True Crime Campfire - Stranger Than Fiction Vol. 5: Petty Motives Edition

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

We tend to cover strange cases on our show. We seek them out, because we find that there are always interesting lessons to be learned there. But when it comes to weird, some cases are in a category all their own. Like a pair of high school students so upset about a grade that they plot the brutal murder of their Spanish teacher…and a mother so obsessed with protecting her child from pain that she loses all sense of right and wrong. They’re two very different cases on the face of things, but underneath they have one major thing in common—the motive is just bizarre.Case 1: Final Bell: The Murder of Nohema GraberCase 2: Dark Magic: The Murder of Joey FischerSources: Interrogation of Willard Chaiden Miller by Fairfield PDInterrogation of Jeremy Goodale by Fairfield PDLaw & Crime network, YouTubeCouch Detectives, YouTubeNBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slain-iowa-teacher-nohema-graber-remembered-best-us-rcna4710The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/09/13/murder-on-the-border https://blog.chron.com/narcoconfidential/2013/09/twenty-years-later-recollections-of-wilder-than-fiction-south-texas-murder/https://myrgv.com/featured/2021/12/11/motion-for-early-release-denied-dora-cisneros-to-serve-out-life-sentence/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. We tend to cover strange cases on our show. We seek them out because we find that there are always interesting lessons to be learned there. But when it comes to weird, some cases are in a category all their own. Like a pair of high school students so upset about a grade that they plot the brutal murder of their Spanish teacher. And a mother so obsessed with protecting her child from pain that she loses all sense of right and wrong.

There are two very different cases on the face of things, but underneath they have one major thing in common. The motive is just bizarre. This is Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 5, Petty Motives Edition. Case 1. Final Bell, the murder of Noamah Graber. For this one, we're in Fairfield, Iowa, November 3, 2021. The family and friends of high school Spanish teacher, Noamma. Maima Graber were worried. She'd never come home last night from her daily walk in Chautauqua Park, and she'd been a no-call, no show at work that morning. That was way out of character

for Noema. She was dedicated to her students. Noemma and her husband Paul had divorced in 2017, but they were still close friends, so much so that they still lived together. Paul reported her missing right away, and it didn't take long for police to find her. Unfortunately, though, it wasn't the happy ending her loved ones were hoping for. In Chautauqua Park, where she took her daily walks, police found Noamah underneath a red wheelbarrow, with a tarp covering her body. She was dressed only in her top and underwear, and she'd been brutally beaten with some kind of blunt object, probably a baseball bat.

Autopsy would reveal her cause of death as blunt forced trauma to the head. Still missing was Noamma's car. It seemed like the killer or killers had stolen it. Police would eventually find it, abandoned on a dead-end road not far from the park. So, hmm, the motive didn't seem to be financial gain, the killer didn't keep the car. And the amount of violence done to Mrs. Graber was a clue as well. When we see overkill like this, way more violence than necessary to end someone's life, it tends to point to a more personal motive.

Rage. Jealousy. Revenge. But who would have reason to rage against Mrs. Graber? Noemma was 66 years old, still healthy and energetic and full of life. She was a special, much-loved person, and she lived an adventurous life. She grew up in Mexico. That was where she met her husband, Paul, in high school, when he arrived as an exchange student from the U.S. Noemma always wanted to see as much of the world as she could, so after high school, she became a flight attendant. She loved the job, but she had higher aspirations, too.

so she put herself through flight school, which was a hell of a thing for a woman to do in 1970s, Mexico. She was a natural, and when she got her pilots license, she became one of the first women in the country to fly commercial aircraft. Just so cool. She and Paul lived in Mexico City for a while before coming to the U.S. to raise their family, but they always loved to travel, and their kids grew up in a house full of music and dancing and love. Noema became a leader in her church and a much-loved family. figure in the local Latino community. When Paul became disabled, Noema went back to school to get her teaching certificate so she could support the family financially. Her students loved her

sense of humor, her enthusiasm for the job, and her never-ending support for them and their interests. If you loved art, she'd want to see your latest painting. If you played the clarinet, she'd ask you to play for the class and get everybody clapping for you. If you were in the school play, she'd make sure to be there to cheer you on. That kind of teacher. Rarer than platinum and more valuable, too. The kind of teacher you remember for the rest of your life, the kind you go visit when you come back to town as a grown-up. One of her old friends from her flight attendant days told NBC,

we were trained how to deal with very difficult people, but Noamma got along with everybody. Everybody, that is, except one troublesome student, 16-year-old Chaden Miller. Actually, his full name is Willard Noble Chaden Miller, which I can only assume is why he's. full of so much pent-up rage. Just, oh my God, wow. Shaden was disgruntled about his grade in Mrs. Graber's Spanish class, and he had not been

quiet about it. He'd even been to the principal to complain about her teaching. She was too old school. She didn't make the homework clear. One of his friends' moms was from Guatemala, and she couldn't believe some of the stuff Mrs. Graber was making us learn, and on and on and on. Shaden was hoping to apply to a special boarding school in Spain, and he knew a failing grade in Spanish was not going to look great on his resume. Plus, his mom had been on his ass about it, taking away his phone and other privileges

to motivate him to do his homework. Forget about the fact that most people were doing just fine in the class. Chaden felt he'd been terribly wronged by the crappy Spanish grade he was getting. Just two weeks earlier, he'd gotten in a heated argument with Mrs. Graber in front of the class.

And on the day the teacher went missing, Chaden and his mom had a meeting with her, the school to discuss his grades. Mrs. Graber said she wasn't going to change his grade. He was going to get the grade he'd earned. It was only November, she pointed out. There was plenty of time left in the school year if he wanted to improve his performance. Yeah, and that was Noama's reputation. Tough but fair. She'd go out of her way to help and support you, but she expected you to do your part too. To their surprise, Detective started hearing the name Chaden Miller immediately as they spoke to the other teachers and students at the high school. The guy

had been running his mouth for weeks about Mrs. Graber, the other kid said. Somebody had vandalized her house a week or so before the murder, broken a window, and people suspected Chaden was behind it. Most startling of all, he'd asked one kid if he'd help him kill her. I just thought it was a joke, the guy said. Now I'm not so sure. Other friends came forward about Chaden's creepy fixation on Mrs. Graber in the weeks leading up to her murder. He kept saying he was going to make her pay, they said. He talked about popping her with a baseball. bat. He said if she went missing in the next two weeks, they shouldn't call the cops. The detective's ears perked up at this. Some witnesses had reported seeing two teenage boys

driving Noemmo's car on the evening she went missing. And then, a kid named Jonathan came forward with some bombshell evidence, a series of Snapchats he'd gotten on the night of November 2nd from his friend Jeremy Goodale. Tall, blonde, and smart, Jeremy was hoping for a tennis scholarship to college next year. He'd had some ups and downs at home. His mom had left the family years earlier, and Jeremy hadn't had any contact with her in a while. He lived with his dad, his sister, and her little boy. He'd been in trouble here and there for small stuff, like fighting and weed.

He was mostly a good student. He liked skateboarding. Jeremy didn't seem like the kind of kid who would be involved in a murder, but these Snapchat messages he'd sent his friend were blood-curdling. The first one showed a hand-holding a bottle of Clorox bleach. with the text, time to hide a body. You can see a swipe of blood on his shirt cuff. Another one showed Jeremy in a hooded sweatshirt, a dark mask covering the bottom half of his face. The text said, P-O-V, you're my Spanish teacher, and this is the last thing you see. Oh, my God. The next

showed a gloved hand holding the handle of a shovel. In the background, you can see a green plastic bag full of rope. The text said, no, I'm actually ready. Here we go. The last snap was of a red wheelbarrow, just like the one police had found Noamma's body under. There was a shovel in it, an electric lantern, and the same green plastic bag from the other Snapchat. The text said, new wheelbarrow, who dis? Oh, wow, he's got jokes. Hilarious. There's something so chilling about the memeification of this murder.

Like, I don't like it at all. I know. It's so creepy. As bizarre as this was, the idea of a high school kid killing his teacher over a grade, this was pretty damn incriminating. And it got even more so when they found out who Jeremy's best buddy was, none other than Chaden Miller,

the guy who'd been running around asking people for help murdering the Spanish teacher. It was time to bring Jeremy and Chaden in for interviews. Jeremy came in with his dad, and unlike his buddy Chaden, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and ask for a lawyer. Chaden, on the other hand, is the kind of guy who thinks he can talk his way out of anything.

and he didn't do himself any favors in the interrogation room. He seemed grumpy about being there. Before the detectives came in, he complained to his mom about having to be there so early in the morning. He was hungry, he whined. He was parched. Parched. He wanted his mom to be sure and tell the cops he'd been with her all day on the day of the murder, to which she responded by saying,

So did you go straight home after he left my office? To the detectives, Chaden waxed on about what a shitty teacher, Mrs. Graber was, how she picked favorites and how everybody wanted her fired, which is total bullshit. Her students adored her. They had a candlelight vigil, people were sobbing, like it's total nonsense. I'm sure it didn't take the detectives long to figure out that our boy was a blooming narcissist. At one point, Chaden talked about how exhausting it was to be around his less intelligent classmates, how hard it was to argue with a stupid person.

Oh, the irony. The lead detective was immediately struck by how calm and casual Chaden seemed. Most of the kids they'd talked to were nervous and upset, which is how you'd expect them to feel under the circumstances, but this kid was chill at first. Chaden's story, let's say it evolved over the next hour or two. First, it was just, I don't know what happened. I can't imagine who would hurt Mrs. Graber.

And interestingly, when asked to list his closest friends, he left out Jeremy Goodale. Hmm, wonder why. But as the detective slowly revealed more and more of what they knew, Chaden started squirming like a bug under a magnifying glass, and instead of using that alleged big brain of his and asking for an attorney, he started spinning an elaborate yarn.

Okay, okay, he did see something go down in Chautauqua Park, two nights ago. Some people in masks and hoodies carrying something heavy looking. How many people? A six or eight, Chaden said, which you should know that Chaden later takes Jeremy aside at the juvenile detention center and describes this story as very convincing trying to get Jeremy to back it up with the cops. Eight kids in masks murdering the Spanish teacher is to him very convincing. Bless your heart. At first, Chaden tried to get out of naming anybody specifically. Oh, they were all in masks. I don't know who it was, but eventually he caved to pressure and started name and names perfectly willing to throw his innocent friends under the bus to save his own ass.

Later, the story evolved to where the gang of killers intimidated Chaden into helping them dispose of evidence. It was ridiculous, and the detectives told him so. They already had a pretty good idea of who all was involved in the murder. Chaden Miller and his best bud Jeremy Goodale. They were searching Chadens and Jeremy's houses, and they found blood-stained clothing in both. And that wasn't all they found. Chaden had left the bloody baseball bat in his bedroom,

just propped up against the wall. A bloody souvenir, I guess. As teenage killers are so fond of doing, Jeremy and Chaden had written down their murder plan in detail for police to find later on Chaden's computer. So helpful. There was a list of children. materials. Plastic trash bag, Ziploc bag, wet wipes, backpack, gloves, hammer, cover,

transport vehicle. And there was a concise paragraph labeled procedure. Stun, it read, move off trail, empty compartments, load cargo. I assume the cargo here is Mrs. Graber. Blanket cargo. Deactivate compartment contents. Leave bag by exit. Transport. Empty transport. Safety stun. Switch glove. Deactivate article to bag. Finalize the win. Secure victory. Load into storage spot. Don't forget to close the door to the ground. Switch glove, move the sticks, wipe down tools, dispose article, and grab bag by exit. Done. Yeah, great job, kid. That's an uncrackable code if I ever saw one. Like, if you stumbled upon that paragraph in somebody's notebook, wouldn't you immediately assume it was a murder plot? Like, I would. Like, what else do you wipe and stuff? stuff down for and switching glows. And like, I love how they think they're being crafty here. And I love

that they didn't do it. Like, they kept... Oh, no. Oh, hell no. They kept the clothes. Kept the murder weapon. Like... Absolutely. They, this is what happens. Every time somebody writes their murder plot, okay? Yep. It always, it just becomes abundantly

clear how fucking stupid they are. Because they can't even follow their own instructions. And it's just, it's just, it's just baffling, man. I don't know. Pitiful. I don't like the finalize the win, in parentheses, secure victory, especially because that just me, like, oh, I killed a 66-year-old woman. I know, victory.

Congratulations, you little twerps. You took down a woman three times your age. Go fuck yourself. God. They also had another witness, a friend of Chaden's and Jeremy's, who said they'd called him for a ride home on the night of the murder. He'd pick them up on the same road where Noamah Graeber's car had been ditched. So real mensa members we've got here, okay?

Literally. Good job. We'll play. Both Chaden and Jeremy were arrested on November 4th, about a day and a half after the murder. Each was held on a million dollar bond. And before long, detectives got word that Jeremy Goodale and his attorney would like to have a chat. He wanted to tell them exactly what happened, and it was one hell of a story. Right. Chaden had been stewing about his shitty Spanish grade for weeks, presumably instead of studying for Spanish.

Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. He was worried about that boarding school, his college application, and a vacation he was supposed to take that summer. His parents might not let him go if he flunked a class. Sometimes it seemed like it was all he wanted to talk about. Then one afternoon, Chaden sidled up to Jeremy in the lunchroom and said, hey, would you help me kill Mrs. Graber? From the tone in his voice, Jeremy said it was clear he wasn't joking. Jeremy didn't have a dog in this fight, like at all.

He liked Mrs. Graber fine. He'd done well in her class the previous year. Thought she was a pretty good teacher, but Chaden was his buddy, his good time boy, his rotten soldier. How could he say no? In his confession, Jeremy told the prosecutor he didn't even really think about telling Chaden no. couldn't let him think I was scared, he said. I didn't want to be seen as a pussy. Yeah, pro tip, kiddo, being scared that you're going to look scared and then going through

with a murder of an innocent woman to save face with your loser friend, that makes you a pussy. Telling Chaden, sure, man, I'll help you. Then secretly recording the conversation and taking it to the cops, that would have been a badass move. Yeah, it is terrifying to me how easy it was for Chaden to talk Jeremy into this murder. Like, the way Jeremy himself tells it, it was as simple as just asking. Yeah.

He told the detectives he didn't even think about the consequences. Unbelievable. Which is crazy because, like, Jeremy had more to lose. Like, Chaden had all these, quote-unquote, plans, but we saw how his plans have played out so far. Like, he was going to get a tennis scholarship. He was going to go to college. He was going to, you know, shake off his child and make something of himself. And he just decided to throw all that away.

And it wasn't even his beef. That's the thing that stunts. stunning about it. Yeah. So, like a good little toadie, Jeremy left most of the planning to Chaden. He decided the upcoming four-day weekend in early November would be the best time to do the murder. They did a little low-key surveillance on Mrs. Graber for a few days, lurking around and taking note of her daily routines.

They knew about her walks in Chautauqua Park. They knew her car she drove. They went back and forth with emails and texts, planning it out, though it doesn't seem like they planned it super carefully, they were winging it to some extent. They really didn't think much about what they were going to do after the murder, for example. The day finally rolled around, and Chaden and Jeremy were like a couple of kids on Christmas morning. After smoking some weed with his girlfriend at the park, Jeremy met up with Chaden, and they headed onto the walking trail that Mrs. Graber used. The girlfriend later testified both guys seemed keyed up and excited,

but they wouldn't tell her why. Chaden had come. prepared with a bat, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a pocket knife. They knew Mrs. Graber was there. Her car was in the parking lot. And on their first lap around the trail, they actually bumped into her, said, hi, Mrs. Graber, and went on their way. And now that they knew which direction she was walking, they each posted up in a different spot to wait for her to come around again, and to look out for anybody else who might see or interfere. Chaden hid in a little clump of trees. In a few minutes Jeremy looked up to see Chaden poking his head out. He gave Jeremy a little nod like here she comes, and Jeremy started toward her. Did she see him again and smile? We don't know.

But we know that Chaden Miller was creeping up silently behind her with the baseball bat in his hands, and as Jeremy watched, he brought it down as hard as he could on Mrs. Graber's head. She fell to the ground. Make sure she's dead, Jeremy said, and Chaden hit her a few more times, then scurried away to make sure nobody was coming. Mrs. Graber was down, but she was still alive. Jeremy picked up the bat and hit her a few more times. Later, he told the detective she was making pained noises, and he just wanted to put her out of her misery. Aw, give you a Nobel Prize. So Jeremy was actually the killer in the end. He was the one who dealt the fatal blows. Later on, Chaden would claim he never hit Mrs. Graber, but Jeremy insists he made the first hit.

They dragged their teacher's body off the trail to a strip of woods and dumped it. They'd talked about maybe dragging her to some nearby train tracks to try and make it look like a suicide by train. But they realized now that wouldn't work. They'd done too much damage to her body. So they looted her pockets for her keys and hauled ass out of the park in her car, dumping it on Middle Glasgow Road and calling their buddy to come pick them up. They both went home and had a bite to eat. Jeremy took a little nap.

and later, around midnight, they set about phase two of the plan. Chaden had a red wheelbarrow, which they loaded up with rope, bleach, wet wipes, a shovel, and a tarp. They met up back at the murder scene and cleaned up most of the blood with the wet wipes. They loaded Noamma's body into the wheelbarrow and rolled it all the way down to the train tracks. Then they covered her up with the tarp, weighed down with some railroad ties they found, then laid the wheelbarrow on top of her to hide their handiwork. Then they went back to Jeremy's house and got blackout drunk. To celebrate?

In Chaden's case, probably. Jeremy, on the other hand, was a bit of a mess. He sent the Snapchats to his friend, along with a text that said he was probably going to kill himself soon. He never got the chance. The murder was on Tuesday evening. He and Chaden were arrested and charged before the sun went down on Thursday. The dynamics of these two will be familiar to. to any of y'all who've listened to our episode about the Dartmouth murders, the master and the

blaster, the dominant one with the stronger personality, and the deeper pathology, and the less dominant one who desperately wants to please and impress. Those dynamics played out not just in the murder itself, but in the aftermath as well. Jeremy didn't get a plea deal for his confession, but his attorney knew it would look good to the court, and he was right. Jeremy pled guilty to the murder and received a 25-year sentence with a chance for parole. He cried all through his courtroom apology, and it felt genuine, although I'm sure the tears were mostly for himself and his family, more than for Noema and hers. And this was kind of eerie. At the end of his statement, a thin stream of blood dripped out of Jeremy's nose, like a reminder of the blood he and Chaden had spilled. Chaden claimed he had just played lookout and never actually touched Mrs. Graber, which I don't buy for a second. He smirked all.

the way through his courtroom apology. It was one of the grossest things I've ever seen. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison with a chance of parole. Of the two of them, I think Chaden is the coldest. Oh, I absolutely agree. I think this kid needs to stay right where he is, a narcissist and manipulator to the core. And you can watch both his and Jeremy's interrogations on the YouTube channel couch detectives, and they're both fascinating for different reasons. They really give you a sense of the differences between these two killers. Noema's loved ones made heart-wrenching victim impact statements. In one, her brother-in-law revealed Noamah wasn't the only casualty of Chaden and Jeremy's

murder plot. Noamma's husband Paul had been sick before the murder. And after he lost her, he just kind of stopped taking care of himself, stopped going to the doctor. He was heartbroken and it ended up killing him. Noema left behind a whole village of people who loved her and now had to grapple with the enormity of this petty, mundane evil that took her away from them. Yeah, it's the pettiness for me.

It's just the absolute senselessness of this one. And as a teacher, this case is my worst nightmare. Like, I think we all worry about it, but we never expect it's actually going to happen. Yeah, and one of the things I think Chaden was most upset about, was, like, she preferred, like, handwritten assignments. She didn't really like using computer assignments. And it's because he couldn't cheat. Or he was too lazy to just write out what Google Translate said.

Like, he was just a little torp. He couldn't cheat. Yeah, I think she bruised his ego. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, she picked favorites, he said. He wasn't one of the favorites because he was always mouthing off to her in class. Surprise, surprise.

You know, I have some news for some, any high school school. kids is like your actions do have consequences teachers don't unconditionally love you like your parents you can you can be a dick to a teacher and they won't like it so get real Okay, campers, moving on to case two. This one is Dark Magic, the murder of Joey Fisher. For this one, we're in Brownsville, Texas, a border town just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico. March 3rd, 1993. It was early in the morning in the golf course suburb of Rancho Viejo.

An 18-year-old Joey Fisher was having a hard time getting his younger brother Eric ready for school. He drove Eric there in their mom's car every morning, and every morning he'd back it out of the garage onto the driveway and hose all the dust off of all the windows. Their neighborhood was well to do, but not wealthy, a street of neat ranch homes with palm trees and backyard pools. It was before 7 a.m. and still quiet as Joey hosed down the car. Just a few early commuters headed for the highway, and then a car he didn't recognize slowed to a stop outside his house. Joey's mom, Corinne, was in the kitchen and heard two sharp sounds, one right out to the other. She thought maybe a couple of heavy palm fronds had fallen on the roof of her car, or maybe a neighbor's vehicle had backfired. She went to the door to the garage to see what was going on, and her world fell to pieces.

Joey lay motionless on the driveway, face up. His hand still held the garden hose, and the flow of water past his body was stained red with blood as it washed over the driveway. Oh, my gosh. Curran screamed, then frantically called to Eric and the boy's older sister, Kathy. Call 911. Call your father. She and their father, buddy, had been divorced for six years, but he lived pretty close. He raced to Corinne's house, and by the time he got there,

there were already flashing lights from the Rancho Viejo PD. I can't imagine things were much different back in 1993, but right now, this department only has seven officers, and they mainly have to deal with people driving golf carts where they shouldn't. Statistically, the murder rate in Rancho Viejo is a big fat zero. It's one of the safest communities in the country. To have a kid shot down in his driveway was shocking. And that was what had happened.

Joey had been shot twice at close range with a 38 caliber handgun. Once in the chest and once in the head. He died immediately. There was no sign of a struggle and his killer hadn't hung around at all once Joey was dead. This looked like a hit, a deliberate, targeted assassination. On a teenage boy. Who would want to kill Joey Fisher, a smart, good kid without an enemy in the world? And Joey was a slim, neat kid with a sharp mind and occasionally a sharp mouth.

Not in a mean way, but he was one of those kids who wasn't afraid to challenge his teachers and have a little fun with them, to treat them like peers. His teachers liked him, and he had a 4.0 GPA at St. Joseph Academy, the private school he went to. He and two others were voted by their class as most sarcastic, so they posed together for their class photo with a sign that said, What, us? Sarcastic. That's so cute. One time he'd come to class with a couple of balloons, and his teacher made him put them in a closet. A couple days later, Joey asked for his balloons back, and when the teacher opened the closet, about 20 balloons fell out. That's what happens when you leave two balloons alone, Joey said.

Like a lot of Brownsville teens, as soon as they had their driver's licenses, Joey and his buddies made a few trips over to Matamoros, the big industrial city right across the border from Brownsville. They'd go to bars and hit on local girls, a kind of PG-13 version of going wild that has probably been going on for about as long as Brownsville has existed. Author Marie Brenner, whose New Yorker article Murder on the Border was one of our main sources for this story, describes Metamoros as long the equivalent of a theme park for Texas teenagers. But by the start of senior year, Joey was focused more on schoolwork than the Surbasis. He was ambitious and already had his sights set on college and then a high-eastern. flying career as an engineer. So he was a smart, well-liked kid, right on the cusp of what promised to be a great life. Who would want to kill him? Cameron County Sheriff Alex Perez looked like a production had been a little too on the nose in the casting for Texas lawman, a burly dude in cowboy

boots who wore gold aviator shades, had a tie pin shaped like handcuffs, and wore a big gold ring with a pistol picked out in rhinestones. Wow. He said, I was asking myself, why would a young man like this, just starting life, a brilliant student, get shot? Usually, it's either drugs or love.

There wasn't even a whisper of drug use in Joey's life, so that left door number two, La Pacion. In the spring of 1992, he asked out a classmate, Christina Cisneros, a pretty girl with long, dark hair who was kind of shy initially, but who was a lot

a lot of fun when you got to know her. They got on really well, but this certainly wasn't a grand dramatic romance. Joey's stepmother, Connie, didn't even know they were dating. She thought Christina was just a friend. She and Joey would play tennis or swim together, and then while Joey did his homework, Christina would play video games, which I'm guessing meant either Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario World, good times. Connie didn't remember ever seeing the two of them even hold hands. But things progressed as teenage romances do. They snuck away together to the condo Christina's parents had on South Padre Island. They went to junior prom together, and then Joey broke things off.

They just weren't clicking in any way beyond his physical attraction to Christina, and he wanted to end things before they got too complicated. He'd given her his class ring and asked for it back, but Christina wouldn't give it up. She was heartbroken, even though they'd only dated for a few weeks. We've all been there. and either from personal experience or just from being a human being alive on planet Earth, you probably know that having a broken heart at 17 can be brutal. It can feel like the entire world is collapsing into a sucking black hole of hopelessness.

Of course, as adults, we know that this is not going to last, that the sun is going to shine again, and that going through all this is a normal part of growing up. At least, adults should know that. Not long after he'd broken up with Christina, Joey got a call from her mom, Dora. She was very friendly and polite. She just wanted to know why Joey had broken up with Christina. This was, of course, an excruciatingly awkward conversation for Joey, but he put on his best manners and answered politely and honestly. Maybe a little bit too honestly. Well, ma'am, I think she's very nice, but I just want to see other girls. Next, Dora called up Joey's dad, buddy, and asked her.

asked him the same question. Why had Joey broken up with Christina? Buddy gave the sensible answer. This is really between Joey and Christina. It has nothing to do with us. Dora kept calling Joey, asking him why he broke up with Christina, asking him to go out with her again and again. And I want you to mentally time travel back to when you were 17 years old and imagine your mom calling up the person you like and asking them to go out with you. Yeah, I think I'd have to move to a different town or possibly a different country. That would be awful. Yeah, I'd apply to go to the space station. God.

It got even worse. Seeing that she wasn't getting anywhere, Dora tried to sweeten the deal. If Joey would go out with Christina again, Dora would pay him $500 a month. And that's the kind of thing that if your mom tries it, every school in the county is going to hear about it, and it'll follow you for the rest of your life. God, that poor girl. Oh, my lord. Yeah. Humiliating.

This was the limit for Joey. He said to a friend, I've never told an adult off before, but yeah, I told her off. When Joey started back to school after summer, there was a beautiful new girl from San Luis Potosi, Marianella Caballero, and he fell for her hard. But although they flirted sometimes, Marianella wouldn't bite. Apparently, in the early 90s, the Anglo boys at St. Joe had a love them and leave them reputation that made some girls wary, and Joey's flippant charm didn't exactly promise anything else. But in February of that year, they were both at a friend's quinceaniera, and Marianella's

attention was on another boy. Joey realized that the standard 90s teen thing of acting like you didn't care about anything, wasn't going to get him anywhere. So he wrote Marianella a sweet letter and told her how he felt about her. The next night, they talked on the phone for three hours. A couple of Joey's buddies were around at his house studying during this call and reacted to him being all moon-eyed over a girl with the sensitivity you'd expect from teenage boys. Meaning, they'd held him down and started shaving his legs with an electric razor because teenage boys are savages and it doesn't matter how you burn your friends, as long as you burn them.

It's nice that Joey had such a good night, because it was his last night on earth. After Joey was shot and killed, his mom, Corinne, immediately moved herself and her other kids win with her own mom. No one had any idea why Joey had been shot, or if his family was still in danger, and Corinne had known right away that she'd never be able to spend another night in the Rancho Viejo house. 600 people came to Joey's funeral, including Marianella and her mother, who both sat weeping in the pews. Christina was there too, also crying, but not Dora. Police work isn't usually like it's portrayed in classic detective stories. It's not all

chasing down clues found at the scene, but this particular case opened up as police chased down a clue found at the scene. The clue in question was a yellow business card found on the driveway close to Joey's body from a bail bond company up in McKinney just outside of Dallas. Investigators thought it had fallen out of the killer's pocket as he struggled with Joey or as Joey fell forward after being shot. There was a handwritten phone number on the card with a Dallas area code 214. The number four was written in a very distinct, exaggerated style. Investigators called up the bond company and asked if they'd had any recent bail applications from South Texas.

When the company faxed down one such application, there was that same weird number four. They pulled the startled guy in. He had nothing to do with Joey Fisher, but he did say he'd given the card to a buddy so he'd know who to call if he got arrested. This buddy was Daniel Garza, who had a landscaping business

that was a cover for his main career as a Little League drug runner. When he was brought in for questioning, it didn't take Garza long to crack and own up to arranging Joey Fisher. murder. Daniel had been having a little trouble at home. His wife of 22 years just didn't love him anymore and was asking for a divorce. And Daniel wasn't keen on any solution to that problem that required much effort on his part. No, what he wanted was to have somebody cast a spell that would

make his wife love him again. This took him to 73-year-old Maria Mercedes-Martinez, a local fortune-teller who would read your fate in the tarot cards for five bucks out of a dark room in the back of a second-hand clothing store. Maria told Daniel she could help him win back his wife's heart, but he'd have to do something for her first. There was a young man who needed to be taken care of, a young man named Joey Fisher. When police arrested Maria a little later, she folded immediately and gave up the name of the client who wanted Joey taken care of. Dora Cisneros, Christina's mom. Dora was an odd duck and had gotten otter after 1974 when her oldest son, a high school senior named David, had died in a car crash. To people who knew her, it seemed like Dora, then 36, was obsessed with having one more child after David's death, and that child was Christina.

Dora was kind of a nightmare mom with all of her kids. One son was a dentist, and once Dora called his office and was told he was in the middle of a root canal, Well, I don't care. He knows he needs to be here, Dora said. Another son was underachieving in school, so Dora marched down there and blamed his teachers because her boy could do no wrong. All her children lived in her alternately demanding and protective shadow, but Christina was special. Outside of her family, Dora was known as a quiet, neat woman, a surgeon's wife who lived a normal upper middle class life. She was in a mall walkers club, a group of ladies. who got their exercise marching through the air-conditioned interior of the sunrise mall to escape the

South Texas heat. After David's death, she'd become more religious, which to Dora meant she not only went to mass more often, it meant she frequently visited local coronderas, wise women who included Maria Mercedes-Martinez. By the time of Joey's death, Dora and Maria had known each other for years. By the fall after Joey and Christina's spring romance, things had progressed in the normal, natural way for high schoolers. Joey had fallen from Marianella Caballero, and Christina was dating somebody new. Being dumped had felt like the end of the world at the time, but it turned out it wasn't. She was over it. Her mom, though, was not. Dora initially wanted a couple of things from Maria. She wanted to curse Joey with bad luck, and she wanted for Christina to magically get her

virginity back. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. God. You know, like extra virgin olive oil. If you can do it to an olive, why can't you do it to a girl? But Dora's demands soon got darker. She wanted Maria to put a curse on Joey that would kill him outright. And I think you have to wonder here how much this still had to do with Christina and how much it had to do with Joey telling Dora off over the phone. For some people, if they obsess over a slight, real or imagined, it can boil them up to her rage with no external help at all.

See, Chaden Miller. Maria declined to put the touch of death onto Joey for the obvious reason that, you know, that's not a thing that people can do. So Dora asked for a more practical solution. Did Maria know anybody who'd killed Joey Fisher for her? Joey, remember, had broken up with Dora's daughter after a few weeks of dating and had one unpleasant phone call with Dora months ago. That was it. That was what Dora was willing to have him killed for. And Maria went right along. Yeah, she did know someone who would probably do that. A little later, Dora handed over $3,000 for a hitman, along with a photo of Joey and Christina from the junior prom, so they'd

recognize him. Oh, my lord. Daniel Garza claims that when Maria asked him to arrange a hit on Joey Fisher, he agreed and took the money in the picture, but only intended to hire a couple of low lives to beat the kid up. Yeah, for whatever it's worth, I don't believe that at all. I think the two guys he hired for Matamoros, Roberto Pisana and Israel Olivares did exactly what Garza asked them to do, which has ambushed Joey in his driveway early in the morning and shoot him dead.

They were career criminals in a drug running and car theft ring, but this was one hell of a step up in criminal activity for them. They got $1,000 each for shooting a boy dead in front of his home. Daniel Garza agreed to wear a wire and called on Maria Martinez

to tell her the hitmen were demanding more money. Maria handed over the cash. This wasn't her own money, of course. The recordings were enough to arrest Maria, and she also agreed to wear a wire. Wires all the way down. Okay. Yeah. Imagine if they had done this at the beginning. You know, that's what makes me so mad about hitman cases. It's like, if they would have just been like, yo, this crazy bitch wants me, wants me to kill some young boy. We've seen it happen. And nobody gets hurt. She set up a meeting with Doris Sneros to get more money for the hitmen.

And when Dora handed over $500, the police pounced and took her ass to jail. In 1994, Dora Cisneros was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, but just a couple years later, she was free. After an appellate court ruled the prosecution wrongfully instructed the jury to convict Dora for direct involvement in the murder, after only showing evidence of her involvement in a conspiracy. She was acquitted, and Joey's family was furious. Oh, my God. But after spending two years in prison, Dora would only get another two years of freedom and sunlight. Because the case involved Mexican nationals, federal authorities were able to charge Dora with the use of interstate commerce facilities of the commission of a murder for hire. In 1998, Dora was convicted in federal court and sentenced to life in prison, where she remains today at the age of 86, having recently been denied compassionate early release.

Daniel Garza was also sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years, which would be this year. But we haven't heard anything about him getting out. We also don't know how things worked out with his wife, but I bet she dumped his sorry ass like radioactive waste. I hope so. Fortune teller Maria Mercedes-Martinez was sentenced to 20 years but released after six. By odd coincidence, District Attorney Louise Sands got to know Maria's son pretty well. She always told her son to pass on her respect to the man who had put her away. She died a few years after her release.

The two men accused of actually killing Joey Fisher, Alberto Pisana and Israel Olivares, were never charged in relation to his death. They went back to Mexico, and because this was a capital case with the death penalty potentially on the table, there was essentially no chance that Mexico would ever extradite them to the U.S. I'm having trouble thinking of any other case we've covered, that is simultaneously as tragic and as ridiculous as this one. Joey was a bright, beloved kid who was gunned down right on the cusp of what promised to be an amazing life over something as banal and every day as a high school breakup. It's just

astonishing. And the girl he broke up with had nothing to do with it. It was just her weird, obsessed mom. And I can only imagine what Christina went through after this in that town. I can only imagine. Because you know how people are. And I bet she went through absolute hell. You know, not only did she lose her mother, but I'm sure people blamed her. It must have just been awful. And it wasn't her fault at all. You know, if there's somebody in your life who drives you to this kind of unhinged rage,

it's a good idea to take a step back and try and see if circumstances really justify putting yourself through all that. Because I can pretty much guarantee you they do not. If you happen to have kids in your life, sit down with them. Watch Frozen for the 35th time And take note For the love of God Let it go So those were a couple of wild ones

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 to Stevie Millie Joe Tony with an eye Cucumb pear I love it Rachel and Anita

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 even two, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. They're about to get a special Halloween episode, just for them. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rad enamel pin or fridge magnet while supplies last at 10, virtual events with Katie and me, and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you. So if you can, come join us at patreon.com slash truecrime campfire.

For great TCC merch, visit the true crime campfire store at spreadshirt.com. And check out our website at truecrimecampfirepod.com.