True Crime Campfire - Love Bomb: The Murder of Marcus Toney, Pt. 1

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Identity. The core of who we are. For some of us, we’re connected to it from our earliest days onward. Our interests may change, but our core never does. For others, identity is more fluid. We may change because of the people we encounter, the things we experience, the lessons we learn. Some of us are never in any doubt about who we are. For others, it’s a lifelong journey to find out. But whichever category we fall into, identity is central to being. Unfortunately, some people never develop their own identity. For them, there is no core; there is no essential “I.” So they tend to be chameleons—whoever you want them to be. They may pick up and discard new identities as easily as some of us put on a new dress. This can make them very seductive…sometimes prone to seeing people as tools to help them get what they want…and sometimes, very dangerous. Sources:"Seduced" by Joy Bergmann. Chicago Reader, May 2002. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/seduced/Content?oid=908545Oxygen's "Snapped: Killer Couples," Episode "Sienky Lallemand and Lisa Toney"Investigation Discovery's "Wicked Attraction," Episode "Lust for Life"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] 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. Identity. The core of who we are. For some of us, we're connected to it from our earliest days onward. Our interests make. change, but our core never does. For others, identity is more fluid. We may change because of the people we encounter, the things we experience, the lessons we learn. Some of us are never in any doubt about who we are. For others, it's a lifelong journey to find out. But whichever category we fall into, identity is central to being. Unfortunately, some people never develop their own identity. For them, there is no core. There is no essential I. So they tend to be chameleons, who have you want them to be. They may pick up and discard new identities as easily as some of us put on a new

dress. This can make them very seductive, sometimes prone to seeing people as tools to help them get what they want, and sometimes very dangerous. This is Love Bomb, the murder of Marcus Tony. So campers, we're in Chicago, Illinois, my old city. February 15th, 2000, around 11 at night. Residents of a small suburb jolted awake to a huge boom that shook their walls and rattled their windows and set off their car alarms. What the hell was that? Well, it was an explosion. And when neighbors ran out into the streets to investigate the sound, they saw a scene straight out of a movie.

The home of one of their neighbors, Marcus Tony, was just a story. just wrecked. First responders arrived quickly to find two bodies at the scene. One was lying on the sidewalk outside. He was still alive, though covered in blood and in bad shape. The other, Marcus Tony, the owner of the house, was lying dead inside. The fire department quickly found the remnants of a pipe bomb in the wreckage, as well as a second intact bomb that it apparently failed to detonate. So one bomb did all that damage. Dang. Yeah, yikes. So of course they had to clear the scene immediately and bring in the bomb squad and take care of the undettonated bomb before the investigators could even work the crime scene. The bomb had killed Marcus Tony immediately. It

had clearly been inches away from him when it exploded. And this is gnarly. So just prepare yourself. It blew off his feet and one of his arms. And a piece of shrapnel had pierced his heart. Just absolutely awful way to die. Although it would probably be really fast. That would be the one tiny silver lining, but just a gruesome scene. It would turn out that the man that they'd found badly injured but still alive outside on the sidewalk was a friend of Marcus's who just happened to be visiting him that night. So talk about wrong place at the wrong time, right? The blast had sent the guy staggering out the front door, deafened from the noise and

confused and bleeding. Obviously, this poor guy was now being treated at a local hospital for his injuries and they didn't know if he was going to make it or if they were going to end up with a double murder or what? The investigators found pieces of a cardboard VCR box all over the scene and some scraps of bright color wrapping paper. Part of the box that had survived the blast still had a shipping label attached addressed to Marcus Tony. They figured they were dealing with a mail bomb here. Somebody had mailed this poor guy a bomb. What the hell? Who does this? Literally only someone with the charm of Ted Kaczynski. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what it must have evoked for everybody.

They couldn't determine where the box was from, but they did find Marcus's cell phone still intact at the scene. So, damn, early cell phones were indestructible, right? Oh, yeah. So, anywho, they contacted Mark's next of kin, who was his estranged wife, Lisa Tony, who seemed completely devastated when they told her that her husband had been killed. She said she had no idea who would want to hurt him. He didn't have any enemies. He was a stand-up guy. So who would want to kill Marcus, Tony, and why?

what was going on in his life at the time of his murder? Well, when they spoke to Marcus' devastated family, they got an earful. Apparently, this package had arrived eight days earlier. He'd opened the outside box to find that gift-wrapped box inside, and he'd peeled back just a little bit of the wrapping, just enough to see that it was a VCR box. And he initially thought maybe it was a present from his estranged wife, Lisa, who'd been coming around more lately,

hinting that she might be ready to talk about getting back together. They'd even had a few little romantic encounters, and she was doing his laundry, and, you know. But it wasn't her handwriting on the shipping label, and he didn't know the return address, which would later turn out to be a vacant lot. So he was suspicious of the package. He didn't think it was a bomb, obviously. I mean, if he had, he never would have opened it. But he did think that it might be part of a string of frauds that had been perpetrated on him over the past couple of months.

he was pretty sure somebody had stolen his identity for example when he had tried to set up phone service recently at his new house the company denied his application because of quote-unquote bad credit but marcus who worked as a custodian and flipped houses on the side had always had good credit he worked hard to keep it that way so it didn't make any sense and then on top of that he kept getting these weird collections calls like one asking why he'd missed a payment on his new leased lexas Well, Marcus didn't have a Lexus. He drove a Toyota four-runner.

And then he'd gotten a call from a credit card company. They'd become concerned, they said, about some of the charges that had recently been made on his cards, all in pretty quick succession, all for really expensive stuff. Now, this was news to Marcus. He hadn't even opened any new credit cards. But the company told him that several cards had been opened under his name with charges and cash withdrawals that added up to prepare yourself for this $300,000. which is just a staggering amount of money and I mean Marcus was not a wealthy guy

the charges were all for luxury items expensive jewelry, restaurants a flippin' whole ass Mercedes Benz and Alexis things like this of course are classic red flags for identity theft and the company told him so so Marcus thought maybe the identity thief had bought this VCR and either accidentally had it shipped to his address or worse maybe shipped a tomb on purpose

purpose, to mess with him. Kind of a, ha-ha, I'm stealing your money kind of thing, right? For like a ha-ha, I'm stealing from you, and all I got you was this lousy VCR, like a souvenir t-shirt. Or even worse than that, ha-ha, I know where you live. And Marcus was pretty freaked out, a little bit scared even. Why scared? Well, see, Marcus had some ideas about who might be responsible for the identity theft. His estranged wife Lisa had been driving around in brand-new luxury cars lately. While he was getting this string of insane bills for stuff he'd never bought, he couldn't think who else could be doing this. He'd even threatened to report her to her job. And it wasn't just Lisa that he'd been side-eyeing, according to Marcus's family. Lisa had a boyfriend,

or as she put it, a friend from Michigan. A friend. Marcus had figured this guy was probably ended up to his neck, but the thing was, he had no idea who this guy was. He didn't have a name. When the investigators questioned Lisa about this after the murder, she was coy. She just said, who was a cucumber? Oh, he wouldn't hurt Marcus. And then she refused to tell him his name. She said she didn't remember. She didn't remember her friend's name.

And she said that she hadn't seen him in months. Convincing. Even after they showed her crime scene photos of Marcus's body, she wouldn't give it up. She did throw up in a trash can, but she wouldn't tell him who her quote-unquote friend in Michigan was. Interesting. And the story got more interesting than that. Marcus had also been getting harassing voicemails. The caller never identified himself by name, but he said Marcus was being watched.

He said, quote, I know you like I know the palm of my hand. I've been in control of this situation for quite some time. Yeah, your wife let me in the house. And all your shit, you're not just dealing with the petty shit here. And you're not dealing with the conventional. So yeah, fuck Lisa, fuck you. Like I said, I could do you a big-ass favor. You want to make a deal or what have you?

Creepy, right? He also talked about the package. He said, why don't you open up your little gift and see what I sent you? So Marcus was beginning to feel hunted. After that last voicemail where he'd referenced the package, Marcus had taken the package to the police station and tried to turn it in as evidence of the fraud. But the cops weren't convinced there was enough evidence to prove it was related, and they told him they couldn't keep it. He should just return it to sender and contact the credit bureau.

Well, he'd already done that. With the help of his lawyer, he'd been trying to unravel the identity theft, and they were still in the process of that. So, with no help from the cops at that stage, Marcus just took the damn thing home. His family said he thought there might be something in there that he would need to prove what was going on, but he was worried about it. He thought, you know, maybe Lisa's boyfriend might have sent him like a second. tape to taunt him or something. He didn't want to see that. So he was hesitant to open it. Sadly, he'd apparently overcome that hesitation. So who was this guy leaving messages on Marcus's answering machine? It seems obvious who Marcus suspected Lisa's new man, but he didn't know the guy's

name. Lisa had done a good job of keeping that under her hat. Lisa and Marcus had been married since 1994, but they'd been living separately for a few months at the time of Marcus's murder. Lisa had asked Marcus to move out in November. Marcus wasn't surprised, according to his family, he'd seen it coming. He didn't know she was cheating on him yet, but he knew their marriage was suffering. It was a surprise to Marcus' family and to many of their friends. Marcus and Lisa's marriage, which was the second one for him, had always been kind of tumultuous, but they made up every bit as hard as they fought. Lisa had grown up in a close middle-class family.

Her parents put a high value on traditional 1950s-esque roles for wives and husbands. So in addition to her busy schedule and human resources at a big corporation, Lisa worked hard to be the perfect wife and a good stepmom to Marcus' nine-year-old. Her mom had taught her, be a good wife, put your man first. Take care of the home. And Lisa took all that to heart. She laid out Marx's clothes for him, cooked beautiful meals, kept the house nice. Funnily enough, the Stepford wife routine isn't always as deeply fulfilling as advertised.

And Lisa and Marx's relationship was up and down a lot. Lisa had developed some insecurities about her looks. I can't imagine why, because she's a pretty lady. And she looked a lot younger than she was. Well, I mean, okay, speaking as the elder here, the ancient oracle turning forward. 40 could mess with your head. I'm not going to lie. You'll find out probably. Although you probably won't because you're like supremely confident, but it's still messing with my head, okay? And it happened to me two years ago. And I look younger than I am too. But you start to see these little changes

and it hits you that there are like way bigger changes in the mail and like the not too distant future. And you just, I don't know, you start wgging out a little bit or at least I did. And apparently so did Lisa Tony. In 1998, when Lisa was 41, she was on a walk one afternoon when she saw a gorgeous 20-something guy playing with a little girl, his niece, it turned out, in the front yard of a house. The guy saw her looking and smiled, and she smiled back. And googly eyes were exchanged. And the rest was history. This guy was a 27-year-old six-foot-two Haitian American snack named Sienki Lalamand. At least, that's how he looked to Lisa. Now, see, this is interesting to me. You say you don't find

him attractive at all, right? Correct. Yeah. I remember texting you a picture of him from like 2001 right around when all this was happening when I first started researching this case and I was like, God dang, he is infuriatingly pretty because you know it irritates the piss out of me when like awful people get to be gorgeous. It's one of my pet peeves. It's like, no. And you were like, look at his dead eyes, Whitney. And I was like, oh, well, I wouldn't look in his eyes, Katie. But it raises an interesting point because for lots and lots of different reasons, some people are better at detecting red flags than others. And I realize I don't come out too good in this story, but you're usually very good. I think it was just, you weren't taken. I was noticing the abs, okay? I'm not going to

lie. And some people are more vulnerable to manipulation than others. And Lisa, because she was insecure about her looks and probably a little freaked out about turning 40, I think she just got dazzled by this built young guy who was making goo-go-go-eyes at her and flattering her ego. Yeah, I think that if you don't know what to look for, it's easy to miss the early warning signs. For Lisa, this was certainly the case. She saw a hot bod and was like, yes, please, I want to go to there. And missed an entire brunt of flags waving in her face.

Yeah. No, okay, back up. This isn't to say that reptile eyes are a dead giveaway one way or the other. But at the same time, you know, when a smile doesn't reach your eyes and you can't see anything but like blankness underneath, it's concerning. He's just gazing into the abyss. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and also I suspect she was probably chafing pretty hard against her role as the perfect wife, TM, and was looking for any excuse to jump ship at this point. And Sienke looked like a pretty good excuse.

So campers, let's talk about Sienke-Lalamond, or as we like to call him, Stinky. Stinky little man. Stinky was born in Haiti, the son of a famous Olympic athlete, a soccer player. A year after he was born, his family emigrated to the United States, Chicago, specifically. Early on in his life, it became clear that Stinky Sienke was a born manipulator. He could read people like a newspaper and reflect back to them whatever they wanted or needed to see in order to give Stinky what he wanted. women talked about his sexual prowess like okay we have our doubts yeah we do and about what a great listener he was oh he was listening all right he was paying careful attention to you so he could

figure out where the weak spots were where he could start cracking you open like a pinata you know to get the candy out to see yankee people especially women or pinatas yep and he felt very entitled to help himself to as much candy as he could grab. To give you an idea of what a massive narcissistic windbag this man is, one of our main sources for this case is a fantastic article by Chicago reader journalist Joy Bergman. Bergman struck up a correspondence with Sianke about this case in the early 2000s, and oh my fucking God! In her article, which is called seduced,

Bergman says Cianke's letters were full of literary references and quotes from Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, John Keats, T.S. Eliot, and others. Sometimes he'd send her poems in French or quotes in German. This dude is desperate to sound smarter than he actually is. My theory is, he used a ton of literary quotes in his letters because he's insecure about his own intellect. So why not let people whose brilliance is universally. recognize speak for him. Can't lose. I completely agree with this. Congratulations, Stinky. You have read books. You know what? I went to high school too, bro. His own writing from the samples I've seen is just ridiculously purple. He's almost as absurd a human being as Dyson Koff. He's just a lot

prettier. And, you know, no aliens. But other than that, we'll give you some quotes in a bit. but it's that like arch pretentious style that you hear a lot from the fedora wearing crowd or like that emotionally stunted philosophy major you dated your first year of college you know the one that smoked the clove cigarettes you know exactly who i'm talking about the word milady is hovering just right around the corner like he might not be saying it but it's there right it's in his heart it's the milady in his heart the milady is there yeah he writes like a guy that asks you if you've ever read Hemingway and when you tell him yes he explains him to you like you said no it's always Hemingway too or like Hunter S. Thompson it is or Charles

Bakowski he's the other one that's the trifecta Hemingway Thompson and Bakowski who are fine writers sure you know they're great I'm glad I read them in high school yeah read another book for the love of God and maybe let one of them be by a woman like just in your life at some point. In his early letters, he played what must have been an exhausting game of push, pull with her. First saying he had a good feeling about her, and she should feel privileged. Yeah, no, no, thank you. But then calling her questions boring and saying that maybe their correspondence wasn't meant to be.

Go away, no, come back. Push, push, push, pull. He quoted Oscar Wild, quote, there is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world does not understand things, end quote. But then he told her, the artful picture, capital A, by the way, will come in time. And I am interested in seeing your capabilities as a reporter and as a person of influence. If you prove yourself worthy, I might actually hire you when I leave this den of iniquity.

Yes, because we hire journalists. That's how that works. good God and bless Joy Bergman's heart she had the patience of a sphinx I definitely don't think I could have put up with one one hundredth of the pretentious twattery

that this asshole threw at her the guy thinks he's a criminal mastermind and he's sitting there in his prison jumpsuit calling this smart accomplished journalist Clarice I shit you not and telling her her questions are boring and that she has to prove herself worthy I'm sure that was real hard on her

oh no This incarcerated thief and murderer thinks I'm asking boring questions. How will I sleep nights? Fuck off, you sad hack, Clarice. God, I can see him sitting in his cell writing this letter and just being amused to no end at being so meta with the Clarice bullshit. It's like, you know what? You don't get to get caught like almost immediately and then act like your fucking Hannibal Lecter. No, the ego.

And by the way, this journalist, do you think you're manipulating scenes to have done a very neat job of getting you to spill your guts about your many crimes? So who's the winner here, kiddo? It's not fucking you. And by the way, Joy Bergman makes an appearance in an episode of Snap, Killer Couples. And Wicked Attraction, too. And she is wearing the best red lipstick I've ever seen. I know. I think she's really pretty, actually.

Yeah, Joy, if you're listening to this, I need the brand of the lipstick you're wearing because, holy shit, I want it. I think she's wearing the same color in the Wicked Attraction episode, actually. Yeah. And she's very well-spoken, and you can tell there's this, like, current of amusement in her voice when she talks about him. Like, she's as amused as we are with how he attempted to manipulate and seduce her through his prison letters. Yeah, the hunter has become the prey, stinky. Anywho, Sienke told Bergman that he considered what he did, his endless stream of, of con games, sweetheart swindles, and identity thefts, a game, capital G, and an art form,

capital A. Every time he refers to his art, it's always with a capital A, which is just gross. He told her, I simply tap into the emotions of an individual and seize control. Freaking Dennis Reynolds over here, for all you, it's always sunny in Philadelphia fans, right? He's a golden god in his own mind anyway. And I just got to be honest with you, I might not make it through this episode with Al I'm just going to be honest. I'm having to breathe through my nose and just remind myself, I can do this. It's just, this guy is so far up his own ass, he can't see daylight.

I just, I absolutely loathe people like this with all the fire of youth. The ardor of a thousand sons. Anyway, so one of Stinky's friends told the oxygen show Snap that he had an amazing ability to make you feel like the only woman in the room. when he first met Lisa Tony he'd just been through a breakup and was living with his mom who happened to live in Lisa and Marcus' neighborhood and those little details always kill me because it's just so funny that hair's breadth of chance

that can just bring total chaos into your life like if his mom hadn't happened to live right across the street from Lisa and Marcus like none of this would have happened you know just bananas so after their first flirty little encounter in his mom's front yard Lisa couldn't get Sienke out of her head She constantly checked to see if his car was in his mom's driveway And if it was, she'd make sure to walk by

I'm assuming she probably got all gussied up before she did so And they continued their little dance for a while And Sienke worked really hard as he always did to charm her Remember, charm is a verb So important Lisa resisted temptation as long as she could stand to Because, you know, after all having an affair with a 27-year-old neighbor didn't exactly fit into her good wife narrative, did it.

But she eventually gave in, and soon all her reservations about having an affair with Sienke were gone. Part of the attraction was physical, I'm sure, but he also flipped her view of a relationship completely on its head. She was used to always being the one taking care of her partner and never really the other way around, but Sienke would take her out to five-star restaurants and shows in downtown Chicago, and this was brand new to Lisa and, you know, intoxicated. but she didn't know much about her new lover.

He didn't tell her anything. He didn't tell her what he did for a living, for example, which is just a massive red flag. I don't know why that didn't bother her, but there you go. And when Lisa asked Marcus to move out in the fall of 1999, she didn't tell him about Sienke either. But Marcus knew something was up. He'd seen her become more and more distant, he'd been feeling kind of neglected, and he was hoping that they just needed some time apart, just like a temporary separation, not a breakup. He wasn't thinking they would divorce or anything, just a little bit of time apart. But Lisa filed for an order of protection to kind of rush him out the door to the shock of everybody who knew him well. Now, obviously, we can never know for sure whether Lisa needed that

order of protection, whether there had ever been any violence or threats of violence from Marcus. But as far as we've been able to determine, she never involved police or confided in anybody about any of this. So was it a ploy? Or had things really gone that bad? between Lisa and Mark. Whatever the truth of the matter, he moved out, and soon Lisa and Sienkees stopped trying to hide their affair. According to everybody you saw them together, Lisa was head over heels in love with this guy. But Sienke later told reporter Joy Bergman that he never loved or cared about Lisa, and he

wasn't even attracted to her. I love that he, like, made sure to tell her that. I wasn't even attracted to her. He said, it was more about the attitude. She's got balls. And according to Bergman, Sienke was by no means a loyal boyfriend to Lisa. I know that's shocking to everybody who's listening because you'd think he'd be such a loyal

partner, right? He had several other girlfriends during his time with her, and it wasn't a long time. We're talking like six months or something, right? He would specifically look for challenging women who were resistant to romantic advances. So he didn't necessarily go for easy marks. He would, quote, unquote, strip away their walls and become whatever type of man they wanted. He said in one of his many letters to Bergman, I'm definitely a chameleon. That is the essence of my art, capital A, again.

Which reminds me of Scott Peterson, doesn't it you, Katie? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Scotty P. In his many personalities, a different one with every woman he was involved with, right? So anywho, Bergman's read on him, which I think is dead accurate, is that Sienke got off on, quote, getting one over on the system. He was in this just as much for the thrill of it as he was for the easy money. This is a guy who didn't finish high school, whose dad was a famous athlete, which I imagine puts a lot of pressure on you to live up to that.

And I think he was addicted to anything that, A, allowed him to live the high life without working very hard for it, and B, made him feel superior to everybody else. Because remember, campers, narcissists are actually very insecure people. Underneath all that grandiosity, these people are very needy and insecure. Yeah. And you can see that insecurity in how he writes. Oh, I never loved Lisa. I just liked her moxie. And he's like obsessed with being the one in charge with the journalist. He's the one interviewing the journalist. He's the one hiring her. He's explaining her fucking job to her. He does it again and again and again. It really does. It's fucking exhausting. He's like,

if mansplaining were a dead-eyed Haitian narcissist, this dude is. a freak about his appearances. Even in prison, he has to feel like he's in charge. Yes, and I'm sure the great game has continued in prison, aren't you? Like, ah, I have plied my art capital A today by conning a 19-year-old petty thief out of a bag of flamen hot Cheetos. I am truly at the pinnacle of my powers. Such a twat! Anyway, so he and Lisa were involved for about six months before the explosion that killed Marcus, and despite the fact that Marcus's family initially couldn't imagine that Lisa would ever be involved in anything that would hurt him,

police were suspic. Not just because of this info they were uncovering about identity theft, but also because she was stonewall in him about her affair, just flatly refusing to offer up her lover's name. This lover she claimed she hadn't seen or been involved with for months. She also said she didn't know anything about any credit card fraud or threatening voicemail. So they dug into Lisa's phone records.

Lo and behold, what do we find? But lots and lots of calls to his Sienki Lalimant. And by the way, those calls did not stop months ago. Oh, no. So they ran a background check on him and hit paydirt. Old Stinky had a record a mile long for fraud, forgery, sexual extortion, and con artistry of various types. So I'll just give you one notable item from his resume. This is charming.

In 1992, Sienke served 8.5. months for black male. He'd gone jogging at a nature preserve where he knew gay men liked to cruise for sex. And not all these guys were out and some of them were desperate to keep their sexuality on the down low. So he invited a guy back to his place and Sienki was married at the time by the way. So this is while his wife was out at work where he had glued a fake apartment number on his front door and set up cameras in the bedroom, hidden cameras. And after they had sex, he tried to extort the guy who was closeted and married to a woman. And when his initial attempts to squeeze money out of this guy failed, he went so far as to drop off a copy of the sex tape on the wife's doorstep, which is just despicable on so many levels.

What she must have gone through. My God. So she left her husband. The man first called the FBI and reported it and then attempted suicide, bless his heart, and Sienke never got a dime. Which is the only good part of that story. So he's a peach, this guy, ain't he? Yeah. Yeah.

What'd you say about people being pinatas to him and not people? Yeah. So much candy inside. So much candy. So while he was in prison for that, Sienki met a guy named Anthony T. Gommillion, who he later described two journalists Joy Bergman as his father, mother, sister, brother, which is just fucking weird and not as deep as you seem to think it sounds, twat.

And, quote unquote, the first one who really introduced me to fraud, bank fraud, and that kind of thing. Different identities. I can see why somebody like Sienke would like to have different. identities. Because, you know, his own identity sucks out loud. So hard. He said, it was something I was always into different identities. I'm a James Bond fanatic. It really intrigues me. It's just, oh. Okay. Bless your heart, honey. Here's the thing about James Bond is he was one of the good guys. He wasn't doing what he did in the service of his sad sack little ego in his bank account. He was a spy. Okay. Have you read the books?

Gamelian was an expert fraudster, although obviously he's in prison, so expert might be a little bit of a stretch because he was in prison, but there you go. And he taught Sienke everything he needed to know about all this scammery fuckery. Sienke had a knack for drawing in women who were useful to him. His ex-wife worked for the DMV, who, by the way, at the time of the blackmail was pregnant. Oh, that's right. She was. Oh, he's such an asshole. So this man has children. That's terrifying. Yeah. So she worked for the DMV and pulled the license plate number of the guy he blackmailed for him.

Yeah, and she didn't do it on purpose. Like, she didn't know why she was doing it. She didn't know she was helping him. No. She's innocent in this. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He also sought out girlfriends that worked for the social security office, banks,

DMVs. He said, I'd go in, run my SOC, the one I'm using at the time, and see what's happening and get a vibe for whoever might go. I noticed that a lot of women initially may not have wanted to, but it's like, when they get into a relationship with me, you know, women are different than men when it comes to sex. For guys, it's just sex. For women, they take it more to an emotional level. When you get into a relationship with somebody, you will literally do anything to be with

them to a certain extent. So sometimes you use that skill. Oh, I love this sexist horse shit. Ooh, women are so emotional, whereas men are creatures of of icy logic who would never commit a crime for something so silly as love, right? Yeah, men never get suckered into committing crimes for the women that they're obsessed with, right? I guess we forgot to mention that to like half the dudes who end up on dateline for like killing their wives so they can be with their mistresses or the endless list of lovers who've murdered

their girlfriend's husbands for them or whatever. There's an entire show, like a spinoff of Snap, about this, okay? So get out of my face with that nonsense. since Stinky, you're just wrong, as you are about most things, I suspect. So, was Sienke using Lisa like he'd used so many of his previous girlfriends? Had she been helping him steal Marcus's identity to finance a lavish shopping spree? It was looking increasingly likely. We're going to leave it there for Part 1, Campers, but because we release both halves of an

episode on the same day, go ahead and listen to Part 2 now if you want. Or save it for later, whatever butters your biscuit. it. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we can get together again around the True Crime Campfire. You can follow us on Twitter at TC Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash truecrime Campfire.