True Crime Campfire - Stranger Than Fiction: Vol. 2

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

“Stranger than fiction” is one of our guiding forces here at True Crime Campfire. We always try to find the kind of stories that will live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life. But of all the weird stories we’ve encountered in our decades of true crime obsession, there are a few that stand out far above the crowd. In our first case, a quirky professor known for his unorthodox views on fast food comes home from a conference and walks into a nightmare. A day later, detectives walk in on the weirdest, most brutal crime scene they’ve ever seen. And in the second, a teenage boy is forced to confront a kind of betrayal worse than he ever could have imagined—and investigators will have to puzzle through a maze of bizarre clues to work out what happened. Sources: https://archives.law.virginia.edu/dengrove/writeup/appledorfhttps://www.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2018/04/04/35-years-after-murder-appledorfs-memory-lives-on-in-popular-uf-course/12823197007/Investigation Discovery's "Tabloid," episodes "Deadly D-List" and "Devils in Disguise"https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/22/us/2-sentenced-in-slaying-of-professor-in-florida.htmlhttp://truecrimediscussions.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-assault-of-charles-hardeman.htmlhttps://www.actionnews5.com/story/17590194/teen-recovering-after-surviving-fire-car-crash-and-attempted-drowning/https://wreg.com/news/sister-of-kidnapping-victim-arrested-in-case/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/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. Stranger than fiction is one of our guiding forces here at true crime campfire. We always try to find the kind of story. stories that will live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life. But of all the weird stories we've encountered in our decades of true-crime obsession, there are a few that stand out far above the crowd. In our first case, a quirky professor known for his unorthodox views on fast food,

comes home from a conference and walks into a nightmare. A day later, detectives walk in on the weirdest, most brutal crime scene they've ever seen. And in the second, a teenage boy is forced to confront a kind of betrayal, worse than he could ever have imagined. And investigators will have to puzzle through a maze of bizarre clues to work out what happened. This is Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 2. Case 1. Secrets and Fries, the murder of the junk food professor, So, campers, for this one, we're in Gainesville, Florida. Labor Day, 1983. A guy out for a walk noticed that his neighbor's back door had been tampered with, maybe kicked in or crowbarred.

Looked like a break-in, so the guy rushed back into his house to call the cops. They arrived expecting to find a burglary, but what they found instead was the most bizarre crime scene any of them had ever seen. They could see immediately that the house had been ransacked, furniture turned over, drawers pulled out and dumped all over the place, the living room looked like a hurricane had hit it. On the floor, arranged in a circle were the remnants of a meal, cans of beer, glasses of wine, and four plates with sub-sandwiches and chips on them in varying states of consumption, one completely untouched. A note lay next to one of the plates. It said, sorry you couldn't be with us, Howard. And on the wall above this strange tablo, someone had written, in bright, still-wet red, the word red rum.

Murder. Backwards. Just like the scene in the movie The Shining. As they stood in the doorway surveying this chaos, one of the detectives spotted the body. A man lay shirtless on the couch, his legs and wrists tied with electrical cord, a bag over his head. His bare chest was covered with angry-looking marks that would turn out to be cigarette burns. What the hell was going on here? When the investigators took the bag off the victim's head, they couldn't believe it.

This was Dr. Howard Appledorf, the University of Florida's gregarious celebrity professor, a guy who had gotten almost as much airtime on TV talk shows as he had in the lecture hall. 41-year-old Dr. Appledorf, or Doc, as people called him, taught one of the most popular classes at the university. Man's food, which had grown over the years from a small, 15-person classroom to a 700-head capacity lecture hall. There was a waiting list to get in. Why was the class so popular? Well, Dr. Appledorf was a researcher with serious credentials, a Ph.D. from MIT, a post-doctoral stint at Berkeley, and an unusual message. Junk food is good for you. Oh yeah. According to Dr. Appledorf, you could get pretty much all the

nutrition you needed from a diet of fast food and the kind of snacks you buy at 7-Eleven. God, if only it were true. Honestly, that feels like the kind of research that would be featured in some kind of sci-fi allegory about diet culture or something. You know, it's funny you should say that. Have you seen the Woody Allen movie Sleeper? Yeah. I know Woody Allen.

Ooh, fuck Woody Allen. But Sleeper was about a guy who, like, slept for like a thousand years or something. And when he woke up, the world was this bizarre world version of the real one. And a lot of the stuff that's really bad for you was like good for you now, like a doctor. keeps trying to get him to smoke because it'll help him get better. And she's like, come on, it's tobacco. It's the best thing for your body. It's really funny. So yeah, good call. And may I say again, Woody Allen. Boo. Appledorf's schick was probably a little bit easier to sell in the early 80s than it would be today

because, you know, it's provably false and we have mountains of research to show that. But Doc had a big charismatic personality and he sold it well. His students thought he was cool as hell. and, of course, so did big food companies who hired him on left and right as a consultant. Talk shows had him on, conferences invited him to speak, he was always flying here and there, giving lectures, and breaking in cash.

He wasn't in it for the money, though. Aside from a few little splurges, like a pretty little Pontiac Firebird, he actually donated most of what he earned to the school, and some to charity in his local Little League teams. He was a regular fixture at the Red Lion, his favorite bar, where he went every night for a few beers after work. He'd hold court, charm in the pants off everybody, macking on all the ladies, buying rounds.

He knew everybody, and everybody was always happy to see him. Now, somebody, or from the looks of the crime scene, possibly more than one somebody, had tortured and suffocated him to death. Such an unnecessarily brutal way to kill somebody, so why? Dr. Appledorff's beloved Pontiac Firebird was missing. I mean, was that the motive? Surely it went deeper than that, given all the violence of the scene. Investigators quickly learned that Dr. Appledorff had seemed preoccupied the previous Friday night

at the Red Lion the last time anyone had seen him alive. His friend Richard, one of the bartenders there, said Doc had been uncharacteristically quiet and tense. He hadn't wanted to talk about it, though, said he was just tired from the conference he'd just been to, and he wanted to go home early and go to bed. Richard just took it at face value at the time, and then the next thing he knew, he was hearing about the murder. Investigators were pretty baffled. at first. The crime scene looked like the work of a mentally disturbed killer, or a satanic cult. Because, of course, you can't have a weird murder in the 80s and not consider a satanic cult. It's always a satanic cult. They had satanic cults out the wazoo in the 80s.

And rumor ran wild all over campus. One theory was that Dr. Appledorff had managed to get on the wrong side of a jealous husband or boyfriend. He definitely had a rep as a ladies man. Or maybe it was one of his students, somebody he'd failed. Or maybe he'd had an affair with a student and this was her angry dad's revenge. The possibilities seemed pretty much endless. But then, Detective Ray Davis remembered something he thought might be important. A week before the murderer, he'd worked another case involving Dr. Appledorf. Three young men had shown up at a branch of Appledorf's bank.

They'd handed the teller one of the professor's checks made out to cash. quite a significant amount of cash for 1983, like 900 bucks, which is about $2,500 today. The teller was suspicious right away. She knew Dr. Applnorth, and she'd never seen these guys before in her life. But they didn't seem like the kind of people the professor would hang out with, much less give such an enormous gift. The guys insisted that Howard was a good friend of theirs. One said, give him a call. I've got his number right here.

turned out the number went to a pay phone, not Dr. Appledorff's condo. And right after cashing the check, the teller called the police. They put the habeas grabus on the three guys, tossed him in jail, and fully expected to see the case play out in court. But now, as Detective Davis checked in on the case, curious to see if there would be a connection between the theft and the murder, he got a surprise. The charges had been dropped at Dr. Appledorff's request. At the time, everybody had assumed the thieves had some of the crime.

how lifted the stolen check from Appledorf's wallet or car. They'd assumed the professor didn't know these guys, especially when they were from out of town, all the way up in New York. But now Detective Davis wasn't so sure. The three guys involved in the Czech forging case were 19-year-old Paul Everson, 21-year-old Gary Bown, and 15-year-old Shane Kennedy. Davis wanted to find and question them ASAP, but after they bailed out of jail for the check fraud, they'd pretty much disappeared into the wind. So the investigators knew Dr. Appledorff's firebird was missing and they knew the three suspects were from New York, so they got in touch with the NYPD and had him put a be on the lookout on both the car and the guys. Detective Davis soon learned that Everson, Bown, and Kennedy

were all fixtures in the gay club scene in New York City, and that gave Davis a hunch. He sent over a picture of Dr. Appledorf and had the New York cops show it around some of the gay bars in the city, and at every one, people said, oh yeah, we know him. That's Doc from Florida. Hmm. So apparently, Dr. Appledorff had been living something of a double life. When he was at UF, he was the ladiesman, the regular at the Red Lion, buying rounds of drinks for all the prettiest girls, but when he was on the road, it was a different story. Doc was gay. But it was 1983 and the world the LGBTQ community was living in was very, very different than the one we live in now. Now, obviously, we still have a long way to go right here in 2022, but in 83,

It was rare for a distinguished professor to come out as gay. It would have just been too dangerous for him, and it could have been tantamount to career suicide, which is really sad and awful, but true. So, when he was at home in Florida, he guarded his sexuality carefully and wore the mask of a heterosexual playboy. When he went on the road for conferences and TV appearances, though, he let his hair down and hung out at the gay bars.

Could he have met the suspects at one of those bars? It seemed clear now that he knew the three teens, and obviously the police knew that Bown, Eberson, and Kennedy had tried to steal $900 from the dock. But that wasn't enough to prove they killed him, of course. They needed more than that. And it didn't take him long to find it. Coiming through the crime scene evidence again,

they found a receipt for a sub shop near Doc Appledorf's condo. Remember that weird little place setting tableau and a circle on the floor with like the half-finished subs on the plates? So Detective Davis took a walk over to the sub shop and questioned the employees who worked there. and lo and behold, he hit paydirt. The kid had been working there the night of the murder remembered seeing these three suspects.

They bought four subs, and while they were waiting for him, the employee overheard them having a weird conversation that's stuck in his mind. That scene in The Shining, where little Danny Torrance writes red rum and lipstick on the door and scares the living shit out of his poor mom. Red rum.

The same word the cops had found written in what turned out to be ketchup, appropriate for the junk food professor, on Dr. Appledorf's living room wall. Can we take a second and talk about how fucking lame it is to stage your crime scene based on a movie? Yeah. Like, it's not creepy. No one's going to, like, walk in and be like, oh, my God, red rum, what does it mean?

They're like, oh, yeah, the thing from the thing. Like, be original for Christ's sakes. I agree with you, but I would probably piss my pants if I walked in and saw that on the wall. Until I found out it was ketchup, and then I might have just been like, oh, for God's. And this, of course, was the nail in the coffin for Bown, Everson, and Kennedy. Detective Davis had himself an arrest warrant. But he still didn't have the guys. They'd obviously been lying low since the murder.

Fortunately for the Florida cops, though, Doc Appledorff had been just as popular a figure in the gay bars of New York as he was at his regular place in Gainesville. And it seemed like the whole LGBT community was keeping an eye out for the three suspects. One night, a bartender at one of the clubs happened to see Gary Bown stroll in for a drink. Gary was in full drag, maybe hoping to stay incognito and still managed to go out for a good time. I don't know. The bartender still recognized him immediately and beeline for the phone to call the cops. Good for him. And right as they arrived, they saw our boy Gary strolling out the front door of the club,

looking by all accounts very glamorous and heading right for, you guessed it, Dr. Appledorff's Pontiac Firebird. Wow, this guy is dumb. Bless your heart, honey. Look, you kill a guy and you steal his car, you don't keep the car. Okay, Mark Twitchell had to learn that the hard way, and apparently so did Gary Bown. So the New York cops were hot on Gary's trail. He took off in that firebird, and they took off after him, and for the next 10 minutes or so,

it was like something out of an action movie, like 100 mile an hour chase through the streets of New York, just completely bananas. And you know what? I think this might be TCC's very first drag queen involved high-speed chase, which is exciting. Because you know we got more coming. Yeah, of course. Because those ladies are dramatic. Mm-hmm.

But this is our first. You know, I think fugitive drag queen is a really good band name or... Oh, hell yeah. Consider this roller derby name. Just say absolutely. Just say... Absolutely. Fugitive drag queen.

Gary gave it his best shot, but of course the police eventually caught him and hauled him in. And it didn't take the guy. 10 minutes to spill his guts about the murder and throw his two buddies under the bus with him. Gary told the investigators that he met Dr. Howard Appledorf at a soda convention where the doc was a keynote speaker. Yeah, apparently soda conventions are a thing that exist. You know, you learn something new every day. I wonder if we have one of those to blame for the abomination before God that was Crystal Pepsi. Yes, the great soda wars of the 80s, every bit as scary as the Cold War in its own way. definitely. Everyone was just coked up and making opaque things clear for some reason.

I think you answered your own question with that. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Doc met Gary at the convention where Gary was plying his trade as an escort, and they spent a fun evening together. Dr. Appledorf bought a pricey bottle of champs, an even pricier dinner, and by the end of the night, he'd spent over 500 bucks on his new friend. After the convention, Doc called Gary up and invited him down to Florida. This was out of character for Appledorff. He'd always stayed so firmly in the closet at home. Maybe the whole double-life thing was starting to wear him down,

or maybe he was just really smitten with his new 21-year-old friend. Either way, Gary was happy to oblige, and he brought two of his buds along with him, 19-year-old Paul Everson, and yikes, 15-year-old Shane Kennedy. Yikes. Yeah. What these two adults were doing hanging around with a 15-year-old, I don't know.

Not to mention the 41-year-old they're going down there to hang out with. Yeah. Yeah. Not great. I would have liked to think the doc would have taken one look at Shane Kennedy, realized this guy's probably still in high school and shut the whole thing down. But that's not what happened. Ugh, gross.

Instead, the three guys spent the weekend with Dr. Appledorf at his condo, partying it up, and it didn't take long for Appledorf to get really uncomfortable with the whole situation. His three guests were rowdy. When one of his neighbors complained about the loud music and threatened to call the police, Doc had had enough. He was like, okay guys, it's been fun, but you have to leave now. The guys were not pleased about that. They wanted to keep the Appledorf ATM going as long as possible. They demanded more money, and Doc told them no. He He'd already given them plenty, and he wasn't going to give them more. After a few tense moments, the guys stood up to leave.

Appledorf must have been relieved. But, unbeknownst to him, one of the three stole a blank check from his checkbook on the way out the door. And the next thing Doc knew, he was getting a call from the police. They'd just arrested Gary, Paul, and Shane at the bank for attempting to forge one of his checks. Now, these three guys were furious at being arrested. The way Gary saw it, Appledorf owed them that money. Yeah. He earned it by existing.

Yeah, and they cooked up a plan. They called Doc up on the jail phone and let him know. Look, if you don't drop these charges, we're going to out you. So that, obviously, was why Appledorf had called up the state's attorney and asked that the charges be dropped. He was scared to death of the university finding out about his secret life. The three guys weren't satisfied with this, though. They were pissed at having to spend a night in jail and they wanted revenge. As soon as they bailed out, they walked over to Appledorf's condo.

broke open the door and waited for Doc to get back from his latest conference. And we already know the rest of that story. As soon as he walked through the door, they jumped on him. After the murder, they'd staged the scene to look like what they imagined a crazy, cult-type murder scene would look like, right down to the red rum on the wall. And then they stole the firebird and hauled ass back to New York. And creepily, Detective Davis said that Gary Bowns seemed to really enjoy confessing to all this. He looked like he was reliving a happy memory,

like he was telling him about the last time he went to Disney World. or something. Gary and his two buddies all took plea deals in the end. Gary and Paul, the two adults, ended up with life in prison without the possibility of parole. And Shane Kennedy, who was 15 at the time of the murder, spent the next six years in jail and was released at the age of 21. And I wish I could tell you that he got his life together after that. I mean, this kid was so young at the time of the murder, and apparently he got sick to his stomach and left in the middle of it, so he was the least involved of the three. But unfortunately, Shane did not keep his nose clean after his release. He ended up back

in jail for various thefts and then again for, I shit you not, I'm not making this up, stalking Todd Oldham, the fashion designer. Holy shit. Holy shit. That's so weird. So, the murder obviously had a huge impact on the University of Florida and all the people who cared about

Doc Appledorf. He was one of those larger-than-life people and his murder left a pretty major crater in the city's sense of safety. Of course, it would be just a few years later when serial killer Danny Rowling would sweep through Gainesville and leave an even more devastating mark. Okay, so that was bananas, right? Our next case, if you can believe it, is even wilder.

We're calling this one Family Matters, the story of Charles Hardiman. So for this one, we're in Sladen, Mississippi, April 11, 2012. Police and paramedics pulled up to the scene of a one-vehicle accident, a truck that had crashed head on into a tree. A passerby had noticed the truck and called 911, the driver didn't seem to be moving. First responders noticed right away that there were no skid marks on the road, nothing to indicate that the driver had made any attempt whatsoever to stop.

It looked like he'd just driven right into the tree. And when they got over to the driver's side and checked on him, it was easy to see why. The driver, a young black man who looked to be in his late teens, was barely conscious. They could see a vicious-looking gash across his forehead, and he looked like he was having a lot of trouble breathing. As they started checking him out to try and help him, he started flailing his arms, like trying to fight them off. and that's not that unusual patients get like that sometimes

when they're semi-conscious or delirious because they just kind of panic. So the EMTs reassured the guy, like, it's okay, man, we're here to help you. And as they maneuvered him out of the truck and onto a gurney, he lost consciousness completely. Once they got hold of the young man to lift him, the paramedics noticed something weird.

Whoa, why is he wet? This kid was soaked from head to toe, his clothes completely sodden with water. There was no other. water around, like there was no water in the truck. How the hell did he get wet like that? And there were other things, too. The kid had a belt looped tightly around one ankle.

And when the EMTs inserted a breathing tube down his throat, a jet of brown, brackish-smelling water came up. Like, you know, a drowning victim. What the hell? So this scene was getting weirder by the minute. As they always did, the first responders ran the license plate on the truck. It came up, registered to Charles Hardiman. The driver's license picture matched, so they figured Charles was the kid they had on the stretcher.

They loaded him up into the ambulance. The kid had obviously been through something pretty serious, so they needed to get him to a hospital stat. And then, as the ambulance took off from the scene, the firefighters who'd stayed behind with the truck heard another call come in from dispatch. A fire at the residential address. And as the dispatcher repeated the street name and house number, they realized, This was the same address as the one on Charles Hardibin's driver's license. That's so crazy. Just when they thought this day couldn't get any weirder.

Like, this kid was a modern-day resputin. Poor kid. I can't even imagine what he went through. So they sped over to the scene of the fire and found a house fully engulfed in flames. It was way too far gone to save, and as soon as the firefighters got the flames put out, they began to see the telltale signs of arson. There were gas cans positioned all around the house and yard and clear signs that someone had poured an accelerant to get the fire going.

So now we have a teenage kid who somehow managed to get soaked from head to toe with water, has water in his lungs and a belt tied around one ankle, and crashes his truck into a tree. At the same time, his house is burning down a little ways down the road and all signs point to arson. What in the name of all that is holy is going on here? The firefighters managed to get the homeowner on the phone, Charles's mom, Tammy. Just imagine getting that phone call campers.

I can't. Not only is your son in the hospital after running his truck into a tree, but your house just burned down too. Yeah, that is a hell of a day. I can't even imagine that. Just holy moly. I mean, I'm sure her main focus was on her son, but holy crap. Oh, for sure. She rushed right over to the hospital, forgetting about the house for the time being. And when she got there, it was a grim scene. The doctors had put Charles into a medically induced coma to help them safely address the nasty head injury paramedics had noticed back at the crash site.

And they'd made a disturbing discovery. Charles had some serious injuries, and they didn't look like the result of the crash. For example, there was nothing in the truck to indicate that he'd hit the windshield. So how did he get that head injury? And then there was the angry-looking mark around his neck. It looked exactly like a ligature mark. Yeah. It quickly became clear to the doctors that Charles Hardiman had been brutally beaten and strangled.

Of course, none of that explained how wet he was when the EMTs found him or the water in his lungs. But back at the scene of the house fire, police and firefighters were starting to figure that out. Yeah, Detective Kelly McMillan was walking around the property and he noticed a big pond a short distance from the house. There was a little dock, and when he walked out onto it, he immediately noticed a blood trail. So Macmillan thought, okay, we've got blood here, we've got a kid who is soaking wet with water in his lungs, we need to get a dive team out here. Now, so that's what they did. When the EMTs took that belt off Charles's ankle, they noticed that the belt buckle had been ripped off. So that was one of the things they wanted to look for in the pond.

Plus, you know, anything else they could find that might be of evidentiary value that might begin to explain what had happened to this kid. The divers had a tough time of it, though. The pond was muddy brown, so visibility. was pretty much crap, but even so, it didn't take them long to hit pay dirt. The first thing they found was this big heavy statue of a deer, with part of Charles's belt still attached. Had Charles attacker tied his ankle to this thing and tossed him in the pond? It sure looked that way. And I just, that scene in particular just gives me full body chills. Like, imagine what that thing must have looked like under the water. Like you've got this murky pond, sunlight shining down through that muddy green water, just barely enough to illuminate the

silhouette of antlers. Yeah, it's like something from that TV show Hannibal, if you've ever seen that. It just freaks me out to think about it. It's like a scene from a nightmare. So, anyhow, they brought the statue up, and then they went back down to look for the belt buckle. And just

as his air was about to run out, and he was going to have to call it a day, one of the divers felt his hand closed over something flat and metal about the size of a pack of cigarettes. And it was, of course, against all odds, Charles's belt buckle. Okay. Now we might be getting somewhere.

But of course, Charles was still in the hospital, still in a coma, still balancing on a knife's edge between life and death. His doctors were giving him a one in four million chance of survival. So the investigators weren't sure if they would ever get to hear his story in his own words, if he'd ever get a chance to tell them who beat him, tossed him in the pond, and left him for dead. Charles' mom, Tammy, and his sister Ashley were at his bedside nonstop, praying for a miracle. Charles was pretty much the light of his mom's life and before this whole surreal nightmare began everything had been going great for him

he was getting ready to graduate high school he was a smart A-plus student and he was excited about going to senior prom with his friends and graduating and heading to college to study biotechnology everybody who knew Charles felt like he was one of those people destined to make a mark on the world leave it a little bit better than he found it and now his mom took to the media

to lash out at whoever did this too him. In an interview with the local news station, Tammy looked right into the camera and warned them. Whoever did this? Make no mistake about it. Charles is going to wake up and he's going to identify you. Detective McMillan joined her asking anybody who had any information about the case to come forward. They desperately wanted to solve this one. It seemed just so brutal and so senseless. But their only witness was still unconscious, and they had no leads to go on. And then eight days after the attack, as Tammy and Ashley sat beside Charles' hospital bed and prayed, the tide turned.

Charles' eyelids fluttered a little bit and then snapped open, and as soon as he saw his mom, he started frantically waving his hands. Tammy later said he started trying to use sign language to tell me who did it. There was still a lot of damage from the attack, but he was awake, he was conscious, and he was trying his best to communicate. Tammy ran to call Detective McMillan, and he and his son. partner rushed over to the hospital as fast as they could go. There's a video from that first interview at the hospital.

Charles lay in bed, an NG tube in his nose and a brace on his neck. He still couldn't really talk. Detective McMillan tried to reassure him. He said, I'm your friend. I'm going to help you. He wanted to get whoever did this to Charles, he said. Put them in jail for as long as he could. And if Charles couldn't talk to him about it right now, that was okay.

He handed him a notebook and pencil. Write it down, he said. And that was all it took. Charles took the pencil and started scribbling. Two names. Kevin Crackhead and Gregory. Tammy knew who they were. Kevin didn't really surprise her,

but Gregory, he was a good friend of the family. She couldn't believe he could do anything to hurt Charles. Armed with the two names, McMillan and his partner headed out to do some habeas grabbing, and some interrogating. First in the hot seat was Kevin Crackhead, also known as Kevin Shrock, a guy who was known to the local PD, and not exactly a choir boy if his nickname indicates anything to you. He had a substance abuse problem, and it seemed entirely plausible that he might have

tried to rob the Hardiman's house to get money for drugs. But Kevin insisted he had nothing to do with it. I was with my grandma that day, he said. We went to the bank. We met up with one of my grandparents. Grandma's friends just asked them, they'll tell you. And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. Kevin's alibi checked out.

Hmm. Interesting. They moved on to Gregory Jenkins, the Hardiman's alleged family friend. Gregory didn't say much in interrogation, just said he had nothing to do with nothing. And that was pretty much it, but he didn't have an alibi, so McMillan decided to hold on to him. Meanwhile, the story was blown up in the local media. The paper did a big cover story about trying to do. Charles, and what a miracle it was that he survived the attack. And in a stroke of FBI profiler-like

genius, one of the investigators had the idea to cut out the article and hanged on the wall right outside of Gregory Jenkins' cell. I love that kind of stuff. It's so simple and so clever and often it's incredibly effective. Just psyched the guy out. Gregory had been hanging in there okay until that article popped up on the wall where he had to stare at it all day. After that, the cheese started to slide right off his cracker. He started acting up, screaming in a cell, fighting with the guards, wigging out in epic fashion. And then one night he tried to hang himself in his cell.

The guards saw him and rescued him just in time. And when he pulled himself together, he told them enough was enough. He wanted to talk to Detective McMillan. And holy fucking shit, campers, did he have a story to tell? McMillan had barely had time to sit down before he started to spill out the whole sordid story. We beat the hell out of him, he said, and when he was finished talking, Detective McMillan stood up. He needed to go talk to Charles Hardiman again, see if he would corroborate this crazy sounding tale. If so, several people were about to go to prison,

hopefully for a very long time. Charles was sitting up in bed when the detective got to the hospital. He was already doing much better, getting his ability to speak back and everything. He looked a little apprehensive as Detective McMillan took a seat next to his bed, but he pulled himself together. And taking a deep breath, he laid out exactly what had happened to him on the afternoon of April 11th. See, the prom was coming up, he said, and he wanted to buy a tuxedo. His mom thought it was silly. I mean, why not just rent one like everybody else? but Charles felt like a man should have a tuxedo, you know?

That's an adorable. This makes you want to hug him. It was a senior prom. He wanted to do it upright. Nice tucks, nice limo for him and his friends to share, nice dinner. He'd been saving up for it for months, he said. He'd saved hundreds of dollars. And the Sunday right before, at the regular family dinner after church,

he told everybody about it at the table. His mom, his sister Ashley, her boyfriend, Xavier. Everybody was excited for him, he thought. proud of him for saving all that money. On the day of the attack, it started like no big deal, like nothing was wrong. Gregory Jenkins had showed up at the house with Xavier, Ashley's boyfriend, and his younger brother Alexander. They tricked me, Charles said. It was all smiling faces.

They all just hung out for a few minutes, and then they brought up the prom money. They wanted it, they said, all of it. Charles thought they were kidding at first, but it was quickly clear that they weren't. And Charles was furious. He'd worked his ass off for that money. It was everything he had. He wasn't about to hand it over, and he sure as hell wasn't going to just sit by and watch these assholes rob his parents' house. At that point, as Charles later said, he became a problem that they had to deal with. They beat him with some kind of club-like object. He wasn't sure exactly what.

Laid his forehead open with a nasty gash. And then they pulled off his own belt and tried to strangle him with it. It didn't kill him, but he did lose consciousness. Did the attackers think he was dead? It's a possibility because their next move was to grab that heavy deer statue and lashed Charles' ankle to it with the belt. Working together, they carried him out to the pond and dropped him off the dock. As soon as he hit that cold water, Charles' consciousness came roaring back.

Looking up through the murky water as he sank, he could see his attackers just standing on the dock. Gregory, Xavier, Alexander, and one more. one whose presence on the dock hurt more than the water flowing into his lungs. His sister, Ashley. She was just standing there on the dock, watching him sink, her face as cold as the pond. The last thing he saw before he sank too far down was Ashley turning around and walking away, gesturing for the other three to follow her. Charles lost the plot for a little bit after that, but the next thing he knew, he was rising up through the water.

somehow the belt had gotten loose from the deer statue that was weighing him down and within a few seconds he broke the surface gasping and choking for air he could see smoke coming from the house but he didn't see his attackers anywhere so he staggered for his truck somehow had the presence of mind to hotwire it and get it started which is freaking incredible and hit the gas all he knew in that moment was that he needed to go for help but he lost so much blood and ingested so much water within a few minutes he drifted out of consciousness, and the truck ran right into a tree. Detective McMillan was stunned. Charles' story matched the one Gregory Jenkins had told in pretty much every detail. And Charles added a chilling detail. Ever since he'd come to from his coma, Ashley had taken every chance she could to threaten him. Tammy would leave the room for a minute, and she'd lean in and his, don't you dare tell them about me. Ugh, freaking yikes.

Just imagine the kind of heart that you'd have to have to try and murder your brother over a few hundred bucks. That's some dark shit right there. Yeah, especially since you're splitting it four ways. Like... Yeah, I know, right? By all accounts, Ashley and Charles had always been really close ever since they were teeny tiny. Charles later told investigation discovery that he just couldn't believe Ashley could do this to him. As he put it, over a little taste of money.

Heartbreaking. Yeah. And you got to wonder who the ringleader was, too. Like, did Ashley get sucked into this little caper by her boyfriend, or was the whole thing her idea? I mean, either way, it's freaking awful, but I'm really curious to know whose idea it was. So now that he had the story corroborated, Detective McMillan was thrilled. They had enough now to put all four of these jackholes in prison for a long time. Mm-hmm.

When Word reached McMillan that his star witness wasn't willing to take him. tell his tale in court, he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He went and sat down with Charles, like, dude, what's wrong? Did somebody try to intimidate you? Did they threaten you? Are you worried about your mom? Right. Charles shook his head. It was none of that, he said. I mean, Ashley had threatened him in the hospital before he spilled on what happened, but it hadn't stopped him from telling the truth. It was just, this was his sister. He loved her. Yeah, she'd done an evil thing, and he was hurt by it, hurt to the core of his soul, but he couldn't stand

the thought of being the one to send her to prison for the rest of her life. She'd been his friend and playmate ever since they were babies. He still loved her. He just couldn't do it. He was sorry. Holy shit. Wow. Wow was right.

It made him sick to his stomach, but Detective McMillan knew he couldn't force Charles to testify against his sister, and he didn't want to do anything to hurt him worse than the awful betrayals already. he had. Sure. So that was pretty much that.

The four defendants ended up taking plea deals for 10 years, probation. Probation for an attempted murder. As far as these assholes knew, they'd left Charles either dead or dying in that pond. They probably figured his body would never be found, and that was the way they wanted it. And for that, for beating, choking, and drowning an 18-year-old boy who had never done anything to them. They get 10 years probation. It's nauseating and the whole town was rightfully outraged. Yeah, my one consolation is that these dipshits are almost certainly going to do something to break probation. So they're probably going to all end up in prison for a few years at some point.

I sure should hope so anyway, but it's just amazing to me. And it's amazing that somehow Charles had managed to forgive Ashley to the point where he actually still has a relationship with her, at least as of the last source that I saw about it. Ashley and her boyfriend Xavier probably feeling like they could never show their faces in Sladen, Mississippi again, moved away after all this and started a new life in a new town.

Good for them. Hopefully they're keeping their nose clean. They should have both gone to prison and I hope they understand that they owe their freedom to Charles' grace and his big heart and his love for his family. I'm not sure I would have had it in me. You know, if I were in his shoes to forgive,

I mean, that's, I respect him for it, but it's hard to understand at the same time. Of course, Tammy Hardiman, Charles and Ashley's mom, is yet another victim of this crime. She told Investigation Discovery that she loves both her kids, but she kind of feels like she lost her daughter, which is completely understandable. She's obviously so grateful to still have her son. It's nothing short of amazing that he made it through this alive and with his spirit intact too. I've seen the kid in interviews, and he seems just like the greatest guy,

like just a genuine ray of light with a real drive to help people and give something back and he's pretty much planning to take the world by storm. So we fully expect him to be the next biotech genius and we hope he's doing great today. So those, I think you'll agree,

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