True Crime Campfire - In Plain Sight: The Abduction and Murder of Lori Kirkley

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, the movie “Jaws” scared me silly. Now part of that, obviously, is that it’s about a giant shark eating people, but the shark itself isn’t actually in the movie all that much. What makes it unsettling is the setting, a bright, sunny, all-American town, with a predator lurking unseen just below the surface. Our story this week might take place in the land-locked cornfields of Indiana but it still has a similar theme, a sunny suburban life haunted by an unseen monster. Join us for a chilling story of abduction, misdirection, and murder. Sources:Court papers: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/in-supreme-court/1287228.htmlChicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-10-16-0510160225-story.htmlAssociated Press: https://apnews.com/article/852e6f5069180448f7a319cf87e110aaInvestigation Discovery's "Murder in the Heartland," episode "Serial Killer in the Making"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. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, the movie Jaws scared me silly. Now, part of that, obviously, is that it's about a... a giant shark eating people, but the shark itself isn't actually in the movie all that much. What makes it unsettling is the setting, a bright, sunny, all-American town with a predator lurking

unseen just below the surface. Our story this week might take place in the landlocked cornfields of Indiana, but it still has a similar theme, a sunny suburban life haunted by an unseen monster. This is In Plain Sight, the murder of Lori Kirkley. So, campers, for this one, we're in Valparaiso, Indiana. July 21, 1999. It was a warm summer evening that ended in a storm blowing in from the west. Typical stuff for a Midwest summer. And it was just as the sky was starting to look kind of ominous that Bob Kirkley pulled into his driveway,

home from a long day at his engineering job. Bob worked in South Bend, about an hour away, so every day he had to make that long commute, and he was really starting to get over it. But the good news was he'd just been promoted, so he and his wife, Lori, were in the process of trying to sell their house in Valparaiso so they could move closer to his work. They'd already started talking to a realtor. As Bob turned into his driveway, though, he had an immediate sinking feeling that something was wrong. The garage door was wide open, and Lori's green Ford Explorer SUV wasn't there. It was right around sunset now, and Lori was the type to let him know anytime she was going

somewhere after dark. And she'd never leave the garage door open like this. Weird. And worrying. Bob parked in the driveway and went into the house through the garage. A few moments later, his and Lori's neighbors saw a freaked out-looking Bob hurrying over to their front porch where they were hanging out watching the storm roll in. Have you seen Lori?

He wanted to know. The neighbors, big fans of both the... Bob and Lori hadn't seen her. And the look on his face had them immediately concerned. So with the whole group getting increasingly scared and agitated, Bob called 911. It appears as though we've been broken into here. My wife is not here. I guess I need a sheriff here right away.

Okay, the dispatcher said, you've had a burglary? I believe so. I'm not sure. There's some evidence of some blood here, and there's some piece of paper with a note on it, and my wife's not here. I came home and the garage door was open, and something is. wrong. You can hear like barely contained panic in Bob's voice on that 911 call,

and the dispatcher took it seriously from the start. And as soon as the responding officers went into the house, they knew he was right to be scared. In the kitchen, taped to the wall, they found a torn strip of yellow poster board paper, and on it, scrawled in black Sharpie,

44 magnum pointed at head down on your stomach. Shit. The house had been ransacked, or more accurately, it seemed like somebody had tried to make it look that way. A few valuables had been taken, but plenty more hadn't. In Bob and Lori's bedroom, her jewelry box had been open, but Bob couldn't tell if anything had been taken out of it. If you're robbing the place and you find the jewelry box, why wouldn't you just take everything in there

and sort it out later? Also in the bedroom, Lori's underwear had been strewn all over the floor. In the kitchen, there were small spatters of blood on the white tile countertop, and in the sink, a butter knife with blood on the blade. Bob Kirkley had also found an envelope on the floor by the front door with a typed and printed letter, and it was a weird one. Larry, they are showing house at 3 p.m. Hopefully they will make it a quickie. You need to get in and out quickly. The husband works late, but I'm not sure what time the wife will be home, so hurry. Get at least the computer, stereo, VCR, telescope, the bikes, jewelry, and any money

laying around. The wife is cute. Check for lingerie. Burn this letter when you are done. Do not talk over the phone about this to me, only in person. Sorry about the skips after the K's, but I had to use an old computer, not mine. Good luck, Norm Jacobs. The bit about skipping after the K's was because there was a space after every letter K, except right at the end after good luck. As if this wasn't weird enough, when they went into Bob's study, they found his telescope missing, and pasted to the wall were dozens of pornographic pictures of women cut out of magazines. What the hell? So all of this was way, way out there and deeply concerning for anybody who cared about Lori Kirkley.

We've got evidence of a threat to shoot somebody in the head. We've got a struggle with a butter knife that ended up bloody. That was enough to tell investigators that Lori Kirkley had probably been abducted. This obviously wasn't a burglary, and the printed letter was an obvious attempt at misdirection. Yeah, I'm sorry, but if you think that what happened here actually involved anybody called Larry or Norm Jacobs, we are going to need you to turn in your true crime campfire badge and your Nerf gun. Yeah. You're a loose cannon. We can't use you anymore.

Exactly. The letter's just ridiculous. Who prints out instructions for a burglary with their names on it? And then leaves it at the scene? And like, what kind of burglar needs to be told to take like six very obvious things? And, you know, there are criminals that write themselves notes all the time. We're just saying, like, this is just too much. They, they, they, they, they, they, they did too much.

The K thing is interesting because it underscores what you almost always see when a criminal tries to misdirect an investigation like this, namely, an epic dumbass, thinking they're like, Professor Moriarty. Ha, ha. But you see, if the police ever check my computer, it won't skip after the K's and I'll be in the clear. Because, as we all know, major crimes detectives are gullible toddlers

who will pull your finger anytime you ask them to. And he fucked it up anyway, in two ways. Not only is there no skip after the last K in the node, there was one after a C too. And he said, I have to use a computer, not mine. Like, yeah. Sloppy, yeah. So sloppy. So sloppy.

Now, it might have been a blatant red herring, but the note was still concerning. Bob did have a nice telescope, and he did work late. The Kirkley's did own expensive bikes. Whoever had taken Lori was familiar with her and Bob's routine in some of the contents of their home. That suggested somebody who either knew them pretty well or had been watching them pretty closely. Creepy. And then there was the dirty pictures pinned on the wall of the study. Who does that?

Not a burglar, most likely, and the overtly sexual nature of these pictures, plus the kind of disordered thinking that would lead to someone pinning them up there, had investigators very worried for Lori. Whoever had taken this woman, their mind was a loosely wrapped package. She was in a lot of danger. The detectives quickly realized that this wasn't the first time the cops had been in the Kirkley's house. They'd actually had a break-in back in February, and another sort of burglary.

A few random things have been taken, but similar to what was happening now, the intruder's focus seemed to be on going through Lori's underwear drawer and leaving a creepy sexual calling card. That time, it was a collage of pornographic Polaroids taped to the wall. So it seemed pretty clear that this was the same intruder. And the fact that he'd come back to the same house months later suggested a deep obsession, most likely with Lori. Yeah, the thing that scares me the most about that is that they were polaroids, which means he probably took those. Yep. Yep. It's probably not going to surprise you that despite all the signs of abduction, the first thing the investigators did was take a hard look at Bob Kirkley. When a wife is hurt or goes missing, her spouse is going to be the first suspect for good reason.

Over half of female murder victims in the U.S. are killed by an intimate partner. Yeah. Let that horrifying little factoid wash over you and just go ahead and delete your bumble profile. No kidding. But investigators couldn't find a damn thing linking Bob to Lori's disappearance. And everything they heard told them the Kirkley's had a happy, loving marriage and that they were looking forward to their move to South Bend. Lori's job didn't immediately suggest any kidnapping or murder motives either. She was a nurse working in the cardiac rehab department at the local hospital. It was a small department with six nurses,

secretary, and an exercise physiologist. Lori was considered an excellent nurse, caring and meticulous, and she made friends easily, especially with her co-worker Nancy Shiplov. According to Nancy, Lori loved her work. She'd been having some minor frustrations lately, like things she was working on would disappear so often that she started to think somebody was messing with her. And sometimes she'd get frustrated with David, the exercise physiologist, because he'd randomly go AWOL and not be around to help when the nurses needed him.

but it was just minor workplace drama, you know, a collie who was bad at his job, nothing that sounded dangerous. The investigators canvassed the Kirkley's neighborhood, of course, and they didn't have to go far to get some good info. On the day Lori went missing, the neighbor's 12-year-old daughter Bethany had seen her come home and pull into the garage around 5.30.

Short while later, she'd seen her pull out again and drive away. Asked if she'd noticed anything weird lately, Bethany said, yeah, actually, she had. She said that the day before, she and her friend had been in the front yard when a guy, soaking wet from a rainstorm that had just passed by, bicycled past the house. For about an hour, the guy rode his bike in a slow loop all around the neighborhood again and again, and he didn't smile or wave like most people did. Didn't seem to notice the girls at all. He wasn't anybody they knew from the neighborhood,

and something about him just struck Bethany as off. He kind of gave her the Wiggins, so much so that she remembered him immediately when the detective asked her if she'd seen anything strange lately. All right, so a guy on a bike. Interestingly enough, Lori's main hobby was cycling. She was president of a bike club called the Crank Club, which is just an awesome name. And because of what the little girl had seen the day before Lori's disappearance, investigators figured they'd take a quick look at the bike club, but they thought, how much drama could there be in a small town cycling club?

I mean, it's a bunch of people riding through the cornfields of Indiana, right? You're wrong. Apparently, the Crank Club was as packed. full of drama as a Bravo reality show. Anyone that's ever lived in a small town could have told you that one. I once knew of a knitting club that was filled with women that had been deadly enemies for decades. Absolutely. I think we've all known those ladies. And the detectives found that out when they asked if there were any male club members that Lori might have had problems with.

Now, we're getting some of this info from the investigation discovery show Murder in the Heartland, and I suspect they might have changed one or two of the names, but we couldn't find the real one. for this guy, so we're just going to stick with the one they used. So there was this dude in the club by the name of Samuel. And Samuel was in the middle of an unpleasant divorce, and his wife and her new boyfriend were also in the crank club, which was apparently turning Samuel's head into a bubbling little cauldron of rage. And it didn't help matters that Samuel felt rightly or wrongly, who knows, that the other people in the club were taken his wife's side in the divorce. All of which had a very easy solution.

Stop going to the damn crank club, but I'll bet you a month's Cheeto and chocolate money that our boy Samuel just refused to let his wife win. Why should he have to stop going to the club, even though going there reduced him to a quivering blob of sad fury every time? You know, might achieve nothing at all except inflicting pain on himself, but by God he wasn't going to give up his bike club. Now, this little six-wheeled love triangle culminated in Samuel in his car,

spotting his wife's boyfriend out on his bike one day, and apparently trying to run him off the road. Sounds to me like something you'd want to involve, you know, the police in, but it seems like it didn't go any further than an official complaint with the Crank Club, filed by Lori as president. Huh. Had Samuel redirected some of his anger toward Lori? So the detectives brought him in for an interview and asked him.

Samuel came clean about his run-in with his ex's boyfriend, but he insisted he bore Lori no ill will at all. And it turned out he had a rock-solid alibi for the time frame when Lori was abducted, so he was free to go. But on his way out the door, he let investigators know they might want to take a look at another guy from the crank club, William Johnson. And this wasn't the first time they'd heard this name. Some of the women in the club had mentioned him too. A purve, they said, like to say gross stuff to the women. Like one time he asked a female member whether she wanted to masturbate with him.

Ew, dude, that is not why it's called the crank. Club. Okay. And another time, he asked another woman how her crotch felt after a long ride. Ew, no. No. No. So, naturally, the crank club kicked this creep's little spandex ass to the curb. And Lori, as president, took the lead. Given the sexual material left behind in the Kirkley's house, a creepy deviant with a grudge was going to jump straight to the front of the person of interest line. And the antennae really started twitching when one of Purvey guy's Williams' neighbors, contacted police and told them that he'd asked her to give him a fake alibi for the night Lori went missing.

Bingo. Yep. When the police interviewed William Johnson, about 48 hours had passed since Lori's abduction. And as you probably know, when somebody has taken, the odds of getting them back alive get lower and lower with every hour that goes by. The police needed answers, and they needed them fast. And when they first spoke to William Johnson, he didn't. didn't do much to ease their suspicions. He looked nervous and scared enough to poop his pants,

and he had no alibi for the night Lori disappeared. But he claimed to have not seen Lori in over a year, and despite his creepy behavior, there was nothing concrete to prove that he'd ever been in the Kirkley's house. So while investigators started looking out for anything tying Johnson to the abduction, he was free to go about his business. And then, on July 24th, three days after Lori's disappearance, police were called out to a cornfield where someone had spotted the burned out remains of a Ford SUV. As it happened, one of the Porter

County homicide detectives working on Lori's case was also an arson investigator and he saw right away that an accelerant had been used to start the fire. The plates had been removed, but the VIN number confirmed that this was the wreckage of Lori's green Ford Explorer. Investigators started combing the cornfield for a

body or signs of a grave, but found nothing. Inside the burned-out car, they found spent shell casings from a handgun, which investigators weren't sure how to interpret. They might mean the obvious that Lori had been shot in her own car. But her abductor had already made one clumsy attempt to mislead investigators, and this could be another one. And there was more of that coming. Shortly after Lori's car was discovered, a 12-year-old boy was taking the garbage out for his mom when he noticed a Ziploc bag with a shoe in it. He figured it was just somebody's trash that hadn't quite made it to the dumpster. He lived in an apartment

complex, so there was plenty of that. And the kid was just about to toss it into the dumpster when he noticed an envelope through the clear plastic. Printed on the envelope in big all-caps letters was, please give this letter to Mr. Kirkley. His wife is missing. Lorry's disappearance was the big story in Valparaiso right then. It was all over the news. Everybody knew about it. The poor kid was so freaked out, he just dropped the bag and stared at it for a while. Then he ran back home and showed it to his mom who called the police. Along with the envelope, inside the bag was a cycling shoe and a keychain with the keys removed, both of which Bob would identify as belonging to Lori. So this wasn't a hoax. This had to

have come from the kidnapper, and the note to Mr. Kirkley was spooky as shit. Dear Mr. Kirkley, I'm very sorry about your wife. I didn't even know her name. She came home in the process of the robbery. She would not cooperate, even with a 44 magnum pointed at her head. When I tackled and attempted to cover her mouth, she bit the tip of my finger off. I never intended to hurt her. I took her with, and when we arrived at our destination, I attempted to shove a sedative down her throat, halcyon and valium, so I could take her home later when she was sleeping. The pills cause memory loss as I take them. I do believe she saw my face as she pulled off my face mask and squeezed my groin.

I attempted to give her the pills six times, and she would not take them, even when I would bribe her by squeezing her crotch. I had no plans to kill her, but unfortunately I had to. Her ranger has already been repossessed, and you will never find the body because we are both in another state.

She did not suffer one bit. Tell the cops, the case is closed. So that's the stuff of nightmares, right? Jesus Jones. And how much of it to believe was anybody's guess. The level of detail and specificity was unusual and creepily convincing, but then the bit about Lori's car being repossessed was a flat-out lie. Had he, in fact, killed her?

There was no way to know. There were no fingerprints on the bag or anything in it, and no one in the apartment complex had seen who put it there. This was so frustrating to investigators. In the burned car and this note, they'd scored two huge pieces of evidence that so far brought them no closer to finding Lori Kirkley. All they really knew was that her abductor was trying to control the investigation, which quite often leads to a criminal fucking up and getting themselves arrested.

But just sitting around and waiting for the creep to send another weird note was not a viable option. So increasingly desperate to shake loose a lead, police re-interviewed everybody close to Lori. They asked Bob Kirkley to take a polygraph test, which he immediately agreed to do. And he flunked it. Kind of. Sort of. Specifically, the polygraph technician saw that Bob was trying to control his breathing, which they interpreted as a sign of deception.

But what we have here is a prime example of just exactly why polygraph evidence isn't admissible most of the time in court. Bob was barely any less distraught a few days after Lori's abduction than he'd been right after the fact. He'd barely slept, and a polygraph test in a police station is a pretty high-stress event, even if you know you're innocent. Fortunately for Bob, the Porter County Sheriff's Department showed some common sense in this case. and decided that if Bob was trying to control his breathing, it was probably because he was trying to fight off a panic attack. Poor dude. I mean, I can't even imagine.

If this was my husband missing, I'd be a friggin hot mess. I'd be a puddle on the floor. I can't even imagine how I would hold up, so I get this. It really does show you how fallible those polygraph tests are. So for a little while, the investigation was just kind of swinging in the breeze. They were keeping an eye on Crank Club creep William Johnson, but that hadn't given them anything new so far. and while I think they'd have gotten to the right place soon enough anyway,

it turned out they didn't have to. Because on July 27th, six days after Lori's abduction, police got a call from a woman. They had publicized the items taken in both burglaries from the Kirkley's house, and the woman on the phone said she thought she knew who had some of the things taken in the first burglary back in February. When she came down to the station, the lead detective recognized her right away. She was his kid's swim coach, a lady by the name of Kelly Malinski.

Kelly told detectives that the stolen items, a TV, a TV, a VCELD detectives that the stolen items, a TV, a VCR, and a camera were in her house, brought there by her husband David. And David Malinsky was the exercise physiologist in the cardiac rehab unit where Lori Kirkley worked. He'd been side by side with her every day. The two of them friendly, but not really close. I mean, Lori was friendly with everybody. That's the kind of person she was. As far as Lori was concerned, David Malinski was a little bit odd and not great at his job, but that was it. He certainly wasn't anybody. she was scared of. But it was looking like she should have been. What possible reason could there be

for David Milinski to have the Kirkley's missing things other than that he'd stolen them? And that first burglary, remember, was very similar to the intrusion on the night Lori was abducted. A haphazard robbery, Lori's underwear drawer gone through and dirty pictures pinned to the walls. The person who robbed the house the first time was the person who kidnapped Lori. So they dropped the old habeas grab us on David Milinski right away. David was a looming, greasy-looking dude with shark eyes and slightly tinted Jeffrey Dahmer glasses. Straight out of central casting for serial killer. In hindsight, I can't imagine anybody was super surprised it was him. He 100% looks like the type. He looks like evil beaker. He looks like evil beaker. He looks like dark-sided beaker.

In dark-sided beaker. Like, seriously, it's uncanny. He's creepy as hell. Yeah, we'll show you his picture, obviously. He is sleep paralysis demon. A search warrant executed on Malinsky's home confirmed he had items from the first robbery, but didn't turn up anything relating to Lori's abduction. That didn't last, though. See, the police knew they were missing something. In his interview

with detectives, which we'll get to in a minute, Malinski told them about a secret room he had. He called it, I swear to God, I'm not lying to. you his porn room. Plus, they had a recording of a jailhouse phone call between Malinsky and his brother, where his brother mentions the porn room, too. Oh, my God. I know.

Why did his brother know about the secret porn room? Yeah, don't ask questions you do not want the answer to. Oh, God. You're right. I withdraw the question. And apparently, it wasn't much of a secret because Malinski told one of his cellies. about it too. Dude. Oh, my God. Come on. The first rule of secret

porn room club is that you don't talk about your secret porn room. Oh my God, what is happening? This was the Crank Club right here. Not the bike people. Not the bikers. Jesus. So they knew about this alleged wink bank repository, but it's a veritable

library of Alexandria of smut. But Fork talks. We're middle schoolers. We're middle schoolers. I just, I feel like if you have to designate a room to be your porn room, you have a problem. It's so weird. You know who else had a porn room?

The guy that allegedly killed, oh, what's her name? Linda Henning, is a different person. Patty, the woman in Fort Collins, where the kid got falsely accused, the Tim master's case. He had a porn one, too. The doctor. Peggy Hetrick. Yeah, Peggy Hetrick. God, I suck at names. We would be nowhere without Whitney.

So, anyway, they couldn't find Fort Cox because they didn't see any room during the first search of Malinsky's house. So at first they were thinking maybe he just like made it up for some weird reason, like a weird brag. But then a detective happened to be jogging

the Malinsky's house one evening when he noticed a strange little part of the roof that kind of jutted forward. Nothing special in and of itself, but the police had searched the attic space and where that protruding space should be, there had just been flat drywall. So they checked the attic again, and sure enough, that flat piece of drywall was a dummy with a hidden door, and beyond it was the porn room. It was a tiny space, but well put together with floorboards and carpet across the attic beams, drywall on the walls, a desk with a computer, a TV, and a VCR, even air conditioning. The walls were painted a hideous day glow pink, why I don't know and don't want to know, and covered with pictures of women torn out of porno mags. Remember, in both break-ins to

the Kirkley House, the intruder had stuck dirty pictures to the walls. And before we get into David Malinsky's police interview, I just want to express. to you how this fucking weirdo talks, okay? It's like this slow, deep, curt, kind of borderline rude voice with just an absolutely flat affect. Like, if you were casting a show and had a serial killer talk this way, people would think it was too on the nose. They'd be like, dude, like dial it back a click, it's too much. Like, surely no murderer would really talk like that. Oh yeah, this one did. Like he said, KT, right out of central casting. He really is. So, Melinsky admitted to the first break-in, but he said it was for a very specific purpose.

He and Lori were having an affair, he said, and the first break-in was his way of trying to break up Bob and Lori's marriage. I guess the idea was that Bob would see like the blurry polaroids of an anonymous naked woman and think, my God, that must be Lori. She's cheating on me. Don't try and make it make sense. It doesn't. This dude's brain does not work like your brain. I hope. According to David, the Polaroid scheme was Lori's idea. Horshit, of course, we'll get into why the whole affair was obviously bogus in a second, but just the idea that a smart, educated nurse with good people skills would think that the way to break up her own marriage was to have some scary weirdo break into their house, steal some stuff,

and leave homemade porn stuck to the walls without any explanation. It's just beyond absurd. But like I said, David Malinsky's brain does not work like your brain. made sense to him, and he couldn't see why it wouldn't make sense to everybody. According to David, he and Lori had been having an affair for about six months. She was unhappy in her marriage, he said. To David, it was mainly a physical thing, a sexual convenience, as he put it. She was just his sexual 7-Eleven.

Champ that he was, David claimed he still loved his wife. Now, look, the heart wants what it wants on all that. I'm not saying it's impossible that a cute, perky, churchy, neat and tidy nurse like Lori could fall for a scowling, porn-obsessed black horse. whole of charisma like David Malinsky, all the while keeping up an Oscar-worthy facade of a happily married wife to her friends and neighbors. It's probably happened somewhere. And maybe they make it work. And if so, good for them, I guess. You know, she goes off to church every Sunday. He stays home and wanks off to furry porn. It can happen. But it's not likely. Let's just

be honest. David's story was that he and Lori also planned the second burglary together and staged her abduction. Gosh, the dumbest story I've ever heard in my life. And we've heard some dumb ones on the show, but this is just beyond the pale. They were going to run away together, but David got cold feet at the last minute, you know, at the very last minute after they'd already staged the break-in and slashed Lori a few times with a butter knife and yet again stuck some porn to the walls because reasons. See, he just loved his wife too darn much. Couldn't leave her.

So he and Lori argued and then Lori just up and left, drove out on her own and that was the last he saw or heard from her. He told the police, she said she was going to head out, just take off. But David, despite evidently obsessing about Lori for months, was apparently unaware that she was both asthmatic and had thyroid problems, two conditions that she took regular medication for. She hadn't taken either medication with her on the night she disappeared, and she hadn't refilled either prescriptions since. She was known to be careful with her health,

and skipping town without her meds was so far out of character as to be essentially impossible. David Malinsky was, of course, lying. During this interview, detectives noticed a band-aid on Malinski's right middle finger. Remember that, please give this letter to Mr. Kirkley note that the kid found by the dumpster? The author of that letter wrote that Laurie bit the tip of his finger off when he tried to cover her mouth. Malinski still had the end of the finger, but he had a pretty gnarly injury on it that sure as hell did look like a bite mark. He said he'd hurt himself helping his brother move some cabinets, but his brother said that never had. happened, and a forensic dentist soon determined the injury was most likely a human bite.

David Malinsky was initially arrested for the two burglaries, but prosecutors knew he could bond out on those charges, so they went ahead and charged him with murder, even though they felt like it might be tough to make a case without a body. But Malinski, helpfully, went ahead and made their case easier, run in his mouth to two fellow inmates about the location of some Polaroids that, if the police found them, he'd be dead. You know, good job. Yeah. This happens a lot.

People in jail for the first time just start spilling all the details of their crime to try and impress their fellow inmates. Yep. Dude. Most of those guys are in there because they stole a car, got caught with drugs. They're not going to be impressed by your creepy porno polaroids. They're going to be fucking weirded out. Absolutely. Sure enough, both inmates went straight to the police, and in short order, the investigators went and scooped up the Polaroids from where Milinski had left them.

under a tree a couple miles from his house which is like a great hiding place just burn them like what the fuck I know it's so weird he's so bad at this well dudes like this just can't do it's the same reason why he kept all the stolen items it was a trophy yeah he had an attachment to it he's a fucking right and thank God because this was key I mean you know and getting him gone good job good job David's the only good thing you've ever done

These photos were awful. They didn't show her face, but it was Lori Kirkley, naked and bound on David Malinsky's bed. In some of the shots, she was being sexually molested. A forensic pathologist who examined all the photographs determined that Lori was very likely dead in some of them and quite possibly all of them. Oh, bless her heart. Yeah, I think they can tell that sometimes even just by looking at pictures, like probably because of the positioning of the body, but also maybe the levidity, like the way the blood can settle in the body after death. Because I think that happens pretty fast. So, yeah, I can see how they could tell it from the pictures.

Oh, it's horrible. So the prosecution might not have a body, but now they had the next best thing. The exact circumstances of her death and what she suffered beforehand would remain unclear. But I suspect that the note Malinsky left by the dumpster was pretty close to the truth. Because his fantasy was so important to him, he had anticipated being able to control and drug Lori. But she fought back, and he killed her. He still wanted the Polarides, though, so he'd taken her body into his bedroom and played with it.

Oh, sick piece of shit. This is already enough of a horror story, but it gets worse. When CSIs discovered David Malinsky's burglary plans from the computer in the porn room, they found that he'd stolen and copied Laurie's garage door opener and house key from work. Then, he'd put them back without her noticing they were ever gone. He'd learned how to override Lori and Bob's alarm system, and he had his alibis already planned if he were ever questioned by police. He'd spent a long time watching the Kirkley's and learning their habits. He might have only the slightest idea how most people actually work and behave, but he was a meticulous planner, and he liked to watch.

At Malinsky's trial, Lori's 12-year-old neighbor Bethany testified that David Malinsky was the man she'd seen cycling around and around the neighborhood the day before Lori's abduction. He lived nowhere nearby. The prosecution's theory was that on the day of the abduction Melinsky put his bicycle in his pickup truck and parked at a gas station close to Lori's house. He biked over there and let himself in with the copied garage door opener and keys. When Lori came home, he overpowered her and forced her back into her SUV, probably at gunpoint, and put his bike in the back. Then, hiding low in the back seat, he forced Lori to drive them back to his house. She most likely died soon after, killed by Malinsky once it became clear he couldn't control her. Melinsky's defense stuck to his story that he and Lori had been having an affair and had planned

to run away together. It was weak sauce, but it's not like they had much else to work with when their client was guilty as shit. They were screwed. But this line of defense did allow the prosecution to rebut Malinski's claims that Lori was unhappy in her marriage, unhappy in her work, and unhappy where she lived. You're not generally allowed to use character evidence in Indiana courts, but in the rebuttal of these claims, the jury heard how much Lori was loved by her friends and family, how supporter she was of everybody in her life, how much she loved and cared for her husband, how she loved playing with her dog, and how excited she was to find a nest of bunnies in her yard, and they heard what avoid her passing had left in the lives of everybody who knew her.

She was a gentle, compassionate person with a good life, and there was no way in hell she'd have ever run off with a creepy loser like David Molensky. In February of 2000, a jury took all of two hours to find Crepo Supreme David Molinsky guilty of murder, criminal confinement, deviate conduct, arson, auto theft, and two counts of burglary. A month later, he was sentenced to a total of 155 years in prison, with the sentences for each charge running consecutively. Kaboom.

You love to see those consecutive sentences for creeps like this. The criminal case might have been closed, but the people would be. people who loved Lori were still a long way from having any kind of closure, and the fact that her body hadn't been found played a big part in that. And then, in September 2005, six years after Lori's murder, David Malinsky made it known that he was finally ready to talk. He'd apparently found religion behind bars, and he's the only one who knows how sincere he is on that. I mean, it's sensible to be skeptical about jailhouse conversions, but Malinski's never getting out no matter what, so it's not like he has anything to gain. Maybe he just wanted some attention,

but who knows. Whatever his motives might be, he finally confessed to Lori's murder and offered to show investigators to her body. He had buried her in the woods on his family's 17-acre farm, a property detectives had wanted to search while the case was active

but had lacked probable cause to get a warrant. Lori's body was exhumed. In her grave, was a newspaper dated two days after she'd disappeared. Her abduction had been front-page news and I guess the paper had been some kind of weird memorial. to her killer's work.

I think that's incredibly creepy that he would put the paper in there. Or, you know, who knows why he did that, but it, you know, it's incredibly creepy to me. I guess at the end of the day, it's kind of a fool's game trying to figure out how David Milinski

thinks. Totally. Yeah. An autopsy showed that Laurie had been killed by manual strangulation. He hadn't used the gun after all, only to threaten, not to kill. For the murder itself,

he chose a much more up-close and personal method, and we can draw our own conclusions from that. I think it tells us a lot of what we need to know about Melinsky. After her body was released, her family gave her a proper burial at Fulton Baptist Temple and released balloons into the air. Her aunt, Connie Jones, told Colleen Mastony of the Chicago Tribune, we know where her body is, and we know where her soul is. I know it's late, but it's okay. It's going to be okay. Later, profilers would tell the Porter County Sheriff's Department that based on what he'd done and how he'd planned it, there was every chance David Molinsky would have gone on to become a serial killer if he hadn't been caught. I think they're dead right about that. That kind of

specific, sexualized, necrophile violence where the victim is not only the target of a lot of anger, but also essentially just a prop. And it doesn't really matter if they're alive or dead is something you see so often with serials. And the stalking and planning that came before the abduction seems very clear to me that Malinsky got a kick out of every part of this horrible crime. And yeah, he'd want that rush again and again, and again. Not that he would have been very successful at it, mind you, because he's way too fond of his little notes and games. I mean, but there's definitely a BTK vibe about him. You know, he just maybe wasn't quite as clever about it. I think it's highly, highly likely he would have killed at least one more time before being caught. And that is

obviously one time too many. 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, let your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Jen Gell Fling, Kate, Lauren, Carrie, Lucia, Stacey, Katie, and Michelle. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more.

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