True Crime Campfire - Matchstick Man: The Murders of Carla and Alan Rutherford

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

In his novel “1984,” George Orwell wrote, “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.” The man at the center of this week’s case didn’t manage that—his secrets and troubles gnawed at him constantly—but he did manage to act like he had nothing at all to worry about, sailing serenely downstream while knowing full-well that just around the next bend there was a waterfall that would smash the boat of his life into pieces. Join us for a story of secrets, greed, and personal betrayal on a breathtaking scale. Sources:The Hamilton Spectator, 4-part series by Susan Clairmont: https://www.thespec.com/news/crime/2022/11/16/the-teacher-had-scandalous-secrets-when-a-trip-to-greece-threatened-to-expose-his-lies-he-did-the-unthinkable.htmlToronto Star, Susan Clairmont: https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2022/11/16/fake-bank-statements-maxed-credit-cards-piles-of-lies-after-the-fire-a-killers-shocking-secrets-are-revealed.htmlToronto Sun, Jane Stevenson: https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/judge-sentences-monster-to-life-in-prison-for-killing-mom-stepdadGlobal News: https://globalnews.ca/news/8929229/richard-taylor-guilty-murder-mother-stepfather/YouTube, Hamilton Spectator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZlOjBu06hU&ab_channel=TheSpecFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote, If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. The man at the center of this week's case didn't manage that. His secrets and troubles gnawed at him constantly.

But he did manage to act like he had nothing at all to worry about, sailing serenely downstream while knowing full well that just around the next bend there was a waterfall that would smash the boat of his life into pieces. This is Matchstick Man, the murders of Alan and Carla Rutherford. So, campers, for this one, we're back in Canada again, Hamilton, Ontario, in the early morning hours of July 9, 2018, when Alan Rutherford woke up on fire. Like a nightmare come to life, the whole bedroom was an inferno, the floor, the covers, the walls, in flames. In the bed beside him, Alan's wife Carlo was screaming. His skin burning, Alan leapt

out of bed and rushed for the closed bedroom door, scorching his bare feet with every step. But the door wouldn't open. In a panic, Alan threw himself out of the first floor window and fell, naked and burning onto the grass ten feet below. Gravely hurt in an unbelievable pain, he rushed to try to get back in the house to save Carla, but he couldn't get in, either the back or patio doors. The front door was unlocked, though, and he stumbled up the stairs to try and reach his wife, but the flames beat him back. He could save somebody, though. Carla and Alan had two chocolate labs, Kara and Cody, and Alan tried desperately to get them outside. He got Kara, but Cody, terrified, wouldn't come. His heart-breaking, Alan stumbled to the front door of their

neighbor Karen Monk and hammered on the door. When she answered, Karen didn't recognize her neighbor. 95% of his body was burned, and he was bleeding from multiple wounds. She'd say later that it looked like he was melting. Alan gasped out that somebody had firebombed their house and that Carla was still inside. She needed help. Karen frantically dialed 911 and voice shaking repeated what Alan had told her. Emergency services got there quickly and an ambulance rushed Alan to Hamilton General Hospital as fire crews struggled to get the burning house under control.

They did succeed in limiting the blaze to the area around the bedroom, and one firefighter managed to drag out Cody the chocolate lab who was singed and scared but would make a full recovery. But by the time they managed to get into the bedroom, it was too late for Carla Rutherford. She was pronounced dead as soon as they got her body out onto the lawn. Most deaths and house fires are caused by smoke inhalation, but that wasn't the case for Carla.

She had literally burned to death and would only be identified by dental records. And 11 hours after Carla's death, Alan also passed away in his hospital bed. There's only so much damage the human body can take, and he had gone way over that line. The doctors at the hospital had known right away they wouldn't be able to save him. It was amazing he'd been able to do as much as he had.

And he'd done one other thing, too. As he'd sat slumped in agony on Karen Monk's front porch, she'd asked him if there was anybody else she should call. Don't call Rich, Ellen said. he did this. He'll already know about it. And as paramedics and other neighbors gathered in the quiet cul-de-sac, five or six others would hear Alan repeat the same thing with some variation. Sometimes he said rich, sometimes Rick, and sometimes he said my son-in-law. But that was an understandable stumble given the shock and agony he was in. Richard Taylor was Alan's stepson,

not his son-in-law. He was Carla's oldest son, and before his death, Alan had pointed his finger right at him for the two murders. So here we have a family, torn apart by flames, and a son implicated as a killer. How did we get here? Carla Holmes and Richard Taylor got married when they were both 19 in 1973. A son, also called Richard, came along three years later. To mostly avoid confusion, dad would be Rick, and the new arrival would be rich. Another son, Chris, was born in 1980, and a year later, the tailors moved into the house on Greening Court, where Carla would live for the rest of her life. By all accounts, the Taylor Boys had happy, almost idyllic childhoods. Chris would say the suburb of Dundas, where they grew up, was like Pleasantville. They walked

to school, their doors were never locked. The tailors had a pool in their backyard and video games in the basement, so their house was kind of kid central for Rich and Chris's friends. The yard backed onto Grove Cemetery, which if you're not spooked out by graveyards, is a pretty sweet situation. You get quiet, open space behind your house that's never going to be developed. In the winter, the boys would go sledding on the cemetery slopes. And I got to say, little goth high school, Whitney would have been all over that. I used to go to our local cemetery to walk around all the time in my little Doc Martins and listen to the cure on my Walkman and feel all deep and shit, you know.

I wrote some real, real bad poems there. Good times. I will give you $100 to show me some. Oh, deal. Untitled number 72 Oh God, I had a poem They were all titled something like Yeah, of course, untitled is always one

The one I wrote, well, the one I wrote that I remember Was titled Pretty Poison And it was about the girls that were mean to me Delightful Anyway Rich and Chris were both thought of as normal, well-behaved kids And they were both rock star athletes, especially in baseball. They both played varsity baseball in college

too. In 1997, Rich helped his team win their first national baseball championship. The kids might have had idyllic lives, but the Salon wasn't quite as smooth for their parents' marriage. Carla and Rick got divorced when the boys were in high school. Rick moved out with Carla and the kids staying in the house. Carla worked as a medical technologist at McMaster University Medical Center, and after a while, she started dating a guy she worked with, Alan Rutherford. Alan was a dynamic guy, the kind who likes to try and leave the world a better place than he found it. He was super fit, he ran marathons, and he liked to ride his bike to work. In the winter, he'd even ski there sometimes.

He was a passionate environmentalist. Sometimes his kids would roll their eyes when he complained about people leaving their car engines running and stuff like that. They called him Mr. Safety because he was always kicking their car tires and renewing their roadside assistance memberships every year. I know. It's like my dad. My dad does that. Every winter, Alan would go up and down the street, clearing the snow from his neighbor's driveways. He and Carla hit it off big, and although they wouldn't actually get married till 2007, she invited him to move in with her early on. It was a great new chapter for her, now that both her kids were grown and out of the house. Well, for a while they were. Anyway,

After college, Rich moved down to Buffalo to get a degree in education, and after graduation, he moved right back in with Carla and Al. And in 2002, he got a job as a PE teacher at Billy Green Elementary School. Rich was popular with the kids there. They thought he was fun. And on the one hand, that's great. I mean, obviously it's important for teachers to get along with kids. But on the other hand, how hard is it to impress a bunch of eight-year-olds? Like you bring out those little rolly seats and a bunch of balls and it's going to be great.

They're going to have a good time. Rich didn't have nearly as much luck impressing his grown-up colleagues. His sense of humor was sarcastic and mean, and he loved making fun of the kids' parents behind their backs. But his favorite topic was complaining about how broke he was. Wow, yeah, he sounds fun. It gets better. Not long after Rich started at Billy Green Elementary, staff started noticing money going missing. Huh.

One time, $1,800 for a student ski trip just vanished from a filing cabinet. And when a teacher left envelopes with $50 liquor store gift cards as Christmas presents for their school janitors, they later thanked her for giving them $20 Tim Horton's cards. Yeah. Rich had swiped the cards and replaced them with something cheaper. And I would bet all of the money I have right now that those were gifted to him. Oh, yeah, probably. There's no way he spent $40 to make $20.

No, it's ridiculous. No, he's probably re-gifting those Tim Horton's cards. If any cash gathered for school trips was left in teacher's desks, it had a habit of disappearing. When Rich transferred to Hess Street Elementary in 2017, the thefts mysteriously stopped. Yeah, mysterious. is. If only Nancy Drew were here to guide us through this unsolved mystery. And although the kids liked Rich, the feeling didn't seem to be mutual. On a school trip to Montreal, he and another teacher saw some students from another school jumping from

one high hotel balcony to another. The other teacher was horrified. Like, oh my God, we have got to stop them. But Rich just laughed. He was like, hey, they're not our kids. So, you know, I guess it's okay if they splatter themselves all over the sidewalk because you're not responsible for them. Good, good. boy he's a peach ain't he rich had always been beyond awful with money racking up debt his whole adult life and just flat out ignoring bills right up until either a service was about to get cut off or something was about to get repoed and then he'd scramble around for some last-minute cash to keep things together and while for most people this would be an incredibly stressful way to live their lives for rich it was just normal didn't stress him out at all and he was about to make it somebody else's problem too in the early 2000s rich started to dating Evangelia Papadimitrio, who went by the name Vange. Why in the world would she shorten her name? She has got the first and last name of the femme fatal in a, like straight out of a film noir. Yeah, it's a beautiful name, actually.

Evangelia. In 2005, they got married, and with some help from Rich's dad bought a nice suburban house in Oakville, a pretty little town not far from Toronto, for $266,000, which is about $194K U.S. Vange had a good job at Toronto Metropolitan University, and Rich made pretty decent money as a P.E. teacher, so together they had a nice middle class income. So when I criticize him for being bad with money, like, if you're, if you just don't have a lot of money, then you have to scramble like that. That was not the case. They had a nice income. But despite all of that, Rich and Vange were soon up to their eyeballs in debt. A part of this was Rich's dumbass way of handling his existing debt, like maxing out a new credit card to cover the payments for another. maxed-out card. But also, they both just really liked spending money. As far as we can tell, there wasn't any big hidden secret behind their spending, no gambling or drug problems or anything like that, and it didn't go on fancy furniture or cars, or rich drove a Honda Civic. They just had bad habits. When they wanted some unnecessary thing, even if they couldn't afford it, they just went

ahead and bought it. They soon had kids, and every birthday party was an expensive extravaganza with huge piles of gifts. The kids' dressers were stuffed with new clothes. most of them never even worn, tags still on them. Vange liked buying new clothes for herself, too, and Rich had to have the latest gadgets. Colleagues at Billy Green Elementary remembered him always bitching about how much daycare cost, and also always having the latest iPhone and iPad as soon as they came out. And Rich and Vange hardly ever cooked. It was takeout and delivery every single night, and that adds up for a family of four.

By 2018, their combined income would be $155,000 or about $110k U.S. So comfortable, but not buy whatever the hell you want all the time, comfortable. And on top of takeout for dinner every night, Rich had himself a little Tim Horton's problem. And I got to confess, I've never been to Tim Hortons, because it's a Canadian thing, right? So I've never been, but I can't imagine it's this flipping good. This dude would get breakfast there for himself and the kids every morning. That's like 20 bucks gone before the days even started. And on school days, he'd go get a sandwich for lunch.

Every weekend, he'd go and see his mom and owl pick up coffee and donuts. on the way, so it was just in and out of Tim Horton's all day every day. So you've got a lot of little things that add up to a couple living pretty far beyond their means just by nickel and diamond it to death. Not that Vange knew it. She would later describe herself as not a very number savvy person, and she let Rich handle the finances completely to the point where she didn't even have a bank card of her own. Rich would just slip cash into her wallet, so she always had a few hundred dollars on her for daily expenses. She had no idea that they were even in debt. She had no idea. She thought they had $100,000 in a savings account, when in reality it was overdrawn by

$400. Rich was paying thousands in fees for bounced payments and overdrafts. He was good at woodworking, and he tried using that skill in a couple of side hustles to make some extra money. He and his little brother Chris started the Taylor Brothers chair company, incorporating some of their old baseball bats, which their mom was threatening to toss out of her garage, into the design of their chairs, which I bet those were cool chairs with baseball bats as like arms or whatever. Yeah. The chair business never really took off, though, making less than $15,000 a year, which was fine by Chris, who by now was a successful chiropractor.

To him, this was just a fun hobby where he got to hang out with his brother and make a little pocket money. But Rich needed more. He made and sold charcutory boards, which was an even bigger flop than the chairs. It's like, come on, Rich. You're over a hundred grand in debt, man, shark coochie ain't going to cut it. But Rich told everyone that his woodwork. company was taking off big time and that shark coochie money would soon be rolling in and this big fat lie opened the door to the main method by which this business made him money getting people to

invest in it his dad who had no idea rich was in debt gave him nine thousand dollars jeremy pekin a childhood friend who was now a cardiologist loaned him 20 rich of course was slow to pay this back and extremely vague on how he was using the money to help his business. Every cent had vanished into the black hole of his debt. Then, when Jeremy asked again about the money, Rich burst into tears. Jeremy knew his buddy was in a bad place, and bless him, he tried to help. If you have debt, I'll pay it, Jeremy said. Later, he'd say, I literally begged Rich to tell me what happened.

And while he probably couldn't guess at the size of Rich's debt, This was someone who actually could have helped him. Cardiologists usually have a dime or two to spare. But all Rich said was, I've been kicked around and bullied for one reason or another all my life. This is something I need to figure out for myself. Huh? Plenty of people have spoken about Rich's childhood years by now,

and nobody's ever said one word about bullying. He was pretty much a popular Uberjoc from the time he could walk. Every difficulty in his life was absolutely 100% his own fault. And as for figuring it out himself, dude, you've been figuring shit out for yourself for 20 years now. Look where it's got you. I suspect that by bullying, he really meant sometimes people tell me no. But that's just a little pet theory of mine. And mine, I think you did right about that.

Instead of coming clean with Jeremy and taking the help he'd offered, Shortly after this conversation, Rich scammed him out of $3,500. Claimed his van had been stolen. And because his wallet had been in the van, the bank had frozen his account. Oh, bullshit. And I kind of suspect Jeremy knew that even as he was writing the check. The fucking nerve. That just floors me.

The nerve of the sky. So his sweet friend says, I will pay off your debt, which is incredible. And this is what he does. He says, no, I've got this. And then he flippin scams him out. $3,500. That is just beyond. It's almost like he should have just said, yeah, you will. And then just like never, like, never said anything about it again and just kept asking for, like, weird scam money.

Ugh, ugh. Rich lied to Vange constantly about money. He was just completely incapable of coming clean or putting any limit on their spending. Because as we all know, if you're in a whole, the quickest way out is to just keep digging. Hope that, hope that one day you'll hit the other side and just be like a billionaire. That was the plan. So when Vange wanted to go on an expensive trip to Thailand and Cambodia in 2017, Rich said, sure, and packed her wallet with thousands of dollars.

Anybody else doing an impression of that Captain Picard face palm right about now? Yeah, me too. The king of all face palms. This text exchange is a nice little snapshot of the kind of waste-deep financial shit Rich was in, thanks to season Claremont of the Toronto Star for the quotes. Vanch, have you taken money out of the kid's piggy banks? Rich. Yeah, I put it into the bank so we could add to their investment.

Yikes. God. Of course, if that meager amount of cash ever hit Rich's bank account at all, it was only there for about a nanosecond before being blown on a payment for Rich's 12th credit card or three sausage and egg biscuits from Timmy's. But the fact remains, Rich was willing to steal from his own kids, his own flesh and blood, to cover his ongoing financial ruin. From their little piggy banks, that just breaks my heart. How much could possibly have been in there?

Like, he just wanted to get his Tim Horton's fix. Yeah, it's insane. And, I mean, we talk about this all the time with these kinds of scammers. It's like they have no concept of, like, future consequence. They're just like, that's a part of. problem for future me. I'll deal with it when it happens. Put out the fire right in front of me. Absolutely. Yep. When Rich couldn't pay the internet bill, he had his cell phone act as a hotspot, which meant that

there was only internet when he was home. He told Vange, this was just because they had a shitty service provider. And the money issues were about to hit a crisis point. Vange's parents wanted the family to come on a month-long vacation to Greece. They would pay for the kids' airfare, and Vange's sister paid for her and Rich. But the deal was, once they landed, they'd be responsible for the rest of the vacation expenses themselves. Which they absolutely did not have the money for. But of course, as far as Vange knew, everything was fine. They could just dip into their hundred grand savings, no problemo. So for Rich to put the kibosh on the grease trip, he'd have had to come at least part of the way clean about the lies he'd been telling his wife for years. And while I don't think

there was ever much of a chance of that, it was especially difficult in this. case. After the birth of their second child, Vange had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. She was angry or sad a lot, bless her heart, because postpartum depression is no flippin' joke. And in the run-up to the Greece trip, she texted this to Rich from her doctor's office. I'm sorry I'm so much work. He said he thinks the trip is very important to me in terms of counseling. That just shatters my heart in smithereens. I'm sorry I'm so much work. I have literally said those exact same words to people before, too. Because when you're depressed, you feel like you're a bird.

And it's just, it makes it so much harder. Bless her heart. And of course, this gave Rich an out. He wasn't being a spineless little gremlin by hiding the truth from Van. She was protecting her, right? So the plans to go to Greece went forward, full steam ahead. Somehow, Rich would get the money. He'd always managed to before when his back was against the wall.

They were scheduled to fly out on July 11th, 2018. two days after the fire that would kill Rich's mother and her husband. Even before the Greece trip, Rich had been on a downward spiral. At the end of 2017, his first year at Hess Street Elementary, he told his principal he'd just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was going through chemotherapy. He'd lost quite a bit of weight, so this didn't seem too outlandish. And generally, you just don't expect people to lie about having cancer. Because who the hell would do that?

But it was a lie, of course. He took 24 days off work, telling Vans she'd been given time off for stress. Our boy was in a bad place, but that was most definitely not the case with his mom and her husband. Both Carla and Allen have been married before, but sometimes you just have to wait till the second try to get it right. They were just one of those couples, just madly in love, always smiling with their arms around each other in pictures. They love to travel, Carla especially, and she loved telling stories about their vacation to Egypt. She also loved Savannah in New Orleans, and she made a mad gumbo for the Mardi Gras party she and Al liked to throw. She loved Labrador Retrievers all her life, and she and Alan were a familiar sight on their street walking their two chocolate labs and waving to the neighbors.

They were a well-loved couple who had built a really good life for themselves, and after they retired in 2016, things were looking even better. They could spend their time on their hobbies and interests and spoil their grandkids rotten. On a typical summer day, they'd both be out back. Carla reading in the shade, Al working on his rose garden. Sometimes, of course, there'd be grandkids splashing in the pool. Isn't that sound lovely? I mean, those are the golden years right there. That's what you're supposed to be like when you retire.

The weekend before the fire, 63-year-old Al went on a 50-mile bike ride, just for fun. Carla texted back and forth with her sons. She loaned rich $500, and she and Chris shared their concerns about Rich's finances. He'd been hitting them both up pretty hard lately for cash, so much so that Chris had stopped. answered answering the phone when he saw it was rich. Oh, God, wouldn't you hate to be that guy? Mm-hmm.

Chris and his mom agreed that when Rich got back from Grease, they needed to sit down and have a family meeting about the money stuff. The guy needed to get his shit together for his wife and kids' sake. On the evening of Sunday, July 8th, Carla and Al took the dogs for a walk, had a glass of wine out in the gazebo and watched the sunset, then put Kara and Cody in their kennels and went off to bed. It was the last time they would ever go to sleep together.

By the end of the next day, they would both be dead. The morning before, Saturday, Rich had come over, supposedly to help Al put something together in the basement. But as he and Carlo were going down the stairs, Rich apparently tripped over one of the dogs and fell, knocking his mom down in the process and cutting his right knee. Just after 11 a.m., he limped into the ER on a crutch, claiming he was in a world of hurt.

He got some x-rays done, but after examining Rich's knee, the doctor's report said, bone and joints are normal, no effusion. If the doctor could have gotten away with writing, faking it, LOL. They probably would have. Rich was discharged with no treatment. Later on, Rich and his family went into a drug store to get a few things for the grease trip. And Rich casually shoplifted a lufa. And this is weird. Sure, he was in desperate financial straits, but he's going to steal a $4.00 alufa? Yeah, that's just like one of the

funnier things you could shoplift. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, dude. Shoplifting for no real financial gain is actually a fairly common trait among people who are suffering from depression or going through some other mental turmoil. And Rich was definitely stressed. He and Vange had a total of $483 in the bank. All their credit cards were maxed out. Their loans were in default. And they were about to go on a month-long vacation that would cost them thousands of dollars. Unless something happened between now and takeoff, they'd get to the Athens airport without enough cash to pay for a cab. Oh, and by the way, the security cameras showed Rich strolling up and down the aisles of the

drugstore with no hint of any trouble from his very painful knee. That's worth remembering for later. On Sunday, Vange took a prescription sleep aid and went to bed. she wouldn't go downstairs or see Rich until the next morning. Rich was sleeping in the living room, supposedly so his wife wouldn't jostle his terribly painful knee. He says he started watching a movie on his iPad, but turned it off around 2 a.m. when his son had a nightmare and came downstairs for comfort. Rich says the kid stayed with him until about 2.30. Then he took him to his bedroom, came back down to the living room, and fell asleep. Yeah, right. At 309 a.m., a.m., a.m., a.m., a.m., a.m.

security camera on a house just around the corner from Carla and Allen's place caught some creepy footage. A figure, unidentifiable in the shadows, walking back and forth along the sidewalk. Every now and again, lighting a match and tossing it on the ground, the flare bright in the low-light image from the camera. Then, the creep walks towards Greening Court, and a few minutes later runs back the opposite direction. Seconds later, Alan Rutherford woke up to find his world in flames. On Monday morning, Rich got a call from his dad. A friend from the old neighborhood had told him there was a fire on Greening Court,

and he wanted Rich to check on Carla. Fifteen minutes later, Rich texted back, Hey, dad, there's no answer at the house, and mom isn't answering her phone. I'm scared. What should I do? He also texted his brother Chris, who was driving back to Toronto from a weekend trip with his family. Call me, please.

Chris ignored the text, figuring Rich was just going to ask him for more money, something Chris had gotten thoroughly sick of. Two more texts than a phone call, and this time Chris answered, in case something actually important had happened. It had, of course. Rich told him that there had been a fire at Greening Court and that he was worried about their mom. Chris's wife, Talia, checked the local news sites on her phone and right away recognized the burned out house as Carla's. She took over driving while Chris, shaking and scared, tried to get in time. touch with the police and his dad. From his dad, he learned that Carlo was dead and Alan was in the hospital, not expected to survive. Shortly after he got home, Hamilton detectives called Chris and

said they wanted to speak to him and Rich downtown. Chris drove to Rich's house to pick him up, as Rich said his knee hurt so badly that he couldn't drive. He could barely walk, limping along badly with the help of a cane. God, I hate this piece of shit jaw. I just... I hate him. way detectives told them that Al, who by this time had just died, had implicated Rich in the fire. Rich was told he was a person of interest and led to an interview room. And I have to say, my heart just breaks for Chris here. Like, in quick succession, he learns that his mother and stepfather have just died gruesome deaths, his childhood home is burned down, and his fuck-up big brother, who he'd always been close with, might be the one behind the whole thing. Can you even imagine?

I cannot. Just, that's a lot. In the interview room, Rich acted baffled that Al had accused him of setting the fire. He'd been at home sleeping in the living room. And besides, with his mangled knee, he couldn't drive, could barely walk. How was he supposed to have gotten over there in the middle of the night? On a rascal? To emphasize just how much his knee was bothering him, Rich repeatedly rubbed it and made theatrical ow, ow, ow, faces.

It was real convincing, as I'm sure you can imagine. I love when these D-Gens get creative. It's like watching an elementary school play directed by somebody who thinks they deserve an Oscar. Oh, yeah, he was chewing the scenery good. He was cooperative, though, and had nothing but good things to say about his mom and Alan. When police asked for his phone so they could make a copy of it, he agreed.

The data on Rich's phone would show that it had not left his house the previous night, but it would also show that between 404 and 4.41 a.m., rich walked 1,806 steps at home, which sounds a hell of a lot like nervous pacing back and forth, something Rich had never done on any other morning, according to the phone, especially with that bad knee and all. Chris and their dad also sat down for interviews and they handed over their phones too. Now their dad, remember, went by Rick,

which was one of the names Alan had used to identify the fire starter, so police wanted to nail down whether he was a suspect. Didn't really seem likely, though. Rick, like Carla, had remarried after the divorce, and the relationship between the two exes was pretty friendly by all accounts. he and Alan weren't exactly bosom buds but they were always cordial and they never argued or anything like that

and it turned out that Rick and his wife were at a cottage three hours away when the fire started. Al's dying words were certainly enough for police to point their investigation in Rich's direction but they weren't evidence and they definitely weren't enough for an arrest. After his interview, Rich was released. The investigation into Carla

and Al's deaths had already started. It wasn't hard to determine where the fire had started. The floor floor at the foot of the bed and the ceiling above it were burned through. So that was where it had burned the hottest. And bedroom floors don't just spontaneously combust. Fire investigators would determine that a medium petroleum distillate, like lighter fluid, paint thinner, something like that, had been poured at the foot of the bed and run under and all around it. So just think about that for a second. Somebody poured lighter fluid all around the bed where these two people were sleeping.

And then, a flame, most likely a match, had been tossed onto the liquid, igniting it and the vapor above it, creating a hot, fast flash fire that swallowed the whole room in seconds. The bedroom was completely destroyed. Alan Carla had a penny jar, and the frickin' pennies had melted. Oh my God. Yikes. But thanks to the fast action of the firefighters, much of the house beyond the bedroom was pretty much untouched. There were still pictures hanging on the walls, shoes sitting by the front door, and also by the front door on a shelf was a box of wooden touch matches with red tips.

It was a box of 40 matches, but there were only 39 inside. Had the killer running away in a panic unconsciously left his murder weapon behind in plain sight? The police put Rich under surveillance. You know, let's watch this guy and see if he does something sketchy. And early on July 10th, the day after the fire, Rich drove. to a country road a couple miles from his house. He got out of the car and walked around in a ditch beside the road, like he was looking for something.

This ditch, by the way, was rocky and uneven, like ditches tend to be. Tough going for a guy with a bad knee and a cane. Right. But miraculously, out there with nobody watching, as far as he knew, there was no limp and no cane. Their surveillance officers even described him as jogging back to his car. A few hours after they'd gotten some nice, clear video of him tiptoeing through the tulips on the back roads of Ontario, detectives talked to Rich again at his house. What did he have to say about Al's accusation?

That's impossible, Rich said. There's no fucking way he said that. That's ridiculous. I can't even walk down the steps. I can't drive. I mean, how am I getting there? How am I going to get there and light their house on fire? The detectives asked him if he had any financial issues.

Rich's answer was an emphatic, no. Yeah, smart move, man. It's not like they're going to like check that or anything. Nope. Police kept up their surveillance on Rich for months, and he stayed completely oblivious, which is kind of pathetic. Like, I'd like to think if I had cops on my tail for months, I'd probably notice at some point. Like, a lot of people do.

A lot of people do, yeah For months, yeah Like Gacy, John Wayne Gacy The Killer Clown He loved it He loved having the tail He would talk with them He'd play with them

He was having a great time But nope Yeah they don't tend to be super subtle I don't think And if it goes on for months Like damn The Mounties must be good Is all I'm saying

Yeah true Rich was just going about his life Running through The Tim Horton's drive-thru Doing his regular thing Happy as a clam Sometimes he remembered to limp. Sometimes not.

The detectives watched him pop into the bank and the insurance office. He was moving pretty fast on his mom's life insurance, of course. No limp, no cane, seemed to be trucking along just fine. On July 15th, a once again limping rich went to his mom and stepdad's funeral. By then, a combination of detectives, forensic officers, and fire investigators had reached the conclusion that they'd been expecting. the fire that killed Alan Carla had been deliberately set. It was a double murder. While executing a search warrant on Rich's home,

police found a bunch of bank statements showing Rich and Vange had tens of thousands of dollars of savings. But a little more investigation showed that these were fake. Rich had taped numbers showing positive balances onto the original statements, and then got photocopies to show Vange as proof of the, savings. They also found a shopper drug mart receipt from the day before the murders, which would lead them to the security footage of rich shoplifting aloofa, and importantly, not limping at all. And this was interesting. In the kitchen, they found a box of touch matches with red tips,

a carbon copy of the box they'd found right by the front door of the house on Greening Court. While that house was being demolished, a worker spotted a fireproof safe full of important documents, including Carla's will, which had named Rich as the executor. The will was dated 2007. I'm guessing if it had been more recent, level-headed younger brother Chris would have been the executor, but back then, Carla had no idea about the trouble Rich was getting himself in. Carla's will wasn't what Rich was expecting at all. She'd left some of her estate to Al if she died before him, which she had, if only by a few hours. And Al had left everything to his daughters. It was a complicated inheritance, but on August 18th, Rich got a preliminary check for $17,000 from Carla's life insurance company. He took $4,000 out the same day, and by October, Rich's checking account was overdrawn again.

He also got $22,000 from a joint account with Chris. that held money from Carla's savings account. Now, 6,800 of this was supposed to go to their probate attorney and also to cover the cost of Carla's wake. But the attorney never saw a dime from rich. He said the check must have been lost in the mail.

Right. Some free advice here, campers, don't try to pull that the check was lost in the mail bullshit, especially on an attorney. Not on an attorney, okay? Bad idea. Younger brother Chris took care of both payments himself. The lion's share of the inheritance

was still waiting to be dispersed, though, and both Rich and Chris stood to inherit $420,000. And while police had no real doubt that Rich was behind the murder of his mother and Alan, they still didn't have a smoking gun. They kept him under surveillance and continued investigating. Then, on January 23, 2019,

the decision was made to pull the trigger. While Rich was driving home from Hest Street Elementary, he was stopped by police. An officer he knew, Detective Ben Adams, came to his window, and we have a very polite Canadian habeas grabbous. Hey, Rich, can you just turn off the vehicle and step out here for me, please? Do you remember me?

Yep. So right now you're under arrest for the first degree murder of Carla and Alan Rutherford. Sorry, I'm trying to Canadian X. No, it's so good. It's so good. If you could turn around for me, please, and put your hands behind your back. Yeah, that's what it's all about. Rich was calm and cooperative for the whole thing.

It could not have been a surprise. In an interview room at Central Station, Detective started amicably enough. They asked about his bad knee. Which leg was that again? And this is my favorite thing ever. Rich had to actually stop and think about it for a second. Like, it's so obvious in the interrogation footage.

It's hysterically like, but finally he patted his left leg and said, it was this one. I think my left. You think. Oh, my God. So he rolled up the left leg of his pants and, oh, no, no little scab.

Oopsie. It was his right knee that was hurt so terribly that he couldn't drive or walk without a cane. Sorry about that. I just, you know, I just forgot. Which leg was an excruciating pain. Oh boy, bless his heart. That's a bless your heart moment right there. After that, the detective showed Rich the surveillance video of him rooting around in a ditch the day after the murders. And after finally getting Rich to admit that he was in fact the person in the video, they were like, okay, so what were you doing? Rich's story was that he'd gone for a drive on the day of the murders with the car windows down and some papers on the front seat had flown out. And apparently he didn't give a shit about that at the time, but a couple days later, he'd gone back to look for him. What papers were these? Oh, he didn't know. They were just papers, you know, sitting on the front seat of his car.

And he had no idea what they were, where they came from. Hate when that happens. I mean, obviously they must have been important, though, for him to go looking for him in a ditch with a bum knee the day after his parents, Just died in a fire, right? That makes perfect sense. Sure. Next came the money talk. The detective showed Rich a stack of financial documents that proved he'd been broker than broke at the time of the murders. How would he plan to pay for a month in Greece? Now, Rich claimed he had $6,000 in cash stashed in a sock drawer,

but police had searched his house, including the sock drawer days after the fire and no cash. Oh, right, Rich suddenly remembered. He'd put the cash in a Tupperware contained. and hit it in the basement rafters. As to why it wasn't there anymore, Rich's inventiveness failed him on that one. He said, he had no idea. Maybe rats stole it, I guess. That happens, right?

Rats? Yeah, you know, they were business rats. It was like Ratatouille except with capitalism instead of a restaurant, like Gordon Ratko instead of Gordon. Gordon Ratko. Greed is good. Yeah, exactly. That kind of rat. So this line of questioning, of course, was important because Rich's big old tower of lies, his whole life would come tumbling right down if he was broke when the family got to Greece.

They couldn't pay for anything once they got there. I mean, it was one hell of a motive, right? Then Rich, champ that he is, tried to pin the fire on Al. He must have tried to kill Carla, but screwed up and set himself on fire too. The detectives treated this bullshit with the contempt it deserved. Even Rich acknowledged that Al loved Carla, so he's going to burn down his own home and kill the woman he loves for minimal financial gain. This would involve him setting a fire buck naked and fucking it up so badly that he somehow managed to block the bedroom door

and had to throw himself through a window. Yeah, it was just ludicrous, just Rich's petty way of trying to get back at Al, I guess. for a living long enough to tell on his dumbass. Aesthetic, just like everything else he does. Yep, and nobody was buying it. Shortly after Rich's arrest, the staff at his elementary school cleaned out his office. They found a big brown paper bag stuffed with hundreds of bank statements,

bills, legal notices, and even sympathy cards that Rich had never bothered to open. Any bank account with actual money had less than $100. Most were overdrawn or empty. Rich had defaulted on over $70,000 of bank loans. He was in serious arrears with his mortgage company and the gas and phone companies were about to disconnect his service. Rich's trial started in May 22.

By this time, he and Vange had separated. Good for her. And this is wild. In June 2019, she'd sold their house for $720,000, allowing her to clear their debt while still pocketing half a million dollars. Holy moly. This is important because if you look at the bare bones of this case, you think he did it for the money.

But Rich had ways out of his financial catastrophe. He could have taken the help his doctor friend offered. He could have talked to his mom and gotten some of his inheritance early. Carla would have helped her son if she knew how bad things were. Or he and Vange could have done what she eventually did by herself, sell the house, downsize a little, wipe the slate clean, and move on. But of course, all of those options involved revealing what a fuck up he was. They were embarrassing.

And as we've seen, with so many family killers, it was most likely to avoid that humiliation that Rich murdered his mom and Alan. Yeah, it's similar to what we see with family annihilators. And I honestly think Vange and the kids were lucky that he was arrested when he was, because his finances were hitting another crisis point already. There was no inheritance to bail him out this time. So God knows what his next move would have been. I think he is precisely the profile of a family annihilator.

And that's really scary. No, I completely agree. Rich took the stand in his own defense because of fucking course he did. And he didn't do himself any favors. The Crown prosecution was easily able to show that Rich had lied again and again to his wife, his parents, his brother, his friends, and the police. So why should the jury believe anything he said? They didn't.

On June 16th, they found Richard Taylor guilty on two counts of first-degree murder. Canada being Canada, he got an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years. Not the life without parole we'd like to see him get, but that's a pretty stiff sentence for our neighbors to the north. And as far as I know, you don't get no Tim Horton's in prison. That's the harshest part of the sentence for Rich right there. No Tim Hortons for 25 years. That's going to smart. Yeah, it's like, I feel like Tim Hortons is like the Canadian equivalent of like a Dunkin Donuts. So it's like, it's probably fine. Yeah. But Jesus, dude. Tell us Canadian campers. Yeah. Please let us. It's. Eating there for every meal. And, and going into hundreds of thousands of

dollars in debt. To get that sweet, sweet Timmy's. I know they have something called Timmy bits. which are like just like donut holes. But anyway, sorry. Yeah, they sound fine, okay? The judge in this case was pretty stoic for most of the trial, but at the sentencing, he unloaded on Rich, calling him a pathological liar and a monster who should never see the light of day.

He praised Allen's heroism too and criticized the way Rich had treated Vange, saying he thought she was still in love with Rich. But Vange gave him the finger when he said that, So I'm guessing maybe she disagreed with that diagnosis. I love that so much. Oh, my God. Good for you, Vange.

Bless your heart. Don't flip off judges, though, kids. It's a good way to get yourself a few days in jail. But bless her, I think Vange earned the right to a little snark in this case. And I really hope she and the kids are doing well now. She has been through it. So if there's one thing to take away from this story, it's just how poisonous secrets can be. They can just eat away at a person and twist them into something.

They don't even recognize in the mirror anymore. Rich had been living with and lying about his ever-growing debt for over a decade, too scared, too proud and too flat-out dumb to come clean to the people in his life, and there were plenty of them who loved him and would have helped him. He wasn't even able to change his own actions just a little bit to ease the burden, just kept right on spending. It's a really infantile reaction, you know, close your eyes and the monster will just go away. And the stress and fear being revealed as a loser who needed help, twisted Rich Taylor, who had been given every piece you need to build a great life into a monster who burned to death his mother and the man she loved. I think his brother Chris said it best in 2019 when Rich was still in jail waiting for trial. The person I grew up with, it's not him.

Something broke. Yeah. And it broke a bunch of other people too. 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 patrons. Thank you so much for Estefania, David, Amy, Abigail, Tracy, Nicole, Rihanna, and Liz.

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 an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin while supplies lasts at 10, virtual events with Whitney 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. And for great TCC merch, visit the truecrime campfire store at spreadsheet.com. And one more thing. Our camper Nick's birthday is coming up,

and his bestie Alex wanted us to tell him happy birthday and to thank him on her behalf for making her a camper. Alex loves you very, very much. Happy birthday, Nick.