True Crime Campfire - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: The Real Thelma & Louise

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

In the mid-90s, a spate of bizarre robberies caught the attention of police in Houston, Galveston, and Las Vegas. The perpetrators were a pair of 30something women who met their victims through dating ads. The women forced the men to strip at gunpoint, handcuffed or tied them up, then ransacked their homes. In only two months' time, they amassed nearly a quarter of a million dollars in cash and stolen goods. Who were these lady bandits, and what motivated them to drop their seemingly normal lives for a secret life as outlaws? Join us now for a wild story of robbery, revenge, and rebellion. Sources:https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/13/us/unlikely-suspects-are-sought-in-thelma-and-louise-robberies.htmlhttps://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-09-03-mn-41917-story.htmlhttps://www.houstonpress.com/news/thelma-louise-and-sybil-6572010Canadian Broadcasting Service (CBC), "72 Hours True Crime," Episode "The Game"Investigation Discovery's "Tabloid," S1, Episode "Dressed for Revenge"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://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/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. I think everybody daydreams sometimes about escaping. Just packing the car up or jumping on a train and seeing where the adventure takes you. it's a romantic idea and interestingly enough a lot of times the people who daydream the most about doing it are the ones who on the surface seem to have the most enviable lives the nice house the

nice car the 2.5 kids the respectable job for some of us that life really is a dream come true but for some people being successful in that life takes wearing a mask that bears very little resemblance to the real inner self that nice house that nice house could become a gilded cage. Some of these people will find a healthy way to get out of that situation and make a life that works better for them. Others, well, you're about to find out.

This is Girls Just Want to Have Fun, The Real Life, Thelma and Louise. So, campers, for this one, we're in Texas, winter 1995. Police were dealing with a rash of armed robberies unlike any they'd seen before. These weren't your typical couple guys in ski masks pulling a gun at a gas station kind of crimes. These had finesse. And the perpetrators were women. Two of them.

30-somethings by the look of it, and they worked together like a well-oiled machine, like they'd been at it for years. some of the details varied but their emma was basically the same every time they'd meet some unsuspecting dude through an ad for a telephone dating service this was nineteen ninety five remember the women tended to target the guys who were looking for kinky sex a threesome with two lovely ladies specifically with a little light bondage thrown in bonus points if the guy was a little older and even better if he was an immigrant or visiting from another country clearly they were going after the men who would be the least likely to involve the police, either out of embarrassment or a language barrier. The guy would rent a hotel room thinking he was in for a night of sexy sex with two hot, uninhibited ladies. Yeah, not so much. Hot and uninhibited? Yes, but instead of treating our guy to a threesome, once they got them all naked and trussed up like a Christmas ham, they robbed him. Cash, credit, and ATM cards, jewelry, anything they could get. If the victim had invited him to his

house instead of a hotel, the damage would be even worse. The women would make off with electronics, silver, whatever they could find. Sometimes there was a gun involved or a stun gun, though so far none of the men had been physically hurt, just threatened to get their pin numbers off them and whatnot. What made it worse for the victims was that these two ladies were so obviously enjoying themselves. They really got into it, man. They had wigs and costumes. Sometimes they impersonated cops, which must have confused the hell out of whatever poor. bastard had arranged to meet them for a threesome, like, open up, it's the sex police. What is happening?

Most of the time, it took the men a while to realize that what was going on wasn't, you know, part of the show. But at the end of the encounter, it was always the same. There he'd be, the poor dude naked and handcuffed and humiliated and often several thousand dollars lighter. One of the victims, a 70-year-old man later told police, I knew it was too good to be true. Well, I mean, yeah, bless your heart. But, you know, we live and learn, right? Wasn't his fault for shooting his shot. So this went on in Texas and one or two in Vegas for a couple of months.

And then Dollar Store Thelma and Louise made a little oopsie doodle. On February 3rd, a guy named Javid Gondal called 911 in a near panic. He'd just been robbed at gunpoint, he said, by two women and a man. He'd met the women through a dating ad. They were supposed to come over for a date. But when they got there, there was this dude with them. He pulled a gun and ordered Javid to strip while the women tied him up and rifled through his pockets for cash and credit cards. The man held the gun on him the whole time. But then something went askew for his captors.

The man with a gun took a big swig from a bottle of water they'd brought with him, and about 20 seconds later, he passed out cold. The women who were busy turning over Javi's apartment for, valuables heard the thud and immediately freaked out like oh my god he drank that stuff oh you moron that was supposed to be for the mark drugged water obviously apparently they hadn't let their little buddy in on that part of the plan yeah i don't know for sure but i feel like telling everyone involved in a small time heist if there's drugs in the water bottle that may be rule number one of committing petty crimes. Of course, rule number two is to always bring enough snacks to share.

Obviously. Yeah, if you're going to bring goldfish, bring enough for everybody, okay? Including the victim. I mean, why shouldn't he have a snack too? So the women didn't wait around to figure out what to do about this little development. They just grabbed what they could grab and hauled ass. And as Duffy McDufa snooos snoozy, just face planted there on the carpet, Javid managed to scoot over to the phone and call police. I mean, it's like you can't make to shit up. It's like a sitcom or something. Bringing Sleeping Beauty along to guard

the victim was the first and last mistake these two made and what Houston PD would soon realize was one hell of a crime spree. By the time they met Javid Gandall they'd done this about a dozen times. Netting in two months more than a quarter of a million

dollars. In two months. That's incredible. Unfortunately for them, they decided to add a little extra muscle to the team and brought this rookie dude along. According to one of the sources we found, this happened after one of the two women accidentally fragged herself with a stun gun. Ouch.

One of the weird gaps in the story is what happened with this dude after Mr. Gondal called the cops. Presumably, he was still snoring on the floor when they arrived. Yeah, I suspect he probably barely knew the two women. Like, they'd probably met him in a bar and just said, hey, you want to make a quick hundred bucks or whatever? either wasn't able or wasn't willing to give up any useful information about them. I have no idea what happened to him, and believe me, I looked.

Well, he is the least interesting part of the story, so I guess the papers just didn't bother with him. But this was the first time a victim had called the police so soon after the robbery, and the woman's trail was still warm. The Houston PD quickly got two big breaks. First, they checked Mr. Gondal's phone records and found several calls from a local hotel. the Drew Rie-in. Side note, I believe this is the second case we've covered that involved a Druryin.

Like, do they advertise in the criminal yellow pages, which definitely exists? When they talked to the hotel manager, they got a description of two female guests who sounded an awful lot like our robbers. And then the ladies were dumb enough to use one of Gondal's ATM cards, and the security camera got a nice, clear picture. of one of them, breaking rule number three of petty crimes. Never get caught on camera. She turned out to be a 35-year-old psychiatric nurse, wife, and mother of three named

Rose Turford, and her accomplice, her best friend and co-worker, 30-year-old medical tech Carolyn Stevens. The investigators were confused. These women did not seem like the type to do this kind of stuff. They seemed like regular, ordinary upper middle. class professional women. And I mean, yeah, that's what they were. And they were insistent that they had only done these robberies because they were under threat. From Carolyn Stevens' abusive ex-boyfriend, a shady private investigator named Orlando Avery. And to the astonishment of the Houston cops,

they spun out a story that read like a dark criminal version of Charlie's Angels. Charlie's demon. Rose and Carolyn had been afraid for their lives every second of the past two months. They said they were terrified that Avery would act on the threats they'd been making. They'd done robberies at his direction to make money for him, and they suspected to entertain him. Avery obviously took a sadistic pleasure in torturing them. It was his way of punishing Carolyn for trying to escape him. And punishing Rose for helping her do it.

You didn't get to leave a guy like Avery. So, who, wow. Apparently, there was more to this story than anybody thought. The Houston investigators had a lot of digging to do to get to the bottom of this. But let's put a pin in that for now and get some background on Rose and Carolyn and how all this unfolded. They met in 1992 when they were both working at the Spring Shadows Glen Rehabilitation Center. Rose was a psychiatric nurse and Carolyn was a technician on the same unit.

It seems like they were drawn to each other pretty much from minute one. They bonded fast and soon they were confiding in each other about everything. They were kind of an odd couple, on paper at least. Growing up in Toronto, Canada, Rose was the quintessential good girl, TM. She'd been an overachiever all her life, a girl who did what her parents and teachers told her, ate her vegetables, made her bed as soon as she climbed out of it in the morning, got good grades. you know, Lisa Simpson, basically. Now, she was living

your basic suburban American dream in Houston. Nice upper middle class house, a husband, and three boys. When she wasn't at work, she spent a lot of time driving the kids to baseball practice and making healthy meals and other such mom-type things. Carolyn's upbringing wasn't that different.

She came from a nice family. Her dad was a Methodist minister. She was smart, had a degree in psychology, she had friends. But Carolyn had struggled with some mental health problems. She'd once been arrested at an airport for carrying a gun. When she met Rose Turford, she was kind of a drift. Maybe Rose felt like a lifeline to her. And maybe the feeling was mutual. The thing was, the shiny, airbrushed perfection of Rose's outer life didn't really tell the whole story. Her marriage to her husband, Brian, wasn't going too well. She just wasn't satisfied. And in her

quiet, three o'clock in the morning moment, she caught herself daydreaming about a different kind of life. and one day Carolyn showed up with a nasty-looking bruise and shared an ugly little secret. It was her boyfriend, Avery. He was abusive, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally too. He was always ridiculing her, threatening her, wearing away at her self-esteem. He seemed to enjoy it. It was so confusing, she said. In the beginning, she thought he was such a catch.

Smart, handsome, private investigator who hung on Carolyn's every word and told her she was the most beautiful woman. he'd ever seen can we say love bombing right now all that had turned to ashes and she dreamed about getting away from him over the next few months rose noticed more bruises on her new friend and caroline told her more horror stories about avery so when rose's husband who was an executive for a computer company got transferred to detroit for work which was more than a thousand miles away two besties took it as caroline's chance to escape from her abuser brian moved to Detroit without Rose and the kids, so he was flying back to Houston on weekends to see his family. I don't know how long they intended to keep that up if Rose was planning to move up there with

the kids eventually or what, but this meant that during the week, Rose was San's husband. And soon after Brian left for Detroit, Carolyn started spending every spare minute at Rose's house. And before long, Carolyn took the final plunge to try and escape Avery. She just went right ahead and moved in with Rose. And soon after that, the close friendship they developed morphed into something romantic. They started a hot and heavy sexual relationship behind Brian's back. Surely not. As historians say, they were just gals being pals, right?

No, um, no, they were doing it. Not just really good buds? Nope. I'm quite sure. If you say so. They were lesbians, Katie. Oh, okay. And they were together all the time now, at work and at home.

Carolyn and Rose were totally wrapped up in each other, high on that buzz of new romance. We all know what that feels like, right? But it didn't take long for a pretty enormous fly to come dive-bombing right into their chardonnay. In the form, of course, of Avery. Shockingly, he wasn't taking Carolyn's exit very well. What?

I know. I'm shocked, too, because he seems like a dude that would just roll with the punches and just take everything with perfect diploma, but not so much, it turns out. Yeah, just rock steady. He's just rock steady. In the sense of, like, he's going to start throwing rocks through the windows and having a man tantrum. At one point, Carolyn had to go back to pick up some of her stuff, and when she got back to Rose's house, she was all sweaty and just white as a lily. And she took Rose into the bathroom. This is so awful and took off her clothes. to show her two bloody gunshot wounds. Avery did it, she said. And Rose, of course, was horrified.

It was not like they were really serious injuries. It was like flesh wounds, really, but Jesus, you know. Avery was clearly out of control. So, you know, Rose was a nurse. She cleaned Carolyn up and bandaged her and tried to talk her into going to the hospital and obviously the police. But Carolyn said, no, no, no.

It would only make things worse for her if she tried to get Avery arrested. and she seemed so fragile. Rose didn't want to push her. Rose wrote about the scene later in her diary. She just took Carolyn's face in her hands, looked into her eyes and promised her. She was here now, and she'd make everything all right. Oh, very romantic. I mean, not the gunshot part, obviously, but the rest of it, yeah, romantic. Right, and there's something about sharing a common enemy, especially when the enemy's goal is to break you up.

How many times have we seen that dynamic play out in one of our killer teenagers cases? Oh, yeah. So parents of teenagers, perk up your ears here because you're going to need to face facts on this. If you hate your kid's significant other because he has this stupid little fuzzy teenage mustache and he reeks of cigarette smoke and weed and he thinks he's a reincarnated vampire and skip school and rolls his eyes at you when you try to ask him how school's going, the last thing you want to do is tell your kid, you can't see Brandon anymore, that's it. Because aside from the very real possibility that she and Brandon will murder you in your sleep,

there's also this. The quickest way to shove two people closer together is to try to break him up. Exactly. And like, teenage romance is not built to last. They will be broken up in two weeks, I promise you. Yeah, she'll figure it out for herself that he's a second nerd. Like, if you move on. If you raised her or him or them with the same, same, like, morals as you, it won't last.

This is just rebellion. Let them make out. It's weird. It sucks. She'll get over it. Yes, I agree completely. Avery obviously didn't get the memo on that, though. He didn't understand that all he was going to accomplish by threatening Carolyn was to activate Rose's Captain Sabahoe instincts and ratchet up the intensity of their romance.

but, as I said, he didn't get the memo, and the longer Carolyn stayed away, the more he amped up his campaign of threats and intimidation. Rose started finding creepy notes and block lettering. At first, they just threatened Carolyn and demanded she do little things to hurt herself. One time she came home covered in weird drawings and permanent ink. Avery's work, of course. Rose had to help her scrub them off in the shower. That's so weird.

But soon, I feel like a way to not drive, like, two lovers away is to, like, write slurs on them and then, like, oh, I have to, I have to get in the shower with my lover and have them wash it off. Like, that doesn't seem like, anyway, that's just my opinion, though. I'm not an expert on being an abusive creep, so whatever. Soon, Avery's threats and demands started including Rose. He threatened to do all kinds of awful things to her. He threatened to kidnap her kids from the backyard. And he started sending weird hangman games they'd have to fill in in cipher-coded letters that they'd have to figure out how to read.

Okay, what is it with bad dudes and cipher codes? This is like the fourth or fifth time that's come up. It's so weird. I think it's like it makes them feel. special and like super smart because they're like I know that like they're professor Moriarty or something shit I know the secret to this code and no one else does even though it's usually like just like connect the dots or color by numbers really easy too yeah this one was really not hard to crack the code was literally like just a bunch of

little dots and lines on the page and it looked like nothing at first but if you connected the markings the right way you could read the text And before it was all over, there were thousands, thousands of pages worth of notes and letters from this guy. Jesus, Murphy. Yeah, it was like he had this deep need to make sure he was a constant present in their daily lives. They could never just relax and forget about him. He was always there lurking in the background, a constant, creepy threat. One of the hangman games ended up being a demand that they travel to Colorado on some random errand.

It was just one more way for Avery to mess with them and assert his control. And Rose and Carolyn did what they were told pretty much, at least most of the time. They were terrified of the guy. And then came a demand that knocked Rose and Carolyn sideways. Avery wanted them to start committing robberies and give him a cut of the cash. And, of course, I mean, neither of them had ever done anything like this in their lives. their first instinct, of course, is to call the police, tell him this guy is harassing us, trying to get us to do crimes for him, but Carolyn was terrified to do that, and she just begged

Rose and begged her not to. He'd kill us. He'd kill your kids. He'd kill Brian. We cannot involve the cops, which, as frustrating as it is to hear, is actually pretty common behavior for people who've been abused. They're more afraid a lot of the time of what will happen if they tell than they are of whatever is going on already because that's kind of a known quantity. It's like take the devil you know over the devil you don't. So that demand just sort of hung in the air, along with the ominous thought of what Avery would do if they didn't act on it. And then one weekend, while the kids were away staying with friends, Rose and Carolyn packed their bags for a couple days in Vegas.

They desperately needed some time to just lounge around the pool, have some drinks with little umbrellas in them, and forget everything else. and when they were lying around by the pool that first afternoon looking banging in their swimsuits they suddenly looked up to see that they had a visitor a 70-something older gentleman had sidled over to the lounge chair next to theirs and was given them the eye t m now most of us would just be like heck off man i'm trying to hang out with my girlfriend here but rose and caroline found themselves in conversation with the guy. And it didn't take him long to figure out what he wanted. Ooh, a game of shuffleboard?

No. Damn, I'm 0 for two today. He wanted, bless his heart, a threesome. With these two beautiful 30-something young women, dude's 70. You gotta hand it to him for the confidence, right? I'm sure he was expecting him to slap him or throw their little umbrella drinks in his face. or at least say, ee, no, and like sprint away screaming with laughter. But instead, an interesting, hard-to-decipher a little look passed between Rose and Carolyn,

as if they were having a conversation by telepathy and then came to a decision. And then Carolyn said, sure, okay, let's go up to your room. He must have had a heart palpitation from the shock of that. And once they got up there, it got even better. These two gorgeous young women wanted to get a little kinky. They wanted to tie him up with his own neckties. Well, he wasn't going to say no to that. But, of course, then it all went to shit.

Once they had the old guy tied up, Rose and Carolyn sprang off the bed and started rifling through his wallet and his luggage and pocketing everything they could carry off. All his cash, his credit cards, his camera. They'd just pulled off their first robbery, and it was so easy. And from their campers, it was on. Once Avery found out that Carolyn and Rose were one, willing to commit crimes for him, he rattled off a whole string of instructions for improving

the M.O. They were to take out an ad for a fake telephone dating service. Target the guys after kinky sex, threesomes and bondage. That way, you can tie him up before they figure out what's really going on, which is actually pretty clever in an evil sort of way. Get a gun, nine millimeter, maybe a stun gun too, and you should disguise yourselves, wigs, costumes, the kind of clothes you'd never normally wear. Vary the days of the week and the times of day, so that's harder for cops to connect the robberies, and don't do them all in Houston. Go to Galveston, too, and back to Vegas. And before long, they were off to the races, pulling off one lonely heart's robbery after another. They couldn't believe how easy it was and how much money they took away.

And somehow they never got caught. No late-night knocks on the door from the cops. The truth was, most of the men didn't even pursue charges. Some of them filed police reports, but that was about it. They were embarrassed. They sometimes varied their M.O. a little bit. Once or twice, they dressed up like cops, fake badges, handcuffs, and everything, and pretended to be searching for a missing woman. Interesting, right? Once they were inside their victim's house, they pointed their guns and ordered the poor dude to strip.

And they handcuffed him and tossed his house. And all the while, of course, Avery was there in the background, in constant contact, making sure Rose and Carolyn knew who was in charge. he could kill them at any time he could kill Rose's kids he could kill her husband they'd do well not to test him the thing was though

as awful and scary as that sounds many of the victims of these robberies later told police that the two women seemed to be reveling in what they were doing they'd make vicious fun of the guys while they forced them to strip they seemed to be almost on a high as they ransacked their hotel rooms

and homes was it a way for them to work out some of their rage against Avery maybe? Was there a part of them that was enjoying this a little? I mean, obviously nobody wants to have an abusive piece of shit gunning for him, but you have to admit, there's something kind of lifetime movie romantic about that us against the world thing. Yeah, I mean, look at Bonnie and Clyde. Mm-hmm, exactly. Bonnie and Claudette. And, you know, the whole outlaw thing is kind of sexy, I guess.

But of course, all things. must come to an end, and every criminal is going to make a mistake eventually. As we already know, for Rose and Carolyn, that mistake was bringing a rookie along for muscle. And like we said, we wish we knew how they met him, how he got involved, etc., etc., but we couldn't find out. What we do know, of course, is that the guy drank a bottle of roofied water the women had made up for the victim, face planted on the poor dude's floor, and when Rose and Carolyn realized what had happened, they ran. And soon after, the cops tracked them down using the victim's phone

records and surveillance footage from an ATM. When they searched the truck they were driving, they found a treasure trope of evidence. Wigs, fake IDs, a stun gun, caught costumes, a veritable gold mine of stuff. Rose and Carolyn had written out a plan for each of the robberies and assembled a kit for each of them too. Costumes, makeup, fake ID, guns, whatever they needed. These ladies had been capital P prepared. I love that they're like overachieving little Lisa Simpsons even with the robbery. It's like, well, we got to make an outline and plan every step. Put our little kits together. It's probably why they were so successful, you know. They have like a step-by-step plan. They did an outline before, you know,

you got to make an outline before you write the essay. You got to write an outline before you tie a dude up and all them at gunpoint. Exactly. And we call that pre-writing, but this is pre-robbing. It's a little English major, hashtag English major humor. English major humor. God, we're such nerds. Well, within just a few days of the arrests, Rose and Carolyn had their bail hearing.

Because their crimes were so prolific, almost a dozen in two months. And because they'd been armed at the time, they each got a whopping, Half a million dollars, bail. Dang. Nobody really expected them to be able to post it, but their families, especially Roses, stepped up. They put up their homes and savings as collateral. Rose and Carolyn were supposed to report in to the bail bondsman several times a week,

and they were ordered to stay away from each other. No contact. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to work out great. As we have pointed out repeatedly, telling two people, people in love to stay apart is just not a good plan. Mm-mm. So, Rose and Carolyn walked right out of the courtroom, free on bail for the time being.

They just wanted to get back to their normal lives, spend time with their families. Meanwhile, the investigators got a search warrant for a storage space Rose and Carolyn had rented, and they found the Avery letters. Thousands and thousands of pages of them. Bizarre hangman games and coded messages and all. The investigators knew they needed to find this Orlando Avery asshole and question them about the involvement in these robberies. They figured the quickest way to Avery would be through Rose and Carolyn, so they motored over to talk to Rose. But when they got there, they didn't find Rose.

What they did find was a note on her bed, written in the same big block letters they'd found on some of the Avery letters. It said, I have come to repossess my girls. Repossess like you at a car. Ugh. Ugh. And to no one's surprise when they went to find Carolyn, they found the same thing. The gal pals were in the wind again.

As the investigation saw it, one of two things had happened. Either Orlando Avery had indeed come to Houston and abducted his girls, or Rose and Carolyn had simply gone on the run together and used Avery. as a convenient cover. And try as they might, they couldn't seem to track down Orlando Avery. They dug in, put a couple of detectives on it, find this guy, and fast. And with a name like the stage name for a grungy D-list actor, it shouldn't be that hard. Opinions differed about which scenario was more likely.

Abduction or just plain old on the run. Rose's attorney told the media he firmly believed Rose would not have abandoned her three kids and left her parents in the lurch for half a million dollars. The investigators mostly came down on the other side of the argument. They figured these ladies had cheezed it and were not planning on coming back. The bail bondsman was heartbroken for Rose and Carolyn's families who stood to lose their entire life savings now, and he tried like hell to find him, even printed up t-shirts that said wanted with Rose and Carolyn's mugshots on him.

Um, that's fucking brilliant. I need one in my life immediately. I will wear it. every single day. Yeah, I would wear that. It probably shouldn't surprise us that as soon as word got out that the ladies had skipped town, the media pretty much jumped on the story like a flea on a beagle. The real-life Thelman Louise were on the lamb.

It's so funny how we tend to turn people like this into folk heroes. It's just like what happened with that little shit, Colton, whatever the fuck his name is, the barefoot bandit kid. This kid was out there stealing airplanes and flying them with like no qualifications whatsoever, crashing him and going on the run to find more and everybody was all like hey it's the barefoot bandit are you all kidding me what if he crashed the damn plane right through the roof of your house and squashed your grandma would you want to write a folk song about him then because i sure as hell wouldn't and like i get that he had an awful childhood and stuff and that's sad but like don't fly

planes if you can't fly planes kid it's dangerous yeah should not be romanticizing this no amount of trauma gives you pilot training no exactly Those two things are not even related. So anyway, I hate that whole phenomenon, and it was in full swing with Rose and Carolyn. Nobody seemed to give two shits about the men who'd been humiliated, stripped naked, and robbed. They were more the butt of jokes than anything else. It's like because they'd met these women through a kinky dating service, they were just gross perverts who deserved it or something.

It's just, no. I cannot believe I'm about to do this. But like, what's the opposite of a kink-shaming corner? Is it a kink-validating gazebo? Anyway, that is where we're headed, y'all. Regardless of what you're into sexually, the most important aspect of any intimate encounter is consent. Like, these dudes were not being sex pests.

They thought they were meeting up with two ladies that were enthusiastically consent. to the sex they were about to be having. That's... Yeah, adult women in their 30s. Like, we're not... I mean, some of the age differences you might raise an eyebrow at

just for preference, but, like, it's not like Chris Hanson was going to be waiting there with a glass of iced tea. These were 30-something women. They were grown adults. They can have sex with a 65-year-old man

if they want to. That's great. Good job, guys. Gold Star for doing the absolute fucking minimum. Thanks for being, like, respectful and not being pieces of human detritus.

Live long and get tied up or whatever. Yeah, and nobody seemed to consider that the victims of crimes like this can develop post-traumatic stress, have flashbacks and nightmares, and lose their sense of safety and trust in other people. That's not nothing. One of the attorneys actually had the nerve to tell the L.A. Times that although Rose and Carolyn had used guns and a stun gun to control their victims, quote, they never really heard anybody. Uh, yeah, they did. Not physically, maybe, but yeah, they did.

and so to bank robbers, which is another group of people that we love to romanticize as folk heroes. I just find it icky. But to the media and a lot of the public in general, the girls were Thelma and Louise, too cool for school. The tabloids, of course, were all over it, splashing lesbian and kinky and robbery and handcuffs all over the headlines. I cannot imagine that was fun for the families or the victims, but there was no stopping it. And before long, a steady stream of tips started rolling in from all over the place, the U.S. and Rose's home country, Canada. They were working in a strip club.

They were posing as nuns. It just went on and on. Eventually, though, they got a tip that seemed like it could be legit. A woman called the FBI from Toronto, Canada, to report that two of her new co-workers looked an awful lot like those Thelma and Louise chicks on the run from Texas. And earlier that day,

she'd seen him kissing in a hallway when they didn't know anybody was looking. The cops might want to come check it out, and by the way, was that reward money still available? Good for her. Yeah, get that back, sister. Absolutely. And after about a year on the lamb in Canada,

Rose and Carolyn finally got that knock on the door they'd probably been dreading since the daily left. They'd been living together in a small apartment, working in an office, and rapidly running out of money. As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police put the two gals in the back of a patrol car and drove away, a news camera captured Rose and Carolyn just grinning and waving out the windows.

They just looked like they were having the time of their lives. and interestingly Orlando Avery was nowhere in sight hmm by now the Houston police Interpol and the FBI had all been scouring the globe for Avery and most of them had come to the conclusion

that the guy just didn't exist and when they finally got Rose and Carolyn extradited back to Texas they sat him down and asked them about just that and of course they protested no no he's out there he kidnapped us he made us do every bad thing that we did But as she sat in jail, inching closer to a trial that could put them both at risk of a 90-something year prison sentence,

Carolyn started to wonder if maybe she'd made some bad decisions. And finally, she sent word through her attorney that she was ready to talk. I'm sorry, the thought of somebody sitting in prison and being like, maybe I was wrong is just so fucking funny. Just so good. And, like, maybe I didn't make the best decisions to get here. At some point, I might have gone askew. I'm just... It's a possibility.

And at long last, she admitted the truth. There was no Orlando Avery. There had never been an Orlando Avery. She made him up. Prosecutor Dan Rizzo was happy to have been right about Averyl. Long. Who doesn't love that, right? But he was also just so confused.

He asked her, why? Why did you do all this? So elaborate with the cipher code and threatening notes and just all of it. Carolyn was quiet for just a few seconds. then she looked up at him. It was the game, she said. The game. Wow.

Now, in one of our sources, it says that when Carolyn was evaluated by a defense psychiatrist, she was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. So there's a lot of debate about what Avery was all about. As we're going to see in a minute, Rose's side said he was a manipulative tool that Carolyn used him to keep Rose scared and under control so she'd be Carolyn's partner in crime and stick by her. Carolyn's explanation is, you know, it was a game, a fantasy. Her prison diagnosis suggests it could have been a symptom of her mental illness. I don't know for sure.

Yeah, not to mention the just rarity of a DID diagnosis. It's just... Right, I know I really raised an eyebrow at that. Yeah, who knows. And, you know, I don't want to say she's lying, of course, because literally only she knows that. but it's so rare. Right, sure. It really is, yeah.

Carolyn pled guilty to aggravated robbery in exchange for a 10-year sentence. To the prosecution, it was a fair trade. She'd been cooperative. She'd told the truth, at least as far as they could tell. She'd taken responsibility, and she showed remorse. Rose, not so much. She wouldn't let go.

She insisted she'd been nothing but an innocent pawn. in Avery's chess game, or at least she believed she was, and she didn't deserve to be punished. She insisted she'd believed in Avery 100% in everything she'd done, from the robberies to the sex she'd had with Carolyn, raising a major eyebrow with that. Because she said that it was at Avery's direction. Yeah. Under duress, she'd been manipulated. It wasn't her fault. Yeah.

Problem was, campers, that one of the things the investigators had found in that storage space was Rose's diary. And the diary begged to differ. Written in a purple, cringy, airport romance style, it left the jury in no doubt whatsoever that Rose had been all in from day one. In one passage, Rose talked about her reasons for doing the robberies, none of which mentioned to protect my kids from Avery. Right. And she made fun of some of the victims. She called them stupid.

Not good, Rose. Not fucking good. So gross. Grow up, you absolute overripe turnip. Yeah, I bet that got the jury's attention. As part of her plea bargain, Carolyn admitted that Rose was a fully informed, fully willing participant in the robberies from the start. Avery was, as she told the prosecutor, a game, a fantasy, something to add spice to this sexy little adventure they were on together. Spicee.

Spicy. Clearly, these were two women who weren't satisfied with the way their lives were going. Carolyn had some other stuff going on, I think. I mean, untreated mental illness can cloud our judgment pretty severely. And I think Rose was just flat out bored. Yeah, I agree. It's that old story, you know, tired of being the good girl, the Steppford wife, the soccer mom, whatever. I mean, I'm sure she loved her kids, but I think part of Rose was just shriveling up inside.

And then when Carolyn came along, she got sucked in. And the lines between real life and fantasy just started getting really. real, real blurry. Oh, and another thing. The investigators also found written plans for a whole big batch of future crimes. If they hadn't got arrested when they did, they'd been planning to kidnap a Texas lottery winner and hold him for ransom. Okay, just don't win the lottery campers. Just, Jesus John, it's like a death sentence. Just sometime go and Google lottery curse and read all the horror stories. That's just more trouble than it's worth, I'm telling you. What's the line? More money, more problems?

No money, no problems. Mm-hmm. Yep. I think Abraham Shakespeare would agree with that. Absolutely. They had other victims lined up, too. All kidnappings are ransom, for some reason. All wealthy men from Texas and Canada. So obviously they were planning on expanding their criminal enterprise. Yeah, that would have been a flippin disaster. Can you imagine it? I mean, these ladies were good at these, like, set up robberies, But holding somebody for ransom, that is a whole other ball of wax.

I think they'd have fallen flat on their asses with that. Oh, for sure. That's another level. Like, you weren't ready for that, especially because, like, how many times have, like, criminals tried to branch out into kidnapping and then ended up killing their victims? Oh, yeah. That's exactly what would have happened. Yeah.

And I do think they had the potential to be dangerous. I mean, you don't bring a gun and a stun gun, you know, if you aren't prepared on some level to use them. And not to mention any time you're like drugging someone, you stand the risk of them having a bad reaction, of killing them. It's just, it's, it's astounding that more people weren't hurt. But yeah, the kidnapping thing blows my mind because like, I think people think, oh, they'll be a docile person because like at a certain point, something flips on in your brain that's like just survival and you'll fight back. So, yeah, sure. Anyway, Rose was convicted of aggravated robbery and sentenced to, wait for it, 30 years in prison.

Ouch! Yeah. Should have done what your girl Carolyn did and taken responsibility, Rose. Yeah, no shit, right? I wish I could tell you what Rose and Carolyn are up to today, Camper's, but we couldn't find out. I tried. Carolyn's out for sure, given her 10-year sentence, and Rose was sentenced to 30 years in 1996, I believe it, was, so technically she'd be released in 2026, but I think there's every chance she's already

made parole and is out and about, and possibly listening to this episode right now. And if that's the case, hi, Rose, hi Carolyn. Y'all did some real dumb stuff, but of course, that was decades ago, so we hope you're keeping your nose is clean, doing well for yourselves. So that, I think we'll all agree with some 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 we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our newest patrons.

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