-in-prison/85873180/https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/07/us/florida-murder-trial-that-bared-secrets-of-the-rich-nears-end.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Benjamin Franklin wrote, Money has never made a man happy yet, nor will it. To which I think a lot of people would say, yeah, try. being poor, Benny. A couple thousand dollars would make me plenty happy right now. But once you're

beyond that stage of having enough wealth to be comfortable and free from fear of destitution, I think his point mostly stands. We've seen a lot of cases involving very wealthy people, and I don't think you could say they were any happier than the average Joe. If anything, just the opposite. That's definitely true in this week's case, which involves a staggeringly wealthy family with a whole collection of messy, grasping lives that culminate in tragedy. This is Explosive, the Benson Family Murders. So, campers, for this one, we're in Naples, Florida, July 9, 1985. 40-year-old Carol Lynn Benson Kendall sat in the back of her.

her mom's big Chevy suburban with the door open. The AC and the SUV was on the fritz, and even at just a little after 9 a.m., the day was getting hot and steamy, and Carol Lynn didn't want to shut herself in the car. Her mom, Margaret, sat in the passenger seat in front of Carol Lynn, and her youngest brother Scott, just 21 years old, was in the driver's seat. They were waiting on Carol Lynn's other brother, Stephen, who had hurried into the house to grab a tape measure. They were all about to drive over to the plot of land where Margaret intended to build the sprawling estate she would retire in. The Bensons were very rich. Carol Lynn had a pile of blueprints on her lap, which she tried to hold on to, along with a glass of Coke she'd brought out from the house. Carolin

knew her mom didn't exactly have the patience of a saint, and there'd be trouble if she spilled a pop in her car. She saw Scott reach for the ignition, about to see if he could get anything at all from the AC. But when he turned the key, instead of the engine turning over, there was just a distinct click, and then the world turned to fire. Carolyn didn't know what was happening. There was pain and pressure all around her. She thought she was being electrocuted. All she could see was red. She didn't realize it initially, but whatever had happened had forced her eyes closed. When she opened them, she found herself in the ragged remains of the SUV, flames licking higher and higher around her. She saw Scott lying on the driveway, his eyes open but unseeing, blood soaking through his plaid shirt.

She couldn't see his back, where a lot of the flesh had been torn away, exposing his organs. A shattered thigh bone stuck through the back of his swimming trunks. Her brother was dead. Carolyn couldn't see her mom at all, as the flames, and the heat grew around her, she couldn't see much of anything. She was already terribly burned and wounded, but she knew with certainty that if she stayed where she was, she would die. She threw herself out the door she'd left open

and crashed down onto her shoulder on the driveway from the suburban's high body. Margaret Benson's home was right beside the third hole of the Quail Creek golf course. Chuck Meyer was playing around with a group of fellow retirees and had been just about to tee off when the explosion cracked out from the Benson House just about a hundred feet away. Chuck thought it was just construction noise,

until he saw black smoke funneling up into the sky. The golfers ran through the bushes at the side of the house toward the drive, Chuck still gripping his five iron. Flames shot 60 feet up into the air from the skeleton of the suburban. Scott was clearly dead. Chuck could see that Margaret was, too. She'd been thrown by the blast into a flower bed beside her bronze Porsche, and it looked like half her head was missing.

Carol Lynn was on the ground close to the Inferno, screaming, I'm hot, I'm hot, as she tore off her burning blouse. She looked up and saw her brother Stephen come out the front door of the house, a big, burly dude with dark hair and glasses. His mouth and eyes were wide as he stared at Carolyn. Stephen helped me, she cried out. Stephen turned and ran back into the house. Still holding his golf club, Chuck Meyer ran into the heat.

He grabbed Carol Lynn under her arms and pulled her maybe 12 feet away, and if he hadn't, she would definitely have died because that was when the second explosion went off. The blast lifted them both up and threw them clear. Shrapnel went through Chuck's arm and chest and tore off the end of his nose. The police and emergency services were quickly on the scene. Some garbage men nearby had helped Carolin across to the lawn, but she refused to sit down saying there were bugs on the grass. In fact, she felt that if she sat down, she might die. She might have been right.

She was staying upright on shock and adrenaline, but within a half hour she'd be in critical condition in the hospital with her life in the balance. She was severely burned all down her right side. Her right ear was essentially gone. When the burning car had been put out, with Carol Lynn on the way to the hospital and an ambulance, investigators found two craters in the driveway under the SUV. Later, a detective would find fragments of a steel pipe beside a neighbor's door, where they'd been blown by the blasts. Two pipe bombs had detonated beneath the SUV, one after the other. Margaret Benson and her son Scott had been murdered, and Carol Lynn very nearly had as well.

How the hell did we get here? The money came from Margaret's father, Baltimore native Harry Hitchcock, who, despite being a non-drinking, non-smoking Methodist, made a fortune in the tobacco business. In the 1920s, he set himself up as a middleman between the tobacco farmers and the cigar makers. He bought up the whole year's crop. Six years later, almost every cigar maker in America was buying from Harry's new company, Lancaster Lear. which was the biggest trader of dark leaf tobacco in the world. By the time his eldest daughter, Margaret, was 10 years old, Harry was a millionaire at a time when a dollar would get you around 20 times as it would today.

Not that Margaret knew it. Her parents lived comfortably, but simply, and Margaret and her younger sister had more or less normal childhoods, if ones where their father was frequently absent as Lancaster Leaf set up offices in other states and other countries. Margaret grew up to be real pretty and real smart, graduating in the middle of World War II with a bachelor's degree in science, something not a lot of women did back then. Oh, yeah. Also during the war, Friends introduced her to Edward Benny Benson, a captain in the Army Air Corps, and has happened with a lot of couples who met during wartime they got married fast. Post-war and married to the boss's daughter, Benny rose quickly through the ranks at Lancaster Leaf, although it wasn't all.

depotism, Benny was just as driven as his father-in-law. Unlike straight-edge Harry, though, Benny was the standard-issue 50s executive right off the set of bad men. Chain smoking, scotch drinking, wrapped up in gray flannel suits. Probably calling his secretary doll, or doll face. And in keeping with the Don Draper vibe, he was hardly ever home, always traveling and working late. By the time the war ended, there was a lot of the war ended, there's first kid, Carol Lynn, was already a year old. She was a precocious kid, walking, talking, and reading earlier than any of the other kids around. And when she was seven, her little brother Stephen arrived. By 1955, Lynn Castor-Leaf was a huge international enterprise. But Harry Hitchcock,

pushing 60, was still trying to run every part of it. It was more than a body could take, and when he was in his office alone, he just collapsed from exhaustion. He just shrugged it off. Then, a couple days later, he collapsed again. Harry wasn't dumb enough to keep going and see if the third strike meant he was out. It was time to start turning the reins of the business over to Benny. This, of course, meant he'd be spending even more time away from home and away from his kids. Benny's absence in his children's life was blatantly obvious, and Margaret's first impulse in dealing with a problem was always to throw money at it. she spoiled those kids rotten.

Whatever Carolyn and Stephen wanted, they got. Margaret's younger sister, Janet Lear, remembered being over at the Benson's on Christmas day when the kids would take turns opening presents. It literally took them all day. Wow. Like her own mom had, Margaret pretty much accepted what the times demanded of an executive's wife. While Benny was out chasing after business deals like a kid hunting for Pokemon,

on, Margaret kept everything beautiful back at their house in Lancaster. But for little Carol Lynn and Stephen, a beautiful home wasn't much of a replacement for a dad, especially for Stephen. When Benny was home, he doted on Carol Lynn, who was lively and smart and barely seemed to notice his son. Stephen couldn't have been more different to his sister, an awkward introvert with a blankly staring face who just scraped by in school. his only real skill was in tinkering. He built all sorts of gadgets, radios, a TV from a kit. He even put together some kind of elevator to get him up to his tree house, which holy shit, can you imagine? Like, A, how cool that would be as a kid. And B, having the brains to do that as a kid, like, that's amazing. Now, obviously, there's nothing wrong with being a weird nerd. I'm a weird nerd. I'm sure a lot of y'all are, too. In this family of starchy high flyers, though, there was an unspoken but clear view. that Stephen was a dud. Then he had been hoping his son would be

somebody who could follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and guide Lancaster Leaf into the future. But even when the kid was young, it was pretty clear he didn't have the juice for that. Oh, hello, brilliant, accomplished daughter. I was just sitting here bemoaning the fact that there'll be no one to carry on the family legacy because your little brother is such a nerd. I guess there's no other choice. He is our only son, after all.

Well, you just carry on being brilliant and a accomplished and female, I guess. Like, hey, I'm right here, Dad. Has to be the boy. The differences between Stephen and his increasingly glamorous sister were highlighted even further when Carol Lynn hit the beauty pageant scene, where she'd be crowned as Miss Atlantic City and the second runner-up as Miss New Jersey. That's not too shabby, but Carolin wasn't the kind of person to be happy as a runner-up.

She ditched the pageant scene and headed for college down in Texas, while Stephen stayed home with his transistors and soldering iron. But it was the golden child, not the dud, who first caused ruckus in the Benson household, because when Carol Lynn came home after her first year in college, she was pregnant. If she ever said a word about who the father was,

nobody outside the family heard it. Along with maintaining a beautiful home, Margaret saw it as her duty to maintain the family's status and reputation. This was tough among the blue-blood families of Lancaster, some of whom could trace their presence in the town back to before the American Revolution. A lot of them probably thought the wrong side had won. The Benson's might be the wealthiest family in the county,

but they were still often snubbed by the social elites. Carolyn, for example, had never been asked to attend a fancy debutante ball with the other snotty girls, so Margaret was sensitive about the family's image. Her teenage daughter, having a kid outside a wedlock, would not do it all. She set Carol Lynn up in the family's old hometown of Baltimore, where Carolyn gave birth to his son on Christmas Day of 1963, and this happened a lot in those days, where if a teenager got pregnant, they'd just ship her off until she had the baby, and they'd, you know, do whatever. The little boy, Scott, went back to Lancaster, where Margaret and Benny told everyone that they'd impulsively decided to adopt a new son. that the little boy was actually Carol Lynn's kid was a deep family secret, which Margaret shared with 13-year-old Stephen,

along with strict instructions that he must never tell anyone. The big family secret really wasn't much of a secret. There were childhood pictures of Carol Lynn all over the house, and up until he hit his teen, Scott was practically a clone of his sister-slash-secret mom at the same age. So no one in town sees Carol Lynn for months, then all of a sudden, Margaret, at the age of 41, adopts a baby boy who might as well have had Benson stamped on his forehead. Wasn't really a hard puzzle to figure out, nor was it by any means a unique situation among the rich folks at the time.

Also, you just can't give a 13-year-old boy a secret like that and expect it to stay secret. Stephen told pretty much every friend and girlfriend he ever had that his new baby brother was also kind of sort of his nephew. In fact, it seems like the only person completely in the dark about the whole thing was Scott, who as far as we know, remained totally oblivious to the fact that Carol Lynn was more than just his older sister, just like Ted Bundy. Just like Teddy. Yep.

Stephen always overshadowed, had had just about a year and a half of undivided parental attention. With a new baby in the house, he was in the back seat once more. Stephen always had trouble making friends, and as he hit high school, he reached for the same solution his mom had. Throw money at the problem.

He'd race into the school parking lot in a red Mercedes sports car and throw cash around like it was confetti. He was the only person in the sophomore yearbook wearing a suit and tie. Little Niles Crane. He told people his family were the Benson's of the Benson and Hedges cigarette brand, which was a weird, sad lie. The actual family business was a much bigger operation than Benson and Hedges, but unlike Lancaster Leaf, most people at his school had heard of Benson and Hedges. Stephen's friends got to borrow his car,

and they got invites to the country club to play tennis or swim in the pool. Stephen picked up a few hobbies. He liked to drive fast on the country roads around Lancaster. He learned judo, which he mainly practiced on younger kids in the neighborhood, like Kramer in that one episode of Seinfeld. I love that episode. Kramer, you're fighting children. And then, of course, they kick his ass in the alley.

But Stephen's main hobby was what he called fooling around with fireworks. Could go one of two ways, right? He loved making things go bang and soon graduated from store-bought fireworks to making his own. Except you wouldn't really call them fireworks. They didn't do anything pretty. He'd break open firecrackers to get the gunpowder out, then poured into sealed tubing with wires. running from it. In a dry creek bed, he'd touch a battery to the wire to set off what you could

only call a bomb. One friend remembers the blasts being powerful enough to make the earth shake. Yeah, I was going to say, that does not sound like fireworks. That just sounds like a straight-up bomb. Yeah. One night, Stephen and his girlfriend went out and parked in a country road and waited for a car to drive by. When one did, Stephen tossed a small version of one of his devices to explode on its hood, and it happened to be a police car. If he hadn't been part of the richest family in town, I'm guessing things would have been different, but all Stephen got for this was a stern talking to. Oh, for God's say, can you imagine if you were I did that? God. Can you imagine being the cop had happened to?

I know, right? Like you're just doop-to-do, driving along. And then your sergeant is like, we can't do anything. I know. It's a Benson kid. Sorry. When he was 17, Stephen asked out a girl in his English and social studies classes.

A cute redhead called Nancy Ferguson. Nancy was a printer's daughter from Blue Collar Cabbage Hill. She wasn't a country club kind of girl, and she didn't have much interest in country club kind of boys. But she saw, accurately, I think, that beneath the flashy car and big money bluster, Stephen was a sad, scared kid who hadn't been shown a lot of love by his family. She felt sorry for him. Pity probably isn't the best way to start a relationship, but

she said yes to the date anyway, and to more after that. Margaret was much warmer to Stephen's new girlfriend than Nancy had expected, which was possibly due to Carolyn having just had a quickie wedding to Tom Kendall, a water ski instructor at the Cypress Gardens theme park down in Florida. A sensible local girl must have seemed pretty good by comparison, although the friendliness wouldn't last. Nancy and Stephen went to college together with Nancy studying special education and Stephen studying, well, he dropped out twice and re-enrolled twice without ever declaring a major before finally calling it quits and dropping out for good. Still, Stephen was determined to prove himself a success to his mom and dad, or rather,

mother and father, as he called them. Oh, God. I don't think you can say it any other way. I think you have to say it with like a very, like, depressed tone. mother and father he set up a landscaping business and hired old classmates he had one big initial advantage namely that father bankrolled everything at the start but stephen never had much of a business brain it's like he once heard the phrase you have to spend money to make money and never stop to think that there might be some steps between those two yeah we see a lot of that on the show So, so often, especially in like cases like this where it's like just a bunch of like children of like business boys. Yeah, absolutely. He bought the absolute creme de la creme of landscaping equipment, the most expensive riding mowers, the most expensive everything, trimbers, clippers, clippers, all top notch stuff, often more than one.

So it's a startup business in a field in which he has no experience. and he's made a huge initial investment before he even has any customers. Bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off. Yeah, it's going to go great. Nancy, meanwhile, had her first taste of Margaret's temperamental side. She knocked on the door and it was opened by the Benson's Belgian maid, Peggy, who looked exhausted. Nancy asked if she was feeling all right, but before Peggy could answer, Margaret appeared at the top of the stairs and summoned Nancy up to her bedroom. As soon as the door closed

Margaret started screaming at her How dare you imply that Peggy's Overworked? You are never Never to talk to my servants like that again Is that clear? You will not go around talking to my maid as if I were working her into the ground. I hope you understand. Do you Nancy? Do you understand?

Wow! That quote by the way comes from Serpent's Tooth by Christopher Anderson, which has a ton more details on this case if you're interested. When Stephen proposed, Nancy said yes, but had doubts pretty much immediately. Mother and father had a tight psychological grip on Stephen, and if he went out a line, there was always the threat of cutting him off financially. You know, so he'd have to live like the rest of us, working for a living without

mother and father throwing luxury cars his way every now and again. Perished the thought. That was never even an option for Stephen. Nancy thought he'd always be at his parents' beck and call, but still in In 1972, they got married and moved into a house that mother and father bought for them. Stephen's landscaping business never made any money. When they struggled, he'd just stand up and say, I'm going to talk to father, and come back a little later with a check. In 1975, the business failed altogether, and Stephen bit the bullet he'd long avoided and took a job at Lancaster Leaf. As if, as a reward, mother and father bought the young couple a new fancier house, one that was just just 50 feet away from their own front door.

Ooh, boy. There are some dynamics going on here, aren't there? Grandfather Harry lived just in back of the house, and a couple of years later, Carol Lynn's family would move in just around the corner. Your parents, your grandparents, and your sibling living not just within walking distance, but practically within talking distance. I'm sure that probably sounds like heaven to some of you, and not like, you know, a living nightmare.

No, thank you. Stephen hated working for the company and wasn't good at it. What he really wanted was to be a successful guy on his own terms, mainly to stick it in his family's face, I think, but so far he hadn't really shown any capacity for that. After a couple of years, he was deeply unhappy. Nancy got real concerned when Stephen started sleeping with a loaded rifle under their bed. He wasn't the only Benson boy having trouble.

Scott, now 14 years old, was a friend of. frequent visitor to his brother's house and was often dazed and or confused. Scottie had discovered the dubious pleasure of whippets, getting a quick high from inhaling nitrous oxide from whipped cream cans. He used his rich kid allowance to buy cans of whipped cream by the crate, and was floaty and strange more often than not. This was just the beginning of a substance abuse problem that would occupy much of Scott's short life. Again and again, Nancy tried to convince Stephen to making his own way without his family. Let him cut off the money.

The two of them would manage. But whenever Nancy tried this, Stephen would just go in the living room and start reading. If she kept talking, he'd turn on the TV and turn the volume up louder and louder until he couldn't hear her at all. That's real mature, man. She only got a little way through to him one time

when she asked him if he was happy. I've never known what happiness is, he said. When Nancy asked what would make him happy, he paused and then said, to make a million dollars before I'm 30. Jeez, Louise. If this marriage was a horse, you'd shoot it. Nancy was mainly still in it

because she didn't think Stephen would be able to cope with life by himself. Relationships started by and maintained by pity. It's like building your house on Jello. And then she found out he was cheating on her with a secretary at Lancaster Leaf. And then that was it. They divorced with no contest. Nancy didn't want alimony or property.

She just wanted out and away from every single solitary last one of the frickin' Benson's. She was done. As she packed up to leave, Margaret and Benny hurried over. They wanted to make sure their former daughter-in-law wasn't making off with anything of theirs. Lancaster leave had plants up in Wisconsin, and Stephen visited every now and then. And that was how he met Deborah Franks Larson, who was every inch an archetypical blonde Wisconsin girl. She was literally a dairy farmer's daughter. And she was working as a tobacco sorter at the plant.

We don't know whether she caught Stephen's eye before or after his divorce, but three months after Nancy moved out, Deborah moved in. Three months, yeah. Jeez. A slight wrinkle was that Deborah was a. already married, but a quickie Dominican divorce, and I suspect a payoff to her husband, took care of that.

Stephen was married again within a year of his divorce. This marriage wasn't the biggest thing that happened to the Benson family in 1980. Benny had been a heavy smoker since he had been a teenager, and in recent years he developed an awful cough

that would sometimes leave him gasping for breath for minutes. The x-ray that showed cancer, in his lungs was no surprise. His doctors estimated he had less than a year to live. At least on the surface, Benny seemed to take the news in stride, and he set about taking care of business. He sold off most of their property at a tidy profit, but he kept the Shishi Vacation estate down in Naples, Florida. He and Margaret had planned to retire there, and he thought she'd like to make her place her home after he was gone. He left Margaret all his property and put

just over a million dollars into a trust for his kids, specifying that this applied to both natural and adopted children to prevent any shenanigans to try and cut out Scott. Benny was a successful man, but the real money in the marriage had always been Margaret's, as an heir and part owner of Lancaster Leaf. Benny died in November at the age of 60. Margaret was both grief-stricken and panicky. Benny had always taken care of the money stuff, and there was a lot to take. care of. She felt overwhelmed and started to have panic attacks. Six weeks after father died,

Stephen quit his job at Lancaster Leaf and set up a new firm, the blank and anonymous United International Industries. Stephen intended to compete directly with Lancaster Leaf in the tobacco training game. He got company stationary, business cards, calendars. What he didn't get were any orders. Turned out, companies weren't willing to give up decades-long relationships to set up with a weird dude who didn't seem to know much of anything about the business despite being born into it. United International Industries quickly died, but at least he got some pens out of it. Yeah, as long as there's merch. Got to have that swag. That name, by the way, like United International Industries.

It sounds like a villain in a movie, you know what I mean? Like this nondescript little name and like it's a front for some god-awful thing. Yeah, exactly. Like he's dumping stuff into like an endangered animal's den as we speak. Stephen went back to old habits to make himself feel better. March 30th, 1981 was the day President Reagan got shot by John Hinkley, which is why everyone remodeling the Benson's Lancaster. her house remembered that date later on. Margaret had moved into the house down in Naples but told

Stephen to oversee the work. One of the construction crew, Tom Schelling, saw Stephen walking out to the tennis courts with copper tubing and wire. Shelling had gone to the same high school as Stephen. One time, Stephen had forgotten his gym gear and the teacher had made him go running with the other kids in just his underwear weeping all the way. And that's the kind of thing that makes you stick in other students' minds. Jesus. The 1960s were a great time to be both a gym teacher and a sadist. Yeah, that's psychotic.

My God. Jesus. A minute later, Schelling heard three quick explosions and hurried out. He'd been working in construction for a while and thought each sounded louder than a half stick of dynamite. Smoke rose from the tennis court, and Stevens stood there holding a little black box, kind of like a homemade garage door opener with a white button. Stephen was grinning like a lunatic as he watched the smoke rise.

Margaret's Florida estate was in Port Royal, a neighborhood so she-she that you had to pass a background check before being offered the privilege of buying one of their multi-million dollar mansions. She probably would have moved down there anyway, but Scott sealed the deal. Now 17 and just out of high school, Scott wasn't good at much, but he was great at tennis, wanted to go pro, and Florida had some of the best tennis coaches in the world. Scott was kind of a mess. He was a good-looking, cocky kid. He had lots of friends, which wasn't difficult. He'd buy tons of weed and cocaine and was happy to share. He could do this because Margaret gave him a $7,000 monthly allowance, and that is in 80s money.

More parental advice from the childless here, but I don't care how rich you are. You don't give your teenage kids $7,000 a month. It would be like $25,000 in today's money, but seven is bad. bad enough. As far as substance abuse went, Scott had stayed true to his first love, nitrous oxide. When he went driving, he kept a scuba tank of the stuff in the passenger seat with a hose and a face mask so he could take a hit without even slowing down. It's like Dennis Hopper and blue velvet. It's wild. This kind of thing doesn't mesh too well with dreams of being a professional athlete, but those might have been pipe dreams anyway. Margaret tried to help Scott

and the only way she really knew by throwing money at him. She hired an expensive coach who worked with Scott for a while, then told her that while Scott was certainly talented, he probably didn't have the physical gifts to make it on the pro circuit. So Margaret fired him and hired another expensive coach who told her the same thing. Pro sports isn't fair. It doesn't offer equal reward for equal effort. No matter how hard you work or how much time you put in,

the body nature gave you puts a hard upper limit on how far you can go. Margaret just kept throwing money at the problem. What's crazy is he probably could have played in college and had a very good career. And she just kept trying to like ham fist him into a pro. Yeah. It's just like money doesn't replace parenting. In the spring of 1981, she spent thousands of dollars to send Scott to an exclusive training camp north of St. Petersburg. They ran a pretty tight ship.

Scott got up at 6 a.m. to run five miles, then got instruction for six hours. He had his own condo up there, but had little time and energy for his usual kind of trouble. But 17-year-old boys have more on their minds than dreams of tennis glory. One afternoon, while he was doing laps in the pool, Scott spotted a bikini-clad Tracy Mullins, who was tall, beautiful, and 14 years old. But two weeks after they met, Tracy dropped out of school and moved into Scott's condo. And you have to think that if Scott had been anyone other than a spoiled kid from a super rich family, somebody would have said, uh, no, you don't get to do that. But nobody did, and Scott and Tracy played house together.

She called him her husband, and did all the cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Scott bought her fancy jewelry, and I'm probably going to butcher this, but bought a buvier de flondra, which is a dog named Buck, which he trained to protect her. If you're not familiar with the breed, imagine a Scottish terrier the size of a German shepherd. Margaret, she was mother to Scott, just like she was to Stephen, was developing something of a talent for identifying problems but being incapable of bringing herself to do anything about them. She knew she should step in between Scott and his teenage girlfriend, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. She was still fragile after Benny's death and the thought of alienating

her youngest child, cut her to the quick. Similarly, as soon as she'd started handling her own money, Margaret had started worrying about it, fearing she'd end up poor in her old age. Even as these worries solidified, Margaret bought herself a bronze Porsche 928 and two red lotus turbos. She had two yachts, one with a permanent captain and crew, and was in the process of having a $100,000 racing boat built for Scott. If you can't sleep at night because you're spending a million dollars every year, maybe you could like stop spending a million dollars every year. Interesting point, Whitney. I'm intrigued. I'd like to hear more. It's a radical suggestion.

The fact is, though, she probably could spend a million dollars a year. Her own personal wealth was around $10 million, but her dad Harry was still alive in Kicken in his 80s up in Lancaster. He'd long since retired and devoted himself to his flower garden, but he was old, had just two kids, and was worth around $400 million. Margaret was going to be just fine. Meanwhile, Stephen's new marriage to Deborah initially found the same fault lines as his marriage to Nancy. Deborah hated it that any time mother called, Stephen went running. Yeah, don't marry a mama's boy, y'all. I'm telling you, there's that show on TLC. I'm in love with a mama's boy or whatever it is. That show is bonkers.

Stephen and Deborah still lived in Lancaster, but Mother was clear. calling Stephen down to Naples so often that they bought what was by Benson standards a small, modest house down there, just three bedrooms. In 1981, Deborah had twins, a boy and a girl, which gave her some leverage. Although she seems to have loved Stephen, Deborah saw all of the Benson kids as spoiled brats and was determined that that wasn't going to happen to her twins. I mean, she was correct. She saw the truth. She told Margaret not to spoil her new grandkids, but Margaret ignored her and arrived with an SUV packed to the roof with toys. So, Deborah put her foot down.

She told Margaret she couldn't see the twins at all until she learned to behave herself. To try and snip the apron string, tying Stephen to mother, she also forbid Margaret from calling Stephen while he was at home. She could only talk to him while he was at work or in his car. If Deborah picked up the phone and heard Margaret, she'd just hang up. This was all pretty heavy-handed stuff, but subtle did not really work on Margaret. Stephen and Deborah had a tumultuous relationship. She left him twice, each time taking the twins with her up to Wisconsin. The second time, she filed for divorce, and unlike his first wife, Nancy, she planned to get as much out of the Benson family as she could.

In Lancaster, Stephen had burned hard. hundreds of thousands of dollars of Margaret's money on a failed real estate scheme, but he was still convinced that that was the route to success. The Florida Realtor Test was much simpler than the Pennsylvania one, so Stephen moved permanently down to Naples, close to Mother and Scott. Thinking that he might finally be getting shit together, Deborah flew down and reconciled with him, and then promptly got Preggers with their third kid.

Carolyn's relationship problems were relatively boring by comparison. Her quickie marriage to a water skiing instructor hadn't worked out, and she was divorced with two young teenage kids, living up in Boston, where she went to film school with the hopes of becoming a producer. Margaret, meanwhile, didn't date at all, despite still being quite a catch in her early 60s. That was the problem. Her new obsession with her finances made her paranoid that anyone who showed an interest in her was only after her money. But because teenagers are idiots, the real relationship drama in the family came from Scott. He was 19, and for some reason, I can't imagine what. Margaret had let him move 16-year-old Tracy in to live with him at Margaret's Naples estate.

Oh, boy. One day, he told Mother that they'd gone down to the local planned parenthood clinic, and yep, Tracy was pregnant. Oh, my gosh. Margaret flipped her shit, despite creating every circumstance for this to happen. Tracy was nothing but a gold digger. This would ruin Scott's as-yet imaginary tennis career. The kid probably wasn't even his.

Scott's own temper was at least a match for mothers. He grabbed Margaret by the shoulders and shook her, screaming, I love Tracy. I'm not going to let you run my life anymore. Oh, boy. Margaret laid it out for him. If he chose Tracy and this baby, she'd cut him off and disinherit him. The next day, he tried to talk Tracy into having an abortion. Tracy refused and tried to convince Scott to elope with her and have a normal family life,

but being anything other than a millionaire's spoiled kid was unimaginable for Scott. He left, leaving mother free to throw. Tracey out of the house. She went back home to Indiana and had a daughter, and Scott refused every attempt she made to get in touch. I guess mother did still run his life after all. Because he'd been a good boy, she bought him a condo of his own in Clearwater, where Scott almost immediately replaced Tracy with a new blonde girlfriend, Kim. He also moved in a five-foot-high tank of nitrous oxide, which he kept in the closet. He got these tanks from auto shop. saying he needed the nitrous to turbocharge mothers to lotus a spreeze,

but the fact was he needed to inhale more and more to get a satisfying hit. Scott, along with Kim, tanks of nitrous, and Buck the Dog soon moved back into the main Naples estate, and an argument about Buck peeing on a carpet escalated into Scott violently shaking mother by the shoulders while she desperately called for her secretary to call 911. When the cops came, Scott made a run for it, they tackled him and hauled him to a squad car as he wailed, Oh, mother, please help me. Look what they're doing to me, mother!

Really? Oh. Margaret had Scott involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. After nine days, he was declared symptom-free and released. Scott, who'd been high as balls on nitrous, didn't remember the incident at all. Margaret certainly did. She had a deadbolt installed on the door to Scotland. Scott's bedroom on the outside.

Wow. The Port Royal HOA also remembered. They wanted the Benson's gone, and the neighborhood's strict deed restrictions gave him some weight. Margaret moved to a relatively modest little mansion in a gated community on the Quail Creek Golf Course and bought up land nearby. She started plans for the estate she intended to retire in. Stevens' new business was going to be called Meridian Real Estate,

but because he always tried to run before he could walk, he scribbled notes for a whole slew of related companies, meridian construction, meridian security, meridian technology. There would be dozens of meridians, a global business empire that would finally show mother and father that Stephen wasn't a dud. With a rare flash of good sense, he decided to start with meridian security,

basically a burglar and fire alarm installation company. This was well within Stephen the Tinkerer's competence He'd installed security systems in most of the family's houses and cars. Mother, of course, would bankroll the whole thing and control the finances, but Stephen would have a free hand to run the business. He bought lots of fancy stationary and took out a full-page ad in the yellow pages, declaring that Meridian was opening offices in Fort Myers and other cities, and that interested parties should call for a free survey or visit our showrooms.

Who knows what he would have done if somebody had actually wanted to visit a showroom, because Meridian Security existed entirely in one trailer in an industrial park out in East Naples. There were no showrooms. Carol Lynn was a frequent visitor to Naples, helping Margaret out with her construction plans. Her visits weren't exactly peaceful. She and mother had always been able to go from zero to a shouting argument in about six seconds. Back in Lancaster, they'd once gotten to screaming in each other's faces about what cereal to have for breakfast, and that wasn't particularly unusual for them.

Always afterwards they calmed down with no bad blood at all like it never happened. And despite the true nature of their relationship and the fact that Carolyn was nearly 40, she and Scott squabbled and fought like teenage siblings. Only Stephen, the family's only introverts, stayed aloof from all the constant bickering. Stephen had a secret. Without telling Mother, he'd already started a second company, Meridian Marketing. This was mostly run by Steve Hawkins. He'd designed the yellow pages ad and a company logo for Stephen, so Stephen made him vice president. That's how good Stephen was at running a

business. Meridian marketing was failing, losing money fast in large part due to Stephen insisting, true to form, that they have state-of-the-art office equipment and computers. The company's checks were bouncing. Stephen made sure those bounced checks didn't go to the main meridian office where mother might notice, but were covered by his own personal bank account. See, Margaret, like always, was bankrolling Stephen's latest business venture, but she didn't know about it. More bluntly, he was stealing from her, tens of thousands of dollars at a time, because he was convinced that this time, this time his big business dreams would come true if only, He had enough capital to start his Meridian Empire.

Stephen wasn't a careful, detail-oriented guy and made only cursory efforts to cover up this scam. One day, his secretary called up Wayne Kerr, Margaret's accountant, and asked what she should do with W-2 forms for Meridian marketing. You mean Meridian security, Kerr said. No, she meant the new company that went out in Fort Myers. Wayne, of course, told Margaret. When she confronted Stephen, he flat out denied it.

He knew nothing about any Meridian marketing. His secretary must have misspoken. Margaret worried. One day, she suddenly told Carol Lynn, Stephen would prefer it if I weren't around because it would mean more money for him if I were dead. When Carolyn asked what she was talking about, Margaret said, I just wouldn't put it past Stephen to do me in.

that's all. Carolyn didn't take her seriously. Mother had always been prone to paranoia and hyperbole, especially since Benny's death. And Carolyn wasn't real close to Stephen. She mainly remembered him as a quiet little boy. As Carolyn sat there, Margaret called up Wayne Kerr,

and the two of them arranged to go to Meridian's trailer to go through their books. Not long after Stephen learned of this impending visit, a big guy wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap went into a huge supply hardware store and bought two four-inch wide pipes and end caps. Ooh, no. Stephen told his staff that Margaret was being audited, and that's why she needed to go through the books.

When she and Wayne Kerr arrived at the trailer, Stephen was nowhere to be seen, but a secretary gave them what they needed, the address for Meridian marketing, and also Stephen's new house in Fort Myers. Stephen called ahead and told Steve Hawkins at Meridian Marketing to hide the company computer with all their financial records in the trunk of his car. But Margaret and Wayne didn't even come in, just sat in the car outside. They just wanted to see that the place existed, which was enough to prove Stephen a liar. Then they drove to Stephen's new house, a palatial estate with tennis courts and an

Olympic-sized spool with Stephen's fancy Datson sports car parked in the train. driveway. They sat in the car for a bit, Margaret getting angrier and angrier, her own son, taking her money and lying to her. She wanted to disinherit him, there and then. Wayne Kerr suggested a calmer course of action, get a full accounting of what Stephen had taken and consider an advance against his share of Margaret's estate. Margaret considered this in silence for a while. Then said she wanted to get back the money Stephen had taken. I want to want to put a lien on this house in that car and everything he owns if that's what it takes to get my money back. They drove back to Meridian and Margaret casually told Stephen she'd heard he'd bought a new

house. Stephen told her he'd sold his Datsun to make a down payment. Another lie. They'd seen the car sitting in the driveway. Margaret and Wayne left. Margaret more determined than ever to drop the hammer on her wayward son. It was July 8, 1985. The next day, Carolyn and Margaret were going to go over to the land Margaret had bought and stake out her property lines. Stephen called Carolin the night before and unexpectedly offered to help, and insisted Scott come too. This was weird. Neither of the Benson boys were especially helpful as a matter of course, but it was going to be a long, hot day of work, and Carolyn would take all the help she could get. The next morning, Carol Lynn and Margaret were having breakfast when they heard a van pull up.

Stephen, they thought. But he didn't come in right away, so Carolin went to the window. She couldn't see him clearly, but it looked like he was lifting something from his van, close to the back of Mother's Chevy Suburban. Stephen headed for the door a moment later, and Carolin didn't think anything more of it. When Stephen saw them drinking instant coffee, he offered to drive over to the shop and go and get some real coffee for everybody. His van was low on gas, so to be safe, he'd take the Suburban, even though the shopping go was only five minutes away. Nevertheless, though, it was nearly an hour later that he came back with coffee and pastries.

Scott and Margaret hurried out with Stephen while Carol Lynn grabbed the blueprints and a glass of Coke. Outside, Stephen helped Margaret up into the passenger seat and gave Scott the keys. When Carol Lynn came out, Stephen had the right rear door open for her. In a moment that would haunt her in the future, Carolin thought, this is weird. This is wrong. The whole setup was off. Margaret habitually sat in the back of cars because she didn't like to have the AC blowing in her face. Carol usually sat in the front because being in the back made her car sick. And no one liked to be in a car with Scott driving. By the tender age of 21, he'd already completely wrecked multiple vehicles. Anyway, if it was possible for Stephen the

control freak to drive whatever vehicle he was in, he would drive it. Carolin almost stopped. almost said something like, what's going on here? But then Stephen was hurrying her on, even helping her into the tall suburban with a hand on her butt. Stephen made to get in the other side and said, oh, darn, I forgot the tape measure. And hurried back into the house.

A few moments later, Scott turned the ignition and the world exploded. When the police arrived, they wanted to move Stevens van away from the burning SUV, but prudently wanted to check it for more explosives first. A bomb squad member disconnected the ignition and searched the van. After reconnecting the ignition and moving the van, he took note that there was about a quarter of a tank of gas in it, more than enough for a dozen trips to the shopping going back.

In the hospital, doctors only let a detective talk briefly to Carolyn, who was listed as being in critical condition. Ideally, they wouldn't have disturbed her at all, but they understood the urgency of the interview. There was still a chance Carolyn. would die. Her voice was a little slurred from Ivy painkillers, but Carol Lynn was coherent as she answered the detective's questions. She didn't

suspect Stephen at all, but after listening to her story, the police definitely did. How Margaret was starting to investigate his finances. How he'd vanished with the suburban on a trip that should have taken 15 minutes but took an hour instead. How he'd

scurried inside the house just before the explosion. It's didn't help Stephen's case that he hadn't accompanied his seriously injured sister to the hospital or made any inquiries at all about her health, hadn't even asked whether she was alive or dead. As Carol Lynn flew north to begin extensive plastic surgery and physical therapy, the police started their investigation. A significant part of the case against Stephen would be forensic in nature. Police had confiscated Stephen's clothes soon after they'd arrived at the house. Stephen's story was that he'd barely been six feet away

when the first blast went off, a narrow escape, and certainly closer than anybody would willingly put themselves to an explosion. But there was no trace of gunpowder at all on Stephen's clothes. It was on every other piece of evidence from the scene. And people are often confused

about exactly what happened right after a shocking thing like an explosion. Stephen might have just been mistaken about where he was. Thing was, forensic scientists also found a barely visible flake of metal on Stephen's jeans. It was zinc. The metal from the pipe bombs had been galvanized steel coated with the zinc. A tiny fragment like that could certainly have been blown onto Stephen in the

blast, but not without accompanying gunpowder. A possible scenario was that the zinc had rubbed off onto Stephen's jeans before the explosion, which was obviously bad news for him. A tiny U on a fragment of the pipe was a maker's mark, and investigators were able to track down hardware stores in the area that carried pipes like that. It didn't take them long to track down a recent purchase by a big guy in sunglasses and a baseball cap. Stephen had scrawled illegible nonsense onto the invoice instead of a signature and had taken care not to touch it with his fingers and leave prints, but he'd underestimated what forensic technicians could do. They managed to lift a clear palm print off the pink, invoice a perfect match to Stephen's hand. Soon enough, Stephen was arrested and charged.

At trial, Stevens' defense attorney, Michael McDonald, tried to lever in Scott's drug connections as an alternative motive for the murders. It was worth a shot, I guess. Miami Vice was on the air, and President Reagan had just reignited Nixon's dubious war on drugs. A lot of people in the May to 80s thought every drug dealer was Tony Montoya from Scarface. The theory of the theory was on shaky grounds once you tried to work out why anyone would want Scott dead. He was a rich kid who bought drugs in large quantities, both for himself and his friends. To any dealer on the East Coast of Florida, he was basically a walking ATM. That's not someone you kill. That's someone you try to keep healthy and happy because he's making you rich. You can gauge Stephen's

chances going into trial by how his attorney reacted to the two big moments of it. When Stephen was found guilty of two counts of murder, one of attempted murder, and several related to arson, McDonald hardly reacted. When the jury voted against the death penalty, McDonnell was delighted. Keeping Stephen out of the elector chair was his goal from the start, and he chalked this up as a win. The judge gave Stephen two consecutive life sentences for the murders, plus 37 years for his other crimes. He would have been eligible for parole 49 years later, but he didn't make it that long. In 2015, while he was walking back to his cell from the cafeteria, Stephen was stabbed in the head multiple times with a shiv and

killed. He was 63 years old. The same age mother had been when Stephen murdered her. A fellow inmate was charged with Stephen's death, but found not guilty. Wow. Carol Lynn inherited almost all of her mother's estate. Stephen, of course, could not profit from his crimes, but a $220,000 trust was established for his kids. Tracy, Scott's former girlfriend, sued for some of the inheritance on behalf of her young daughter but was unsuccessful. As far as we know, Carolyn didn't give one cent to either Tracy or the little girl who was likely either her niece or her granddaughter, depending on which way you wanted to look at it. Wow.

Back in Lancaster, where everything started, Harry Hitchcock was heartbroken. His wife, Charlotte, had died in 1981. They'd been married for 62 years. He'd settled into a quiet life of tending to his flower gardens and inviting people who stopped on the street to admire them to come in and walk around. Now, 88 years old and his oldest daughter was dead, murdered by his grandson. And another grandson was dead, too. Harry had built a sprawling international business and a vast fortune,

but he discovered that all the satisfaction he took from that could be shattered by greed and envy. Before he died in 1990 at the age of 93, he said, If rough seas make good captains, then I qualify as an admiral. 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 as always, we want to send a grateful shout. out to a few of our lovely patrons.

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