True Crime Campfire - Phantom: The Murder of Heidi Bernadzikowski

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

I'm not going to try and do his voice because it'd tear my throat up, but Hollywood legend Jack Palance once said, "The only two things you can truly depend upon are gravity and greed." Greed has been a motivation in more true crime cases than I can count, and it's astonishing how a grasping desire for dollars and cents can twist the human heart. It can drive someone to acts of both chilling cruelty and jaw-dropping stupidity, and in this week's case we get both. Join us for a bizarre true story of a heartless murder for hire that took 11 long years to solve. Sources:Court papers: https://casetext.com/case/cooke-v-gangCourt papers: https://www.mdcourts.gov/sites/default/files/unreported-opinions/0815s23.pdfInterrogation footage from the interrogations of Alexander Bennett and Grant LewisNBC's Dateline, episode "Indiscretion"Investigation Discovery's True Crime with Aphrodite Jones, episode "Discreet House Cleaning"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @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. I'm not going to try too hard to do his voice because it would probably tear my throat to shreds, but Hollywood legend Jack Palance once said, the only two things you can truly depend upon are gravity and greed. Greed has been a motivation in more true crime cases than I can count,

and it's astonishing how a grasping desire for dollars and cents can twist the human heart. It can drive someone to acts of both chilling cruelty and jaw-dropping stupidity, and in this week's case, we get both. This is Phantom, the murder of Heidi Bernadzikowski. So, campers, for this one, were in my old town, Baltimore, Maryland, or rather the suburb of Dundalk nearby. April 20, 2000, around 8 o'clock p.m. Stephen Cook put his key into the front door of the townhouse he shared with his girlfriend Heidi Bernadzikowski and stepped into a nightmare. Heidi was lying in a pool of blood on the floor.

a horrible gash across her throat. Frantic, Stephen called 911. As the dispatcher tried to get information from him, he kept saying, I can't stay with you, I have to go to her. Police arrived to find him down on the floor, cradling her and sobbing. On the wall near Heidi's body

was a sight you'd only expect to see in a cheesy horror flick. Someone had scrawled a big number one in red lipstick. Number one, what did that mean? that Heidi was the first in a whole series of murders to come? That was a terrifying prospect. Baltimore was still reeling from the case of serial killer Joe Mathini, a huge hulk of a man who had murdered at least five people and possibly as many as 13,

and worse, ate some of them and served others to customers at his burger stand. Mathini was caught just four years earlier in 1996, and the memory was still pretty damn fresh in the minds of the Baltimore detectives. Who could possibly want to kill this beautiful 24-year-old woman? Why? Heidi was much loved by her family and friends. She was a ton of fun, a talented player on the local billiards scene. That was where she and Stephen met in the summer of 1998, about a year and a half before her murder, at a bar during a game of pool.

They moved fast. Within a few days of that first meeting, Heidi moved in with Stephen. My guess is her family probably raised an eyebrow at that, but Heidi reassured them that she'd found her dream guy. He came into her life at a time when she was feeling vulnerable. In the past few years, Heidi had had some crappy relationships, some uncomfortable drama with past roommates and some trouble finding a full-time job, and it had all taken a toll on her. Steve, five years older, quiet, and kind of shy, seemed stable and steady,

just the kind of guy she needed right then. Stephen's family loved Heidi right away. and as true crime legend Aphrodite Jones put it on her TV show, Steve almost came across like Heidi's rescuer, her knight in shining armor. And he always seemed to want to be with her. Her friends noticed they didn't seem to do much apart. Now, reeling from the shock of finding the love of his life dead,

Steve told the detective that whatever happened to Heidi had to have happened in the past couple hours. He'd just left her a couple hours before to help his sister fix her sink. He'd picked Heidi up from work at a little after 5 o'clock that afternoon, dropped her off at the townhouse at about 5.30, then went to run a couple of errands. He got a haircut and an oil change, then went over to his sister Kimberly's place to help her fix her leaky sink. It was a pretty tight window of time for a killer to strike in. Heidi's body was lying sort of partly propped up against the wall, one arm flung out to the side.

Blood had soaked into the carpet underneath her, so much that when seeing her, PSIs went downstairs later, they found that it had dripped all the way through to the concrete basement floor. There was no sign of a murder weapon. During the struggle, the stuff in Heidi's purse had been thrown all over the living room. A day planner, a little woven coin purse that said Jamaica, a deck of hoyle playing cards, the red lipstick the killer had used to write the number one on the wall. Other than that, the room was weirdly empty. There wasn't any furniture. Strange. Steve. Steve said they'd been living there for over a year. Around the rest of the house, the killer had pulled out a few drawers here and there,

done a little ransacking, throwing stuff around, a jewelry box was open, but all the jewelry was still there. In fact, all the valuables seemed to still be there. It tugged at the detective's spidey senses. There was a lot about this scene that just screamed staging. Or, these could just be the signs of a very disorganized, panicky killer. At the morgue, the medical examiner took fingernail clippings from Heidi's body, hoping for a DNA match. Heidi had fought hard for her life.

She had defensive wounds on her hands and arms, and there was skin under her nails. The Emmy had found that the killer had most likely strangled her to unconsciousness, then cut her throat, just to make sure she was dead. A brutal way to go. Heidi's family was gutted, of course. They woke up to that dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. two detectives on their doorstep. Their only daughter was gone. Heidi grew up the only girl in her tight-knit Catholic family.

She had four brothers, and like a lot of girls do in that situation, she learned to kick ass and take names. Oh, hell yeah. God, I grew up with one brother, and if you didn't know how to throw an elbow, you weren't going to get your share of the French fries, you know what I mean? Heidi was athletic, always laughing, always full of energy, and after high school, she was eager to soak up everything life had to offer. She moved to her own place at 19, and she started up a new passion, playing pool.

She was good at it, really good. She joined a league and started making a reputation in the local scene. Man, that's so red. I have always wanted to learn how to rock at it, and I'm just, like, pitiful at it. Granted, I haven't played it that much, so I just need to practice, I guess. But I would love to, like, go to a bar, put on a tight dress, chalk up my cue, you know, and just take every last dime off everybody in the place. Even better if, like, the guys laugh at me.

Oh, a woman wants to hustle us. Please, you know, preferably, like, while some epic 80s rock ballads play on the jukebox, just awesome. You can see I've thought a lot about this. It's so specific. Like, I also in this, in this fantasy, I'm imagining that your hair is inexplicably feathered as well. Obviously. Of course. The thing about pool is, like, on paper, it seems so simple.

It's just geometry, right? But I pick up a... Yeah, me too. I pick up a pool queue and I'm like, I suddenly become the most uncoordinated, like, baby giraffe in existence. I'm like, what do I do? I know. It's so sad.

Heidi was amazing at it, apparently. She was amazing. Now it would be up to the homicide detectives to figure out what had put a stop to a life that was just getting started. And as always, step one was to tell. talk to the boyfriend. Still covered in Heidi's blood from where he'd cradled her body at the scene, Steve sat down with detectives for an interview. He seemed distraught. Heidi was the love of his life, he told them. They were planning on getting married that summer in Vegas. They were planning all kinds of upgrades for the townhouse. This wasn't the first time Stephen Cook had been through

this particular brand of nightmare. Five years earlier, his parents were mugged at gunpoint on the street. Trying to appease the mugger, his mom pulled out all the money she had in her pockets. 52 cents. Steve's dad tried to fight with the guy, and in the struggle, he fired the gun. The bullet hit Steve's mom and killed her. Murdered over less than a dollar. God, I can't imagine going through that once, let alone twice. Jesus, Jones.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. There was one thing that raised the detective's eyebrows about Steve. a fat $700,000 life insurance policy on Heidi with him as the beneficiary. Steve had one too for a similar amount. They'd taken them out together, Steve said, when they decided to get married, just to plan for their future. Seemed like an awful big policy for a receptionist. But Steve's alibi for the time of Heidi's murder was pretty rock solid. He showed them receipts for the haircut and the oil change and the Home Depot where he bought a part for his sister's leaky sink.

she confirmed that he'd been there helping her fix it. Later, they'd verify his presence at several of these places with security footage. There was no way he'd done the murder himself. But Stephen did have a thought about who might have killed Heidi. Some strange stuff had happened recently, and Heidi was scared. The first thing was a creepy encounter she'd had a few weeks before the murder. She was home alone one afternoon when a man knocked on the door of the townhouse. Heidi didn't recognize the guy.

She described him as dark-haired and dark-complected, either a dark-skinned white guy or a light-skinned black guy. I'm thinking about starting a neighborhood watch, the man said. Would Heidi be interested? It was an innocuous enough question, but Heidi knew her neighborhood pretty well, and she'd never seen this guy before. And there was just something unsettling about the way he looked at her, as if he was studying her face. It was too intense. It upset her enough that she told her friends about it, even drew them a pair. picture of the tattoo on the guy's left forearm. And although she kept an eye out for the man

around the neighborhood, thinking maybe she'd somehow just never noticed him before, she didn't see him again. It was nerve-wracking. And then, just the day before the murder, Heidi came home to find scratch marks around the doorknob to the basement entrance of the townhouse. Somebody had obviously tried to break in, probably with a screwdriver. This scared the shit out of her, especially in the wake of the weird encounter with the neighborhood watch guy. Steve had gone down to the rental company's office and insisted somebody come over and changed the locks. And the CSIs at the scene noticed the scratch marks around the basement doorknob, definitely looked like an attempted break-in. Still, there were no other signs of forced entry to the townhouse, and the killer hadn't gotten

in that way. So that was looking like a pretty hot lead. There was plenty for detectives to dig into, and at this point they definitely didn't have anything to hold Stephen Cook on. It was too soon to tell if they needed to keep the spotlight on him. So they let him go, for now. And it didn't take long for them to catch a break about Heidi's neighborhood watch guy. The investigators had been talking to Heidi and Stephen's neighbors, and some of them had noticed a man sort of hovering around the townhouse a few weeks before the murder. The guy seemed to fit the description of Heidi's creepy mystery man, dark complexion, tattoo.

Eventually, one witness was able to point the detectives to the man he thought it might be. His name was Terry Gilliam. Terry was a 19-year-old black man, and he had a tattoo on his left arm in the same spot Heidi had described. And there were several other things about him that got the investigator's attention. First, he was a butcher at Safeway, so comfortable with knives. And when they looked into his whereabouts on the day of Heidi's murder, they found something that made their antenna twitch.

The Safeway kept printouts of their employees' hours, their sign-in and clockout times, and on Terry's printout for the day, somebody had handwritten over the original times with different ones. Suspish. This wasn't enough for an arrest, obviously, so they used a time-honored trick. They arrested Terry for something else and hauled him in for questioning. Terry denied any involvement whatsoever in Heidi's murder.

He said he didn't even know her. But when they asked him if he knew Stephen Cook, he admitted that, well, he used to work with Stephen's sister Kim. and now she was his realtor. She'd been helping him find a house. You're buying a house? The detectives raised an eyebrow at this. This dude was all of 19 years old.

Yeah, Terry said. In fact, he'd just put down a pretty chunky down payment. Where'd he get the money for a house? I saved for it, Terry said. Okay, didn't happen to get paid for killing this young woman, did you? Of course not, Terry said. He agreed to let the investigators take a sample, of his DNA, and he agreed to a polygraph, which he passed. So, hmm, there was nothing to hold

the guy on. They let him go. These days, being able to buy a house at 19 would be suspicious. Before, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think it's suspicious back 25 years ago, to be honest. I don't know. Yeah, I would say, I mean, I would say it probably was, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anybody at that age who could have even thought about it. But that, you know, my friends are all artsy-fartsy-type. Also, butchers do make bank. They do make good money. But it's just so funny because I'm like, I'm trying to buy a house.

And it's a fucking man. No chance in hell today, probably, unless you're a rich kid. Yeah. Come on. I need those nepo baby numbers. It seemed like Terry wasn't their guy, but they were becoming increasingly convinced that the theory they'd confront him about that somebody might have been hired to kill Heidi was legit. And they were pretty sure they knew who did the hiring, Stephen Cook. See, Steve had painted a rosier than rosy picture of his and Heidi's relationship, said they were planning a wedding that summer, planning all kinds of improvements to the townhouse. But as detectives spoke to Heidi's friends and family, a different story started to emerge. Heidi's family had been uneasy about Steve from day one. They'd never thought of him as Heidi's ideal guy. It wasn't that they disliked him exactly, at least not at first. It was more just an awkward feeling. Heidi's mom later said that he's

seemed kind of remote, hard to know. And they worried about his plans for the future. He tried and failed at various career paths. One of those was real estate, the kind of house slipping where you buy a rundown crap hole for a dollar and try to rehab it and sell it on. It can work sometimes for some people. It did not work for Stephen. One of the houses he bought didn't even have stairs to the second floor. Like, dude, that's a lot to take on. Eventually, financial tension started to ratchet up. Heidi was making most of the money and paying most of the bills, at least according to her family and friends. His family seems to dispute that to some extent, but according to the people

close to Heidi, they were fighting a lot about money. Heidi would go to work and not even have enough to buy lunch. And Stephen was always pressuring her for more, trying to get her to ask her parents for a loan. Heidi didn't want to do that. And it wasn't just money stuff. Heidi's loved ones started to realize that Stephen was controlling. He was always keeping tabs on her. If a friend asked her to go out for dinner or a movie, he wouldn't want her to go. He'd badger her to stay at home with him. She'd end up turning down the invitation just to avoid a fight. It became sort of understood among her friends that she wasn't allowed to go out without Stephen. Yeah, boy. Heidi wasn't happy with him, they said. She'd been talking about leaving him as recently as the night before

she died. And not only that, but she'd kissed a guy a couple of weeks before the murder. She told friends she was thinking about starting up a relationship with him. One of Heidi's friends had even loaned her a couple hundred dollars just two days before the murder. What four? So she could rent a storage unit for some of her stuff when she moved out of the townhouse. And then the investigators discovered something that amped their suspicions up to 11. Just one month before Heidi's murder, Stephen Cook had filed for bankruptcy. The guy was in bad financial shape. And then you have to consider that huge $700,000 life insurance policy on Heidi with him as the recipient. When they first asked Stephen about it, he was like,

well, I have a policy on my life too for the same amount. And she was my beneficiary. But when they dug into the policies, they realized that Stevens had never been activated. Only Heidi's policy was active at the time of her death. And again, the amount was just ridiculous. Stephen was working part-time at Lowe's, and Heidi was a receptionist at an insurance company. I mean, they didn't have any kids together. They weren't even married yet. On what planet did either of these people need a $700,000 life insurance policy? It's just bananas.

And yet again, dipshits not paying for their own policies, but letting their partner pay for their... Like, it's just fucking insane. It's just idiocy. And to detectives, it was suspicious as hell, especially considering the bankruptcy. But what it wasn't, of course, was proof of his guilt. And with no DNA match, no eyewitnesses, no confession, no nothing, the case started going to cold. Stephen started moving on with his life. He found a new girlfriend. Heidi's family watched all of this in a kind of despair that I imagine

only murder victims' families can feel. They'd been deeply suspicious of Stephen from the start, despite his alibi. He was behind the murder. They felt it in their bones. And that feeling got even stronger when a few years after the murder, one of Heidi's brothers found out that Stephen was trying to collect on the life insurance again. Initially, the company had refused to pay out because of the circumstances of Heidi's death. The company called up one of the detectives and basically said, yo, is this guy a suspect? And the detective said, oh yeah. And that was pretty much that. But Stephen was persistent. He'd been pestering the insurance company, trying and trying to collect. The idea of that money going to the man they believe,

had ordered Heidi's death was just unthinkable to her family. I mean, imagine. So they made a move to try and stop it and get some testimony on the record at the same time. They sued him under what's called the Slayer Statute. Now, if you're not familiar, the Slayer statute prevents a killer from inheriting anything from their victim. And the nice thing about it for Heidi's family

was that to invoke it, you don't have to have a criminal conviction in place. You just have to prove in civil court that this person is likely guilty of the crime. and the standard of proof is much, much lower in civil court. Stephen decided to fight the suit, and they went to trial. The jury heard all about the murder, the life insurance, the financial problems in Heidi and Stephen's relationship, and the testimony that she was about to leave him right before her death.

They heard that Stephen was still a suspect in the murder. And then to everyone's surprise, right before he was scheduled to take the witness stand himself, Stephen Cook called an audible. He was willing to settle. said. Heidi's family could have 80% of the insurance money. He'd take 20. Hmm. Wonder why our guy didn't want to get up on that witness stand and shout his innocence from the rooftops? That's kind of weird, isn't it? So this was a hard decision for Heidi's family. On the one hand,

they really wanted to get his testimony on the record because anything he said could be used against him in the murder case. But the idea of him profiting from Heidi's murder was just nauseating. If he'd hired someone to kill Heidi as they believed he had, this had been the motive. She had died for that money. The idea of letting him have it was just, no, they just couldn't stand it. So after a lot of back and forth, Heidi's family somewhat reluctantly agreed to the settlement. At least he'd be deprived of most of that money, whereas if they let it go to the jury, he could get every penny. But it still hurt.

It hurt, too, when Stephen married his girlfriend. went back to school, had a child. Hi, I'm Darren Marler, host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere. From Apple Podcasts to Spotify. But the real game changer for me was Spreeker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion.

That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes. No editing required. And with Spreker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Spreaker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network,

Spreeker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out Spreaker.com. That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R.com. by, and as Stephen Cook built his new life, Heidi's family stayed in a sort of gray limbo, trying to hold out hope for justice, trying to go on without their girl. But in the background, things were happening. One of those things was the evolution of newer, much better DNA technology. Heidi's case had never been abandoned. It was cold, but the investigators wanted to solve it.

In 2000, the National DNA database, CODIS, was in its infancy, but but by 2011, it had been up and running for years. And when they ran the male DNA profile from under Heidi's fingernails, they got a hit. The lead detective, Sergeant Alan Meyer, had been promoted out of homicide years earlier, but he'd kept working on Heidi's case. He thought about it a lot, about her family. Now, when he learned they had a DNA match, he felt a jolt of adrenaline. Who was the guy? Some local creep? A professional hitman?

The answer was the last thing anybody was expecting. The DNA belonged to a man named Alexander Bennett, a young guy studying opera at the Denver School of the Arts in Colorado, all the way on the other side of the damn country. Not a professional hitman in Baltimore, an opera singer from Denver. Huh? What in the hell was going on here?

Killer opera singer? I feel like I've seen that play before. This was weird beyond belief, but when Sergeant Meyer looked at a picture of Alexander Bennett, he felt another jolt. Remember Heidi's creepy Neighborhood Watch guy? She couldn't be sure if he was a dark-skinned white guy or a light-skinned black guy. Alexander Bennett fit that description to a T. He was in the CODIS database because of some minor stuff in his past, and yep, record said he had a tattoo on his left forearm, just like Mr. Neighborhood Watch. now we're cooking.

And it got better. Detective Meyer discovered that Mr. Bennett was in Baltimore just a few weeks before the murder. He'd been picked up by a patrol officer because he was walking on the side of a busy highway at like O Dark 30 in the morning, which you're obviously not supposed to do because, I don't know, it's hella dangerous. So the cop pulled over and picked him up, ran his name and birth date to make sure he wasn't like America's Most Wanted or anything, which is like better than like, I'd say 30% of the cops we cover on the show.

He, like, did his due diligence for once. And then asked him, hey, can I give you a ride somewhere? And guess where he asked to be dropped off? Right in front of Stephen and Heidi's house. Yeah, I can see we're dealing with another criminal mastermind here, KT. We sure are. Moriarty right there. So Detective Beyer and his partner Detective Child

slew out to Colorado to interview Alexander Bennett, who seemed perfectly happy to talk to them. They kept the DNA match under their hat at first, just asked if Alex had been in Baltimore in early April of 2000. Oh, yeah, Bennett said. I went out there with a few friends to see a concert. Well, not close friends, just some guy I met here in Denver a few weeks earlier. They invited me to go.

But it wasn't a good time, Bennett said. These new friends ended up ditching him once they got to Baltimore. He didn't have any way to get a hold of them. This was 2000, so no cell phones. and he ran out of money fast, so he ended up stuck in Baltimore for three weeks. Uh, what do you mean stuck, Detective Meyer wanted to know? I had to live on the streets for three weeks, Bennett said. This was a weird story, to say the least.

Accepting an invite to fly across the country one way when you don't have the money for the trip, then getting abandoned by the people who invited you and not having the wherewithal to figure out a way home. Like, dude, what? Rick Steves would not approve. Not that it doesn't happen, I'm sure it can, but it didn't make a lot of sense to the detectives. While you were in Baltimore for those three weeks, Detective Child said, what did you do?

Did you stay with anybody, hook up with anybody? But darn it. Wouldn't you know it? Alexander Bennett just couldn't remember. He admitted it was a little strange, but his memory for that whole three weeks was just kind of blank. I mean, come on. It was 11 years ago and everything.

All he remembered was his friends leaving him high and dry, which is, in my extremely expert opinion, suspicious as heck, this is prime party story by dude. You're an opera singer. You've got to schmooze all the rich folks into making you their kept boy. This is the perfect story to use to end up as some rich widow sugar baby that she parades around like a show dog. Like, where is your entrepreneurial spirit? Unless, of course, you're fucking lying.

At this point, the investigators decided to go ahead and drop their bomb. The thing is, Mr. Bennett, there's this murdered young woman and your DNA is under her fingernails. Got anything to say about that? At this, the reality of the situation seemed to hit Alexander Bennett. He was quiet for a few moments. Then he said, okay, I do remember one thing. There was a woman at the bus stop, Bennett said. She was just very belligerent with me.

She was like pulling on my shirt. I got kind of scared and I was trying to fight back. And I think I heard her. I'm not sure. Okay. So was it like somebody you knew? Did you have an argument? Nope.

It was just this random woman, Bennett insisted. He'd never seen her before. She just came up and started freaking out on him. You know, like random women are want to do. I know I'm always going full. Velociraptor on guys at the CVS. It's one of my little hobbies. The investigators had brought a photo lineup to show Alex, Heidi's picture alongside those of similar-looking women, and when they showed it to him, Alex quickly picked Heidi's face. So this must be why she had his DNA under her

fingernails, Bennett insisted. He hadn't killed her, just got into a melee with her at the bus stop. Huh. All right. Never showed up on her doorstep saying you were trying to get a neighborhood Watch started, did you? No, Alex said. Then, on request, he showed them the tattoo on his forearm, right where Mr. Neighborhood Watch had his. It's not looking real good for you, Child said. At the end of the interview, Alex asked if he was being charged with anything. Not yet, they told him. Well, in that case, Alex said, I have some things I need to do, so I'm going to leave. But before he went, he made a suggestion to the investigators. Talk to my friend Grant Lewis. He said, he said, said. He'll vouch for me, and we've been friends forever. He'll remember that time I got stuck in

Baltimore. Grant Lewis. Okay, we'll look him up. And they did, and who boy? Turns out our boy Alex and his bestie Grant, they'd been in some trouble before, and y'all buckle up for this shit because it is bananas. In 2003, Grant and Alex decided they wanted to get their grubby little pause on Alex's roommate's nice car, and they came up with a cunning plan to do it. It was foolproof. All they had to do was call in a bomb threat to the local courthouse in the roommate's name. And to add verisimilitude to the story, they decided, why not actually make a couple bombs? Plant them in the courthouse, in like a broom closet or someplace, right? Then write up some bomb-making instructions on the guy's computer, probably save them under a file name,

like blowup courthouse dot dock so the feds will be sure to find him then once he's in prison serving his 25 to life for attempted terrorism or whatever we gang his car it can't miss now y'all i know i've said this before okay but if that ain't some bizarre wily coyote shit i don't know what is all to steal a car this is the mindset we're dealing with here campers This is the criminal mastermind that we are dealing with. Sweet Moses Malone. So, shockingly, this plan went askew and they got caught. The poor roommate did actually get arrested for making the bomb threat,

but when he heard the recording of the 911 call, he immediately recognized Grant Lewis's voice and realized he was being set up. When the police confronted Alex and Grant, they admitted they'd set the guy up. Fortunately, before they ruined this poor guy's life. Damn. Going full bond villain over a used car. It's really kind of ballsy, but mostly just dumb. The opposite of Keep It Simple Stupid.

Make it complicated, genius. Yeah, it's mostly just dumb. But points for creativity. So, anyway, Alex and Grant each did a little bit of time over this before being released back into society. Yay. What's insane to me is that Alex told the cops like, yeah, call the guy I did time with for doing the world's most brain-dead yet complex car heist for my roommate's like 1999 Toyota Corolla. Grant's my best friend. He's my pal. He's my homeboy, my rotten shoulder. He's my sweet cheese, my good time boy. Sweet cheese. So, anywho, the investigative

invited Grant Lewis in for a little chat, and somewhat surprisingly, in my opinion, he agreed. Showed up shaken like a leaf, clearly one deep breath away from shit in himself, but Grant didn't really want to talk much about Alex. They had to really press him over the course of multiple interviews. But finally, Grant seemed to get it through his noggin that they weren't going away. And miraculously, he remembered something Alex had told him 11 years earlier, that on a trip to Baltimore, somebody had hired him to do something bad for a lot of money. Something really bad. He said, I knifed somebody, and I think I killed them. Okay, so that was it. Just what they needed to charge Alexander Bennett with murder, with his old buddy, Grant Lewis, as the main witness against

him. But there were still pieces missing from the puzzle. How did Alex even know Heidi? Was Stephen Cook involved? Did Alex know him? They had no idea until one afternoon, over a year into the preparations for Alex Bennett's murder trial, they got a phone call from a woman named Rebecca, Grant Lewis's ex-girlfriend, Rebecca, and she had a hell of a story to tell. Years earlier, Grant had told her an awful secret, that in 2000, he'd sent Alex to Baltimore to do a contract murder for a man he'd met online. That was all Rebecca knew, but it was a huge deal to the investigators who had to

never stopped looking at Stephen Cook as the mastermind behind Heidi's murder. Alex Bennett had clammed up after that first interview with the detectives. After his arrest, he just lawyered up and kept his mouth shut. But now, possibly because his lawyer got wind of this phone call from Grant's X, or possibly just because he was getting close to his trial date, Alex sent word that he wanted to talk. What he wanted, specifically, was a plea deal. And he was willing to give them some important info in return.

See, Star Witness, Grant Lewis, had big dreams in life. Back in 2000, he was dreaming about opening a nightclub. It's always a fucking nightclub, Whitney. Why is it always a nightclub? I know. The only problem was he didn't have any money. So we cooked up a little plan and ran it past his bestie Alex. We'll be hit, man, he said.

We could just do one or two jobs and make enough to open the club. Oh, boy. Now, what does an enterprising 20-something fella do when he wants to find work as a contract killer? What else could he do? He posted an ad on Craigslist. Yeah. I wish to Almighty God that I had the exact text of this Craigslist ad because I'm sure it was

beyond ridiculous, but we know that the heading was something like professional discrete house cleaning. Let's all pause to roll our eyes so hard it hurts a little. There we go. it's the discreet that really sells it there is no legit reason to say that you know it's either going to be sex or murder have you ever seen the word discreet that wasn't referring to some sketchy activities or sex toys yeah exactly no actual cleaning service would say that now depending on the source this could have been a plan to try and scam some would-be client out of money

take the money don't do the head or they may have intended to do the murder from the get-go. I've seen it reported both ways. Yeah, given what we know about these guys, I'm inclined to believe that they liked the idea of becoming hitmen, and this is how they chose to go about it, because A, they are man-children who fantasize about being bond villains, and B, they are turnips. Right. Like, considering they actually ended up doing it, I'm guessing these root vegetables were Stone Cold Steve serious. Yeah. And according to Alex Bennett, their very first customer, the first and only client who responded to the ad, was none other than Stephen Cook. Stephen got in touch with Grant Lewis via Craigslist. They started an online correspondence over the

next couple of weeks, and eventually Stephen agreed to pay Grant $60,000 once Heidi's life insurance money came in. Grant talked to Alex and doing the hit, and Alex flew to Baltimore. It was Alex who showed up on Heidi's doorstep asking about a neighborhood watch. He wanted to meet his victim, feel her out a little before the actual hit. It was Alex who tried to break into the basement of the townhouse with a screwdriver. And it was Alex who met with Stephen there that night before the murder while Heidi was out. It needs to look like an accident, Stephen said. The insurance money will take forever to pay out if it doesn't. Which, by the way, wow, way to nail it, man. I can't decide, which is more ridiculous, trying to become a hitman via Craigslist or being enough of a doorknob

to hire a hitman that way. Right, and trust that they're going to be experienced and know what the hell they're doing. Everybody in this story is just a goob of epic proportions. It is pitiful. So Stephen gave Alex a key to the townhouse that night, which explains why there was no sign of forced entry the day of the murder. And on the afternoon of April 20th, when he dropped Heidi off home after work and left to go run errands,

Stephen Cook did so knowing that a killer was waiting for her inside. Just let that sink in for a second. It's just unbelievable. Heidi came in, and before Alex could grab her, she saw him and panicked. I'm sure she probably realized immediately that this was the same guy who scared her so badly a few weeks earlier. Heidi fought, hard, but Alex was bigger, and eventually he choked her unconscious and slid her throat. Then, realizing he'd blown the plan to make the murder look like an accident, he half-assed an attempt at staging it to look like a robbery.

gone wrong, then drew that number one on the wall in lipstick as an afterthought. Like, maybe they'll think it's a serial killer. Then he went back to Colorado. He and Grant never got paid a penny for the murder, by the way. The sweet, bright girl died for nothing. It's just infuriating. What's also infuriating is that the original detectives didn't think to search Stephen Cook's computer at the time.

It was 2000, and that wasn't necessarily standard procedure yet, but still they should have in my opinion. The internet had been a thing for a while by then, for God's sake, and if they'd done that, the case might have been solved years and years earlier. So, as it turned out, their number one witness was in this thing up to his eyebrows. The investigators have been treating Grant Lewis to lunch, helping him get his testimony all ready for trial. Talk about it kicking the kidneys, damn.

Can we talk, by the way, about what an absolute piece of shit this guy Grant is? like you're the one who came up with this bright idea and now you're going to act like an innocent baby and testify against your like oldest friend and partner in crime. Wow man, you are something else. It's like the old saying goes, I guess. There's no honor among failed Craigslist hitman. So anyway, with this new info, they finally had what they needed to go put the much delayed habeas grabus on Stephen Cook. The case finally made sense. All the pieces fit together. For his part, of course, Stephen denied everything. This was just a killer trying to lessen his sentence. And you know, I think a jury might have actually considered that if it wasn't for one

inconvenient little detail. See, after he got arrested, Stephen Cook took up residence at the county jail. And while there, taking a play from page four of the classic TCC villain handbook, subtitled the Dummies Guide to Complete Dipshittery, our boy decided to confide in a fellow inmate. There's another inmate here, Stephen told his new best friend, who's planning on testifying against me, and I need him to, you know, not do that. Oh, said his new best friend, tell me more. Presumably, while discreetly opening up a notepad. See? Sketch activities. Discreetly. Honorable, but sketch. And as soon as their conversation was over, new best friend ran straight to the authorities and agreed to wear a wire. It was a long conversation. You can read most of it in the

court papers for the case, but the gist of it was this. Cellmate. Okay, we're going to hit Lewis this week. Stephen, yeah, do it. Tell me about it later. I trust you, okay? So, say it with me, folks. Your prison buddy ain't your buddy. Get it through your heads for the love of God. Or you know what, better yet, don't. Just keep right on doing this dumb shit and get getting caught because it makes things worse for you and that's delightful. But the thing is, it scares me to think that some of these people might actually succeed at arranging a hit from prison. So if we can deter these tools from even trying it, that's a public service as far as I'm concerned. And I think the plan was not necessarily to kill Grant Lewis, although I'm not

sure about that. It may have just been to beat the crap out of him and tell him, don't you dare say a word against, you know, Stephen Cook or whatever. It wasn't entirely clear. But either way, Stephen got hit with a new and exciting charge in addition to his first-degree murder charge, witness intimidation. And this, more than any other element in the case, convinces me and probably convince the jury, that this man is guiltier than hot-buttered sin, because you just don't do that, if you're not. In my opinion, anyway. Mm-hmm.

He tried to soldier on, got up on the stand and talked about how much he loved Heidi and how he wanted her family to know the truth, that he never would have hurt her in a million years. The jury didn't buy a word of it. In 2015, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He's still proclaiming his innocence today, has a website and everything. It's pretty gross. Grant Lewis was convicted of the same thing,

first-degree murder, and got the same life sentence. And as for the hitman himself, Alexander Bennett, he took a plea deal and got 30 years. some semblance of justice for Heidi, 15 long years after the fact, they've all appealed their cases and lost. I think Alex signs up for the prison talent show. I think the other inmates appreciate his opera singing. Just like Jody Arias. She likes the prison talent show too, I hear.

I think this is one of the coldest murders we've ever covered, purely motivated by greed. And the image of him pulling away in his car, watching Heidi walk up the driveway to the that front door, and knowing what was lying in wait for her, just chills me to the bone. Yeah, she did not deserve it. And the people who did this to her did not deserve their years and years of freedom. I hope they never see daylight again. 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.

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