True Crime Campfire - Hunted: The Murder of Judy Blake Moilanen

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

Thanksgiving weekend is supposed to be a time to reflect on the blessings in our lives—especially the people we care about. Sure, you might end up in an argument or two around the dinner table, but hopefully by the time dessert comes out everybody’s over it and feelin’ lucky to be there. You wouldn’t expect, sitting around the table with the people closest to you, that one of them was biding his time, planning out your murder, step by step. Hiding death behind the smile. But that’s exactly what happened in this story. Join us for a story of lies, lust, greed, and a series of murder attempts disguised as "accidents." Sources:The Sweater Letter by Dave and Lynn DistelA&E's "American Justice," episode "The Deer Hunter Murder"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. Thanksgiving weekend is supposed to be a time to reflect on the blessings in our lives, especially the people we care about. Sure, you might end up in an argument. argument or two around the dinner table, but hopefully by the time dessert comes out, everybody's over it and feeling lucky to be there. You wouldn't expect sitting around the table with the people

closest to you that one of them was biding his time, planning out your murder step by step, hiding death behind the smile. But that's exactly what happened in this story. This is The Murder of Judy Blake Moylanan. So, campers, for this one, we're in Antenoggan, Michigan, November 29, 1992. It was the Sunday right after Thanksgiving and the last day of deer hunting season, a day when a hefty percentage of the town's population would be out in their neon orange jackets and hats. Judy Blake Moylanan, her husband, Bruce, and their three-year-old daughter were visiting Judy's parents for the holiday. And that morning, Bruce had gone out early to look for a deer with Judy's dad and brother.

Judy and her mom stayed home, and after lunch, Judy decided to go for a walk in the woods near the house. She took her and Bruce's dogs with her, and her parents' dog, too. Five dogs, all thrilled a bit to be out on a walk with one of their favorite humans. Nothing weird about any of that, but an hour passed and Judy didn't come back. Then another hour. At a little after two, the parents' dog, Streak, came trotting into the yard alone. By 4.30 p.m., Judy's mom, Marianne, was really worried. She knew the trails Judy would have taken, so she put on her jacket and went out to walk them,

thinking maybe her daughter had fallen and twisted an ankle or something and needed help. The late fall afternoon was quickly turning to twilight, and it was getting colder by the minute as Judy's mom searched the woods. As she walked, she alternated between calling Judy's name and blowing a dog whistle to try and summon the other four dogs. Eventually, she heard some commotion up ahead, and they all four came running, but without Judy. Imagine that was a sick-feeling moment for Marianne, but she kept on, walking in the direction that the dogs had come from. In about an hour into the search, she stumbled upon a scene no mom should ever have to witness.

Judy was lying across the hiking trail, covered in blood. It was obvious she'd been shot in the chest, and she was gone. Judy's mom ran to a neighbor's house as fast as she was. she could, and they called 911. At first glance, it looked like a hunting accident. Happens a lot, sadly. People get mistaken for deer, and that's that. And the person responsible doesn't always stick around to be accountable.

Matter of fact, the person responsible doesn't always know they're responsible. A rifle can fire a bullet far enough that a hunter could shoot at a deer and miss and not even realize they'd hit a human being instead. So it wasn't a hard leap to make that this was an accident, here on the last day of deer hunting season. But the lead detective assigned to the case knew it wasn't a good idea to assume anything. Tunnel vision can distort the hell out of a case and end up injustice denied. He'd seen it happen before, with disastrous results. So Detective Bob Ball decided to keep an open mind.

Aside from Judy's body, there wasn't really any physical evidence at the scene. Judy hadn't gone too far into the woods from her parents' house. There was a blaze mark on a tree nearby, caused when a bullet whizzed close enough to the bark to cause a burn. Of course, it was dark by now, so maybe there would be more evidence to look at in the morning. In the meantime, Detective Ball moved on to interviewing the family, who were all totally shell-shocked. What an awful thing to come home to for Judy's dad and brothers, not to mention her husband Bruce. The first thing Detective Ball needed to do, of course, was establish where everybody was when Judy was shot. Judy's dad filled him in on the hunting

trip. He, Judy's brother, and her husband Bruce had all gone together, though they weren't within sight of each other the whole time. Everybody seemed appropriately stunned about what happened, but there was one thing that sent Detective Ball's antennae up. When he spoke to Judy's husband, Bruce, one of the first things out of his mouth was Judy wasn't wearing orange out there. He said it in a really critical, almost irritable way, like a weird way to talk about your wife whose body was still lying out in the woods with crime scene tape around it.

Yeah. This sent up a little red flag in the detective's head, and like any good in it. investigator, he was going to keep poking at it to see if it kept flapping. A day or two later, after the medical examiner finished Judy's autopsy, Ball had a piece of crucial information that he didn't have for that first round of interviews, a time of death. According to the Emmy, Judy had been shot in mid-afternoon around 3 p.m. And those poor dogs must have seen it, which just kills me.

I hate when that happens. I always worry about the pets, you know, who witness, especially dogs, just because they're so pack-oriented, it just breaks my heart. No, and they understand. They know. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't stayed with her, you know? Yeah, it breaks my heart. So Detective Ball went back to Judy's parents' place to re-interview her dad and her brother. Did they have eyes on Bruce at the time Judy was shot? Well, no, actually. Bruce had been with them all throughout that morning, but they couldn't remember seeing him around the time when Judy was shot.

But they were sure Bruce had nothing to do with it. They were crystal clear about that. and Judy's family all bristle at the idea that her widowed husband might be a suspect. They were totally confident in his innocence, and they wanted it known. I mean, it wasn't like they would have picked Bruce as a son-in-law if they had the choice. When he and Judy first got together, they were like, oh no, not that guy. They found him kind of obnoxious, to be brutally honest, and they worried that he might be too wild to settle down, too much of a partier. but that was a sort of water under the bridge by now, more than 15 years worth. Bruce might not be their favorite person on the planet,

but they couldn't imagine that he'd ever hurt the mother of his three-year-old daughter. As for Bruce himself, he gave Detective Ball an almost minute-to-minute rundown of everything he did on the day his wife was killed, along with the names of almost 30 different people he'd seen that day, who he said could vouch for him. 30! And he did it in the same tone you'd use to describe your golf game the day before. Ball had talked to a lot of bereaved spouses over the years.

Everybody's different. Not everybody flies into hysterics when they find out their wife was killed, but most people don't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up either. Investigators noticed that Bruce would be sobbing uncontrollably one minute, minus any actual tears, and perfectly calm and casual the second they needed him to answer a question. And despite Bruce's detailed account of his whereabouts on the day of Judy's death, there was a problem, and it was a doozy. Bruce had a missing chunk of time, and it was in the early afternoon.

A dead half hour, right around the time Judy died. It was the only gap in his otherwise meticulous timeline for the day. Detective Ball was starting to wonder if nobody had seen him because he was prowling the woods at the time, hunting down his wife, lying in wait, out of her sight, Taking careful aim and firing. When you've been in homicide long enough, you develop pretty well-tuned instincts, and Detective Ball's inner alarms were blaring at him. But so far, there wasn't anything you'd call proof of murder. Until, a few days later, Detective Ball got a call from a woman named Gail, Gail Lampinen.

She was a co-worker of Bruce's, she said. They were both support staff at the local hospital, and she had something she thought the detectives should see. So Gail came in, and she brought an envelope with her. She said that a few days after Judy's death, Bruce showed up at her house unannounced. Rue, don't do that, but anyway, he showed up with five boxes of stuff which he unloaded from his car and sat on Gail's porch. Judy's things, he told her, you know, his dead wife.

And that was it. He dropped off the boxes unceremoniously and left. Weird, but Gail had come to expect nothing less than weird from Bruce, as you'll soon find out. It was the holidays, and Gail and her husband were too busy planning for Christmas to even look in the boxes for a few days. When she finally got around to opening them, she found them full of women's clothes, sweaters mostly, Judy's sweaters. And in one of the boxes, there was a letter. Dated six months earlier, June 2nd, and signed by Judy herself. A woman Gail barely knew. She worked with Bruce, but she'd only met Judy once. Why had she written her a letter?

And one hell of a letter it was. We were lucky enough to find a copy of the whole thing in the book the sweater letter by Dave and Lynn Distal, and here it is. Hold on to your butts. Gail. These are for you. Bruce wouldn't let me send him to St. Vinny's. He thought you or your girls could wear them. Enjoy them if you can use them. He sure thinks a lot of you. I guess it's the animals you have in common. Sometimes it makes me jealous, but at this point it shouldn't matter, I guess. He really is a great guy. Actually, none better. After 14 years, we just don't see things the same anymore. He loves those dogs. I love my work and freedom. However, I do need a favor from you. At this point, you are the only woman he trusts, and I'm sure of that. Help him find a woman to

take care of him, one that loves animals as much as he does. I'm sorry we never got to know each other better. You sound like a great lady. Love, Jude's. P.S. Don't tell the prospects, but believe it or not, he's incredible in the sack. Don't tell the prospects, but believe it or not, he's incredible in the sack. So, yeah, uh, yeah. This obviously was about the last thing on planet Earth that poor Gail Lampinen had expected to read when she opened up that envelope. And to Detective Ball, the whole thing sounded dubious as all hell.

I mean, help him find a woman to take care of him, seriously? What woman on her way out of a marriage is going to write a letter like that to a woman she barely knows, especially the PS, obviously, incredible in the sack? Oh, please. Oh, come on, Whitney. I know the first thing I always say to a side chick is, he do be slinging that dick, though, before I tell her she can have the cheating loser and no heart feelings.

Yeah, this letter was basic. wrap an old Brucey up in a big shiny bow and handing him to Gail. Forget about the fact that she was happily married already. Detective Ball was pretty sure Judy didn't write that letter, a hunch, by the way, that would later be backed up by handwriting analysis. He felt pretty sure Bruce wrote it himself, possibly six months before the murder, which had implications that were pretty creepy if you thought about him,

and then delivered it to Gail only days after the shooting. Judy was hardly cold in the ground, and our boy was already looking for a new. model. Detective Ball felt like Gail Lampinen had just handed him half the combination to a safe full of cash. This was dynamite stuff. And that wasn't all Gail had to offer him. She said Bruce had been a pest to her and her husband for months. He was like a bad penny popping up all the time. Like a gnat always buzzing around her, oblivious to how much she wanted him to go away. Bruce wasn't a very popular guy at the hospital where he, Gail, and Judy's best friend,

Leanne all worked together. He was last. He was last. crude, and he seemed to have zero filter between his brain and his mouth. His coworkers hated him, partly because of that and partly because he spent most of his time on the clock hitting on female colleagues, especially poor Gail. And Gail's attitude about it was basically like, why me? She loved her husband. She found Bruce annoying as shit, and she hoped to hell eventually he'd give up and go away. Right.

This, by the way, this right here is proof. that, I have a boyfriend, isn't the best response to unwanted attention from men, because some of them do not give a shit. Yeah, seriously. Judy's best Elyan, who also worked with Bruce at the hospital, echoed what Detective Ball was finding out from pretty much everybody he talked to, that, as he later put it on the show, American Justice, nobody cared for Bruce.

No one had anything good to say about him. And on the other hand, everybody that knew Judy loved her. But it hadn't always been like that. Judy and Bruce had met way back in 1974, Leanne said, and they were one of those opposites attract kind of couples. Bruce was extroverted and snarky. Judy was shy and sweet. They were both in health care, Bruce as support staff, and Judy as a nurse. For a while, it seemed to work really well for both of them. Bruce was actually popular back then. He was a lot more outgoing than Judy was, so she got somebody to help her come out of her shell, and Bruce got a stable-loving partner with a close-knit family. He wasn't

close at all with his own, but Judy had a sort of Norman Rockwell family. They cared for each other, they were pillars of the community, they were involved in the church. Just being around them gave Bruce a little more clout with the people in town. But the bloom fell off the rose before long. In addition to his tendency to hit on anything with a pair of tits, including Judy's best friend Leanne and her boss's wife at the hospital, Bruce really, really liked spending money he and Judy didn't have, and lying about it afterward. He'd borrow money from Peter to pay Paul, and the troubles just got worse and worse. Dude just couldn't bring himself to live within his means. Over the years, he wrapped up quite a bit of debt to Judy's horror. He loved his ski vacations

and hunting and fishing trips, and he liked replacing his cars way more than you could afford to, and if Judy tried to talk some sense into him, he just acted like a jerk. He didn't seem to respect her on any level. Did you know money is actually the number one reason that couple split up? I just think that's wild. It's just a huge source of stress, I guess, and stress is never good for relationships. Yeah, and what's crazy is it would happen in waves. Like they would sell the ATV and some hunting gear in one of the spare cars, and then a couple months later, Bruce just needed a new van. When their daughter was born in 1989, Judy hoped it.

it might make things better, but it didn't. If anything, the added stress of a baby made the tension in the marriage worse. Judy and Bruce were both confiding in various people about their relationship problems. Judy talked to friends, Bruce talked to Gail Lampnan, and Gail wished to hell he'd quit it. Apparently, one of the things he liked about Gail was her love of animals. She trained quarter horses in her off time, and Bruce was interested in dog training. He and Judy had a house full of dogs, but, But Judy wasn't really interested in the training techniques.

So this obviously meant that he and Gil were soulmates, obviously. Yeah, he pestered her constantly, making up all kinds of excuses to call her, stop by her office, and sometimes even her house. And in the summer of 1991, a little over a year before Judy's death, he showed up one afternoon and said, Judy and I are getting divorced. This would have been news to Judy. And the way he said it, it was like, just so you know, I'm about to be available. Gail was like, oh goody. She just wanted him out of her life,

but the guy didn't seem to have any boundaries with anybody. Despite hitting on Gail all the time at work, he also tried to buddy up to her husband Paul. Paul was president of a bank, and apparently Bruce thought he might be able to use him as an end to help climb out of his financial troubles. So despite being warm for his wife's form, he pitched him an idea.

He had this stuff for hunters, he said, that would totally kill a human scent, so deer can't smell him. He wanted to manufacture the stuff and sell it during hunting season. He didn't come right out and ask for money, Paul said, but he was heavily hinting. Obviously hoping Paul would get excited about his anti-stink spray and offer to invest. Paul wanted no part of it. Another time, he did actually come right out and ask for a loan.

This time, he just wanted to buy a truck. And he had the all-fired gall to tell Paul that it was Judy's fault he needed the help. She's maxed out all our credit cards, he said. She's always laid on the payments, which is just horseshit. was him, not her. And again, Gail's hubs declined to fork over any cash. But Bruce didn't seem to have any hard feelings about it. The next time he popped in at Gail and Paul Lampinen's place, he brought an itinerary with him for a hunting trip, for himself and Paul. He wanted to go to Texas, his treat. He'd pay for the whole trip. Come on, it'll be great. Strange, for a guy who'd been

desperate for a truck loan just the other day, right? I wonder why he might want to get his love interest husband alone on a hunting trip, want it so badly that he'd offer to pay for the trip himself, despite his financial troubles. It would be a little over a year, before those questions started keeping Paul up at night. To Gail, Bruce kept confiding about the breakdown of his marriage. It was all over, he said, all but the legal maneuvers.

Pretty soon he'd be wife-free. It all seemed pretty weird to Gail, who'd seen Bruce and Judy together and thought they looked happy enough, not like two people on the verge of divorce. And at some point in the midst of all this, Bruce started himself a little collection. A collection of crystal angels, titty-shaped salt and pepper shakers, vintage Garfields, perhaps. What about pewter dragons? No.

Then Coke cans of the world? Nope. Our boy was collecting life insurance policies on his wife. Some of which had a double indemnity clause, which pays double in the case of accidental death. Accidental death, by the way, includes murder. All in all, Bruce took out over $300,000 worth of life insurance on his wife. Pretty damn good dash in the early 90s. It'll buy you a lot of ski equipment, a lot of time on the slopes, pretty sweet truck.

Might even help you launch your stink stealth product for hunters. Bruce had canceled his own policies, but he made sure to keep up with the payments on Judis. He was uncharacteristically meticulous about that. Yeah, his insurance agent later said that. like the agent kept calling Bruce like dude your policies lapsed are you going to reinstate them but he never got a response and then about a year before judy's death there was an accident at the moylin's house Bruce was up on the roof trying to repair the chimney and judy was working on something down on the ground Bruce had put some chimney blocks near the edge of the roof and as Judy was bending down

to work on some of the flashing at the bottom of the chimney one of these 85 pound cement blocks fell off the roof and hit a glancing blow across her head. If it had hit her from just a slightly different angle, she would have been extremely dead, extremely. Even with a glancing blow, she ended up spending several days in the hospital with a bad concussion. After that, Judy seemed different, scared. She confided in her best friend that she had a bad feeling.

She was thinking about leaving Bruce. I mean, it wasn't all about her anymore. She had a little girl now, and she wasn't feeling safe in her own house. This is what was going on in the background, while Bruce was popping into Gail's office, whining about the breakdown of his marriage. For Detective Ball, the picture was getting clearer and clearer. He already felt like he had a fair degree of circumstantial evidence, plus the CSIs had determined some important stuff from the trajectory of the bullet that pretty much ruled out an accident. But he needed something harder if he was going to put the grab-us on Bruce. What would really help, he knew, was to find the missing bullet.

They hadn't found it at the scene, and if they were going to prove that it was fired from Bruce Moylenin's rifle, they had to have it. So Detective Ball decided to try Hail Mary. He called in a human bloodhound, a guy named Dan Castle. Dan was a copper miner, and he was notoriously good at finding lost objects. The man was a genius with a metal detector, so much so that the local. PD had used him before to help recover evidence at crime scenes. He was good at it partly because he had skills and partly because he was like a bulldog. He wasn't going to stop until he found what he was after. So just a few weeks after Judy's death, Dan Castle went to work in the woods.

He got his metal detector and looked and looked three separate times, but he just couldn't find the bullet. And then a light bulb went off in his head. He knew a night bulb. He knew a night. about the physics of firearms that he had a good idea of the area where the bullet might be, but he needed to be sure. So he set up a little experiment. And it was about as low tech as you could get. Like this is like Calvin and Hobbs type shit, right? He got a slingshot and some marbles, and he recreated the path from where the bullet had pierced Judy's chest. He started by aiming his slingshot at the blaze mark the bullet had left on the tree as it ricocheted off. The forensic investigators had already established with a high degree of confidence that the bullet that hit the tree was the same one that killed Judy.

So, Castle hoped the marbles would land in roughly the same direction the bullet did after it hit the tree. He got a slingshot and he started slinging, marble after marble. And over and over again, the marbles landed in the same area. It made him feel pretty sure that he had the right idea, so he brought out his metal detector, this time focusing, solely on the area where the marbles ricocheted. And this time, he hit Pater. He looked down and sought glinting in the weak winter sunlight, a 30-caliber bullet, the same kind that killed Judy Moylan in. That's just so cool. I love this dude in slingshine, his little bag of marbles. Yeah. So they sent the bullet off to the lab. It had some fibers on it, and damn if they didn't

match the clothes Judy was wearing when she died. They were also able to prove that the bullet hit Judy in her right side and sliced through her heart before exiting her body and ricocheting off the tree, finally landing about 80 feet away. They knew the shooter had to have been straight back from that blaze mark on the tree, no further than 100 feet away. If this was a hunting accident, the bullet would have had to come from further away. Otherwise, you just couldn't mistake Judy for a deer, and the bullet would have fallen downward, not risen upward. This was a murder. And the investigators were pretty sure they knew who did it. The next step was to get their hands on Bruce's guns to try and match the rifling on the

bullet, but no joy. None of the guns they recovered from the Moylandon's house matched. It was a tough blow to the case, and Detective Ball was so frustrated. Meanwhile, Brucey Goosey was living the life. He took a leave of absence from work, which is, of course, understandable. What wasn't so understandable was the amount of fun he seemed to be having. He was dropping the little girl off with Judy's parents, going off on ski vacations. He seemed almost giddy, almost joyous.

like the cat who got the cream. It was bizarre. And it did not go unnoticed. Judy's family were starting to have their doubts about Bruce's innocence. Brother-in-law David remembered that on the day Judy was shot, he'd gone with Bruce to see Judy's body, at Bruce's request. As they were walking down the hall to the morgue, Bruce suddenly turned to David and said, are you sure you can handle this? It's probably going to be a little bit gruesome, but I'm used to it. That startled David. Used to what seen your dead wife's body? I help out in the OR, Bruce reminded him. Well, yeah, David thought, but I mean, this is your wife, not some random patient you've never met before. Judy's family started feeling really uneasy about their late daughter's husband, and they confided their

suspicions to Detective Ball. But he still didn't have any hard evidence to make an arrest. So what did Ball do? Well, he did what everybody should do and they want to catch a fuck boy, fuck boy in. Yep. He assembled, and I think this is genius, y'all, a squad of girls. Listen, nobody can dig up evidence of wrongdoing better than a group of women whose friend just got done wrong. It's true. If you want to see what nuclear-powered, fierce-ass loyalty looks like, just tell a group of close female friends that some dickhead man just screwed over their girl, see what the fuck happens. Oh, yeah. I love a detective who knows the value of spying and gossip. Okay, two central tenets of investigations that I think get shifted to the bottom of the pile, you know?

Like, an angry girl squad can find your name, your mom's name, your alma mater, and your last five girlfriends by just looking at a profile picture. It's truly impressive. Hell yeah. Specifically, he recruited Judy's friends, plus Gail Lampinen to keep tabs on Bruce. Just keep your eye on him, he told them, let me know if you see anything you think of. I need to know about. And these ladies were all in. They started documenting and sometimes recording any communication from Bruce. Gail felt kind of conflicted about it for about a split second and then she realized, hey, if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to worry about. Leanne, Judy's best friend,

had no such compunctions. Bruce had hit on her, too. On Valentine's Day, my dude sent half a dozen red roses to both Gail and Leanne. With a card that said, happy Valentine's Day, perhaps someday we can be more than just friends, Bruce. So first of all, I want to point out that he split up a full dozen roses to send to these two women. You know he did. Oh, yeah. We've got to save money, right? Got to save money.

Second of all, I feel the need to remind y'all that neither of these women had even shown one iota of interest in this man. He was just down cataclysmically. He is the Simp King. this is in-cell behavior. Yeah, definitely. And then one night, weeks after the murder, weeks after the murder, he invited Leanne out to dinner.

Of course, the conversation turned to Judy's death eventually, and y'all might want to be sitting down for this because you seriously might have a rage stroke. So have a seat. As they talked about the shooting, Bruce took out a pen and started drawing a diagram of how it had probably played out, on one of the cocktail napkins at the table.

Yeah, when I read that, I had to take a minute to stop myself from crying. What a mind-numbingly cool thing to do to Judy's best friend. And Leanne took it big. Her blood just froze in her veins. It was one of those moments when you feel like time is standing still. She hadn't been sure before. But now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, she knew. She was breaking bread with her best friend's kill.

and she was terrified. She was too afraid to take the napkin diagram with her when they left the restaurant. She thought it might make Bruce suspicious, but she told Detective Ball about it later in great detail, and he said the diagram matched the true details of the crime scene perfectly. This is when Leanne's nightmare started. She had dreams about Judy, Judy's little three-year-old daughter and herself, running through the woods with Bruce chasing after them.

And she wasn't the only woman getting nervous. Gail was, too. Since Judy's death, he'd really stepped up the creepiness, inviting her on a ski trip, even if Paul can't come, squeezing her hand and telling her how much she meant to him. And then there were the letters. The sweater letter, as it came to be called, was only the first of several, and they all have to be seen to be believed. The first was the one the investigators called the I Love You letter. and Bruce gave it to Gail in person on January 21st, a mere couple months after Judy's death.

It was inside a card with a picture of a cute puppy on it. The printed text on the front read, If you need a pat on the back, I'm here. And inside, Bruce had written, Naked Mud Wrestling is also available on request. Oh, God. Yeah, mm-hmm. As if that wasn't bad enough,

there was a folded letter inside the card. and here, thanks again to the distals in their book for this. Gail, I really don't know how to say what I feel. We've known each other for a couple of years now, and most of it has been pretty, for lack of a better word, shitty, time in my life. Whenever I needed somebody to talk to, you were always willing to listen, and for the most part, tell me what you think, good, bad, or indifferent. We share many common interests.

Maybe that's why I feel comfortable with you. Comfortable. Just what a beautiful. woman wants to be called. I guess what I want to say is this. I truly love you. Not in the sense of throwing you in the sack and thrashing your bones, although any man who hasn't had the thought cross his mind is crazier than I am.

No, I just mean I hold your friendship very close to my heart. I'll never be able to thank you enough for just being there. I just want you to know that you're one of the people I would walk to hell on hot rocks for if there's anything i can do for you or paul please don't be afraid to ask i will always cherish the times we've had just to sit and talk and i hope i haven't been a bother to you i love you dearly i'll be your friend and immoral supporter forever you're in you're out in one ear and out the other love Bruce. Immoral supporter. Jesus, Murphy. And by the way, note the use of the phrase in the sack, just like in the

sweater letter, right, that Judy supposedly wrote. So, yeah. So yikes. This is what she gets for showing basic politeness to a co-worker, which is really all she ever did. And this wasn't the last letter. Later on, he wrote another one. This one, Detective Ball would come to call the asset letter. Now this thing is nine pages long, so we can't read you the whole thing as much as we'd like to, and it is weird as hell. So here are just a few highlights, or low lights, whatever. It's now 3.40 a.m. and another night of no sleep. This was just the first line in a barrage of whiny, poor me stuff. The police were harassing him.

He barely had any friends left. Nobody understood him. He couldn't sleep. Blah, blah, blah. Bullshit. Later, he swore he'd never actually cheated on Judy. He knew he was a flirt, but that's all it was. And y'all, I swear to God, he started talking about his and Judy's sex life in a letter to Gail.

Now, the authors of the book didn't actually transcribe this whole letter, so we don't know exactly what he said. But, wow. Just the fact that he brought it up at all, just incredibly from Mars inappropriate. He did acknowledge, though, that he might have flirted a little too much with Gail herself. And he followed this up with a very optimistic description of his net worth now that he was swimming in life insurance cash. And then he said this. So if I ever decide to date again, maybe a couple years down the road, you can introduce me to a 30-something girlfriend of yours who likes to work her butt off on a farm with her own horses and my dogs with no overhead and a small income and a young daughter to raise together. Pre-requisites, 30 to 40, beautiful inside and out, loves animals, driven to compete.

Yeah, look up a picture of old Bruce sometime. Beautiful inside now. Get the hell out of here, man. Well, the letter ends, if in your travels, you find someone who fits the job description, give her my name. I'll let you know when I'm ready. Thanks. Thanks for that.

This dream woman he was describing, by the way, was a not even slightly veiled description of Gail herself. And it wasn't just Leanne and Gail. Another co-worker at the hospital, a woman named Beth, told Detective Ball a stomach-churning story about Bruce coming up to her in the hall one day. That's insane. Getting way up in her personal space,

slipping a handful of loose, probably sweaty, candy hearts into her pocket, like the kind with little messages on them, and whispering in her ear, read them. I know. Just take a minute to say, stop screaming or shuddering or whatever it is you're doing. I get it. Creepy. Beth's husband was so pissed. He threatened to, quote, rip Bruce's face off, which, you know, bless your heart, honey. The last thing we want in response to shitty male behavior is more

shitty male behavior. Okay? She don't need you going to jail. Settle down. Like, I get it, but just settle down, hoss. Imagine thinking putting loose chalky, as you said, sweaty candy, in someone's pocket and thinking that's romantic. Like, I feel like that's something a preschooler might do. It literally is, like, a loose handful of those nasty, friggin' conversation hearts. Like, not in a box. And he came up and put them in her pocket. What's the creepiest thing I've ever heard?

Whitney, he picked out those messages that are on every piece of candy specifically, that she's seen a million times. He had a specific message for her. So he put his friggin pocket lint candy in her, oh, it's just, it's horrifying. It's the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. This man is maybe the weirdest one we've covered. And we covered Diasin-Hosnikov, may I remind you. He is an odd duck.

This guy is a weird, okay? Yeah. I don't understand him at all. Like Dias and I get. He's like a mad scientist. He has a cartoon voice. Okay, okay, okay. This guy is just like, he's like, he learned how to flirt in second grade.

He's just stuck with it. Yeah, I think he's an alien. I'm just saying it. Guys, it gets weirder. Okay? That's all I'm going to say. For five months, Detective Ball had been trying to get Bruce to take a polygraph test. And for five months, Bruce had hemmed and honed and dodged the issue.

But finally, who knows why, he agreed to take the polygraph. He came in looking calm as can be. All the investigators who were there that day had the impression that in Bruce's mind, he was the smartest guy in the room. Oh boy, that's always deadly. Huberous, it'll kill you, folks. Yep. And surprising absolutely nobody,

although the test showed him as truthful at first, Bruce's chilled out demeanor soon started to crack like an egg in a washing machine. That happened right around the time the polygrapher brought up the sweater letter. Yeah, see, until that moment, Brucey had no idea that Gail Lambinen had been cooperating with the investigators, and it hit him like a tire iron right upside the head. He teared up, got all weepy, big wussy. For some reason, Gail was his tipping point, and he broke right then and there,

told the investigators everything. He said the first time he had Judy in his scope, he couldn't pull the trigger. He stood quietly in the woods, out of her sight, watching her explore with the dogs. She moved into his gunside again, and once again, he couldn't do it. Finally, he said, the fourth time, she walked into his shot, he set his sights, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. Ugh, she wanted to divorce, he told them. He said, she was a tyrant at work and at home, and she was going to ruin him financially. She'd take half of what little I have, he said.

God, what a whiny little wank stain. First of all, you brought your financial troubles on yourself, but even if you hadn't, it's like, oh yeah, that justifies killing the mother of your child all right. Let's just let you go home then. Can y'all please join me in an eye roll? Thank you. After the shooting, Bruce said he'd taken the gun apart and thrown it in the river. They were never able to recover it, by the way. It's like that sometimes with rivers, especially if the gun gets taken apart before they throw it in there. So anyway, there it was, a confession that was horribly chilling, yet somehow almost mundane at the same time.

by the way he delivered it. Such an unfair ending to a life that meant so much to so many. Detective Ball was over the moon about it. He had his confession. That is, until a couple of months later when Bruce decided to recant the whole thing, claiming it was coerced. And just like that, the case got dealt another potential death blow. Between this and not being able to locate the gun in the river, this put them pretty much back at square one. Dick Tree was disputing the confession, and there was no physical evidence, there was circumstantial stuff, but not enough to get a conviction. So Detective Ball did what he'd already done a couple times over. He started over.

And this time he turned his attention to a tantalizing little story that had been living rent-free in his head since he first heard it. The story about Judy's brush with death a year earlier, when that chimney block had fallen off the roof and glanced off her head. Especially since Bruce had told about 17 different stories about how it happened. Not a thing you do if you're just telling the truth. Now, this had happened, of course, after Bruce took out all those life insurance policies on Judy. Was this an earlier failed attempt on her life? According to her closest confidants, Judy might have thought so. She seemed afraid to stay in the marriage after that.

So Detective Ball and the other investigators decided to set up an experiment to recreate this accident. They set up an identical chimney block right at the edge of the roof, just like Bruce said he had. Now, according to Bruce, the block had fallen off accidentally, so the detective, did everything they could think of to do to see if they could make that block slip off the roof. They jumped up and down on the roof right next to it. They stacked one block kind of precariously on top of another one and jumped around some more, which I would pay to see. They tried all kinds of stuff. And what they found was that unless you pushed it, that block wasn't going anywhere.

It was just way too heavy to fall off by itself. You had to get behind it and push with some considerable degree of force. The thing was heavy as lead. and there was something else. Well, two-somethings, actually. First, apparently there was an eyewitness to the concrete block murder attempt. Her statement was short and succinct that she'd seen Bruce drop a brick on Judy's head. Well, actually what she said was, I saw Daddy drop a brick on mommy's head, because Bruce tried to kill his wife right in front of their two-year-old daughter. Oh, every time I think about it, my heart rate spikes so sharply that my smartwatch asks me if I'd like to take a minute to meditate. This absolute useless piece of gutter slime made his daughter watch her mom almost die for money. God, can we prep him for the TCC canon now? Preferably directly into a fucking brick wall.

Yeah, this dude is pure evil. And the second something was that shortly after this chimney block incident, a fire had broken out in the basement of the Moylanan's house, like in a wood pile. Judy was home alone when it happened. Bruce was on a hunting trip. The little girl was at her grandparents. And apparently Bruce had dumped some ashes from the wood stove that morning before he left on his trip and some embers had somehow gotten into the woodpile and ignited.

And Judy woke up alone in a house full of smoke. Fortunately for her, she was able to get out and call the fire department from a neighbor's house and they were able to get the fire under control before it destroyed the entire house, but it could have easily gone differently. She might have died that day. The really interesting thing about that was that Bruce never filed an insurance claim about the fire, something that was really out of character for a guy as money-hungry as he was. Why not?

I mean, he'd filed a claim on the price of Judy's glasses when she had her little concrete block accident. In fact, he had a long history of filing insurance claims for the smallest stuff. So was this because he didn't want any scrutiny into the cause of the fire? For a newbie prosecutor, Beth Pachesney, this was the final straw. This mofo had murdered his wife. She was sure of it, and she was confident she could make a jury just as sure. And finally, a year after the murder, it was habeas-grabis time. The trial started almost exactly two years after Judy's death.

and Brucey and his lawyer seemed supremely confident going in. Defense attorney Tom Castleman was a seasoned trial lawyer, while the prosecutor was green enough to grow. She was only 26 years old. Only a baby. She's probably one of the youngest prosecutors in the U.S. at the time, if not the youngest. She must have been 26. Like, how are you even through law school that young?

It's amazing. I do not know. The prosecution's argument, of course, was that Bruce was tired of being married to Judy. He had a thing for Gail Lampinen. he wanted to pursue, and he was having all kinds of financial trouble, trouble that his wife's $300,000 life insurance policy would come in handy to solve. He wanted to live the playboy life, and Judy was harsion on his good time.

So he killed her and tried to make it look like an accident, just like he'd done a year earlier when he dropped a concrete block on her head, allegedly. As you can imagine, the sweater letter hit the jury like a semi-truck and didn't do Bruce any favors whatsoever. Nobody bought for a second that Judy wrote that thing. And I doubt they needed the handwriting expert to tell them that. No woman is going to write her husband's work crush and tell her he's incredible in the sack. That's just not going to happen. Ain't going to happen. Also, you just can't look at that man and believe for one hot second that he is incredible in the say. It's just impossible. I'm just saying it. I'm sorry. She's in sitting on that for, I think, probably three weeks.

It's true, but she, I had to say, I just had to. I'm sorry, I can't help it. It's impossible. It's true. I got no argument. And the defense didn't have any plausible suggestions for who else might have written the letter. So that was a definite nail in Bruce's coffin. The defense also did something so astonishing that I screamed about it to Whitney over text for 10 straight minutes.

Yes, he did. This motherfucker attacked Gail Lampin's character. You know, Gail, the woman whose only crime was that she didn't want anything to do with Bruce and his wretched dick. The defense attorney, an adult man with functioning brain cells, allegedly, stood up there and said that Gail had betrayed Bruce's trust by sharing the letter. Oh, my. And by being one of the investigators' boss-babe spies. Yeah. Gail.

Gail. How dare you submit pertinent evidence during a murder investigation? Bros before hose. Hose in this case, meaning homicide detectives, obviously. Oh, and this was something else. Bruce sat there like a stuffed frog on a rock throughout the whole trial showing almost no visible emotion until Gail got up on the stand. And when Gail started testifying about what an annoying pest he was to her, that was what finally jerked some emotion out of this prick.

At that, he started crying. Which the jury took his evidence of his obsession with her, because of course they did, and it infuriated his lawyers so much that he yelled at him about it after court. And, you know, I can just hear people saying, well, why didn't Gail just let him down gently? Yeah. Just take a second, quick second, and Google,

A woman killed after rejecting man, and you can pause while you're scrolling through the results. Kind of a lot, isn't it? Like, a scary lot all over the world, everywhere, all the time. Yeah, I actually don't know one woman, I don't think. Not one single woman who hasn't had a scary experience after saying no to a man in a bar or whatever. I once told a guy at a club that I didn't want to dance because my friends and I were leaving, and he immediately called me a bitch and a whore. I did not know this man.

I said 10 words to him. None of them were rude. I just politely declined. His entitlement and his ego were not my responsibility. But he sure as hell thought it was. Yeah. My guess is Gail never came out and told Bruce no because she had to work with him every day. And rejecting men can be fucking scary.

But that doesn't mean she welcomed the attention. And it doesn't mean she led him on. She was just polite and friendly like she was with everybody else. She wasn't open to him at all, but he kept pushing. Look, we get it that it's not all men who do this. Of course it's not. You know, hashtag, not all men, but plenty of them do. You know, sometimes they just see rejection as a challenge or something.

They just keep pushing and pushing, and then some of them get angry and some of them get violent. And for us, it's like, well, what do you do? There's no right response. And anybody that says it's always as simple as a polite no is just dead wrong. Right. And we don't know what kind of man we're talking to. or how he's going to react. It's like Schrodinger's Encel every time.

Oh, my God. Schrodinger's Encel. Man, that is elite material. Well done. Thank you. So, anyway, the prosecution did a good job presenting the case. Ball described their retracted confession. They showed the tape of the concrete block experiment,

which blew the jury's minds because of how big and heavy those blocks were. And the defense, their argument was basically the investigators were mean. They got people to talk about him behind his back. Dude didn't even present any evidence or call any witnesses. He just assumed the jury would think the prosecutor didn't meet her burden of proof, but you know what happens, don't you, when you assume? You make an ass out of your client, and he gets convicted of first-degree murder. After six hours of deliberation, they dropped the hammer.

And Brucey was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He still insists, by the way, that Judy's death was an accident. Bullshit. We hope Judy's family has at least some degree of peace and closure from the fact that this waste of carbon won't pollute our streets ever again. And there's a little PS to this story. We know you love those. Our boy Bruce managed to pull off a prison escape. Now, we're going back in time a little here because this actually happened before the trial. We just kind of wanted to save it for a PS. So before his trial, Bruce was being held in the Antenoggan County Jail, where he ended up in a cell that was right across from a guard station, meaning A, everybody could see him and he could see them, and B, he could hear all the hot gossip from the guards. And the minute they moved him in there, he proceeded to creep everybody the fuck out. Now, this is saying something. When we're talking about prison guards, because my guess is those dudes have seen some shit. But Bruce gave every last one of them the Wiggins, like they could not wait till he was out of there.

He just kind of sat in his cell all day, silently, given his best impression of like the standard Stanley Kubrick's stare-eyed villain. and he just exuded this like measma of evil. According to the distal book, some of the guards described him as haunting the place. It seemed like he was plotting something. And guess what? He was, because on July 31, 1993,

the deputies were busy helping out at the county fair. Back at the station, the sheriff told the youngest deputy, Dale Rontala, that he was heading to the fair and he'd be back later. Rontala glanced at Bruce as the sheriff left and Bruce quickly looked away like he was trying to make it seem like he wasn't listening but like he obviously was. Now Bruce had been told that his chore for the day

was to clean his cell and about 20 minutes after the sheriff left he tapped on the glass and let Rontala know he was done and his trash was ready to be emptied. Rantala opened the door, reached for the trash bag and from behind the bag Bruce threw a bowl full of salt,

pepper and soap shavings into the deputy's eyes. and as Rantella was pawing at his eyes, Bruce made a run for it, tearing off his jail uniform as he hauled ass out of there. And poor old Rantella velm at his way to the radio and sent out the alert that Bruce Mourlin had escaped. You see, because Brucey boy was able to hear everything happening in the sheriff's office, he knew that they were understaffed that day. And he made the assumption that because Rontala was staying at the station and the sheriff

and everybody else was at the fair, there'd be nobody to chase him down if he incapacitated Rantala with his little homemade concoction of mace or whatever. Pepper spray, yeah. So, of course, he was wrong, and the sheriff hadn't actually gotten to the fair yet. He was running errands. He was, like, two minutes away, along with several other deputies who were there, like, within minutes. And they set up a search team, and when they found him, just 25 minutes had elapsed. He was tackled to the ground by a deputy as he was running through a field.

So the only freedom he experienced was a trip to the hospital. to check his injuries. And honestly, I feel like this little story is a perfect microcosm of this entire case, at least as far as Bruce and his truly stunning incompetence as concerns. So I guess we're going to leave it right there. 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 I want to send a special shout out today to the folks who so kindly helped motivate me on our Facebook page the past couple days. I was feeling kind of unmotivated, kind of blah.

I get that way sometimes around the holidays, and I posted about it, and y'all delivered like dominoes, you know, sent me pictures of your pets, reminded me how much you look forward to the show every week. It was a huge help. It really was. So thank you. It genuinely helped me. Like, I might not have gotten this episode done if y'all hadn't done that.

She doesn't listen to me anymore. She's numb to my threats. It's true. So I appreciate that. Thank you. We also, as always, want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Saurin, Mila, Molly, Kate, Emily, Carol, and Haley. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you are missing out.

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