True Crime Campfire - Inspire, Achieve, Repeat: A Grab Bag of Killer Motivational Speakers

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Motivational speakers started really gaining popularity in the 70s and 80s, the golden age of “self-help.” And in recent years, they’ve been even more in-demand, especially in the business world. You can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting some self-proclaimed entrepreneurial guru who claims to have the formula for success and would be happy to share it with you, if you sign up for their seminar for the low-low price of thousands of dollars. Or buy their TikTok course. But you don’t have to get certified or trained to be a motivational speaker, and their industry is almost totally unregulated—meaning, anybody with a megawatt smile and a catchphrase can do it. And according to a Harvard study, most of these guys focus more on entertaining you than teaching you the way to win. It all makes you wonder—are the ones who claim to have all the answers really so enlightened? Well, today we’re gonna tell you about two who most definitely weren’t.Join Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets go on sale February 7: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRESources:True Crime with Aphrodite Jones, S3E4, “Chosen to Kill” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/nyregion/25speaker.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/nyregion/man-seeks-plea-deal-at-retrial-in-assisted-suicide-of-long-island-counselor.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/04/nyregion/new-trial-for-man-who-helped-motivational-speaker-kill-himself.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/killer-of-l-i-motivational-speaker-is-sentenced/?searchResultPosition=6CNBC's American Greed, Episode "Making a Killing"Court papers: https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914e231add7b049348ef740/amphttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/national/2009/08/02/several-questions-remain-in-investors-disappearance/2a3002f5-3c83-4c8d-8e1a-c0f115273394/https://patch.com/california/sanclemente/shawkey-admits-his-stories-sound-unbelievableFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Motivational speakers started really gaining popularity in the 70s and 80s, the golden age of self-help. And in recent years, they've been even more in demand, especially in the business world. You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting some self-proclaimed entrepreneurial guru who claims to have the formula for success and would be happy to share it with you

if you sign up for their seminar for the low, low price of thousands of dollars. Or if you buy their TikTok course. But you don't have to get certified or trained to be a motivational speaker, and their industry is almost totally unregulated, meaning anybody with a megawatt smile and a catchphrase can do it. And according to a Harvard study, most of these guys focus more on entertaining you than teaching you the way to win. It all makes you wonder, are the ones who claim to have all the answers really so enlightened?

Well, today we're going to tell you about two who most definitely weren't. This is Inspire, Achieve, Repeat, a grab bag of killer motivational speakers. one. Hired Hand, the killing of Jeffrey Locker. So, campers, for this one, we're in New York, New York, July 15th, 2009. Lois Locker was at home when she got a call from her husband Jeffrey at about 10.15 p.m. He wanted to let her know that he'd gotten a flat tire just before getting on the Triborough Bridge, which connects Manhattan to Long Island. So he was going to be late getting home, but Lois shouldn't worry. There was someone there who was helping him, and he'd be home soon. Jeffrey wasn't home soon

When he hadn't shown up by the early hours of the morning Lois called the police to report him missing but he wasn't missing for long Early in the day a police officer spotted a man sitting still in a parked car on a street close to the Wagner housing projects in East Harlem. A closer look showed this was far more serious than someone's

sleeping one off in his car. The man, Jeffrey Locker, was dead and looked to have been killed with some serious brutality. His hands were bound behind his back, and there was an angry red line around his neck where it looked like someone had tried to garot him. In the front of his shirt was soaked in blood and cut multiple times. Jeffrey had been stabbed again and again.

What the hell happened here? East Harlem is a tough part of town, with one of the highest murder rates of any New York neighborhood, but for someone to be bound and possibly tortured in his own car before being stabbed to death, that was a startling and horrific death. Jeffrey Locker lived 20 miles away in another world, the green suburban sprawl of Windmere on Long Island. His wallet was still with his body, although empty of cash,

so officers were able to match him with a new missing persons report pretty much immediately. A pair of officers went to deliver the sad news of Jeffrey's death. to Lois and their three kids. Well, theoretically sad news anyway. Neither Lois nor the kids seemed particularly shaken up to learn that their husband and father had been butchered in the city. They didn't seem surprised either. No big emotional scenes, not much emotion at all. It was like the detectives had stumbled onto a family of Vulcans taking a Long Island vacation. After hearing about her father's death, the Locker's 13-year-old daughter said, she was going upstairs to go back to sleep.

It was one of the weirdest, most uncomfortable things the detectives had experienced in their careers. Things stayed weird when the pathologist and crime scene technicians examined the body and the car. Jeffrey had been stabbed six times, with the injuries coming in at an upward angle that suggested he'd been attacked by someone sitting in the passenger seat right beside him. The knife was what had killed him. The wounds on Jeffrey's neck suggested an attempt to strangle him from the back. seat using a rope or cable, but for some reason that had failed. It was a strange scene. And why had Jeffrey even been in the neighborhood anyway?

The Wagner projects are right by the tribrobe bridge where Jeffrey had said he'd gotten a flat tire, but none of his tires were flat. None had been recently replaced, and there were no fingerprints around the wheelwells or on the hubcaps where somebody changing a tire would touch. Jeffrey Locker hadn't had a flat tire. He'd lied to his wife. Jeffrey Locker was, to all appearances, a successful man, a motivational speaker who specialized in corporate work. He had a crunchier kind of approach than many others in the field, emphasizing that people should find work they really enjoyed doing.

Many clients came to treat him essentially as a therapist as well as a business aide, spilling out their personal as well as their professional worries. He was mostly well-liked. East Harlem is mostly a low-income Hispanic. and black neighborhood, but it wasn't all that unusual to see white guys and nice cars cruising around. There are a couple of things that aren't so easy to buy out in suburban Long Island, namely sex and drugs. An early thought among investigators was that Jeffrey was there for one or the other and something had gone badly wrong. Their suspicions narrowed down when a witness said she'd seen Jeffrey buying condoms from a bodega the night before. His cell phone record showed multiple

calls to a local number. So did Jeffrey have a regular East Harlem girlfriend he was there to see under cover of a fake flat tire? The police started canvassing the neighborhood's ladies of negotiable affection to see if any of them remembered talking with Jeffrey Locker. But then, just hours after the body had been found, they got a break. The bank told them someone had just used Jeffrey's bank card to withdraw $800, the maximum daily amount, from a convenience store ATM. Security footage showed a couple, a man and a woman, withdrawing the cash. Was this Jeffrey's girlfriend and her pimp? After police circulated images of the couple, it didn't take long for a confidential informant to ID the man police wanted to talk to, Kenneth Minor.

Kenneth was a minor league criminal, a thief and a low-level drug dealer from the Wagner projects, and police quickly picked him up. As is often the case with people interrogated by the police, Kenneth started with a blanket denial. They had the wrong guy. That wasn't him on the security tape. There were thousands of guys that looked like that. A couple things here. One, police are absolutely allowed to lie to suspects. And two, when you stab somebody multiple times, there's an excellent chance you're also going to cut yourself. So the detectives had a fake report from the crime lab made up and showed. showed it to Kenneth, telling him they'd found his DNA in the car.

And that was enough to get Kenneth talking. He'd been hanging out on the street when Jeffrey had pulled up, rolled down his window, and called him over. Kenneth figured the guy wanted to buy some drugs and went over, but what Jeffrey wanted was something with the potential to get Kenneth into a lot more trouble. He wanted a gun. Jeffrey was a clean-cut guy, and Kenneth's first thought was, this dude's got to be a cup.

Even when he had second thoughts about that, Jeffrey just weirded him out, a complete stranger eagerly asking him for a gun. Kenneth decided to scare him off. He was a big six-foot-four guy, and he knew how to act scary. Jeffrey drove off, but he came back 20 minutes later and asked to speak to Kenneth again. Kenneth was curious now. Usually when he scared someone, they stayed scared. when Jeffrey asked him to get in the car and listen, he did. Jeffrey didn't waste much time in telling Kenneth what he wanted.

As Kenneth later told detectives, he wanted to do a Kovorkian. As I'm sure many of you know, Jack Kovorkian was a doctor who famously advocated for voluntary euthanasia. When pressed on what exactly Jeffrey had asked him to do, Kenneth said, he said, I want you to kill me. Oh, what the fuck? Even for hard-boiled Manhattan homicide detectives, this was a new story. Kenneth was an obviously intelligent guy, but he didn't seem like the creative type who would come up with something like this out of thin air. Still, they defaulted to the standard cop reaction.

This is bullshit. Yeah. The version they were leaning toward was that Kenneth had decided to rob an obviously wealthy guy cruising the neighborhood. He'd bound Jeffrey in the car, then tortured him until Jeffrey gave up the pin for his bank card. Then Kenneth had stabbed him again and again and again and left him for dead. But then the district attorney's office chased down the phone records from the night Jeffrey died. Remember, he'd made multiple calls that night, and investigators initially suspected they were to an East Harlem sex worker. In fact, they'd been to a guy named Melvin Fleming.

Melvin was a 55-year-old heroin addict and occasional shoplifter. who was living on the streets in East Harlem. Four days before Jeffrey Locker had been stabbed to death, he'd spotted Melvin panhandling for change outside of a bodega. Jeffrey gave him a $5 bill, more than enough to get Melvin's attention and buy a little of his time. Once Melvin was in the car with him, Jeffrey made it clear what he wanted.

As Melvin later testified, he informed me that he was looking for someone to make him dead. Holy shit, what a sentence. Jeffrey explained that he was in a deep financial hole and needed to help out his family. He'd taken out extensive life insurance policies, but they wouldn't pay out if he killed himself. He needed to be murdered. He'd pay Melvin $10,000 to get hold of a gun and kill him, with the money to be taken from his corpse after the fact.

Melvin said, sure, but he was lying. He had no intention of getting involved in a murder or of hurting Jeffrey at all, but this guy reeked of both cash and desperation, and Melvin figured he could make some decent money by stringing him along for a while. And he was right. Jeffrey handed over $1,000 in neatly bound bills as a down payment. Jeffrey had a preference.

He wanted to be shot in the head, quick and hopefully painless. Maybe Melvin could do it while Jeffrey was kneeling down to change a tire, shoot him in the back of the head so Jeffrey didn't even know what was coming. Melvin said that'd be no problem, but it had taken a few days to get a gun. It was clear to Melvin that Jeffrey was ready, even eager to get this done. The two of them, apparently both quite cheerful, drove around Harlem scouting for places where one of them could shoot the other in the head. I know, it's the most bizarre story I've ever heard. It had to be somewhere where Jeffrey's body would be quickly discovered, but not so public that Melvin would get caught.

Jeffrey thought that outside a 1st Avenue bus depot was a good spot, but Melvin spotted a security camera. No good. Melvin gave Jeffrey his cell phone number, and they parted ways. They met up again four days later, and Jeffrey gave Melvin another down payment, this time $3,000. He'd get the rest after Jeffrey was dead, which is what Jeffrey expected to happen that night. They cruised around again. Melvin testified that Jeffrey told him that they were aware that he was going to be. going to do this here, but never clarified who they were. He listened as Jeffrey made the call to

his wife Lois and told her he'd gotten a flat by the Triboro Bridge, but that there was someone here to help him with it, setting up his preferred scenario for all this to go down, with Jeffrey shot in the back of the head while changing a tire. But before that, Melvin needed to get a gun. He told Jeffrey he just had to pick it up from a friend upstairs in an apartment building. Give me 20 minutes. He told Jeffrey, and left him waiting in the car. And waiting. Melvin didn't come back in 20 minutes. In fact, he didn't come back at all. Jeffrey blew up his phone, but Melvin gave him the runaround for two hours until Jeffrey figured out he had no intention of coming back. Mel, why did you do me like that? Jeffrey said in his last call. The answer was obvious. Melvin had gotten $4,000

out of this weird dude and wanted nothing at all to do with whatever happened next. Jeffrey probably didn't give a crap about losing the money. He was playing for much higher stakes than that. He had an existing $5 million life insurance policy, and over the last couple of years it had taken out multiple new policies totaling over $12 million. If Jeffrey could get someone to help him stage a convincing murder, he'd set up his family for life.

Taken for a ride by Melbourne Fleming, a disappointed Jeffrey cruised the streets searching for someone to give him what he wanted, and he spotted Kenneth Minor. Obviously, after hearing from Melvin Fleming, Kenneth's statement that Jeffrey had wanted to do a Kovorkian rang a lot more true to the investigators, but they still needed to figure out just what the hell had happened. According to Kenneth, he felt sorry for Jeffrey. Jeffrey told him about his financial struggles, about how he had to look after his family, and that struck a chord with Kenneth. According to him, anyway, Kenneth

minor was a long way from being a saint, and it's perfectly possible that he just accepted what Melvin Fleming had refused, the chance to make some money by giving Jeffrey Locker the death he wanted. Just like Melvin, though, Kenneth told Jeffrey that he first needed to get a gun, so Jeffrey gave him $60, and Kenneth went to a friend to get the piece. And this just shows what a fish out of water Jeffrey was in the situation. You are not getting a gun for $60. What Kenneth got with some liquor and cocaine, and he got wasted. Hours later, near 4 a.m., he wanted to get more money out of Jeffrey and called him up. Jeffrey certainly had money, but he desperately needed more of it. In January of 2009,

the Locker's joint checking account had $84,000 in it. By July, when Jeffrey died, it had $1,000. Wow. They were three quarters of a million dollars in debt. In 2009, of course, was right in the middle of the Great Recession. If you'd lost a lot of money, it could be hard to see how you'd ever get it back, especially for someone like Jeffrey. Companies were cutting costs left, right and center, and it was hard to justify spending cash on bringing in a motivational speaker. And then there was Lou Pearlman. In the early 90s, the entertainment world was being conquered by new kids on the block, and Perlman thought, I could do that. Well, not him personally. He spent $3 million on nationwide auditions, the end result of which was the creation of the Backstreet Boys, who,

as you probably know, did quite well. A few years later, he repeated the trick with InSync, who, again, did quite well. But Lou Pearlman was a crook who immediately started ripping his bands off. And in addition to his Transcontinental Records label, he founded an airline and a savings company which only existed on paper as a cover for one of the longest running Ponzi schemes in U.S. history. One of the things about Ponzi's schemes, schemes is that the people who get in early can make a lot of money. Jeffrey Locker had invested $250,000 with Pearlman and had doubled his money. Jeffrey had also brought other people into the scheme. It all inevitably came crashing down, and now Jeffrey was facing hundreds of thousands of dollars

in fraud suits. So Jeffrey was in a deep, deep hole. And while the financial crisis must certainly have added fresh urgency, Jeffrey had started buying his additional life insurance policies a couple of years before that. In fact, right after Lou Pearlman was arrested and his Ponzi scheme collapsed. That was when Jeffrey Locker started thinking that the only way to help his family was to arrange his own death. And did his family know? It's hard to come to any other conclusion than that. They absolutely did. There's an email to Lois where he tells her to tough with the lawyers after he's gone. And one of his teenage sons texted Jeffrey a couple of weeks before he died with the video thing, do one for my sister as well. Remember, you won't be

there to give her away or any of that. Oh my goodness. Which suggests Jeffrey was making farewell messages for his kids and that Jeffrey and possibly Lois had explained the whole thing to their kids. Like, oh my God. How do you sit down with your children and explain to them that you're going to take your own life. Like, it's staggering. It's cruel. Oh, my God. I can't imagine. It's absolutely bananas. No videos were found, by the way. Their house was never searched. There's obviously some serious moral questions here. Like, hey, Lois, how about you try and talk him out of this? But nothing Jeffrey's family did or didn't do appeared to be criminal. There's no question that what Kenneth Minor did was criminal. He didn't come back with a gun. He didn't come back with a gun.

but he did have some phone cord and possibly a knife. He said Jeffrey had a knife in his glove box, and Melvin Fleming said the same thing, but some detectives thought Kenneth brought the knife with him. But the first plan was the phone cord. To try and make sure there was no question of suicide, Jeffrey had Kenneth tie his arms behind his back with one length of cord. Then Kenneth went into the back seat and tried to garot Jeffrey.

But the phone cord was old, and according to Kenneth, it kept popping, kept snapping. So there was the knife. Kenneth has been reluctant to repeat this sentence, which makes me think it's bullshit, but what he first told detectives was that Jeffrey asked him to hold the knife steady on the middle of the steering wheel

and that Jeffrey, with his hands still tied behind his back, plunged his own torso down onto the blade again and again. Yeah, it seems a lot more likely to me that he just asked Kenneth to stab him. The autopsy didn't. provide a definitive answer either way. But, I mean, it just makes more sense to me, doesn't it? Like, I don't, I feel like a lot of people would have trouble doing that. It's not impossible. People have certainly done painful things to themselves before, but just it makes more sense to me that he just said, stab me and he stabbed him.

Kenneth Minor went on trial in 2011 on a murder for higher charge, with the prosecution arguing that it made no difference that Jeffrey Locker was both the instigator of the killing and a willing victim. Kenneth had accepted money to kill someone. His defense argued that the killing was an assisted suicide, which is a second-degree manslaughter charge, not murder. None of Jeffrey Locker's family attended the trial. Kenneth Minor was found guilty of second-degree murder and given a sentence of 20 years to life, but the case was immediately appealed,

and within two years an appellate court determined the trial judge had improperly described assisted suicide to the jury. A new trial started in 2014, but Kenneth took a plea deal for first-degree manslaughter in a sentence of 12 years, including time he'd already served. He was paroled in 2019, and his sentence expired in 2022. Unsurprisingly, Jeffrey Locker's new $12 million life insurance policies blew up when the truth came out about his death, but on his original $5 million policy, the suicide clause had expired, and as far as we know, his family got that money. So, wow, this is one of the weirdest cases I've ever heard about in my life. And, you know, I've heard debate about this one that like, well, you know, he just did what the guy paid him to do. It's, you know, it's not his fault.

But of course it is. I mean, you can't do that. Even if somebody asks you to, you can't just stab them to death. It's still illegal to kill someone, right? You should have, at bare minimum, said, no, I'm not doing that. and of course what you would hope somebody would do is call the cops, try and get this person some help, but that's not what happened. Okay, so moving on to case two.

This is self-help, the murder of Robert Vendrick. For this one, we're in Phoenix, Arizona, February 18, 2008. Carol Vendrick was getting really worried about her husband, Robert. He'd flown off to California several days earlier to meet his friend and business associate, Gary Schocky. Shockey was supposedly negotiating some big secret conflict. with the U.S. government for some kind of computer program, and Robert had invested a lot of money into the program to help get it started. Now they were both supposed to go meet up with some people from the government to finalize the deal. To Carol, it all sounded like something out of a spy movie.

They were going to take a boat out to San Clemente Island to meet up with these guys, and they weren't supposed to talk about it to anyone. Robert had been so excited when he kissed her goodbye on the day he left. This deal was going to make them a lot of money. But Robert hadn't come home yet, and she couldn't get hold of him on the phone. Couldn't get hold of Gary's shocky either. It all made her very uneasy. She wasn't sure about this shocking guy. Her husband had invested a lot of money with this man over the past few years and hadn't seen a dime in return yet.

Gary just kept promising him soon, soon. Well, now, her husband hadn't been on his return flight home, and Carol was getting a sick feeling in her gut. She called the police to report Robert missing. At that point, she was just worried about her lifelong partner. She couldn't have known what a bizarre nightmare she was about to be drawn into. But we'll get to that. Let's talk about this guy, Gary Shockey. Gary is your classic greed goblin.

The top priority in his life from young adulthood on was to make a lot of money and to make it fast and easy, the classic get-rich-quick thing. And unfortunately, for the people, who would become his marks, he had what a lot of con artists have, charisma, which is amazing to me, based on the footage I've seen of this guy. He looks like a cross between like Ricky from Trailer Park Boys and Guy Fierry. And he just seems to ooze slime from every pore. But according to a lot of people who knew him, he could talk you into anything. And I think we have to believe the people who were there. Yeah. Sometimes, get sucked in by a con artist's charm, you really have to be there. And I think charm is something

that morphs over time. Like, wolfish, oily charm that would have worked 20 years ago has been replaced by like a pouty chiseled charm that talks exclusively an uptalk on Instagram now. Yeah. In the mid-80s, Gary got married and had a newborn son, but Gary didn't stick around long enough to be a dad. His son, Joseph, later told the show a marriage. can gride that between the ages of six months and seven years, he only saw his dad once. What a prince, right? I couldn't find out whether he paid child support, but my money's on no.

Yeah, I suspect no. One of Gary's hustles was selling vitamins and diet supplements online, which he did pretty well at, though he was like a kid in a candy store with money. He spent it as fast as it came in. Okay, why are scammers so obsessed? with freaking vitamins and diet supplements. I have lost count of the number of con artists and like MLM scammers I've seen who've ripped people off with some kind of like natural cure that they supposedly don't want us to know about.

Like that jilly juice, be atch, you remember her with the poop waterfalls? I don't know why, but this stuff just seems to draw these people in like evil little moss to a flame. Because people always want the next thing that's going to make them healthy and fit. Like just go to the doctor, eat a balance. diet and take a grocery store brand multivitamin, and that'll get you, like, 95% of the way there, guys, it's fine. By the time Gary started his vitamin business, his son was a teenager, and he was interested in getting to know his dad, so he moved to Florida to reconnect with him, and he ended up

spending a lot of time in Gary's office, watching his dad work his salespeople. He was amazing at it, Joseph said later, a born leader, and he worked on his persuasive skills, studying the methods of famous motivational speakers and self-help gurus. Isn't me or is that creepy? Like, it's just given aspiring cult leader for me. If you want to learn to speak in public better, it's not a bad idea, but, like, taken in totality, it's on the culty side of the scale, for sure. Yeah.

It's that episode of The Office where Jim tricks to white into watching all the dictator speeches before his speech. Like, that's exactly what it is. he started building a rep as a motivational speaker himself jassing up crowds of eager entrepreneurs with deep thoughts like when you put your mind to something you can accomplish anything that you want to accomplish wow man I've never heard that one before genius I've never said that to a 12 year old before I've never seen that on a poster at Hobby Lobby before.

With a kitten on it or something. Kitten in a rocket ship or something. And like many scammers before him, Gary intuitively understood that if you wanted to sell yourself, you needed some kind of a hook. The sparklier and more original, the better. One day, Gary saw an ad for a course in firewalking. Yeah, I mean when you literally lay down a bunch of hot coals and walk across them. Yeah.

The training was in Vegas, so to Gary, it was a win-win. He ended up getting certified as a firewalking instructor, and in 2000, he got himself on primetime TV by breaking the Guinness World Record in Firewalking. My dude walked 165 feet across a bed of coals that Guinness had recorded at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and his feet came out of it fine. Yeah, which, holy damn, that is hot. So supposedly, as long as you just keep on trucking across the coals and don't slow down too much or stop, you're all good and it's not going to like burn your feet down to little blackened stumps. But I do not get it because I have run across plenty of hot pavement in my day. Okay. And that shit hurts like a bitch no matter how fast I've run. So I really don't understand how this works. But I guess I'm just going to have to take sciences work for it. Yeah, I think it still hurts. I think you're just like it doesn't like. It's got to. blister you. And I think part of the, I think part of the illusion is that you keep a straight face. I think that's, I think that's it. Yeah. You know, it's like, yeah, it's not like laying on a bed of nails. I'm not going to try it. No, no, no. I would never. It's like laying on a bed of nails.

It's not like laying on a bed of nails where like you just have to lay flat and not like adjust your body weight at all and it doesn't hurt. No, it's not like that. It still hurts. I don't want to do that either. You could. It wouldn't hurt you. Oh, no. You know, I was thinking about this, though. We've had a lot of MENSA members, but I think, I think this is the first time we've covered a killer who's been in the Guinness Book of World Records. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the first. No, I think so.

This is like the spiritual opposite of MENSA membership is Guinness Book of World Records. You know, Guinness should have a dumbest murderer category. And they should let us be the judges. Yes, please, get us. get back to us, please. So this became Gary's big gimmick, and his appearance on live TV scored him a level of name recognition that it would have taken years and years to gain as a motivational speaker on the seminar circuit.

Oh, you're the Firewalker guy. It was perfect. It made him seem cool and way more interesting than he actually was. And by the way, done this remind you so much of James Arthur Ray, our other self-help guru who ended up getting somebody killed. Remember with the sweat lodge gone wrong? One of his big techniques, if you recall, was to get people to do stuff

that was out of their comfort zones, like bungee jumping or breaking boards with their fists. It would give his followers this little adrenaline rush and a little sense of pride and achievement and that would make them more susceptible to his bullshit. Worked really, really well.

But Gary could never settle on one path to the riches he was obsessed with getting. He was constantly shifted from one hustle to the next. He got into satellite radio, real estate, energy drinks, software, more diet stuff. So his business ventures were like a little dabble here, a little dabble there. And like a lot of scam artists, he was constantly pulling up stakes and moving to another part of the country. Seems a little unfocused to me, but that didn't stop him from touting himself as a motivational speaker and results coach, whatever the hell that means.

And he always had a squad of eager salespeople working for him, people who had fought. People who had fallen under his spell and believed him when he said he could make them rich. He was talking his salespeople into investing with him, too. Feels a little bit like getting high on your own supply. Yeah. So Gary was collecting investors like Pokemon for his various business ventures, and he was promising them the world. 20 or 30 percent returns on their money. Now, I know at least some of y'all's eyebrows just hit the ceiling, because we've seen this before, haven't we? If it seems too good to be true, folks, it is. But for a lot of the people Gary Shockey worked his charms on, those big, fat numbers were just too tantalizing to pass up. In 2001, Gary made a contact that must have made his heart skip a beat, a guy named Brian Garvin.

Brian had created a software program that could trawl the internet for email addresses and grab them up like fish in a great big net. With a humongous database of addresses like that, Gary could fish in a ton of new people to help him market his company. This is a thing called affiliate marketing. Ideally, it's a way to make passive income by marketing somebody else's services or products for commission. I suspect it's a mixed bag in terms of results. And I suspect part of the reason emails are unusable now because you're flooded with marketing emails. Yeah. But Gary was a major fan.

Using Brian Garvin's software, he managed to hook thousands of people, hugely experienced. expanding his marketing force. He and Brian made a good team. They even published an e-book together, which is still available online for two bucks called Gary Shockey's Secrets, become an expert affiliate marketer overnight, a title that should have been a blazing red flag for anybody thinking about buying it. In the book, Gary called Brian Garvin his number one student and claimed that by marketing Gary's products, Brian was making almost $200 grand a year. Brian himself later told American Greed, I did make some money with Gary Shockey, but that money was about seven or eight grand. So just a slight exaggeration. And just a teeny-weeny little one.

The description of this book on Barnes & Noble's website is something to behold, full of grandiose claims and bizarre capitalization choices. And Gary didn't stop at one book. He also wrote an autobiography called If I Can, Anybody Can. The description reads in part. This is the story of acclaimed motivational speaker, internet marketing guru, and three-time Guinness Book World Record holder Gary Shockey. His life story, as told in his own words with PJ Russell, is a heart-wrenching, in-depth look at his trials and tribulations, and how he ultimately achieved success by overcoming them. Crackling, page-turning tension throughout makes it impossible to put this one down. Ooh, yeah, red-hot affiliate marketing action, baby. Woo-hoo!

You know, it's just hot as a pistol. It also says, in 1997, Gary was inducted into the international who's who of business professionals and entrepreneurs. Today, Gary Shockey is one of America's top entrepreneurs and personal results coaches. Uh-huh. And interesting that in this year of Our Lord 2025, the description doesn't mention anything about, you know, fraud or murder. Hmm. Mm-hmm. In his autobiography and in his motivational speeches, Gary claimed he was making $4 million a year

and bragged about all his fancy stuff, like a $9,000 Rolex. Problem was, all those people who signed up for his affiliate program were shelling out money for investments, goods and services that were nothing more than figments of GareGare's imagination. One of his more disgusting scams, allegedly, was raising money for a a camp for special needs kids. The people who donated claimed the camp never materialized. Wow, man, real nice. What a gaping asshole. Yeah.

Gary Shockey wasn't a successful entrepreneur. He was a scammer, plain and simple, and eventually, inevitably, people started to catch on. Angry posts started popping up in internet forums, accusing Gary of fraud and theft. Even his buddy, Brian Garvin, his number one student, got fed up and cut ties with him. So did his teenage son. The thing about fraud is, you've got to keep new money coming in constantly to stay afloat and keep the scam going. So when one investor figured out the game and bailed, Gary had to bring in a new one pretty dang quick. And in late 2002, in Phoenix, Arizona, he met a guy who was pretty much Taylor made for him,

a retired software systems analyst and granddad named Robert Fendrick. Robert was a sweet guy, much beloved by his wife Carol, and their two kids and three grandkids. He wasn't a big personality, not a big talker. He was pretty much Gary Schocky's polar opposite in that way. But he was always looking for ways to help people he cared about. Maybe sometimes to his detriment. Robert's wife Carol later testified in court that Robert, was a little too trusting for his own good.

She said he was, quote, somewhat naive from his growing up in Indiana on a farm, somewhat gullible. And that wasn't his only vulnerability. Vendrick was constantly in search of the business venture that would make him great financial success. He was always on the lookout for opportunities and he'd gotten sucked into some unfortunate stuff

in the last couple of years, stuff like pyramids games. In other words, Robert Vendrick was prime real estate for Gary Shockey, exactly the kind of mark he loved to get his grubby little hands on. We don't have time to get into all the details of this because it's a grab-bag episode, but suffice it to say, over the next five years, Gary scammed Robert over and over again. It was always some new, exciting investment opportunity that was guaranteed to pay out huge returns.

And Robert kept getting sucked in, propelled by his trust. in Gary, his desire to leave a bigger inheritance to his wife and kids, and probably by the sunk cost fallacy, too, where you think, I've put too much into this to back out now. Gary kept promising those big returns. It was always, soon, soon, it's right around the corner. By 2006, our boy, Gare was in some deep financial shit. He'd burned too many bridges. Nobody was willing to invest with him anymore, except for Robert Van Gogh. For some bizarre reason, he decided to set up shop as a bail bondsman slash bounty hunter. You know, just what anybody would do if they fell upon hard times.

Sure. But his new business didn't work out any better than the old ones had, this time because Gary got a little too excited chasing a bail jumper and decided to fire a shotgun over the guy's head. So Gary got arrested, charged, and convicted for improper use of a firearm. The bail bondsman had to bond himself out of jail and he lost his license. And in the midst of all that stress, Robert Vendrick contacted him again about his investment money. When were his returns going to come in? Soon, soon, Gary promised, just like he always did. But Robert wasn't born yesterday and by now years had gone by with lots of requests for money.

lots of promises and zero to show for it. He was starting to get nervous. But then one day, Gary told Robert he had an incredible new opportunity, one that would make them both rich. He was developing a top secret computer program that the U.S. government was interested in buying. He described it as people tracking software, which sounds creepy as shit, but also like something the government would absolutely want to buy. Homeland Security, specifically. This was in the post-9-11 era where contractors were making obscene amounts of money selling stuff to the government. So it was totally believable that they would get a large amount of money for Gary's software. Now, Robert Vendrick had no way of knowing that Gary's IT knowledge wasn't even within a light

year of where it would need to be to develop a program like that. By 2008, Vendrick had given Gary Shockey over $1.2 million, most of his and Carol's life savings, all without getting a dime in return. For a long time, Carol wasn't aware of how much he'd invested. When she did find out the amount, after she picked her heart back up off the floor, I assume, she demanded that before Robert had anything else to do with Shockey, they needed to have an attorney look at all the transactions

he'd had with this guy over the years and all the paperwork relating to this Homeland Security deal. Gary assured Robert and Carol that once they closed the deal with the agents from Homeland Security, they were going to get far more money back, the 1.2 mil plus $600,000 a year for five years. With their savings depleted, desperate to recoup their money, Robert jumped at the opportunity. But surprise, surprise, it wasn't long before Gary got in touch with Robert with a big urgent request. He needed $100,000 to finalize the deal to open an account at Wells Fargo Bank.

Now, why this would be necessary to secure a government contract, I can't. can't imagine, but Vendrick went ahead and wired him the money, 40 grand of which he had to borrow from his brother. So here's the situation Gary was in. He'd lost his bail bondsman license, which was his only real source of income at that point. He was struggling real hard financially, living in a ratty house he hated. He was in trouble with the law for firing that gun at the bail jumper. Plus, there were some rumblings that the SEC was poking around some of his former business dealings, talking to some of those pissed-off investors he'd left in the dust. And now, the one investor he had left, his human ATM, Robert Vendrick,

was telling him he hired a lawyer to go over all their business dealings with a fine-tooth comb. Shit. Once Vendrick wired that 100K to Wells Fargo, Gary said, it was time to go to California to meet with the agents from Homeland Security, give them the software, and get a big, juicy check. The meeting was to take place on San Clement's, Island, which is owned by the Navy, about 50 miles out from the mainland. Robert was excited. This was going to make all those years of disappointment worth it. He kissed Carol goodbye and got on the

plane. When he met up with Gary in California, Gary had already bought a somewhat decrepit boat for a thousand bucks. It was called The Odyssey, and Gary had bought an anchor and a jolly Roger flag to give the thing a bit of flare. Y'all, what kind of a turnip buys a boat for murder purposes and then decides to outfit it with a pirate flag. Big old skull and crossbones flapping in the breeze. Great job, man. Way to stay inconspicuous. It's very on brand for Gary, though. This guy thinks he's so clever. Probably just wanted a little joky joke with himself so he could feel superior, the sick prick. What a fucking loser nerd.

He could have just been a cosplayer and avoided all of this. also why would you buy a boat for one trip why not charter one could it be because you had a sinister intentions and you didn't want any witnesses unbeknownst to robert gary had also brought a little bag of supplies for their voyage a depth finder a paint tray and roller a first aid kit oh and one other interesting little detail the guy who sold gary the anchor was confused about why he chose it. It was an anchor designed for riverboats. It wouldn't be worth a dam on the ocean. On February 16th, Gary and Robert boarded the Odyssey and set out for San Clemente Island. Security cameras on the marina captured them boarding the boat. They also captured the boat

motoring back to the dock, and Gary's shocky debboarding, alone. Robert Vendrick was never seen again. Obviously, Gary was a suspect early on. Carol told the detectives all about all the money her husband had invested with him over the past five years. She told them about this supposed top secret contract with Homeland Security, which the investigators were able to quickly find out did not exist. Gary's initial story was that his good buddy Robert had gotten seasick so he dropped him back off at the marina. He seemed concerned about his missing friend. Under pressure, Gary admitted that, yeah, yeah, he'd been concerned.

using Vendrick for years, promising big returns on non-existent investments. He'd drawn the older man into 20 different business schemes over five years, and not a single one of them had earned Vendrick any money. By the way, when somebody's willing to admit to something that skeevy and illegal, it should get your antennae hum in. Chances are they're admitting to this skeevy thing to deflect suspicion on something much worse. Gary denied having anything to do with Robert's disappearance. I've never killed anybody, he said. I've never thought about killing anybody.

He denied knowing anything about any government contract or computer software, but he told them he noticed something strange the last time he saw Robert. He had a duffel bag, Gary said, and it was full of cash. Robert said it was $400,000. I have no idea what it was for. His story changed drastically when the detectives froze the Wells Fargo account with that 100K in it. Gary was beyond pissed about it. I'm entitled to that money, he told the detectives.

Robert gave it to me. It's front money for my business. It's mine. Nope, they said. They weren't going to unfreeze that account while Robert Vendrick was missing. Soon after that conversation, Gary contacted the detectives with some great news. Robert's fine, he said. He's in Mexico.

I just met up with him last night. And he wanted me to tell you guys that he's okay. You should unfreeze that bank account so I can get my money. Oh, well, in that case, no problem, I'll get right on it. Okay, so, hey, Gary, what the hell was Robert doing down in Mexico? Gary spun quite the tale about that, like something out of a Hitchcock movie. It was a complicated story, but it involved a message from a mysterious bartender, false identities. But the crux of it was that Robert was in the early stages of dementia.

and he didn't want his family to see him deteriorate. So he was running away to spend his last days on the beach in Mexico under a fake name. The thing was, besides the fact that it made no sense for Robert to abandon his wife and family with no explanation, investigators had found his stuff right where he left it in the hotel room. Most significantly, his insulin. Now, why would a diabetic go anywhere without his insulin? And if he wasn't planning to go back home to his wife in Arizona, know, why was there a return plane ticket to Phoenix on his nightstand? And why was his passport still at home?

You'd need that to get across the border to Mexico, wouldn't you? Needless to say, investigators didn't find Robert Vendrick in Mexico or anywhere else. When Gary brought them a handwritten note, supposedly from Robert, saying he was in Mexico and didn't wish to have any contact with his family or the police, the detectives had it analyzed and found that it didn't even come close to matching Robert's handwriting. What they did find was The Odyssey, and they noticed a couple of interesting things. One, a missing anchor, and two, a missing rope. And when they spoke to Gary again, he changed his story about the computer program.

Oh, yeah, we were going to sell that software to the government. Yeah, that's why Robert fronted me that hundred grand, which I still need, by the way. During that interview, even Gary acknowledged that his stories didn't make a lot of sense, that if a jury heard all this, they'd probably think he killed Robert. On February 12, 2009, they put the habeas gravis on Gary Shockey and charged him with the murder of Robert Vendrick. And, bless his heart, Gary couldn't manage to just sit in jail, keep his head down, and wait for trial.

He did what so many dipshits before him have done, decided to confide in his new prison bestie. And that, Campers, is how we know the awful story. of what really happened to Robert Vendrick. They set out for San Clemente Island on the morning of February 16th, Robert, thinking his life was about to change for the better. He was looking forward to bringing a big check back home to Carol.

She'd be so happy. Gary's focus, however, was elsewhere. He was preoccupied with his little handheld depth finder. When he was finally satisfied that they were in deep enough water, Gary killed the engine. And then he tackled Robert, fastened a belt around him. I cannot even imagine what Robert must have felt when he looked over and noticed what the other end of that belt was attached to, an anchor. Quickly, efficiently, Shockey hoisted Robert up and just dropped him over the side of the boat.

Under the weight of the anchor, he sank like a stone. Robert drowned, helpless to claw his way back up to the surface. It's one of the most terrifying ways to die that I can imagine. Gary waited a few minutes to make sure his victim wasn't going to resurface. Then he started his engine back up and tooled back to land. His trial went on for three months, but the jury didn't need more than three hours to convict Gary a first-degree murder and sentence him to life without parole.

Unfortunately, though, or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it, he didn't end up spending much time in prison. Just a few years into his sentence, Gary Shockey had a heart attack and dropped dead right there in his cell. I hope it hurt like a bitch. Doesn't bring Robert back to his wife or his kids or his grandbabies, though. So what have we learned, folks? We've got two stories about people who put themselves out there as great leaders who had all the answers. But in both cases, underneath that polished exterior was a deep, deep darkness.

In Jeffrey Locker's case, it was a deep well of pain and hopelessness. and in Gary Shockies, just pure, malignant greed. For me, it's another reminder of one of the main lessons I've learned in my life so far, that the people who claim to have it all together are often the biggest messes you will ever meet. Nobody knows the secret, okay? We're all just figuring it out as we go along. And despite these two god-awful stories, for the most part,

I actually find that kind of comforting. So that was a pair of wild ones, 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. If you haven't booked your spot yet on the Crime Wave True Crime Cruise from November 3rd through November 7th, get on it, y'all. It's coming up soon. Join Katie and me, plus last podcast on the left, scared to death, and sinisterhood for a rocking good time at sea. You can pay all at once or set up a payment plan, but you've got to have a fan code to book a ticket.

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