True Crime Campfire - G.I. Joke: The Life and Death of Lieutenant Gliniewicz

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

Joseph Campbell wrote, “It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself, if not the world.” Problem is, sometimes there’s a thin line between “hero” and “hero complex.” Adoration and attention aren’t always good for people. After a while, they can start to believe so strongly in their own PR that they lose all sense of reality. And protecting the image can become the most important thing in their lives, crowding out everybody, and everything. I’d say this is the story of a fallen hero. But the fact is, he was never really a hero in the first place. He was just wearing the mask. Join us for the story of Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, or as his admirers called him, G.I. Joe--a former paratrooper and 30 year veteran of the Fox Lake, Illinois police. A local celebrity and family man who devoted his time to the Boy Scout "Police Explorers" club and maintained an impeccable reputation...until his shocking death in 2015. What initially looked like a murder--an officer cut down in the line of duty--soon revealed itself as something very different, and revealed Joe Gliniewicz to be a villain in disguise. Sources:https://www.fox29.com/news/disturbing-new-details-emerge-in-probe-of-disgraced-fox-lake-copMichael Martinez, CNN special report "The Secret Life of GI Joe" https://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/us/fox-lake-police-lt-joe-gliniewiczABC: https://abc7chicago.com/melodie-gliniewicz-joe-fox-lake-police-guilty/11577785/NBC, Joe Schuppe: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/officer-joe-gliniewiczs-dark-double-life-leaves-village-shock-n458821https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/bad-fox-lake-town-official-killed-article-1.2424992CNBC's "American Greed," Episode "Badge of Dishonor"Investigation Discovery's "Married With Secrets," episode "A Darker Shade of Blue"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. Joseph Campbell wrote, It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself, if not the world. Problem is, sometimes there's a thin line between hero and hero complex. Adoration and attention aren't always good for people.

After a while, they can start to believe so strongly in their own PR that they lose all sense of reality. And protecting the image can become the most important thing in their lives, crowding out everybody and everything. I'd say this is the story of a fallen hero. But the fact is, he was never really a hero in the first place. He was just wearing the mask. This is GI Joke, the life and death of Lieutenant Glenewitz. So, campers, for this one, we're in Fox Lake, Illinois, September 1st, 2015. At around 8.15 a.m., the low.

local police dispatch got a radio in from Lieutenant Joe Glennowitz, a 30-year veteran of the Fox Lake Police. Lately, the director of public works had been calling in to request extra patrols around a concrete plant. He felt like somebody had been trespassing on the property, and he was worried about theft or vandalism. So this morning, Lieutenant Glenowitz had promised to go take a look. Now he radioed in. Lo and behold, he'd caught sight of three suspicious-looking men, two white and one black, prowling around in the swampy area around the plant. I got two white males, one black, heading into the old concrete factory, he said, and following them in. A few moments later, he radioed in again.

They took off toward the swamp, he said. Ten-four, said the dispatcher. Do you need a second unit? Yeah, go ahead and start somebody, Glenowitz radioed back. About ten minutes later, two officers rolled up on the scene. They found Lieutenant Glenowitz's squad car, but there was no sign of the man himself. The tension ratcheted up as minutes passed without the backup guys setting eyes on Joe. You can hear the worry in the dispatcher's voice as they talked back and forth. Somebody try him on his cell phone, please.

And then came the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. Immediately, the two officers took off into the trees toward the sound, guns drawn. And it didn't take them more than a few minutes to come across the lieutenant, lying face down in his own blood. No pulse. Despite his bulletproof vest, he was already dead. said. Send everybody you possibly can, one of the officers radioed in. We have an officer down, call the chief, and tell him to get a hold of his wife, Melody. Lieutenant Glenowitz had started his day

like he always did. He'd stopped by the convenience store to buy his daily two packs of siggies and a cup of coffee. He'd joked around with the cashier, and now, just like that, he was gone. Just a year away from retirement, too. The news hit the town of Fox Lake like a wrecking ball. Joe Glenowitz was sort of the town celebrity. He'd been a paratrooper when he was younger before he joined the Fox Lake PD, and he still had this super short military crew cut. He had a sort of soldiery vibe in general, and this had earned him a nickname, G.I. Joe. Joe liked that everybody called him that. He even played it up a little, driving around town in a Humvee with a G.I. Joe license plate, and wearing fatigues and combat boots around town. People love this guy, largely because of his work

with a program called the Police Explorers, an offshoot of the Boy Scouts, where kids could work mock crime scenes, practice forensic techniques, learn about gun safety and how murder investigations work, all kinds of stuff. A lot of the townspeople had kids who'd been through the Explorer program, learned a lot from G.I. Joe. The kids practically hero worshipped him. He had a way of bringing the quiet ones out of their shells,

helping them find their confidence. When they found out where he'd been killed, it struck the explorers as an awful irony. The swampy area outside the old concrete plant was where they used to work their mock crime scenes and other training exercises. Now it was a real crime scene. The whole town was hunkered down, glued to the news,

schools on lockdown, and the Fox Lake PD knew they were going to need reinforcements to hunt down three killers on the run. And they sure as hell got him. The manhunt for G.I. Joe's killers jumped into gear within minutes of the discovery of the body, and it was unlike anything the town had ever seen. 400 law enforcement officers called in to help,

state and federal. helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, guys on top of people's roofs with binoculars, dozens of scent dogs and their handlers. This was intense, even by Chicago standards. The little town looked like it had been overrun by an occupying force. It was like something out of a movie, one Fox-like neighbor told CNBC, especially when you consider the town's history. According to CNN, Al Capone used to live near Fox Lake,

and he liked to have his minions dump bodies in the waterways around town. As the town people sat by their TVs watching the progress, they all figured the three guys would be in custody soon. But the hours dragged by, and then the days. Tips, of course, had been rolling in from pretty much minute one, and quite a few people had called about a group of guys who seemed to fit the description of the killers to a tea. They even had a moment of big excitement when they looked at surveillance footage from a gas station nearby and saw the guys. Two white, one black, all 20-something men. They found the guys and interviewed them, and when they found out they had criminal records, everybody felt like, oh, this has got to be it. But it didn't take long for that lead to evaporate.

The men were all day workers. They were in the area for a job, and they all had a stainless steel alibi. At the time, Joe Glynowitz was shot, they were having grits and blueberry pancakes at Dino's Diner. Surveillance footage, credit card receipts, the whole nine. It wasn't them. I'm sorry, that just sounded really delicious. I know, right? I'm hungry.

Some blueberry pancakes. That is a good alibi. It is. Better than most I've heard, right? Mm-hmm. It was weird. The police response to Glynowitz's death had been so quick. They had a perimeter set up within two hours.

So why hadn't they found these guys yet? Were they hold up somewhere? Did they, God forbid, have somebody hostage in their own house trying to lay low? until the heat was off. That's been known to happen, sometimes with bloody results. Oh, yeah. Everybody in town was on edge, making sure every door and window was locked down tight. People were sleeping with guns under their pillows. It kind of felt like the whole of Fox Lake was holding its breath. And then finally, a break. A woman called to report a scary close call. She'd been driving in her car earlier that night when she'd lost track of where she needed to go, so she pulled the car over to check her direction. on her phone. And suddenly, as she was sitting there, three men came bursting out of a cornfield

and tried to jump in the car with her. Her doors were locked, thank God, but they were yanking on the handles, pounding on the windows, demanding she let them in. Scared to death, the woman managed to flora and get away, but it was a terrifying experience. And it didn't take long for her to realize that the men matched the description of the suspects in the Glynowitz case, which had been all over the news all day. Three, 20-something males, two white and one black. But under police questioning, the woman's story started falling apart. It was three men. Then maybe it was only two. She wasn't 100% sure. She started to waver. And then when police confronted her with the fact that there wasn't any damage to her car doors, despite how hard these guys were supposedly wailing on them,

the lady cracked. Well, so sorry, she said weeply. I just saw the case on the news. I just saw the case on the and I made it up. She really just wanted some attention, she told them. You know, she just kind of got caught up in the drama. To the detectives working this case, none of whom had slept for more than 15 minutes since the moment they found the body, this hit like a sledgehammer to the ribcage.

They were furious. The best lead, only lead, really, that they'd had so far, and it just went up in a cloud of pixie dust, all because one pathetic dork was desperate for attention. But what could they do? They charged her with making a false report and went back to work. The funeral of Lieutenant Glenowitz held on Labor Day was the biggest one anybody in Fox Lake had ever been to.

Thousands of people lined up along the streets to watch the funeral procession. Officers from as far away as New York came to pay tribute to the fallen hometown hero, and they sent him off with full honors. A local sign maker had put up signs all over town with Joe's picture, and messages like, a hero remembered never dies. At the memorial, Joe's widow, Melody, looked out over a whole sea of tear-stained faces as she talked about losing her husband. They'd been high school sweethearts, married for 26 years with four boys.

He was my hero, the love of my life, she told the mourners, and every night he came home to me. Joe and Melody had always seemed to have an idyllic family life, a standing lunch date once a week, plus date night every Friday, family vacations, the kind of relationship just about everybody hopes for. It seemed so unfair to everybody that it should end like this. The town gathered Melody and the kids up. Donations came flooding in. Behind the mournful pageantry of the funeral, investigators were pouring over the crime scene evidence,

trying to piece together the story it had to tell them, just like G.I. Joe had taught his police explorer kids to do. And frustratingly, there really wasn't a lot of evidence to be found. Tracing Glynowitz's path from his squad car to the spot where he died, they discovered first a canister of pepper spray that had obviously been fired off. A few feet past that, they found Glenowitz's police baton. A way down from that, his glasses, and then the body. Joe had been shot twice, one on the lower torso in his bulletproof vest.

That didn't penetrate, but it left a gnarly bruise that must have hurt like sin. And a second shot right above the vest and tilted downward. This was the death shot. It had gone into Glenowitz's lung, causing him to drown in his own blood, a rough, if fairly quick way to go. They found Joe's gun lying in the weeds a few feet away from his body. Later, when ballistics examined the bullet,

they found something surprising. The bullet that killed Joe was fired from his own service weapon. The killers must have wrestled it away from him in the struggle. Not too hard to imagine when it's a three-on-one fight, but, man, killed with his own gun, execution style. No cop wants to die that way. the investigators also collected two cell phones at the scene one private and one for work that one had been in the line of fire and now had a bullet hole in it but the forensic tech folks felt like they could still retrieve the data it would just take a little while so it wasn't nothing but it wasn't what they'd hoped for didn't find anything dropped by the killers didn't even find any footprints although that wasn't really weird given the swampy terrain but there was one thing that as they began to put the timeline together gave the detectives paul The GPS in G.I. Joe's squad car had, of course, recorded all his movements that morning,

and it showed that there had been almost a half-hour-long gap between when Glynowitz arrived at the old concrete plant and when he called it into dispatch. That didn't fit exactly with what he told the dispatcher, and it was puzzling, to say the least. It was enough to get the detectives looking hard at Glynowitz's background. They thought, what if there was more to this than met the eye? What if G.I. Joe was involved in something he didn't want anybody to know about? What if he'd actually gone to the concrete plant to meet somebody? Right. Or what if the killer was somebody he'd arrested in the past? What if they'd been threatening him or his family?

He told him, meet me here at this secluded location, and we'll work it out. And Glynowitz was unwise enough to come alone. No backup? Yeah, I mean, if his family was being threatened, that might explain that. And the investigators had already heard a few rumors. that suggested there might be a few skeletons in G.I. Joe's closet. For one thing, apparently, he was anything but a faithful husband. It might have been true that, as Melody said at Joe's memorial service, he always came home to her. But when he wasn't home, he was up to some, I guess we'll call him shenanigans.

He had a mistress, a woman he'd met through his work with the explorers, and rumor had it, Melody was aware. She'd come to his office one day to find the two of them in there with the door closed, and they'd both looked very disheveled and red-faced when she walked in on them. You know, that kind of thing. You don't have to be a rocket surgeon to figure it out. Right. The investigators talked to the woman, of course, and she was unhelpful.

Basically just acted all pissy and evasive and refused to admit to anything, which, of course, meant that the investigators came away feeling 100, percent certain that she was Joe's mistress. Yeah, exactly. It's like you're trying to conceal the truth, but you're just making it a hundred times more obvious when you act like that. It's a good job. Yeah, great. A plus. Give her an Oscar. And when the detectives checked out Joe's social media, they were immediately intrigued by the amount of traveling Joe and his family had done over the past few years. We're not talking a long weekend at Lake Michigan here. We're talking luxury trips to Hawaii, stuff like that. Not to mention the Humvee that he drove around

town in. Those are not cheap. The investigators knew they couldn't afford that kind of five-star travel on a police officer's salary, so how could he? Melody was a stay-at-home mom, so it wasn't her money. They started looking at the Glenowitz's financial records, and they were pretty much a full bouquet of red flags. Ten grand worth of credit card debt, almost five figures spent on a trip to Hawaii, two tax lanes, one in 2009, one in 2010, and the cherry on top, about 700 bucks on adult websites, which seems like a lot. I don't know much about that, but like, that's a lot. That really seems like a lot.

All right. Clearly, G.I. Joe was living way above his pay grade, and his bank accounts showed a whole slew of deposits with no clear explanation, some for as much as $7,000 for one deposit. It was going to take a little while, but the investigators put a couple of people on the financial records and told them to dig as deeply as they needed to. It seemed like this was going somewhere important. Meanwhile, detectives decided to look at Glenowitz's personnel file. You never know what you're going to find in an employee file, especially an employee who's been with a department for three decades like Joe had. They wanted to find out if the whistler

they'd been hearing that Joe might not be as heroic as everybody thought he was were more than just rumors. So they cracked open the file. And what did it look like? Oh boy. Let's put it this way. One of the detectives involved in the investigation, Chris Covelli, later said, it's unusual for somebody to be a lieutenant and have a supervisory authority with a personnel file looking like this. File that one under great understatements in history. Yeah. Here are just a few charming highlights from Joe's file from a 2018 article by Fox 29, Philadelphia.

In 1988, a colleague found Joe passed out drunk in his truck with his foot on the gas pedal and the engine revving. So the other officer had Glenowitz truck towed away, and he took messy McMess pants home, and I assume carried his drunk ass into the car. the house and dumped it on the nearest couch. Then the next morning, when our boy woke up all hung over, he had the gall to report the truck stolen. And the personnel file specifically notes that this was not the first time this shit had happened. So how, in God's name, is that not the end of your law enforcement career right there? But it gets worse. Later that same year, Joe got

written up for neglecting to frisk an arrestee. The guy happened to have a knife on him. And later that night, a guard found him in his cell with it threatening to kill himself. Scary, potentially dangerous, potentially fatal to the inmate situation that could have been avoided if Glynowitz had been doing his damn job. In the spring of 2003, he got in trouble for granting himself unauthorized access to a call recording system. This system was full of sensitive information, as you can imagine, stuff so private that even the police chief wasn't supposed to have access to it. And Glynowitz had just finagled himself access without permission. His punishment, the chief made him write out an explanation of why he did it, which I swear to

God, has got to be the piddliest shit I've ever heard in my life. It's the disciplinary equivalent of Mrs. Craboppel making Bart Simpson write, I will not access classified materials 25 times on the chalkboard. For God's sakes, that same year, a woman under Glynowitz's command filed a complaint, alleging that a few years earlier, Joe had coerced her into giving him oral sex. She said he basically cornered her in an office and told her that if she wanted to advance in the department, he was going to need their relationship to move beyond superior officer subordinate. He was going to need a relationship, meaning a blowjob, apparently. Infuriating. But of course, in the grand tradition of these things, that case ended up

dismissed by a judge and G.I. Joe just went right on doing his thing. Oh, no, sorry, he got suspended for a month, so I guess he learned his lesson. Oh, wait. Not. Oh, he didn't learn his lesson because later that same year, still 2003, our boy got into an argument with the dispatcher over some dumb thing. Like she told him he shouldn't be hanging out in the radio room and that hurt his little fee-fiz or something. And he told her that if somebody put a few bullets in her chest, her body would never be found, you know, because of all the handy little lakes and ponds in the area. The dispatcher looked at him like, and then he laughed, which made her feel a little bit better, like, oh, okay, that was just a hilarious joke. good, huh? But then the next day, Glynowitz popped back up in the radio room with a gun in his hand. He walked around so he was standing right behind the dispatcher's chair and then loudly cocked the gun.

Now, surely he was fired after that, right? Yeah, not so much. See, Joe told his superiors that he didn't mean any of this to be threatening or scary. He was just joshin. And as far as I can tell, that was the end of that. Jesus Jones. yeah what's what's funny about that joe quickly quickly tell me it's just you know it's fine to like tacitly threaten to murder people isn't it everybody finds that hilarious yeah i guess she should have known that the lunatic that repeatedly promised to kill her with a clear plan was making a little jokey joke and dump her body in a lake yeah hadn't she heard that threatening to kill your colleague is one of the classics it's right up there with knock knock and why did the she can cross the road. It was just who's on first, basically.

He was expecting her to riff back. Instead of freeze and terror. Yeah, Jesus. So 2003 was apparently a big year for interesting little items in Glenowitz's personnel file because in the fall of that same year, it was all in one year, he got written up again. This time for ordering one of his subordinates to leave a crime scene totally unguarded before any of the forensic texts had gotten there because the next shift needed the squad car. swear to God. Holy shit on a cracker. Like, forget about the fact that he's a walking shitstorm

of, like, misogyny and sexual misconduct. He's also just a really shitty cop. So obviously, all this blew the detective's minds. I mean, they were homicide detectives, so they didn't have anything to do with this, like, patrol lieutenant on a day-to-day basis. It was a different wheelhouse. But it got even worse than that. Yep. The investigators also learned that in 2009, a letter arrived at the office of the mayor at the time. Now, this was a different mayor than the one that Glynowitz was buds with a few years later, signed by, quote, anonymous members of the Fox Lake Police Department. According to CNN, the two-page letter was bursting at the seams with examples of G.I. Joe's drunken frat boy on a spring break behavior, from hoeing around town with various girlfriends to getting kicked out of bars for getting messy drunk and refusing to leave at closing time, to sexually harassing and then threatening to shoot a police dispatcher, taking his family. to the Wisconsin Dells in his squad car,

letting kids from the Explorer Club wear real police uniforms and use real police equipment grabbing women's boobs and getting a tattoo while on duty. Wow. It's like a real American hero, G.I. Joe. He'll grab your boobs.

I don't know. He'll get a tattoo what he's supposed to be. It's wild to me. Yeah. And apparently somebody had like, I forget what the story on this is, but something like someone had actually like donated that as like a gift to the department or something and he just like took it and used it while he was on duty yeah love that you think knowing it's half the battle yeah i loved that show as a kid so it's okay now you'd think a letter like that would be a real bombshell right like the mayor would get two paragraphs into that thing and then light

up the phones at Internal Affairs, like, get on this today. We got to investigate this chucklehead. Mm-hmm. But no. Apparently, the response was to file the letter in Glenowitz's employee file. Wow. Don't be too hard on him, guys. Everybody makes mistakes. Yeah, that's harsh. For his part, G.I. Joe's good buddy, Donnie Schmidt, the mayor in 2015, took a kind of, a pro. Coach, once all this came to light, he said, he'd never heard anybody complain about Joe and added that he didn't have access to the personnel files. And I love this.

He said, the only time I look at the file is if there's a discipline problem. Okay. So you do have access. And there clearly was a discipline problem, my dude, and had been for years. Like, where the hell were you playing golf with the guy, I guess? Gross. So you can see why one of the officers involved in the case later told CNN that Glynowitz was a golden child who must have had dirt on somebody to get away with all the shit he did. The dude had been suspended five times F-I-V-E-1-2-3-4-5 throughout his career.

So about the time they unearthed all this red-hot stuff from Joe's personnel file, the financial investigators finished up their probe into the Glinowitz family accounts. And it was explosive. Joe had multiple bank accounts set up. and one of them was tied to the Explorer program. And as they combed through the program's records and cross-reference that with G.I. Joe's bank information, it became clear as day. Joe had been embezzling money from the explorers for years.

And the total amount stolen was just under $60,000. That explained the Hummer and those expensive trips to Hawaii. Stunned, the investigators reached out to Anne Marin, the new, village administrator. They knew she'd been working her way through all the departments and she got hired conducting audits. And one of the departments she'd been auditing in recent months was G.I. Joe's Explorer program. And Anne was eager to talk about what she'd found out. When she first met with Glenowitz, she'd asked to see the equipment storage area for the explorers. Now, this was a Boy Scouts offshoot, and lots of police departments have it. It's supposed to be a fun way for kids to learn about the

basics of police investigations. Yeah, and what it's not supposed to be is some kind of weird apocalypse now-style militia group. But that is clearly what GI Joke had been turning it into. When he showed her the equipment he'd ordered for the program, Anne Maren had to pick her jaw up off the floor. The storage room looked like the equipment room for a military base, boxes upon boxes of stuff. A lot of it's still unopened. Anne didn't know this at the time, but Glynowitz was getting this equipment from a gun

government program called Lesso, the Law Enforcement Support Office. This is supposed to provide necessary equipment, surplus military gear specifically for actual police work. And that's what the folks at Leso assumed they were doing when they shipped out boxes and boxes of flat jackets and helmets and communications gear and God knows what else to the Fox Lake PD. And they probably got that impression because GI Jabroney was forging the police chief signature on the paperwork to order the stuff. The actual police never saw a single helmet. And even the explorers didn't use a lot of it. It was just kind of sitting there in the storage room, and nobody knows exactly why.

And Joe's explorers were learning some intense shit. It wasn't just like, here are the steps in a traffic stop, or here's how to take a fingerprint. It was SWAT team tactics. It was getting tased while two of your buddies tried to hold you upright just to find out what it feels like. It was getting fucking pepper sprayed in the face. Joe ran them through military-style training exercises, way more extreme than your usual Explorers program. Some of the adults close to the situation were a little uneasy about it. Felt like it was heading in a weird direction. Sounds like Lord of the flipping flies to me,

was this man trying to build himself a child army? Or what? Because it really kind of sounds like it to me. Yeah, these kids are like one conch shell away from descending into chaos. But anyway, I guess we'll get into motivations later. But point is, G.I. Jerkface was being way extra with the explorers, which I'm sure was a ton of fun for them, because T. teenagers love this kind of shit. It gives them that intoxicating feeling of belonging to something bigger than they are. I'm sure they bonded with each other through the training exercises. I mean, you don't get like pepper sprayed in the face and don't bond over that. You know what I mean? We bond through adversity. So that's all great. But behind the scenes, unbeknownst to everybody, Joe was stealing from them. And quietly amassing a huge collection of military gear. Just digest that for a second and let your mind spin out the possibility. Now, if you know anything about the Boy Scouts, you know that these programs tend to have tiny little budgets to work with. But under Joe Glynowitz, the explorers were swimming in cash. In a seven-year period, over a quarter of a million dollars had flowed through the Explorer program, and about

60 grand of that had ended up directly in Joe Glynowett's pocket. Now, some of this was due to Joe's fancy paperwork, forging the chief signature on orders and all that kind of stuff, and some of it came from fundraising, getting local businesses to cough up to help out the kids, you know, and nobody had any idea the kind of money that was passing through Joe Glynowitz's fingers. Nobody, that is, until village administrator Anne Maren came Walton in one morning and asked to see his paperwork. Who had approved all this stuff? She wanted to see the financials and she wanted a complete inventory of all the equipment in the storage room. Anne was just doing her job, but to Glynowitz, this was DefCon 1. The gravy train was

screeching to a halt, and G.I. Joe was stuck on the tracks. So, this was all pretty hot stuff, and when they finally managed to get the data off Glenowitz's busted-up cell phone, oh my God, in over 6,000 pages of texts, which he'd, of course, tried to delete and then shoot a bullet through, but of course they found him anyway. One hell of a picture coalesced. The picture of a man who'd been up to his crew-cut hairdo and shit in the months before his death and was well aware of it. One of the first texts they recovered was one to his adult son, where he was basically like, we have to figure out how to hide this money or you're going to be

visiting me in prison. Oh my God, Joe. They can read deleted messages. He's such a bad cop. I don't think we can, I don't think we can overstate this. He's maybe the worst cop of all time. I think he's in the running. I mean, there's a few bad cops out there. Don't get me wrong. But For sure. Yeah, he's definitely like in the ballpark. But as far as like capability goes, terrible. Crappy. Like remove all the like.

He had, he had no business teaching anybody how to work a flippin crime scene. Like, let's just say it. Or to use a taser. Oh. You should see the footage of those poor kids getting tased too. Like it's just, it hits them and they're just like, oh. Yeah. It's just horrible.

These children. It's a child. It's their hearts. So there was a. lot of back and forth with his oldest son, like, you've got to put that money back or they're going to put me in jail. Clearly, Joe wasn't the only Glynowitz family member who'd been on the embezzlement gravy train. It seemed like he'd been sharing the take with his family and said family was well aware of where the money was coming from. And it got a lot worse than that. In other texts,

Joe talked about reaching out to a gangbanger he knew to try and take care of Anne Marin, the village administrator. His hatred of her just oozed off the page, and it seemed to the investigators that once he'd realize the hit wasn't going to happen in time, he'd resigned himself to the next best option. He couldn't stand to lose his real American hero reputation. For a guy like Joe, losing face would be a fate worse than death. So he came to a decision that would be unthinkable for most of us. Take his own life and make it look like a murder. That way, he could go out and a blaze of glory, cut down in the line of duty as he bravely went one against three in an attempt to protect the people of Fox Lake. And if the investigators bought his death as a murder, his family

would get his full pension. They'd only get 75% if he took his own life. The day Joe was supposed to turn over the paperwork to Anne Maron was the day of his death. The puzzle pieces were all coming together. The evidence at the scene, or lack thereof, the lack of defensive wounds on Joe's body, ballistics that showed he was shot with his own gun, everything pointed to one inescapable conclusion. So on November 4, 2015, after a tense meeting with Melody Glinowitz and her oldest son to give them a heads up, the Fox-like PD held a press conference to break the news. We have concluded with overwhelming evidence that Joe Glenowitz, his death was a carefully staged suicide.

As Chicago Tribune reporter Lisa Black put it, everybody's jaws dropped. As you can imagine, the town took it big. It was an unbelievable betrayal, especially for the kids who looked up to Glynowitz as a role model. I mean, this guy had been honored at a Chicago Bears game. The governor of Illinois had ordered all flags to be flown at half-mast. They had a moment of silence for him on the floor of the Senate.

This case had made national news. People quickly got to work to facing the signs all over town, changing hero to zero, writing liar and loser across G.I. Joe's smiling face. Good job, guys. I especially like the hero zero thing. Well done. Genuinely, the most hardworking Americans are those that vandalize signs to make them funny. Like, there was a candidate where I live whose name could be altered to look like a pretty bad swear word. and so many of his signs were altered. I love to see it, folks. Keep up the good work.

Please carry on. Yes. Yeah, me too. People who have donated money to the Glynowitz family after Joe's death started clamoring for their money back. Yeah. For their part, the family insisted it was a lie that Joe had been looking forward to his retirement

and he'd never take his own life. Common enough reaction for a family, that doesn't surprise me. And some people didn't believe it, at least not at first. It was easier to suspect some kind of cover-up or conspiracy than to admit to yourself that somebody you loved and looked up to wasn't who you thought he was. But ultimately, as one former explorer put it, you have to come to your senses and believe the facts in front of you. But not everybody was surprised. Some people had seen it coming. In fact, as early as a day or two into the case, one former explorer had heard from a friend in the Fox Lake PD that the murder

was really a suicide. In one of the initial reports from the scene, an officer wrote that he suspected suicide. Because, you know, there was really no evidence of a struggle or of anybody else at the scene besides Joe. So as far as they were able to piece it together, here's the theory of what Klinowitz did that day. He went about his usual morning routine at first, stopping at the gas station for a couple packs of cigarettes, so as not to alert anybody that anything was wrong. The investigators believed that while he was at the gas station, he actually saw those three day workers on their way to the diner for breakfast and decided on the spot to use them as his imaginary attackers, because he described them to a tea. And then he headed for the swampy area around the

concrete plant, a place he was more than familiar with after training his explorers there for years, and a place where there had been multiple complaints of trespassing and suspicious activity. He parked his squad car, and then for the next half hour, he did what he'd done so many times before for his explorers. He staged a crime scene. Discharged his pepper spray, then threw the can down on the ground. A few feet down, he tossed his baton, and then, and this part

must have sucked, he fired his gun right into his bulletproof vest, carefully aiming so the bullet would go through his cell phone. I'm sure he figured that would destroy all those incriminating texts, which, uh, no. Bad dude, bad cop, bad haircut.

Is there anything he wasn't bad at? And then after he'd recovered from the sledgehammer blow of that shot to the vest, he radioed dispatch. I'm chasing three subjects into the woods. Go ahead and start somebody. And then it was time. As his backup pulled up on the abandoned squad car and started looking around for him, Glynowitz pulled open his bulletproof vest at the neckline, carefully aimed his weapon down into his chest and fired. What he was thinking in those final moments, we can never know for sure, but a man willing to take his own life rather than face the consequences of his

actions. I'm sure it was all about him. You know, when I was a kid, something like this happened in my hometown. I didn't know the person involved, but my parents did, and she was supposedly really well-liked and well-respected, just like Joe, and then one day she threw herself off a high bridge into a river outside town, took her own life, and afterwards it came out that she'd been embezzling money from the place where she worked, and she was about to get caught. And it was just too much for her, I guess. And this is a thing in financial crimes. We actually see it a lot, and I think it has to do with the personality profile of the embezzler. They tend to be people who don't need to steal to survive. They're doing it because they want money and status. They want a fancier lifestyle

than their job is giving them. And it's partly about greed, but it's also very much about image. Yeah, I mean, they certainly don't ever squirrel it away for a rainy day. They never put it in savings. It's all Humvees and beach vacations and new gadgets. We've seen the story a million times before. Yeah, and for a certain type of person, that golden child image is more important than anything else, anything. It's more important than life itself. If Joe Glynowitz had faced the music, he probably would have gotten off as lightly as financial criminals usually do, especially if it's their first defense. He might have done a few years in prison, but I'd actually be surprised if it was a lot. He'd probably have to make restitution, do community

service, a few years of probation. I'm sure he would have lost his job, but that wasn't the issue for him. You know, it was genius for him to start handling that explorer program because aligning yourself with kids is the perfect cover for somebody like this. Because everybody thinks, oh, look at this grizzled macho man of a cop. He's really just an old softy. He gets to come across like a selfless role model, sacrificing tons of his own time to make a difference in the lives of these kids when behind the scenes, he's using the program as his own personal ATM. All while soaking up the kid's hero worship, which would have been catnip for a guy like this. So, yeah, the issue was not the punishment he was going to have to face in the courts.

The issue was the loss of face. That idea was just intolerable for him, so much so that suicide actually made more sense. But Fox Lake wasn't finished with the Glenowitz's. Oh, no, it wasn't. About six months after Joe's death, his wife, Melody, was indicted on a whole list of felony charges. Money laundering, dispensing charitable funds without authority, and for personal benefit, all sorts of nasty stuff. She eventually pled guilty to helping her late husband embezzle the money from the

Explorers program in exchange for 24 months probation and a slew of other charges being dropped. Yeah, although even as she was taking the guilty plea, she tried to minimize and deny her involvement. So she never came right out and said, yeah, I did this. It was just like, oh, I just want to put it behind me and all that kind of stuff they always say. It also looked like their adult son DJ was headed for charges for a while too, but there wasn't quite enough evidence to make them stick. all they can really prove is that DJ and his dad texted back and forth a lot about some incriminating stuff,

but mostly incriminating to Daddy Joe. So there just wasn't enough to nail DJ. And the people I feel worse for in this story are the kids who looked up to this guy. For them, this has been a real grieving process, not to mention a horrendous blow to their ability to ever trust anybody again. So much for looking up to the adults in your life, right guys?

Those kids loved Joe Glenowitz with the kind of fierce loyalty that kids save for the favorite adults in their lives. And if you've ever been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of that kind of love, you know how great it is. Yeah, and the fact that he could take that love and exploit it for a little bit of money tells us all we need to know about the kind of man he was. Not to mention the fact that he chose three real people to describe to the dispatcher.

Those three guys could have been arrested and charged or worse if the investigators hadn't been as on the ball as they were. Three innocent people could have gone to jail for a crime they did not commit. I think that absolutely could have happened because of the general hysteria that happens anytime a cop is killed in the line of duty and they're not always looking as hard as these guys were looking at the evidence. I think it's absolutely possible that those three guys could have gone to prison and that is ficked up. So what we're left with at the end of the story is yet again the ripple effect of damage that a narcissistic dickweed like this can do to himself, to his family, to the people who loved and herself. respected him and in this case to a whole town. And I think it gets worse than that because in this case, we have a situation where there had been years of complaints against this guy. It's not like

his mask was like perfectly in place. Plenty of people had tried to sound the alarm and nothing ever got done. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing for a bunch of people to get together and write a letter to the mayor about a police officer. That's extraordinary and nothing got done. One of the main investigators got really choked up about the case on one of the TV shows about it. He was like, until this case, I'd always been proud to be a police officer, but this made me ashamed. It's like, yeah. I mean, yeah, you kind of should be. You should be. You should all be, because you turned your back on a mountain of evidence that this guy was a wrong in. And what did you think was going to happen? So the lesson here, I think, is let's not do that anymore, okay?

Time to weed that shit out. Get on it. So, you know, just because I have so much sway. They're going to hop two. Step on it. Snappy. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

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