True Crime Campfire - Stranger Than Fiction, Vol. IV: Couples Edition

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

In case you haven’t noticed already, we tend to seek out the kind of stories that make your brain hurt. The kind of stuff you wouldn’t believe was real if you didn’t have our solemn word for it. This will be our fourth volume so far of “Stranger than Fiction” stories, cases that are probably gonna wreck your head for the rest of the week, and for this one we’ve chosen a theme: Romance. Love is kind of a big deal for us humans. You can’t turn on the TV for more than five minutes without a love story poppin’ up. Poetry and literature are lousy with the stuff. And music—forget about it. Name me ten songs that aren’t about love or sex or romantic obsession. You’ll do it, but it’s gonna take you a while. So today we’re diving into the wild world of obsessive love—and the bananapants things it can make people do.Case One: The Lonely Hearts Killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha BeckCase Two: Nightmare Walkabout, Carolynne Watson and Julian BuchwaldSources:Court papers: https://jade.io/article/259257Australian press: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/nailed-bailed-jailed-then-derailed-the-bush-plot-that-cost-a-man-his-country-20160427-gofuxd.htmlhttps://www.smh.com.au/national/judge-dismisses-kidnap-appeal-as-implausible-20111220-1ugpd.htmlAll That's Interesting: https://allthatsinteresting.com/lonely-hearts-killersVarious articles, Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/female.B/b/beck-martha.htmFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In case you haven't noticed already, we tend to seek out the kind of stories that make your brain hurt. The kind of stuff you wouldn't believe was real if you didn't have our solemn word for it. This will be our fourth volume so far

of Stranger Than Fiction Stories, cases that are probably going to wreck your head for the rest of the week. And for this one, we've chosen a theme, romance. Love is kind of a big deal for us, humans. You can't turn on the TV for more than five minutes without a love story popping up. Poetry and literature or lousy with the stuff

and music, forget about it. Name me ten songs that aren't about love or sex or romantic obsession. You'll do it, but it's going to take you a while. So today, we're diving into the wild world of obsessive love and the banana pants things it can make people do. This is Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 4, Couples Edition. Just a quick content warning on this one, our first case can contains a brief mention of child sexual abuse and the death of a child.

The second case contains a brief mention of sexual violence. Case 1. The Lonely Hearts Killers. So, Cambers, for this one, we're at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Austin, New York, March 8, 1951. It was the end of the road for two of Sing Sing's most infamous inmates, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. Raymond had been a mess all day, panicky, and, scared, as most of us would be on our day of execution. He picked at his last meal, an onion

omelet, French fries, chocolate, and a Cuban cigar. But a little before 11, one of the guards brought him an envelope. It was from Martha, one last, passionate love note before they would both be taken down that long hallway and strapped into the electric chair. The note seemed to cheer Raymond up quite a bit. The news that Martha loves me is the best I've had in years, he said to the guards, now I'm ready to die. Tonight, I'll die like a man. Well, in reality, he ended up having to be carried to the chair, but who can blame him? When her turn came, though, Martha was calm. The female guards who strapped her into the chair were crying. A moment before the current blazed through her body, Martha glanced up at the witnesses in the room and mouthed the

words, so long. Just a few minutes before taking that last long walk into the death chamber, Martha had given an interview to a reporter. What does it matter who's to blame, she said. My story is a love story, but only those tortured with love can understand what I mean. In the history of the world, how many crimes have been attributed to love? Love. Yeah. Well, that's one word for it. Until she met Raymond Fernandez, Martha hadn't had much luck in that department. She grew up in Florida in an abusive home.

According to some sources, her brother, molested her when she was a kid, and charmingly, her mother figured it must have been her own fault and punished her for it. Nice, mom. Way to parent. Yeah, it's disgusting. After that, any time a boy showed a first spark of interest in Martha, her mom would make sure it was his last. She was like an attack dog, trained to scare off anything that might threaten to take her daughter out for ice cream in a show. On top of that, Martha had a medical issue. It sounds like it might have been Hashimoto's thyroiditis that made her a super early bloomer with

boobs that needed an underwire bra by age 10. It also gave her a slow metabolism, which made her gain weight. And as we know, kids can be pretty horrible to each other about stuff like that, so between her awful mom and her medical issues, Martha didn't have the easiest time in school. So she had a lot of self-esteem issues, and she started to retreat into fantasy. She liked romance novels, the cheesier the better, lots of ripped bodices and guys called Heathcliff and dialogue like, I would climb the highest mountains for you, my princess. You are the lodestar of my life. She read these books religiously and daydreamed about finding a guy just like that.

Was there like a 1940s version of Fabio, like jacked men and kilt and like, I don't know, spats? I'm sure. After high school, she decided to become a nurse, graduating with her certification in 1942. She moved to California and started working at an army hospital. and in her search for her own personal romance novel guy she spent a lot of time in bars after work sometimes she'd bring a soldier home

and eventually one of them got her pregnant and if she hoped this might be her shot at happily ever after she couldn't have been more wrong when she told the guy about the pregnancy he was so distraught he went and threw himself off a bridge oh yeah he survived but he made it very clear he wasn't going to marry Martha

just wow that's awful so totally humiliated Martha moved back home to Florida and she had a story for the folks back home to explain while she was preggers but manless told everybody she'd gotten married out in Cali and the dad was on a Navy mission but once he got back they'd get married of course that didn't happen because the dude didn't exist so a couple months later Martha sent herself a telegram her imaginary husband had been killed in action everybody felt so sorry for the new widow and Martha seemed to bask in all that sympathy like a purry cat. A little while later, she had her first child,

a daughter. And not long after that, Martha got married for real to a bus driver named Alfred Beck. They had a kid together, but the marriage didn't even last six months. Al took off. What a prince. And once again, Martha was on her own, this time with two kids under three, working as a nurse at a children's hospital and reading her trashy romance novels. And no disrespect to romance novels. I like a good romance novel occasionally but oh i love them trashy yeah yeah give me a smut book any old day but like any but like any media that killers are obsessed with it's the the fantasy that that gets them you know what i mean yeah and like okay martha was good at her job but she was not happy she wanted capital r romance romance so one day she decided to take a chance she took out a lonely

Heart's ad. She massaged the facts a little. She didn't mention she already had two kids and an ex-husband, for example, but hey, you know, those are just minor details. And after weeks of waiting, she came home to find a letter waiting for her with a return address in New York City. Someone had replied to her ad that someone was Raymond Fernandez. And he sounded like everything Martha had been dreaming of. He was born in Spain where he'd made a fortune in the import-export biz, he wrote, but he was in the U.S. now living and conducting important business in New York. And despite all his money and success, Raymond was still on the lookout for a good woman. I'm living here in this apartment, much too large for a bachelor,

but I hope someday to share it with a wife, he wrote. He said her profile had attracted him because she was a nurse, which meant she had, quote, a full heart with a great capacity for comfort. in love. Wow. Martha had cartoon hard eyes before she even finished the letter. Raymond Fernandez was dreamy, Spanish accent and everything. So wound. They started writing letters back and forth and each sent a picture to the other.

And within a couple weeks, Martha was the smittenest kitten who ever got smote or something. But there was something she didn't know. namely, and this is going to surprise everyone, that our boy Raymond was something of a catfish before catfishing was even a thing. He wasn't interested in her. He was interested in her money. And most of what he told her was bullshit. Raymond had actually grown up in Connecticut, not Spain, though his parents were Spanish. And when he was in his late teens, he did actually move to Spain to live with an uncle. He got married over there and spent some time in the Spanish merchant Marines before somehow, and I wish I knew exactly how this happened, ended up doing spy work for the British government during World War II. What the hell?

Like, okay, so you're from Connecticut, you move to Spain, and somehow you end up a British spy? Yep. That's just weird. I don't know. I know, right. And he was good at it, apparently, good spy. And this is the one time in the history of true crime campfire that we have a genuine article. And he didn't even brag about it.

And that's how you know what's true. Yeah. Like there was no like, oh, I work for the CIA, but I'm not supposed to tell you. No, he just straight up, like didn't brag about it. Yeah. And he had a perfect line, like for those lonely hearts letters. He didn't even use it. It was after the war when things kind of went tits up for Raymond.

That's a scientific term, by the way. He boarded a ship with the idea of moving back to the States to find a job. He was going to send for his wife and baby son once he got there. But at some point during the voyage, there was a freak accident. A huge metal hatch thing fell right on in Raymond's head. He made a big dent in it, gave him a traumatic brain injury and sliced off most of his scalp. He was in the hospital for months. And when he got out, he was a different person.

Frontal lobe damage can do that. He was moody now, and he had a hair-trigger temper. Sometimes he'd ramble on about stuff that didn't make sense to anybody but him. It was downhill from there. He did a short stretch in prison for theft in Alabama. While he was there, a cellie taught him about Haitian voodoo, and Raymond took to it like a pissy little duck to water. Well, sort of.

He kind of just cherry-picked the parts he liked, specifically the dark stuff, and especially the idea that voodoo could enhance his sexual powers. And he based a lot of this on a book called Haiti or the Black Republic, which was written in the 1800s and full of xenophobic horror movie-style, awful misinformation about voodoo, stuff like human sacrifice and torture that Raymond just ate up with a spoon. Hell, there are entire horror franchises from the last couple of decades that take pages from that book. Like, I'm looking at you, Skeleton Key starring Kate Hudson and the entire Chucky franchise.

Yep. And despite the fact that he was still married, his wife still living in Spain, when he got out of prison, Raymond started a new hustle. A way for him to make money without having to, you know, get a job. Fueled by his belief in his own magical sex powers, he started trawling lonely hearts ads for women who sounded like they might have money. He wrote them charming letters, asked them to send locks of their hair for his, quote, voodoo rituals, you see. He bragged to his friends that he could make love to the women long distance by slipping a little magic powder into the envelopes when he wrote to them. And apparently, it worked

at least some of the time because Ray managed to scam dozens of women out of their money, jewelry, and property. In one case, he even scored an apartment by forging some documents and then just moving his fake ass in. And when his victims realized they'd been had that this asshole wasn't who he claimed to be at all and he'd robbed them blind, most were too embarrassed to file charges. One woman, Jane Thompson, even ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Raymond was seen running from her place shortly before her body was found, but nothing was ever proven against him. Martha, of course, couldn't have known

any of that when she got his first letter in the mail. She was infatuated. Even sent him a lock of her hair, which Raymond used for a spell. And before long, they met up in person. And Sparks, Falloo, y'all, because Raymond knew what he was doing.

He liked going for women like Martha, who had low self-esteem and bodice-ripping dreams. Martha thought he was the hottest thing she'd ever laid eyes on. Oh, and by the way, Raymond had always been vain about his full head of luxurious black hair, and when he lost it in the accident, it hit him hard. So he'd spared no expense to buy himself a pretty damn realistic looking hairpiece, which he never let the ladies see him without. Martha thought he looked like Charles Boyer.

Yeah, look him up. He did look like him, actually, I see it. So anyway, they had their first night of, you know, La Pasion, and after that, Martha was a goner. So much so that, he And if you were feeling sorry for her, you ain't going anymore. She took her two children, dropped them off at the Salvation Army, and left with Raymond. Yeah. What a champ, right? Of course, she's the tide to abandon our kids for a man. Hey, asshole, they didn't ask to exist.

Your need for Dick doesn't suddenly make them inconvenient. Yeah. See, Raymond, or as I like to call him, hell to pay, made it clear that, I know. that's a good one, right? Raymond made it clear that she was more than welcome to come back to New York with him, but the kids, not so much. And apparently, that was fine with Martha. She wouldn't see

or speak to her kids ever again. Didn't even mention him again until she was in prison years later. Now, different sources tell the next part of the story differently. In some, Raymond was blown away by Martha's willingness to give up her own children for him, and in others

she walked in one night and saw him without his toupee on. He was humiliated, but she was like, who cares? You're handsome with or without it, and that blew his mind. I don't know what the truth was. But for whatever reason, at some point, Raymond decided that Martha wasn't going to be his next victim after all. She was going to be his partner in life and his partner in crime. Oh.

At last. It's so fucked up. It's really fucked up. So Homeboy sat her down and confessed his whole scheme to her. the Lonely Hearts Club, the dozens of women he'd scammed out of money in real estate, and then he waited. Would Martha wake up, realize she'd just made the biggest mistake of her life, run back to her kids, and never see this bouquet of red flags ever again? No, no, she would not.

Martha decided that, you know, she was in for a penny. She might as well go in for a pound. Martha was all in, and she set about helping him with the scam. She posed as Raymond's devoted sister, as he pitched woo all over a series of unsuspecting women. His preferred emo was to love bomb him sentenceless, marry him within a week or so of meeting, and then get him to sign over their assets and drop them like a bad habit. One woman left him after just a few weeks into the marriage. He'd started to pressure her about signing over all her assets to him, and it made her nervous.

And then she heard a rumor about his former girlfriend, Jane, who died under a suspicious circumstance. after a night with Raymond. The new wife dumped him and took off, but not before Ray and Martha stole her car and $1,000 of her money. A lady named Myrtle Young moved to Illinois to marry Raymond after a whirlwind romance,

but she quickly got frustrated by his sister, Martha, who was cock-blocking them at every turn. Myrtle could not get a second alone with her new hubs because Martha was always there. She even insisted on sleeping in the same bed as Myrtle. Yeah, how Martha managed to pull that one off, I cannot imagine, but she did it.

Somehow, she was determined not to let Raymond bang this lady, but Myrtle wouldn't happen it. She was big mad. Finally, a few days into the marriage, Myrtle got so mad about the whole no-sex thing that she threw a pretty spectacular hissy fit. Raymond dealt with this by drugging her and putting her on a bus back home to Arkansas.

When this poor woman woke up, she was sitting on a bus hundreds of miles away from where she started and $4,000 lighter. People had to carry her off the bus and take her to the hospital, where she died the next day. Wow. Sometimes Martha would veto a scam because the victim was too pretty or too young. She'd just take one look at her and be like, nope, you're not dating that one, shut it down. And Raymond would do it. That's what really surprises me about this whole thing, is that Raymond would be like, yes, ma'am.

Sorry, ma'am. Yes, dear, sorry, dear. Yeah, they were a pair, absolutely. He was devoted to her. They managed to scam a whole string of women out of like $1,000 here, some jewelry there. But what they really wanted was a big score. And we thought they might have found it in a 66-year-old widow named Janet Faye. She had a nice place with a nice little nest egg of savings. And it didn't take Raymond Long to romance her, with Martha tagging along as his sister again. It was all going great.

Janet had taken her savings out of the bank, six grand, which was a nice score in 1940s money, and she and Raymond were planning on tying the knot. But there was a nasty little fly in the Chardonnay, Martha's jealous heart. From day one, she was seething at all the attention Raymond was giving Janet Faye. And when she walked into the bedroom one night and found them in bed together, that was it. Yeah, Martha Kirked out in epic, very un-sisterly. like fashion, and Janet gave as good as she got. I mean, to her, this is her fiance's weirdo sister, button in where she was absolutely not wanted. So Janet jumped out of bed and yelled at

Martha to get the hell out. You're not going to live with us at our new apartment. She told her, you're the most brazen bitch I've ever seen. Good one, Janet. The argument escalated, getting louder and louder until Raymond apparently started to worry about what the neighbors would think. The last thing they needed was for somebody to call the cops. So he said to Martha, shut this woman up. I don't care how you do it. Now, Martha later claimed that she just blanked out at this point. Didn't remember what happened. I don't buy this at all, but that's what she said.

Oh, brother. They all say that. God, God forbid you take accountability for your fucking choices. Killers are all such fucking cowards. It's genuinely baffling. So what we know for sure is that Janet Faye ended up dead, bludgeoned in the head with a hammer and strangled with a scarf. Martha and Raymond worked together to clean up the crime scene.

They put Janet's body in a big trunk, which they ended up burying in the cellar and covering with cement. And then they went on a spending spree with Janet's money. They thought they were sitting pretty, no harm, no foul. They did make one major oopsie, though. To try and keep the cops off their trail, they wrote a letter to Janet's family, telling them she'd met a wonderful new man named Charles Martin and was planning on moving to Florida with him. problem with that was they typed the letter and janet didn't know how to type in nineteen forty six that was a skill a lot of people didn't have her family immediately knew something was up and they called the police the next target was a forty-one-year-old widow named delphine downing delphine had lost her husband not long after her first child was born a little girl named reynell raymond told her his name was charles martin he was a businessman and he and his dear sister Martha just loved children. He worked his mojo on her pretty quickly, and Martha held in her jealousy as

best she could. But the love goggles came off one morning for Delphine when she walked into the bathroom and saw Raymond with his toupee off. She flipped out. Oh my God, you're bald? You lied to me. What else did you lie about? Et cetera, et cetera. They tried to calm her down. Raymond by sweet-talking her and Martha by slipping her some tranquilizers, but it didn't work. And Ray ended up shooting poor Delphine in the head. right in front of her crying two-year-old daughter. Yeah, just deal with the horror of that for a second. Poor little baby. Jesus.

So, now, they had a mess on their hands, and neither of them was sure what to do about it. Little Raynell was young, but she understood that something bad had happened to her mama, and these people had done it. She cried constantly and wouldn't eat, and Raymond got more and more agitated about it over the next couple days. Finally, he looked Martha right in the eyes

and demanded she do something about it. Martha put up a half-hearted fight. She couldn't kill a child. She just couldn't. But Ray insisted. And just as she had when she dropped her own two babies off at the Salvation Army, Martha chose her man over her conscience. She drowned Raynell in a tub of water.

And just as they had with Janet Faye, they buried their latest two victims in the basement and covered the graves with cement. And then they went to work stealing everything they could from Delphine Downing. Money, jewelry, and whatever else they could sell. It was a lot of work, and they felt like they needed a little pick-me-up afterwards, so they went to the movies, shared a large popcorn and a soda.

Huh. When they got back to Delphine's apartment, they got a nasty surprise. Two detectives are waiting for them. The neighbors had noticed all the weird activity over the past couple days and called the police. Womp, womp, womp. And that was it for our first. star-cross lovers, y'all. They both confessed pretty much right out of the gate and a 73-page statement that hit the media like a wrecking ball. The confession was full of headline-ready stuff like

I'm no average killer. Fernandez tells cops, which, sorry, Ray, but you absolutely are. And yeah, the press couldn't get enough of Martha and Ray's weird love story. Couldn't resist making fun of Martha's weight either. They called her something like, quote, a 200-pound figure of wrath in almost every story. Yikes. In a typical move for 40s cops, the DA apparently told them that if they confessed, they'd probably get a sweetheart deal. Out in six or seven years. This, of course, was bullshit. I mean, they drowned a baby. Once they had their confession in hand, they extradited Martha and Ray to New York to face trial for the murder of Janet Faye. They killed Delphine and Raynell in Michigan.

Why was that? Because New York had the death penalty, and people wanted these a-holes to fry. The trial was a zoo. Raymond took the stand, but for some reason, his testimony wasn't so much about why he shouldn't be convicted of murder, as it was a detailed description of all the sex he'd had over the past couple years, including, y'all are going to love this, a strip poker game with Martha and another lady. The winner would get to have sex with Ray. Martha won. Holy absolute shit. And this was the 40s. I know. It's wild. It feels like a dear penthouse. I didn't think it was possible until it happened to me. Yeah. When Martha took the stand, she spent most of her time feeling sorry for herself.

She got all weepy about leaving your kids at the Salvation Army, which must have made the jury pretty sick to their stomachs. And she testified about her eternal love for Ray. We loved each other, and I consider it absolutely sacred, she said. You referred to the love making as abnormal, but for the love I had for Fernandez, nothing is abnormal. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. So he and Martha didn't do themselves any favor. at trial, especially since they sat there canoodling the whole time, whispering and making goo-goo eyes at each other till the jury wanted to vomit. And as you know from the start of our

story, they were both convicted and they both died in the electric's chair at Sing Sing in 1951. In love till the bitter end. Uh, bye-bye. If that ain't some gross pick-me-bitch shit right there, I don't know what it is. Good God, Martha. Gross. And as for Ray, dude had plenty of potential, and he wasted it all. Although they were only convicted of one murder, and we only had time to describe a few more, Martha and Ray are suspected of at least 17, and possibly a lot more than that. All right. So that's a story of a couple who were so obsessed with each other that they went to the chair together, still madly in love. Now, let's move on to our next story of romance gone bad.

This is Case 2, Nightmare Walkabout. For this one, we're jetting across the Pacific to a small town of buddry in the Australian state of Victoria. And for small town, in this case, you should be thinking of a couple hundred people, spread out way, way, the hell in the sticks. In March 2008, a young couple headed out for a picnic. These were 17-year-old Carolyn Watson and her boyfriend, 22-year-old Julian Buchwald, and they'd been dating for a couple of years. These picnics were a pretty regular thing for the two of them, as they both still lived with their parents, and there just wasn't a whole hell of a lot to do in budgery. And, you know, young couples, young couples need some time alone together sometimes for reasons.

Not that those reasons went too far, mind you. Both Carolyn and Julian came from very religious families. They actually met in church, and they decided to wait until they were married before getting down to business. Now Carolyn was a little more committed to that idea than Julian was apparently, but that's not especially strange. These two weren't exactly engaged, but they talked about marriage with the pastor at their church, and they sort of had what you might call and understand it. Now, Julian wanted to go ahead and pull the trigger, get a ring on it and get rolling, but Carolyn was putting on the breaks. She wanted to finish school and get a start on life first, and if you're thinking she sounds like the smarter one of the two of them, you will get no argument for me.

Julian's family owned a big stretch of land and budgery, mostly wild scrub and bushland, but with a real-life actual waterfall that they like to picnic next to. How awesome would it be to have a waterfall on your land, right? It does sound kind of nice, but here's the thing. I'm an American, okay? I've been indoctrinated since birth to think that everything in Australia is trying to kill me.

So I really don't think I'd enjoy it. And I don't need to hear about how that footlong spider isn't really dangerous, okay? it's still fucking terrifying and it needs to meet a flamethrower or just be shot into the sun. That's better actually because a gigantic spider on fire is even scarier than just a plain gigantic spider. Anyway, just alienated the spider stands. Oh, God. So picnic, picnic, picnic. They were having a picnic. They were going to go have a picnic.

So Julian picked up Carolyn in his car and they headed off toward the waterfall with their little picnic basket and their blanket. And somewhere along the way, Julian pulled the car over. He'd just seen a dead deer by the side of the road, and he wanted to go take a closer look. Now, I'm not going to try and pretend this isn't kind of weird, but it actually wasn't weird for Julian. He would do this sometimes. If he saw something that looked interesting when he was driving, he'd just pull over and go take a look. Like I said earlier, there wasn't a whole lot to do in budgery. Okay?

Now, Carolyn, lacking Julian's enthusiasm for looking at dead animals on hot days for some reason, stayed in the car and waited. And wait it. He'd gone a little ways back the way they'd come to get to the deer, like around a bend in the road, so she couldn't see him from the car, and after about ten minutes she started to get a little worried. It wasn't like Julian to leave her hanging like this. When he took these little side trips, they usually didn't take this long.

He'd just go take a quick peek and then come back. And just as that thought ran through her head, Carolyn happened to glance out the car window, and her heart dropped into her shoes. Charging fast toward the car was a man dressed all in, black, his face covered by a ski mask. Before Carolyn could react, the man was right there, yank and open the passenger door and pulling her out of the car. He quickly bound her at the wrists and ankles and covered her mouth and eyes with duct tape. Then he shoved her down onto the

backseat of Julian's car, threw a blanket over her, and started driving. Carolyn was terrified. This was every woman's worst nightmare, straight out of a horror movie, and she couldn't stop worrying about Julian? Had this man hurt him, killed him? Or would he just come back from looking at the deer to find his car and his girlfriend missing? The kidnapper drove for what felt like hours, and all

she could do was lie there, her mind going a hundred miles a minute, wondering what was going to happen next? Finally, Carolyn felt the car stop. The man jerked open the door, dragged her out, and threw her onto the ground. But not into a road this time, onto dirt and leaves.

Carolyn could hear the wind and the trees in the sound of a river. They were somewhere in the middle of the woods. She had no idea where she was. She heard her abduct her drive the car some way off into the bush, then heard his footsteps coming back. Then things got worse. With Carolyn still tied up and gagged, the masked man took out a knife.

He cut off every piece of her clothing and underwear, leaving her completely naked. A little while later from behind her, she heard the unmistakable sound of a shovel biting into dirt. The noise made her sick to her stomach. She was going to be sexually assaulted, murdered, and buried in a shallow grave out in the middle of nowhere. Her loved ones would never know what happened to her. All she felt she could do was lie there and pray. Back in budgery, Julian's parents were getting worried. The kids hadn't come back when they were supposed to,

and that wasn't like either of them. His mom went out and paced nervously up and down the driveway so she could look down the road and try to spot Julian's car coming back. And on one of those trips, she noticed a bottle rammed into the wire fence at the end of the driveway. Inside the bottle was a note. The printed note was full of misspellings, and it was addressed to Christopher Watson, Carolyn's father. The Matthew, it references, is Carolyn's younger brother. It went like this. Christopher Watson, you bloody couldn't leave us alone, so your son and girl went walkabout.

out. You get Carolyn and Matthew back when we finish our business in the area, but only if you behave yourself and don't shit us around again. Tell everyone they are on holiday. Don't you dare talk to the fucking cops again and you'll get your kids back. Shoot us again and you'll never see them again because we'll fuck the girl to death and burn her alive and the bloody boy will really enjoy to torture and sacrifice to our God to pay back a hundred times the hurts he did us when he picked them up. This is your last warning. Do what we say and the kids come back in a live condition. condition. Holy shit. Yeah. Like most of us would, Julian's mom ignored the warnings and called the police immediately. Following up with Mr. Watson, police learned that a similar note had been left on their

porch a week ago. This one had said, Christopher Watson, forget what you two saw in the pines these days and tell your wife the same thing. I have mates in high places who have destroyed the info you gave to the bloody cops, but if you go to them again, I will make your life a bloody misery and fucking destroy you and your family. You are my enemy as a Christian. Accidents can easily be arranged, so you leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone, and we'll all have a great time.

A couple of weeks earlier, Mr. Watson had spotted a car burning in the woods nearby and called the police. Was that what the note was talking about? He couldn't think what else it could have been. Both notes also displayed the symbol of the Order of Nine Angles, a British-based neo-Nazi satanic group, that espouses violence and human sacrifice.

Yeah, boy, nerd alert. Okay, now we've gone over this before. Actual satanic murders and ritual killings are vanishingly rare, but they're sometimes introduced into cases by more mundane criminals who are trying to confuse the police about what's really going on. Especially because it's a surefire way to get the media and public all worked up. There are people to this day that believe that McMartin preschool was genuinely a hotbed for Satanic. ritual abuse, which I hate to be the no fun police, but it absolutely was not.

Yeah, it's real fun. Just saying, people seem to relish it. They're like, you know, there was a preschool in California. And it's like, no, there wasn't. That didn't happen. There really wasn't. It was bad, it was bad therapy work. ...convicted people.

Yeah. So, Victoria Police weren't jumping feet first into the satanic angle here, but they were deeply concerned. When Carolyn and Julian were missing, the kidnapping. had apparently mistaken Julian for Carolyn's brother, Matthew, and the threats made in the notes were just horrific. They started a search, but Victoria is nearly the size of Texas, and the east where Carolyn and Julian had gone missing is mostly just wooded hills. This was like looking for a needle in a hundred haystacks. Back in the woods, the sound of digging stopped.

And then, for a little while, Carolyn heard nothing. She thought her attacker had gone away, but surely he'd come back. Then she heard a voice say, Carolyn, is that you? She didn't recognize the voice at first, but when he called again, she knew. It was Julian. There's a knife on the ground, he told her. It's not far away from you. If you can get to it, I think I can cut us both free. Adrenaline pumping, Carolyn actually managed to do it, feeling around in the dirt and crawling toward the sound of her boyfriend's voice. And after he'd cut the ropes binding himself, Julian freed her and took the duct tape off her face. Julian looked rough.

He was naked, too, with blood all over his face, his clothes lying cut to pieces on the ground just like hers. They were in the woods, apparently, in their abductor's half-assed campsite. Okay, Julian said, let's grab what we can and get out of here before he comes back. He pushed a sleeping bag into Carolyn's arms

and grabbed the shovel, the knife, and a couple jars of peanut butter, and with that, they took off, running across the river and up into the hills. As they hurried, naked and scared through the woods, Carolyn looked inside the sleeping bag cover she was carrying. In it were a brand new sleeping bag, an unopened tube of toothpaste,

and weirdly a pillowcase, half full of desiccated, shredded, shredded coconut. I guess satanic Nazi kidnappers aren't big fans of protein bars and granola for their outdoor adventures. Just shove some coconut in a pillowcase. It'll be fine. So weird. So he brought coconut.

and peanut butter. And that was it. Good Lord. When they ran out of breath, Carolyn and Julian stopped to rest and finally had a chance to exchange stories. Julian said that when he'd gotten to the dead deer, two men had jumped him,

one of them smashing him in the head with a metal bar and knocking him down. Julian still managed to struggle up and started fighting them both, but it was two against one, and they knocked him out. Then, he assumed, they'd put him in the trunk of the car.

He'd only come back to consciousness when he'd been taken out of the trunk and thrown down on the ground close to Carolyn. They thought their attackers might be related to the threatening note left on Carolyn's front porch a week earlier. Or she said maybe it was those poachers Julian had seen a while back, illegally taking deer from his family's land. They couldn't be sure, but they knew they needed to get to hell away from here. So they started walking upstream, following the river. And look, I don't want to criticize the choices of terrified kidnap victims left naked. in the woods here, okay? Because I'm sure I'd be a hot mess and God knows what I'd do. But just as a

public service, if you ever find yourself lost in the woods by a river, follow it downstream, not up. Okay? Downstream leads to people and places. Upstream just goes to mountains and like drop bears and stuff. Probably more of those giant spiders, possibly on fire. But no, that's genuinely great advice. Please follow that. You go downstream to find people. Walking naked and shoelisk through the Australian bush sounds like a circle of hell, to me, but they trudged on for four miserable days with no signs of life, hot during the day and freezing at night, sharing the sleeping bag to try and keep warm. On Saturday morning, with the peanut butter and coconut running low,

they decided to head back to where they'd been taken out of the car. They thought their abductors might have left by now, and there could be more supplies there. and maybe they'd be able to pick up a trail that would lead them to civilization. Following the river directly, it took them a day and a half to get there. Julian crawled in on his belly and found a hole that held his backpack with the picnic supplies, as well as Carolyn's handbag and the torn remains of their clothes. He took these back to Carolyn and pulled on the remains of his jeans and shirt.

Carolyn happened to have a sewing kit in her handbag, and she managed to repair her clothes enough to put them on. The river forked just below the campsite. Julian told Carolyn that he'd seen a red four-by-four with a dog chained to it over to the right, so thinking this might be their attackers and worried that the dog could smell them, they followed the left fork. Eventually, after a whole week lost in the bush, they came to a country road, and shortly after that they were spotted by a farmer in a pickup truck. God knows what he thought, seeing this filthy couple dressed in torn up rags flagging him down,

but he stopped and took them back to his house. They learned they were in Alpine National Park, a wild landscape hundreds of miles from their homes. The farmer called the police, who came and took Julian and Carolyn to the police station in the little town of Buckin. There, Carolyn and Julian were interviewed separately, both telling their stories of kidnapping

in wilderness survival. They were given separate motel rooms for the night. Can y'all imagine how good a motel shower would feel after crawling naked get through the woods for a week. God. And the one restaurant in town had fish and chips and chicken parm and lemon ring pie. I probably would have eaten until I crop.

Screw, dried coconut, and peanut butter, man. You never want to see him again. Mm-mm. In the morning, the cops spoke to each of them again. They'd already found the kidnapper's campsite. No kidnapper, just the remains of the fire and whatnot. So they drove Julian and Carolyn to it, separately. They took Carolyn out there first.

walked her around the campsite and asked her some questions. After that, they brought Julian in. And three minutes after he stepped out of the police car, they put the old habeas gravis on him, Aussie style. Which is just regular habeas gravis, but with like kangaroos or something. Maybe they keep the handcuffs in their pouches, you know? We're going to get canceled by our Aussie listeners. We love you.

See, the thing your average dumbass criminal never seen. seems to get, is that most investigators aren't idiots. Victoria Police had been suspicious of Julian as soon as he and Carolyn had gone missing, which makes sense. If a young man and woman go missing in his car, chances are either he's taken her, or they've run off together. And if they're running off together, they're probably not leaving creepy notes about how she's going to be sexually assaulted and set on fire. Yeah.

Carolyn being abducted by Julian was a more likely scenario a hundred times over than any kind of weird, satanic Nazi bullshit. And after just a few minutes of pressure, Julian cracked like an egg. He'd set the whole thing up. The man in black was him. He showed police where he'd buried the clothes in a map of Alpine National Park. That's right, folks. While he and Carolyn were hiking naked through the woods for days,

Julian knew exactly where they were and could have gotten them back to civilization with no problem at all, at any time. And his car was just 20 meters from the campsite. hidden in the bush. At some point, he'd scratched his forehead on an overhanging branch, just a little cut, but like head wounds tend to do, it had bled all over the place, and he didn't clean the blood off,

figured it would add various millitude to his whole they beat me unconscious story. So, why? Why kidnap Carolyn? Traped through the woods with her for a week, then take her back out? Y'all aren't going to believe this shit. Julian told the police,

he just wanted to spend more time with her. Seems her parents had sort of old-world ideas about courtship, and he wasn't allowed to spend more than a few hours at a time with her. He had to ask her dad's permission for their picnics. But according to Carolyn, Julian had a very specific idea of what spending more time with her meant. When they shared the sleeping bag during the freezing cold nights on the run, he pressured her over and over for sex. First, arguing that it would help them keep warm, then just strutely. right up proposing to her, all naked and filthy in the woods. Like, look, babe, we're probably going to die out here, okay? And before we do, we should just decide that we're married and just have

sex. God'll understand, right? And Carolyn refused him every time, because she was flipping traumatized and hungry and cold, for God's sakes, till finally he just got pissed off and started yelling at her. Charming, just what she needed. It wasn't until he finally realized she wasn't going to give in that he led them back to the campsite and then out onto the road, which he could have done again at any point he wanted to. So just take a minute, because we know this is a lot. Oh my God. So this, all this, just for a chance to try and get into his girlfriend's pants. Except she didn't have any pants because he'd cut him off with a fucking knife. God knows what weird ass Gilligan's Island slash fiction he'd been reading to think that being lost and naked in the

wilderness would act as some kind of irresistible aphrodisiac. I don't think any woman in history has ever said, you know, we both stink and I've got two ticks and a spider bite, and neither of us have seen toilet paper in days, but take me now, big guy. And I swear to God, if any of y'all feel the need to write us an email right now saying you are actually into that, just don't. Bless your heart. I'm about to freak out. I'm about to fucking lose it. Because first of all, Nothing gets a teenage girl hotter than her shitty boyfriend yelling at her for not wanting to have sex. And also, like, I know this is a time, an age old fucking strategy, but like asking repeatedly if someone wants to have sex with you after they've already told you no is not hot. It makes you look fucking pathetic.

And I know this guy is in his 20s, but his logic is so teen boy that I can smell the axe from here. Hold on. Hang on. We're in Australia so I can smell the links from here. I'm guessing that he thought Carolyn would feel so grateful that she survived, that she'd immediately hop on his dick. Like, nothing like some life-affirming sex while both of your genitals are covered in sand and blood, I guess. And insect bites. And insect bites. And another thing. The worst part, aside from the trauma and waste of police resources and the worry he caused their fucking families,

is the goddamn plot hole in his goddamn story. Did the kidnappers know about his penchant for going on Inspector LaStraud on Roadkill? Like, they set up the trap for him knowing that our boy just couldn't help but stare at Bambi's carcass. Yeah, it's absurd. They knew he's like a cartoon character floating toward the scent of a pie on a windowsill,

except it's the smell of decomposing tissue. Like, what was the play here? It is so bizarre, I know, and I'm sure that for that and many other reasons that, like, the vast majority of all saw this come in a mile off. Yeah, yeah. Of course you did. It's so stupid. It's so stupid. It's such a bad plan.

It's just, it's so bad on so many levels. So Julian was charged and convicted of kidnapping and making a false report to police, but allowed out on bail so he could get a pre-sentencing psychievel. And if you think this case wasn't wild enough already, oh, there's more. Julian jumped bail And in spectacular fashion This dude is about as blonde and blue-eyed As you could possibly be Okay, but his next step

As the brilliant strategist that he is Was to get hold of a fake Indian passport Dye his hair and eyebrows black And put on about as much dark self-tanner As the human body could stand Now the results were about as convincing as you'd expect Not to mention racist and weird as hell His plan was to travel to India and then to Germany, where he had family, but Indian immigration

took one look at Julian in his shitty fake passport and laughing their asses off, I assume, refused him entry and sent his dumbass back to Singapore, where his flight from Australia had stopped over. In Singapore, he was arrested again and sent back to Australia. He'd already been sentenced in absentia to seven years and nine months in prison, and now the judge added an extra six months for the attempt to escape. should have added an extra five years for being a dipshit. And there's yet another weird PS to this case. See, while Julian's parents were longtime immigrants to Australia,

he'd actually been born while they were on a trip back to Germany visiting family. It wouldn't have been hard for him to get Australian citizenship, but he never bothered to do it. He was technically there on a permanent residency visa, and shortly before his release, the Australian government decided that this virus, violent kidnapper was an undesirable immigrant and began proceedings to deport him to Germany. In 2016, they put him on a plane and bid him off Wiederson. So, obviously, this case is six kinds of bizarre and kind of hilarious in spots.

I mean, the guy is an epic, dumbass. But then, you remember poor Carolyn, who went through an absolutely terrifying ordeal at the hands of this chucklehead. Yeah. Some people have argued that the Australian government might have been a little heavy-handed deporting Julie into Germany. I mean, except for a few months at the start, he'd been in the country his whole life. Dude couldn't be more Australian if you caught him, I don't know,

fighting a koala over a jar of vegemite. But they had the law on their side. And you can understand them not wanting to find out what happened to the next girl who caught his eye. I'm sure it's tough being dropped into a country where you don't speak to language and only know a few distant relatives, but hey, don't fuck around and you won't find out. Enjoy the Broughtwurst. I just hope Carolyn has somehow learned to trust other human beings again. I don't know if I could. We hope she's living her best life now. Absolutely. 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

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