True Crime Campfire - Into Darkness: The Murder of Denise Huber

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

A lot of the murder cases we cover feature slow-boiling resentments, or criminal schemes hatched with an explicit target in mind. Killings by strangers are rare—and terrifying. You can just be going about your life with no idea that a predator is hunting you, a twisted mind that has no more connection to your life than a shark does. And then, out of the night, they strike. Join us for the chilling story of a would-be serial killer stopped after his first murder.Stick around after the outro for a funny blooper! Sources:Cold Storage, Don LasseterLA Times: https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/tn-wknd-et-denise-huber-20160702-story.htmlCourt papers: https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/2011/s064306/LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-05-23-mn-61651-story.htmlFollow 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. A lot of the murder cases we cover feature slow boiling resentments or criminal schemes hatched with an explicit target in mind.

Killings by strangers are rare and terrifying. You can just be going about your life with no idea. that a predator is hunting you, a twisted mind that has no more connection to your life than a shark does, and then out of the night, they strike. This is Into the Darkness, the murder of Denise Huber. So, campers, we're starting this one in Costa Mesa, California in the early hours of June 3, 1991. By the side of Route 73, just before the exit for Newport Beach, a blue 1988-Honda Accord sat on the shoulder, hazard lights blinking, the right rear tire clearly flat. There was no one in the car, no one standing nearby.

This was where Denise Huber disappeared from, vanished into the darkness beyond the edge of the highway. Denise was 23 years old, right at the start of what promised to be a golden life. She was smart and pretty with a bright personality and a great sense of humor. She had a smile that could knock you over. She made life better for everyone who knew her. Denise never lacked for romantic suitors, but she'd chosen to not make that a big part of her life. She was kind of sort of dating an old friend, Stephen Horrocks, who was the bartender at the old spaghetti factory where Denise had worked as a waitress, but it was all pretty light.

They'd never slept together or anything like that. And Stephen had a treat set up for Denise on Sunday, June 2nd. Tickets to the Morrissey concert at the Great Western Forum in Englewood, which in 1991 was quite a score for a music lover like Denise. She often preferred older stuff like Credence, the Who, and Zeppelin, but she wasn't going to say no to Morrissey. She was super excited, but on Saturday, Stephen found out he'd have to work on the night of the concert, so he asked their mutual friend Rob Calvert to take Denise instead. Rob had known Denise for years, and they'd gone to a ton of gigs together. He had a huge crush on her, but it was always clear Denise had no interest in changing their relationship.

She picked him up on Sunday night, in a classic get-up of little black dress. and thigh highs, which is probably exactly what I would have worn in 1991 to a Morrissey concert. On the way to Englewood, they stopped at a liquor store and picked up a quart of vodka, some orange juice and pretzels. Neither of them were big drinkers, but they wanted to get a little buzz on before the concert, so they sat in the parking lot of the forum, sipping some homemade screwdrivers and munching on pretzels. The concert was a blast, and afterwards Denise didn't want the night to end. She called Stephen Horrocks from a payphone and said he should meet her and rob at the El Paso canteena, a bar and restaurant in Torrance. Steve never showed up, but another friend Ross did.

They all had a couple of beers and danced to songs on the jukebox, a fun end to a fun night. Denise dropped Rob off at his place, smiled, waved, and headed for home. It was just after 2 a.m., and it was the last time he'd ever see her. Denise lived with her mom and dad Ione and Dennis. They didn't keep tabs on her. She was 23 years old after all, but Denise usually told them if she was going to spend the night somewhere else or something like that, which usually meant crashing with her best friend Tammy Brown.

She hadn't told them that, and in the morning her bed obviously hadn't been slept in. They called Tammy, but she hadn't seen Denise. They all started to worry. They worried even more after Ione called Rob Calvert and learned that, but she dropped him off at 2 a.m. and then as far as he knew was heading straight home. Ioni called local hospitals and then called the police. No one had any news about Denise. The day passed with growing dread and no sign of Denise. At night, her friend Tammy went driving to look for her. The most direct way home from Rob's place was on the Pacific Coast Highway,

but Tammy and Denise had talked before about how you were more likely to get pulled over by a cop on that route than if you took inland freeways. Denise had been drinking and was hovering around the legal limit to drive. She might have taken the longer inland route. So Tammy hit the freeway, and there, just after 10 p.m., she saw her friend's car abandoned on the shoulder. She couldn't change lanes fast enough to stop close by, so she took the next exit, called the Huber's from a pay phone, and circled back around. She was only a few miles from Denise's house, and hadn't been pulled over for long before Denise's parents arrived. The battery had gone dead by now and the hazard lights were off.

The only unusual thing about the Honda Accord was the one flat tire. Nothing was disordered inside. Denise's thigh-high stockings were wotted up in the passenger seat, but that was normal. Tammy knew she often took them off at the end of the night because it was more comfortable to drive without them. The doors weren't locked. The keys were missing from the ignition, and Denise's purse was also gone. The police didn't find much more at the scene.

There was a black trail on the freeway from where the tire had blown. A canine unit followed a scent about 75 yards farther along the shoulder than the scent stopped. Beside the freeway, the land dropped down in a grassy slope. On the other side of a chain link fence at the bottom was Bear Street. Officers combed the area in the darkness in case an injured and confused Denise had stumbled down there. They found nothing. Eventually, Denise's Honda was towed to the police storage yard. They still had no idea what had happened to her.

A delivery driver for the Los Angeles Times came forward and said she'd been going to work early in the morning and had passed Denise's car on the shoulder at about 2.30 a.m. The hazard lights had been blinking, and there had been no sign at all of Denise or anyone else. She'd left Rob Calvert's place by two. By 2.30, she was gone. Her tire must have blown only about 10 minutes before the delivery driver went past. Whatever had happened to her happened quickly. And that seemed to be that.

There was a huge effort to find Denise. A banner went up on an apartment complex on Bear Street with a picture of her and text reading, Have you seen Denise Huber? Her story ran on America's Most Wanted, an inside edition. The Huber's printed endless flyers and bumper stickers and spent a fortune on private investigators. We've seen plenty of cases broken open by hardworking ethical PIs, but the Hupers weren't that lucky. Every guy they hired just strung them along on weird unsubstantiated theories. Oh, my God.

Like, one guy claimed Denise had been abducted by an Asian human trafficking gang, which meant he spent a lot of time getting hammered in high-end bars while trying to schmooze with Japanese businessmen, all on the Hupers dime. What a freaking prick. Denise's disappearance was a nightmare for everyone. who cared about her, a nightmare that had a specific edge for Stephen Horrocks and Rob Calvert, the boyfriend and the friend with a crush. Violent crimes and abductions are much more likely to involve someone close to the victim rather than a stranger, and I'm sure some of you have been thinking suspicious thoughts about

Stephen and Rob. You wouldn't be alone in that. Both guys were aware of the side-eye glances and conversations behind their backs, people thinking they must be involved. But they were totally cooperative with the police, and it didn't take long for the investigators. to eliminate them as suspects. Three years passed, and no one was any closer to find Denise. Everyone knew that the longer she was missing, the less likely it was that she'd be found alive. Elaine Canalia and Jack Court were a Phoenix couple

who'd gone into business with their own paint manufacturing company. In May 1994, they were buying and selling at an open-air market near Prescott and met a tall, lanky, bearded guy who was selling stacked cans of paint. He said he'd been a small, painting contractor in California and had recently moved to Arizona. Business had been slow, so he was selling off some of his surplus paint. He seemed like a nice enough dude. They met him again a couple months later and agreed to buy a big load of colorant from him that he kept at his house. They followed his white van to a subdivision of new high dollar homes attached to the Prescott Country Club.

It was very much an Arizona suburb. Walk a couple hundred yards one way and you'd be on the artificially green expanse of the country club golf course, walk the same distance in the opposite direction, and you'd literally be in the desert. The guy's house was nice enough, but right away, Elaine and Jack started to get a kind of hinky feeling. In addition to his van and a pickup, the guy had a rented yellow rider truck parked in his driveway.

It was partially covered by a tarp and looked like it had been sitting there a while. Now, why would someone who has a van and pickup of their own rent a truck and just leave it sitting there for maybe weeks or months. Unlabeled paint cans sat around the truck and hundreds more of them were in the backyard. An extension cable ran out of the back of the rider truck, apparently going over the fence to the house next door. Both Jack and Elaine noticed the rider truck had a Massachusetts license plate. After they bought the color in and loaded it onto their pickup, Jack whispered,

I'll bet the doggone thing is stolen. Before they left, Elaine's surreptitiously wrote down the truck's license number, as well as the company's serial number printed above the cab. Elaine, y'all is a camper at heart. You go, Elaine. Damn Skippy. I love it. They had a cop friend, so they passed on the numbers to him. He called Ryder, but they said they had no record of that vehicle being stolen. He asked them to double check and call him back, and within an hour they did. Someone at Ryder had screwed up and never bothered to contact the police, but that truck had been missing for six months from Orange County, California.

The cop passed on the info to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, and early on the morning of July 13th, they sent a deputy out to take a look. He found the rider truck easily enough, but now it had a different license plate, from Maine, not Massachusetts. The rider's serial number was the same, though. Somebody had switched the plates. That is obviously going to get a cop's antenna twitching, and as the deputy looked at the mess of paint cans around the truck and the electrical cable running out the back of it, he suddenly wondered if he'd stumbled onto a mobile meth lab. That's probably exactly what I would have thought, too. He called in the local narcotics team. The narcs got there just after 1 p.m. No one answered the door of the house.

Any further investigations there would require a warrant, but the truck was stolen and thus was fair game. The cops got a locksmith to open the vehicle's back door. In the dim interior were more stacked paint cans and close to the door a large rectangular chest freezer. This was what the extension cable connected to. The freezer was on and humming. The freezer had a lock on it and was further sealed with thick stripes of duct tape. The locksmith undid the lock, then one of the narcotics officers, Detective Mike Garcia, cut through the duct tape. His job involved lots of chemicals. He had on a white apron, a gauze, a gauze, his mask and rubber gloves. He lifted up the lid of the freezer and a sick, overwhelming smell

came rushing out. Every cop there knew what it was. It was the smell of death. Frost covered the walls of the freezer. On the bottom was some large object completely covered in black plastic garbage bags. Reaching in, Garcia carefully felt the top section of the plastic. Feels like a human an arm, he called out. It was also frozen solid. He carefully closed the freezer while someone contacted the homicide team. Wearing protective gear, the homicide investigators carefully cut away the black plastic. As they pulled back the third layer, they saw a naked human shoulder, pale and frozen. Soon they revealed a pair of hands, handcuffed together in the small of the body's back. It was soon clear what they had found. The naked body of a young woman curled into a fetal

position. They couldn't see her face because her head was covered by separate white plastic bags, bent down so far against her chest that one detective initially thought she'd been decapitated. The body had started decomposing before it had been frozen and was in a much more cramped pose than was necessary in the big freezer. The detectives thought she'd been temporarily stored after death in a much smaller space, maybe a refrigerator, before being transferred to the freezer. They closed the lid, figuring the best way to preserve the body would be to take the whole freezer to the medical examiners and let them extract the body.

It didn't take long to get a search warrant for the home. Inside, investigators found sparse furniture separated by stacks of boxes, paint cans, newspapers, and magazines. There were full bookcases all through the house, which included a fairly extensive true-crime library, books on Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Now, obviously, context matters here, because I also have books on Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. So do a lot of you listening, I suspect, but I don't have a dead girl in a freezer sitting in my driveway. Most people are not reading those books as how-to manuals. Of particular significance were two cardboard boxes, both with Christmas written on them.

In one box was an empty handcuff box, duct tape, a bloodstained tarp, and a pair of handcuffs with keys, various ID documents, all with women's names, and a heavy pry bar, also bloodstained. In the second box was a bloody knapsack and a claw hammer, again, with likely bloodstains. A pair of men's jeans and a sweatshirt with Lake Wobigone written on it appeared to have blood spatter on them. A black plastic bag held a black dress, shoes, and jewelry, along with a purse. The driver's license in the purse had the name Denise Huber. The investigators also found videotapes. An obsessive amount of them featured actress Suzanne Summers,

who at the time was most famous for her thigh master infomercials. Summers and Denise Hubert didn't really look much alike, but they were both athletic and had megawatt smiles. Maybe that was enough. The tape that really got the investigators' attention was an episode of Inside Edition taped off the TV. This tape was kept separate from the others. It was the episode about Denise's disappearance and showed her parents crying in grief.

The investigators were not surprised to find a whole stack of hardcore bondage pornography. In amongst the newspapers, they found a collection of articles about murder and especially sexual murder. As well as Bundy and the rest, there were articles on the Ken and Barbie killers, Charles Manson and Henry Lee Lucas. There was also an extensive collection of articles about the disappearance of Denise Huber. Fingerprints taken from the body confirmed that it was Denise. After three long years, she'd finally been found and she was dead. The resident of the house and the owner of the freezer was, of course, immediately arrested. He was a tall, skinny man with a bushy black beard.

He'd probably groaned to disguise a near total lack of chin and jawline. His name was John Joseph Famolaro. John Famolaro was born in 1957, online eyes, island. But while he was still a baby, his family moved all the way across the country to Santa Anna in Orange County, California. His dad, Angelo was a successful dealer in storm windows and aluminum siding and built a big six-bedroom house on Victoria Drive. He maybe took his new county's name a tad too literally, as he pissed off his rich neighbors by painting the new house a bright pumpkin orange. Good God, if we needed any evidence for why John turned out the way you did.

Angelo and his wife Anna had three kids, George, Francine, and their youngest John. George was an outgoing, expressive kid taking after his mom. Francine was the opposite, a quiet girl who wanted to avoid attention and spent a lot of time in her room. John was hyperactive and had trouble concentrating on anything for long. He was a weak, spindly little boy, always getting sick, and was often bullied at school. The other kids, with the usual subtlety of youth, called him femillaro. You don't have to be witty to be cruel, you know. Their mom, Anna, had her own difficulties with concentration.

George got good grades and was on the debate team and performed piano recitals, and Anna poured most of her attention onto him. There wasn't much left for the other two children, and Francine, just three years older than John, was forced to do a lot of the caregiving work for her younger brother. She'd get in fights with his bullies, a couple of times literally throwing them out of the school bus when it stopped. Bless her heart. When John got in trouble at home, Anna would usually just shut him in his room so she wouldn't have to deal with him or tell Francine to take care of him. Take him for a walk. Go ride your big wheels, something. Get him out of here.

At the end of the week, John would go over to see his grandmother who had an apartment nearby and stay there all weekend. They'd make Jello, watch TV, and go for walks in the park. which, you know, is kind of sweet, but don't you want to, like, go swing on a rope, jump in a creek, maybe play with another human child? John, anyway, came back to his family on Sunday nights, obviously sad to leave his grandma. Their dad, Angelo, was a patient, passive brick of a man. Mama Anna was temperamental, unpredictable, and, frankly, kind of nuts, as we are going to see. Right in front of the kids, she'd verbally abuse Angelo, who just sits.

there and take it. Later, Francine recalled, one night I remember my older brother and I sitting up in Father's Den and asking, why, why do you take this? And he went into the whole Italian Catholic thing that this is what you do. The kids simultaneously felt sorry for their dad and resented him because he didn't stick up for them anymore than he stuck up for himself. Anna tried to exert a smothering control over her kids' lives, which included what they were taught at their parochial. school. The nuns and priests got used to her showing up and telling them how to run their classes, especially with regards to discipline and morality. No other parents did this because nuns are freaking terrifying. I know, okay? I used to teach at a Catholic school and even I was scared of them.

I would not try to tell these people how to do their jobs if you put a gun to my head and told me to do it. Hey, oh no, there's a reason why nuns show up in horror movies all the time. They're just scary. Even worse, the kids weren't allowed to have sleepovers. Anna even frowned upon inviting friends over for a quick little visit. Fun. Great childhood, Mom. Also, for some reason, Anna decided that the children weren't ever allowed to whisper to each other. No secrets were allowed. To make sure the rule was followed, whenever the family drove anywhere,

one kid had to sit up front and mom sat in the back between the other two. If any of the kids got on Anna's bad side, she'd just freeze them out, wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't even look at them sometimes for days. That's so cruel, God. The kids didn't actually want to bring friends back home because they were embarrassed. Their mom collected every piece of printed material that came into the house, every newspaper, every magazine, every flyer. There were massive unsteady stacks in every room. The laundry was in piles four feet high. Anna's hoarding wasn't new. The garage was crammed with boxes full of crap

they'd carried with them across the country from Long Island. The house might have been chaotic, but Anna insisted on rigidly ordered lives for her children. They had their specific seats at the dining table and no deviation was allowed. When they watched TV, the kids had to sit on three stools, all in a line in their designated positions,

Francine in the middle, because the boys got too rowdy together, with mom carefully watching the school. screen in case anything too sexy came on. Sex to Anna was the great Satan, the cause of the country's moral decay and something she had to shield her children from with fanatical zeal. If a show or commercial showed anything more intense than handholding, or God forbid some cleavage or short skirts, Anna would leap over and wrap her arms around the kids' heads, shielding their eyes so they wouldn't be corrupted, or she'd just bark at them to put their heads down and close their eyes. Like,

you seriously imagine living like that? Unbelievable. And how it would screw you up about sex? This only got worse when Anna had been having what the kids called her, juice. This was booze, obviously. Because what a personality like

Anna's really needed was to get hammered on a nightly basis. Let's pour lots of alcohol on this and see what happens. A little bit of a content warning for the next 30 seconds or so. There's going to be a discussion of child sexual abuse. At least unconsciously, there was probably a whole lot of guilt woven in with Anna Falmilaro's crusade against sex because she had some uncomfortable urges of her own.

We've all heard that cleanliness is next to godliness, and Anna's interpretation of this was that her children would be bathed once a week on Sundays, as in she bathed them for way longer than was appropriate right up to the edge of puberty. Oh, my God. With the two boys, she would be especially thorough when she was cleaning their genitals, during which George remembered her getting a weird look in her eyes and breathing more quickly. Yikes. Oh, my God, that's disturbing.

George hit adolescence first and quickly fell from grace as Anna's golden boy. He'd previously told her he wanted to be a priest just to please her, but now he gave up on that idea and instead pursued the most popular career of teenage boys. whacking off as much as he possibly could. His mom caught him once and was predictably outraged. The boys were ordered to sleep with their hands above their covers. And at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, Anna would lurk outside George's bedroom door, listening.

And if she thought she heard anything suspicious, she'd fling the door open and burst in yelling. What the, oh my God, Jesus, Murphy. Yikes. So George got himself a hobby. At night, he'd sneak around going through neighbors' trash cans looking for playboys they'd thrown out. When he found one, he'd take it to the stash he kept in an abandoned house down the block. He went there every chance he got to, you know, read the articles.

Poor kid. Anna shifted her hopes onto John, although not in any way that required much effort from her. She just shipped him off to a Catholic boarding school and hoped he'd decide to become a priest. This probably won't surprise anyone old enough to have grown up with landline phones, but Anna listened in on every conversation her kids had, especially once George started dating, which drove her nuts. She was sure he was doing devilish and moral things. One time, she hid in the back of the car when he took a date out,

just waiting for the young couple to get up to something dirty so she could bolt up right and scare the shit out of them. But they didn't do anything. And although she never admit to it, it was kind of obvious when Anna told this story that she was secretly disappointed. Oh my God. After high school, George got as far away as he could, going to chiropractic school in Iowa, where he soon started dating a young woman named Velma Finch.

Velma got more than she bargained for. Soon, George's mother kept calling her in the middle of the night, yelling at her to break things off with her son, calling her his paramour. Yeah, that word usually means a fair partner. Who exactly was George supposed to be cheating on, Anna? You absolute freaking gargoyle, guh. A couple of years into George and Velma's relationship, Anna promised George she'd provide financial backing for his new career,

but only if he moved back to Southern California and ditched Velma. At first he resisted, but Velma talked him into it. She'd stay in Iowa and come visit him in secret. One time, she came down to stay for two weeks, and George set her up in a motel not far from his home. Near the end of her visit, she and George went out on a double date with George's new business partner and his wife. Afterwards, Velma and George went back to the motel for a little while. Then George left.

A half hour later, there was a knock on the door of the motel room. A muffled female voice identified herself as the wife of George's business partner. She sounded upset and said, quick, let me in. Someone's after me. Velma was already in her nightgown and had been in bed. She was sleepy and confused. She opened the door a crack and was thrown back as it slammed open. Anna Familaro stood there with laser beams

shooting out of her eyes. She was furious. She started yelling at Velma, you love to fuck my son. You love to suck my son. What is wrong with you? My God. She started slapping Velma across the face

and yelling that she wasn't going to have her son. She was going to die tonight. If Velma tried to leave the room, Anna had already paid someone across the street to shoot her. Velma, completely panicked, promised she'd get on a plane back to Iowa that same night and never contact George again. She remembered exactly what Anna said next because it sounded so ridiculous, like a line from a cheap detective story. No, it's too late for you. You're going out tonight, sister. There's nothing you can do at this. You're going to die tonight. Good Lord. And George's mom lunged at her. Got on top of her and started.

started choking her. Just as the room started getting hazy, Velma managed to curl up her knees and push Anna off her with her legs. She ran for the door. Anna snatched at her nightgown, but lost her grip. The family that ran the motel were watching TV in the lobby office when Velma ran in. She yelled, someone's trying to kill me, call the police. The motel manager was baffled. No, your mother was here, he said. She wanted to know what room you were in. Your mom was here to visit you. Oh, my God. Velma finally got him to understand what was happening, and he called the cops. Velma called George at his house, and he and his dad hurried over.

Anna, meanwhile, was just outside the office door, pacing maniacally back and forth. Velma wanted to press charges, but a week or so later, George talked her out of it. George, my guy, what the fuck? I know. Their relationship limped on for a couple more years before Velma called it quits and put the whole Familaro family in the rearview mirror. Good for her. I can't believe she didn't do it that night.

That is bonkers. She must have really love George. Good Lord. For decades afterwards, she would only ever get unlisted phone numbers so that George's crazy mom wouldn't be able to find her. Her mother's conservative demands predictably fell a lot more heavily on Francine than on either of her sons. Francine wasn't allowed to go to parties, and she certainly wasn't allowed to date.

Until she left home, every stitch of clothing she owned was bought for her by her mom. Kids at her school remembered a tall, quiet girl who always wore skirts that reached practically down to her ankles. For Francine, of course, this got real old, real fast. She wanted to go to parties, she wanted to date, she wanted to have control of her own life. So as the end of high school neared, she decided to follow in her big brother's footsteps and go to college in Iowa. George was still out there at this point, so Francine wouldn't just be heading out into the great unknown alone. And when she was getting ready to make the move, her mom came to her with some great news. She was going to come out to Iowa with her.

They would be roomies. Doesn't that sound like fun? I'm going to assume that most of y'all do not have a mother quite as nuts as enafamilaro, but even so, would you want her as a roommate your first year of college? You want to take mom with you? Really? Francine was not quite ready to tell her mom to, you know, go fuck herself, but it wouldn't take long, and Anna skulked back to Orange County with her little beepies hurt. Aw. Should be in a freaking asylum somewhere, this woman.

John, meanwhile, learned some social skills at boarding school. He was a smart, funny, kind of hyper kid. In college, he started dating a girl, Helen Lyons, and became completely obsessed with her. It was like his brain only had one available slot for romantic partner, and once it was filled, there was no room for anybody else. Helen, his first girlfriend, would be the one he pined for forever. Like any young man away from home for the first time, John enjoyed his freedom and had lots of fun with his new roommate.

His new roommate was his grandmother, who John asked him. move in with them as soon as he had his own plays. The arrangement had to be secret from Anna, who apparently wouldn't like her mother and her son being so chummy. Good Lord. Anyway, there were no jello shots for John the freshman, just regular jello. Again, it's kind of sweet, but also kind of weird. Anna Fomalara was, of course, the worst kind of interfering busybody. An eight-year-old girl was once walking her dog on Victoria Drive, and the dog peed on a sidewalk down the street from the Fomilaro house. Anna came charging out and yelled at the girl till she got a bucket of water and

washed away the pee. When their backwards neighbors built an addition to their home with a big bay window, Anna delayed the project by months by complaining to the authorities that the neighbors were just building the addition so they could spy on the Fomilaros. She planted trees to block the view. the neighbors built a little backyard playhouse for their kids, and if she heard them in there, Anna always made sure to spray them with water while she was watering her trees. Not content with making life miserable for everyone in her neighborhood, Anna had ambitions of making life miserable for her whole city.

She had long been a member of the Republican Women's Club of Santa Ana and declared she was going to run for city council. She'll be a natural. Honestly, this woman belongs on, like an HOA. Like this true calling. Queen of the HOA thing.

I could just see her in a little golf cart driving around, writing citations. Absolutely. George, meanwhile, had married and established a career as a chiropractor. In 1980, two of his underage patients, a boy and a girl accused him of molesting them. He was found guilty

and after psychiatric testimony, committed to a state mental hospital where he would stay for several years. This was a very dark cloud, but if there was a silver lining for the people of Orange County, it put the kibosh on any political ambitions of Anna Familaro. It'd be nice to think an impulsive, gullible lunatic wouldn't have any political success anyway, but you never know. Uh, yeah.

After a few years, Helen moved to Missouri to go to school. She and John wrote each other every day, but it was impossible for him not to notice her letters became progressively, shorter and less enthusiastic. Eventually, she broke up with him and started dating someone else. John was devastated and fell into a depression, but this bad news for John was good news for us, because it meant he started keeping a dramatic, self-pity-filled journal of his feelings for Helen.

And God bless Don Lasseter, whose book Cold Storage was one of our sources for this episode for collecting excerpts for us. Amen. I offer myself to her as an empty vessel to be filled with love in a lifetime of happiness together, he wrote. Anyone out there want to date an empty vessel? I mean, it sounds like she's doing all the work. Yeah, no thank you.

Despite the fact that this was, you know, a journal, something only he was going to read, John built up a fantasy version of himself. Life is so ironic, he wrote. I'm always getting attacked by beautiful, intelligent, witty, talented, sensuous ladies. I'm pursued constantly. If I went with the flow, they would have been the, successful in marrying me off about 17 times now. Hmm, why don't I believe you, John?

On his education, John wrote, As it stands now, I'll ultimately have two bachelor's degrees, probably one in human biology and one in anatomy, a master's degree in clinical nutrition, and a PhD in clinical nutrition. Not to mention, of course, my extensive kung fu training going through the police academy and my real estate certification. extensive kung fu training shot the fuck up nerd my favorite sorry go ahead i just love the the addendum of the real estate

certification like that no it doesn't really fit does it creme de la crem yeah the kung fu realtor that would be his gimmick he do little ads you know kung fu realtor my favorite time of all naturally is the wonderful time i have spent getting my doctor of chiropractic, let's fun. I may be overqualified for most jobs. Well, I could always go back to being a waiter. That was kind of a modified Dyson call. That's just the voice I hear it in.

I don't know. These were all career ideas he'd briefly pursued before changing his mind and giving up on them completely. He wasn't actually qualified for any of them, let alone overqualified. Well, except being a waiter. He had apparently been good at that.

He'd eventually settle into a moderately successful career building a painting company. In another entry, John described a walk he had taken in the woods, having a nice time looking at flowers and butterflies, when all of a sudden, there was a shrill, almost demonic wailing scream only a few feet from me. He'd been unlucky enough to stumble on nature's most fearsome and deadly predator, a raccoon. Now, I'm not saying that it would be fun to have a wildest, raccoon yelling at you. They can make some weird noises. Most of them are cute in my opinion, but still, it is one single raccoon. And John

wrote it was a female, which means it was one small raccoon. John was so terrified that he climbed up the nearest tree. Suddenly aware that he might need to defend himself against all sorts of fearsome creatures, chipmunks, groundhogs, maybe even

a possum. John snapped off a branch to use as a weapon. See, that's the Kung Fu train and kicking in. I there. Ah, that was more like it, he wrote. Now I've got those creepy critters on my turf, a kung kung fu staff. My god, what a dweep. My dude, you just got treed by a raccoon. Raccoons are really good at climate trees, by the way. Freaking turn up. Like, that raccoon could have shimmied up there, no problem if it wanted to. He's up there, like, ready to go. Oh, my God. John would in fact be reunited with Helen, a relationship that lasted just a few months until she found out she was pregnant.

Helen told John that she was going to have the child and put it up for adoption, but that she wasn't going to stay with John through the process. And that was it. She left and was gone from his life, this time forever. John spent all the money he had on trying to find her, but he never managed to do it. And I don't think any of the people who've reported on this case have tracked her down either, which is a damn shame because sometime during the decade or so since Catholic school, John Famolaro had developed a deep and abiding interest in bondage and sexualized murders, and Helen might have been able to tell us about that. Not long after Helen left, John started dating another woman, Darlene Miller.

They'd been friends for a few years, and John kept asking her out until eventually, after she broke up with her fiancé, she agreed. Classic love bombing ensued. flowers, fancy restaurants, expensive gifts. Despite his own description of his dating life, John did not in fact have endless sensuous beauties throwing themselves at him like he was James Bond. Shocking, I know.

But for a kind of funny-looking dude, he did punch above his weight class romantically, mainly by using his tried and tested technique, going after women who'd just broken up with someone and making them feel special. That's what predators do. They go after the most vulnerable ones in the herd. Darlene noticed some odd things about John.

One room in his apartment was kept locked at all times. She did get a peek in once and saw rows of file cabinets and boxes on shelves. From later in John's life, we can be pretty confident they were full of porn, bondage gear, and newspaper articles about murder. When John answered the phone when Darlene was over, he'd whisper into the receiver all furtively and then take the phone into the bedroom and close the door. Darlene loved the theater, so for her birthday in 1987, John flew her to New York to see Le Miz and a couple of other Broadway shows, staying at a fancy hotel off Times Square. They saw two of the shows and were having a great time. And one morning they woke up and John started playfully tickling Darlene. She thought this was the kind of foreplay, but then it started to get rough and Darlene tried to get out of the bed.

John pushed her close to the window and quickly handcuffed her to a bar that ran across it. Darlene laughed nervously. John tore off her nightgown, threw the curtains wide open, and left the room, laughing. Darlene was cuffed naked in front of the big window over a busy New York street where anyone down there or in the building's opposite could see her. Oh, my God. She struggled, but couldn't free herself. And although she yelled and stomped her feet, no one came.

John left her there for hours. The last of the Broadway show started. John finally came back, and when he saw her still bound to the window, he started laughing. He undid the cuffs, and Darlene curled up on the bed. John still giggling to himself, started kissing her neck and fondling her. He was horny. This creepy shit had turned him on. When Darlene didn't respond, John finally stopped giggling and tried to help her calm down.

Later, Darlene said, I felt that I needed to play along with this situation. The only thing I could think of was getting back to California. So she played along, and as soon as they were back in Orange County, she dumped his ass. And just as a finale to Darlene's part in the story, when Allis eventually came up in trial, the defense attorney showed a polaroid John had taken of him and Darlane together, with her in handcuffs and very clearly enjoying herself. At least one dumbass on the jury said that this made him doubt her

testimony about the hotel incident, which makes zero sense to me at all. Even the most vanilla of sexual acts is fun if you consent to it and terrifying if you don't. How is this a hard concept for people? That is just bizarre. It's like, oh, well, you like the vanilla ice cream when it was in a cone, but you hated it when it was dropped on the ground. What the fuck? Right. What do you mean?

The next year, John started dating another woman, Kate Colby, and things got serious pretty fast. Within a few months, they were talking about marriage. One time in 1989, she was visiting him at his new house and they started making out in his bedroom. Kate had somewhere she needed to be, so she got up, but John pushed her back onto the bed. As she fell, she hit her head on a bookcase beside the bed and felt briefly dazed. John leapt on her and pinned her down. She struggled as John tried to force her legs apart. Then as he pinned her arms down with his knees, he can cuffed her wrists. He pulled off her shorts and undid his own jeans.

Kate said, go ahead and do this, but when I report it to the police, it will be considered date rape. That seemed to break the spell. John was suddenly all kindness and courtesy, undoing the cuffs and saying it was all a misunderstanding. Then, as Kate was leaving, he switched again, yelling at her that she was a bitch who just didn't understand mature sex games. Wow. And then, in 1991, John Fomilaro, Murrow, murdered Denise Huber. He's kept his mouth shut so we don't know exactly how it happened, but we can be reasonably sure he was cruising the freeways at night with handcuffs and

weapons in his vehicle, and we know how killers like John usually work. They fantasize about their crimes long before they actually commit them, again and again until the darkness occupies most of their mind. They might come close to killing several times before they actually do it. How many nights had John Familaro spent cruising through the night his mind full of bloody static. How many women had he slowed his car down beside, almost ready to grab them before some little things spooked him off? And then on June 3rd, there was Denise, a beautiful young woman stranded and alone in the night by the side of the road. John pulled over and let the darkness take both of them. The medical examiner received Denise's naked, handcuffed body still in the

freezer, with black garbage bags covering her and separate white plastic bags covering her head. The head was the only part of her that was injured, but the injuries were terrible. With her family's consent, the examiner cleaned her skull and sent all the pieces to a forensic anthropologist to piece together. They determined she'd been struck at least 31 times, once with a round-headed object. The other times was something flatter and hard-edged. In the boxes where investigators found Denise's clothes and purse remember, they'd also found a hammer and a pry bar, both with possible bloodstains. John had covered her head with the white plastic bags before most of the blows. She'd been hit with such force that hair and plastic from the bags had been driven into the bones of her skull and face.

The medical examiner found evidence of semen in Denise's anus. I'm sorry, that's so awful. but this was significant because sodomy, along with kidnapping, was among the special circumstances that could remove any possibility of parole under California law. With the technology of the time, and after the effects of freezing and thawing, there was some question about the evidence, and DNA couldn't be extracted. I suspect it could be now, but this was, you know, way back when. But John Familaro had been unable to throw away his own clothes that he'd worn on the night of the murder,

a pair of jeans and a Lake Wobagon sweatshirt. Those were spattered with blood, and that blood was a match to Denise. Not the perfect match you might get with modern DNA technology, but enough to say it would only match one in a hundred people. Denise was in that group, and John Femilaro was not. For most people, those odds would be good enough to be damning. Denise's nine West pumps had lost one heel cap and showed heavy damage, as might be accrued from being dragged across Asphemy.

fault. Her dad chose to believe that John had stopped by the side of the road and approached Denise under the pretense of offering help, and when her back was turned, struck her head once with the hammer, incapacitating her and then dragging her back to his vehicle. Very Bundy-like, isn't it? In this version of events, Denise never regained consciousness throughout what happened next. I think every parent would like to think that their child didn't suffer, but this wasn't just wishful thinking. Denise had no defensive wounds, and most importantly, there was no bruising or abrasions around the handcuffs, which had been really tightly clamped around her wrists. Even if she'd been terrified into compliance, it seems really unlikely she could go through

an awful assault without pulling against those handcuffs. So I agree. I think she was probably unconscious for the whole thing. Investigators crawled all over John's house on Cochee's Drive, and also the one next door. You might remember that an extension cord ran from John's truck over the fence and into that house, and that was because his mom and dad lived there. The house John lived in had actually belonged to his sister Francine. I don't actually know if this is how things shook down, but I have a horrible suspicion that Francine and her family bought the place,

and afterwards, Mom and Dad announced they were moving in right next door. There's no escape, Francine. Well, actually, there was. Francine and her husband got divorced, and she was the one who moved out of the house next door to her parents. John, who for some reason wanted to get out of California, all of a sudden, moved in with his former brother-in-law. Anna Famolaro sat on her porch, glaring at the investigators going through her son's things in the house next door. She had no doubt about who the real victim was here.

I see them over there, leaking information to reporters all the time, she said. They're trying to build a case anyway they can't. Maybe it's because I've been involved in politics. You know all the suffering Jesus went through. That's happening to me now. Anna, babe, get help, you absolute nightmare of a human creature. After his arrest, John hired a respected defense attorney, Lawrence Katz, but his mom was the one paying the bills,

and she fired Katz and hired a new attorney, Thomas Kelly. Katz had no doubt about what was going on. Mama once a Catholic, he said, no Jews allowed. Oh my God. Those quotes, by the way, come from Don Lassiter's book. John's painting business had rented

a warehouse in California. When he'd moved out, one of his employees had tried to use a hose to wash off a bunch of paint spills on the concrete floor. Paint, of course, did not come off easily. You couldn't just wash them out with a hose. But when detectives talked to the guy, they asked if there had been any stains that had washed

away under the water pressure. The guy said, oh yeah, right over there, there was a big brown spot. He took them to a corner of the warehouse. There was no visible staining now, but a luminal test showed blood. A lot of blood. John Familaro had brought Denise to his warehouse, where he'd stripped her, handcuffed her, raped her, and beat her to death if she wasn't dead already.

God, bless her sweetheart. Fucking monster. At trial, there was no real question that John Famolaro would be found guilty. The real arguments were about the special circumstances. of kidnapping and sodomy, which would affect John's chances of receiving the death penalty or being eligible for parole. The defense made a long-shot argument that Denise might have willingly gotten into John's vehicle because she was impaired by alcohol.

Based on her weight and reports on how much she'd had to drink that night, it was estimated that Denise's blood alcohol limit was right around the legal limit for driving. That limit was there for good reason, because it's where your reflexes and coordination start to suffer, but it's not going to radically affect your judgment. It's not, for example, going to make a sensible young woman get in a car with some wormy little creep she didn't know. Right. There was some back-and-forth expert testimony on whether there had actually been semen in Denise's

body, with the prosecution witnesses being more convincing. But there was some question as to whether the rape had happened post-mortem, which would still be a crime, but not meet the strict legal definition of sodomy. God Almighty. The prosecution argued that John would have no reason to handcuff Denise if she was dead, which I really don't know about, there is a difference between modus operandi and signature. Emma includes the practical actions a killer takes to commit their crime, whereas signature includes the things a killer does to satisfy a psychological need. Right, and we know John had a handcuff kink,

and it's easy to believe that putting her in handcuffs was fundamental to his attack on Denise, a significant part of his fantasy. Whether she was alive or dead at the time wouldn't necessarily affect how important this was to him. Unsurprisingly, John Familara was found guilty, and the jury found that the special circumstances applied. He was sentenced to death with no possibility of parole. He's still on death row, although it's currently still up in the air whether California will ever resume executing prisoners. Regardless, he's never going to be released. His dad died in 2009 and his crazy mother three years later. John certainly had the makeup of a serial killer and a lot of

ways, but he probably wasn't one. Police found a lot of women's IDs at his house, but they were able to track them all down, all alive and well. Most had only the most tenuous connection to John, but he'd stolen their driver's license and ID cards. Super creepy, but not murderous. And John's hoarder instinct led him to the most extreme case of a killer keeping a trophy, keeping his victim's whole body and everything she'd had with her. So I think if he'd killed anybody else, he would have kept evidence of it. That said, some killers run on a slow burn, letting years pass before they kill again.

He was caught three years after Denise's death. If he hadn't been, there's every chance the compulsion would once again have become too strong to ignore. I think it's very possible that they got this guy right on the cusp of a long, dark career. 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 as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Becca Lynn, Phoebe, Scarlet O, Christina, and Miss World. 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, plus tons of extra content,

like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rat enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire. The cop passed on the info to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, and early on the morning of July 13th, Deputy Joe Diacompe, DJ, blem, deputy joe de jacombe that's a fun one de giacomo deputy joe de jacomo okay de jacomo okay deputy do

deputy dog it was deputy dog okay it was mcruff the crime fighting dog i was just glad both mentions of his name were in your section because i was like i'm gonna try They don't usually flummox me this way, but... Diacomo? Di Giacoma, I don't know. I'm going to piss off the Italians. God damn it. Why did you have to have such an Italian name, Deputy Joe?

You motherfucker. All right. Oh, yoy. Okay. The cop passed on the info to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, and early on the morning of July 13th, Deputy... Deputy Joe... We got our blooper for this episode.

Deputy dog. Deputy. Deputy. Now I'm just laughing because I know I'm going to fuck it out. No, I know. That's how I get. It could be Di Giacomo? I don't know.

De Giacomo. Di Giacomo. I don't know. Giacomo? Giacomo? Giacomo? Giacomo? Giacomo?

Jcommo? I don't know.