True Crime Campfire - Tales of the Unexpected: A Grab Bag of Odd Stories

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

People can be pretty strange. And not just people—as we’ll see in one story of this week’s episode, you can add all our extended family of primates to that. If you have a big brain and opposable thumbs, there’s a good chance you’ll be getting up to shenanigans. But as we’ll see in our other story, human beings still wear the crown for weird, ridiculously confident nonsense. Join us live at Wet Hot Bad Magic Summer Camp in Equinunk, PA, September 10-13th! Visit ⁠badmagicproductions.com⁠ for more info and to buy tickets. Tickets are on sale now for CrimeWave 2.0! Visit crimewaveatsea.com/CAMPFIRE to get your discount code for $100 off your cabin and a private meet-and-greet with us! The cruise is Feb. 8-12, 2027. Sources, Monkey Invasion case: Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-170-wild-monkeys-escaped-from-a-jungle-camp-and-terrorized-new-york-180985537/ NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1935/08/23/archives/monkey-runaways-still-number-111-32-simian-flagpole-sitters-are.html https://www.nytimes.com/1935/08/22/archives/150-monkeys-flee-camp-stop-train-simians-escape-from-frank-bucks.html Farmingdale Local History Blog: https://farmingdalelocalhistory.blogspot.com/2018/07/frank-bucks-jungle-campmassapequa-zoo.html https://omeka.hofstra.edu/exhibits/show/long-island-business-and-indus/frank-buck-collection--1935-19 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1935/08/30/issue.html https://www.newspapers.com/article/daily-news-174-monkeys-skip-jail/159743530/ https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026749/1935-08-24/ed-1/?sp=1&q=MASSAPEQUA&r=0.241,0.976,0.311,0.229,0 Sources, Alison Gu case: U.S. Court of Appeals filings: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-2nd-circuit/2140129.html https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/6943f1bbcfa51735e29ca3b7 Bennington Banner: https://www.benningtonbanner.com/local-news/former-winhall-woman-back-in-court-more-fraud-charges/article_f37d8ad2-dd24-11ec-94e0-4f8b05aedbae.html "Lowering the Bar," Kevin Underhill: https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/07/defendant-recruited-seven-actors-to-testify-in-fraud-trial.html Manchester Journal: https://www.manchesterjournal.com/local-news/former-winhall-woman-headed-back-to-prison/article_63203790-1e66-11ed-ba8a-77d4d5eff5ee.html 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://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. People can be pretty strange. And not just people.

As we'll see in one story of this week's episode, you can add all our extended family of primates to that. If you have a big brain and opposable thumbs, there's a good chance you'll be getting up to some shenanigans. But as we'll see in our other story, human beings still wear the crown for weird, ridiculously confident nonsense. This is Tales of the Unexpected, a grab bag of odd stories. Case 1. Not My Circus. The Great Monkey Invasion of Long Island. So, campers, for this one, were on Long Island, New York, on the short stretch of highway between Massapiqua and Amityville, August 21st, 1935. Nowadays, the area is home to the Westfield Sunrise Mall, recently closed and slated for demolition,

and grim and spooky like all closed malls are, but in 1935, it was a lot livelier, because it was the location of Frank Buck's jungle camp, a 40-acre zoo that housed lions, tigers, elephants, birds, reptiles, and monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys. To set the scene for where this story's going, here's the start of a 1935, New York Times story. The Chattery-Reses monkey colony at Frank Buck's jungle camp gave no warning during the past week that it was a quiver with impending revolution. But the storm broke shortly before noon today, and tonight homeowners and fruit stand operators in two counties fidgeted uncomfortably in the advancing shadow of a Simeon invasion. Frank Buck was born in 1884 in Gainesville, Texas, but grew up in Dallas, still a pretty small and dusty city.

As a kid, he loved catching and keeping small animals and birds. Frank left school after the seventh grade to work as a cow puncher, which is not quite as weird as it sounds. It's just an old-timey term for cowboy. I hope they weren't punching those poor cows in the face. They were suffering enough, I'm sure. In his mid-teens, he rode the rails north to Chicago to seek his fortune. first of all through a very old-fashioned route.

In Chicago, Frank got a job as a bellhop and caught the eye of one of the hotel guests, a drama critic and former opera singer named Lillian West. Frank was a good-looking kid, and I literally mean kid because he was 17 years old, and Lillian was 46 when they got married in 1901. What? What was in the water in those days? The interesting thing is, and this is so messed up, but at the time, I suspect that if people look to scantz at this, they would think of him as the predator, not her, because 17 was like a girl. I mean, he'd been a cowboy for like five years at this point.

17 was just a grown-ass man by then, so they probably would have thought, oh, he's taking advantage of this poor woman for her money and not she's a freaking perver, you know, and so strange. But it was obviously something either one or both of them was a little sensitive about because for the wedding announcement in the newspaper, they gave their ages as 24 and 32. By the time of the 1910 census, when they were actually 26 and 55, they gave their ages as 30 and 35. Come on now. You know like 50 something is an old looking 50 something back then too. People were probably like right. I mean, she was rubbing like radium lotion on her. face, so it was like, she was been rough.

If they'd stuck together, they'd have eventually wound up the same age, but alas, it was not to be. When Frank was 27, he won $3,500 in a poker game. That's the equivalent of something like $120 grand today. Frank decided to indulge his favorite hobby as a kid. He set sale for Brazil to capture as many exotic birds as he could, leaving Lillian behind. It's not clear whether he flat out just ran out on her as soon as he got some cash of his own, but they were soon divorced. My suspicion is that he wanted to go, you know, admire

the local plumage someplace else, you know what I'm saying? Frank knew there was a big American market for these birds as pets, but was shocked at how quickly and how profitably he was able to sell them when he sailed into New York at the end of his Brazilian trip. He immediately

reinvested his new money in another Brazilian adventure, and when that proved even more profitable, Frank Buck, decided on a new career, capturing wild animals for American zoos and circuses. Obviously, this is not so much a moral gray area as it is a moral black hole. He was tearing animals out of their native environments to line his own pockets. The best you can say about Frank is that his work depended on the animals being alive and healthy, at a time when most Americans traveling abroad to find animals had rifles with them and a taxidermist on call back home. Frank, anyway, was hugely successful.

and in 1923 was made the first full-time director of the San Diego Zoo. He'd signed a three-year contract but would be fired after only three months. Frank was not someone who played well with others. He made his own decisions without consulting the board, like building his own cages, making undocumented deals for animals, and letting a Zibu, a big Asian cow, just wander around the grounds.

He ordered expensive nameplates for the zoo again, exhibits, but most of them had to be returned after Frank misspelled the names. The final nail in the coffin of Frank's career as zoo director was when he decided to oil up the zoo's elephants, Empress and Queenie. Yes, I said oil up. Now, this was a fairly common practice in zoos and circuses at the time where the elephant's natural dry, cracked skin wasn't considered sufficiently attractive. Oh, I'm sorry, you kidnapped me out of my native habitat and bring me here and put me in a freaking cage and now you're offended that i've got ashy knees like shut up it's just the audacity like oh we want our elephants as smooth and shiny as

gumballs oiling up elephants is terrible for them and frank was explicitly told not to do it but went ahead anyway. Empress and Queenie became very sick, suffering from edema and constipation. Bless their little hearts, or huge hearts, I guess, or elephants. This was relieved with a laxative of Epsom salts, bran and alfalfa, which must have been quite an experience for everyone involved. I hope they shot it out right at his face. And the two elephants did recover. And then Frank oiled him up again and was immediately fired. asshole. God, this guy. I just, I don't understand. He's like, well, the first time they got really sick. And so, this time.

Let's do it again. I know. It's so gross. Because aesthetics matter certainly more than the health and well-being of these creatures. Okay. Ugh. He went back to capturing animals and was, again, very successful at it. He got married again the year after the San Diego Zoo Fiasco to a Chicago stenographer named Nina Bordman, who went with him to his overseas adventures. They got divorced in 1927, and Nina later said, as long as I live, I don't want to see any animal wilder or bigger than a kitten. I bet, man.

Can you imagine this poor woman getting dragged around like swamps and jungles? I only know. From Chicago in like a, like, she's in court. She's in courtrooms typing away, and then she gets dragged to like, yeah, no. No, thank you. It's like, I've been pooped on by nearly every animal in the Amazon. That's literally, yeah. Is that the plot of like Georgia the jungle?

The next year, Frank married Muriel Riley, and this one stuck. The two soon had a daughter together, but not everything was rosy for Frank. The stock market crash of 1929 left him broke and bankrupt. A friend suggested he tried to make money by writing about his adventures, and in 1930, Frank and journalist Edward Anthony published Bram Back Alive, a collection of his diaries. The book was a huge hit, and two years later, an Archao film crew accompanied Frank on his next animal-stealing trip to Asia. The movie showed fierce fights between animals that the filmmakers insisted were not set up by them, but which were probably set up by them.

The movie was a huge hit. Two more books and accompanying movies followed, none of them making as big a splash as Bring Them Back Alive, but Frank Buck was now world famous. Disney even put out a cartoon spoofing him with Donald as Frank Duck. That's when you know you've made it right there. I know.

Frank had an exhibit called Frank Buck's jungle camp at the 1933-34 World's Fair in Chicago, a small zoo whose central attraction was Monkey Mountain. This was a man-made tower of fake rock where hundreds of Rhesus macaque monkeys lived. The macaques were one of Frank Buck's specialties. He liked them but didn't trust them, writing, No other living creature is so completely imbued with mischievousness. No other so triumphantly relishes man's discomfort or can be so maddeningly impish. There the personification of perpetual motion whose every little movement has a trouble-making intention behind it. Cry me a river, Frank. Get back in touch

when some of them kidnap you and transport you to Southeast Asia in a cage. Asshole. The jungle camp with its encouraging sign of, they're all alive, out front. was a big hit at the World's Fair. Frank handed out a free pet monkey every week, which I'm sure wasn't at all traumatizing for every primate involved. Oh, my God. After the World's Fair, Frank moved the Drungle Camp, monkey mountain included over to Long Island,

where it continued to be a popular attraction. They're all alive. Super. I guess maybe patrons were used to them not being all life. Or I guess maybe they're just saying, They're all alive, okay? That's the best we can do for you. The bar is on the floor. The bars in hell.

Just in case the elephant incident didn't make it clear, we should point out that Frank Buck knew jack shit when it came to actually caring for animals and running a zoo. Catching them, sure, that he could do. But the zoo wasn't safe for animals or humans. Two zookeepers were bitten by snakes and one had his chest crushed by what content. temporary reports described as a 26-foot-long reticulated python. That would make it the longest snake ever recorded, so not very likely, but still, it was an extremely big snake, and reticulated pythons do actually prey on human beings. Other zookeepers managed to pry the python off its intended lunch, but its poor victim

suffered traumatic pneumonia. Another zookeeper was careless with a lion and got his shoulder clawed open. Good for the lion, I think. God, it's got its lick back, I think. Frank himself was bitten by a python and got trampled by a horse. Yeah, not hard enough. I hate this guy in case y'all haven't sussed that out yet. So this being 1935, all the zookeepers were men,

and they had to follow the image Frank had established in his movies, khaki, safari outfit, safari helmet, and thin little mustache. Lots of them were mistaken for Frank and asked to pose a pose. for photographs with visitors and had pre-autographed portrait postcards to hand out. Imagine working somewhere where it was a prerequisite to dress and groom yourself like your boss. And also imagine being that boss and having to seriously tell people, you have to make yourself look like me. God Almighty, I'll cringe. Monkey Mountain was surrounded by a steep-walled moat to keep the monkeys in there.

When people needed to get in there to take care of them, they lay a wide plank. across the gap to make a temporary bridge, which they'd then pull in after them. That was an important step, as you'll see. So this was the plan, but people can get casual about frequently repeated tasks, and the monkeys, all 500 or so of them, were a friendly and peaceable bunch, who, despite Frank Buck's warnings, didn't really cause much trouble. On August 21st, at about 11 a.m., Charles Selner laid the plank across the moat and carried across a brush, a bucket, and a few other cleaning supplies. There were hundreds of monkeys and no bathrooms, so cleaning Monkey Mountain was a frequent

job. Selner left the plank in place and got to work scrubbing the interior of the tower. I guess he quickly realized his mistake because he headed back to the plank just a few minutes later and saw a torrent of brown monkey bodies just racing across the plank to freedom to vanish with, as the New York Times put it, saucy flourishes. I just love that so much. Sassy monkeys. After a few moments of staring in astonishment,

Selner charged forward and across the plank in the middle of the monkey tide, and when he got to the other side, he yanked the bridge in, tipping a handful of monkeys behind him into the waters of the moat. Maccax are excellent swimmers, so the only harm to the little guys was frustration at being thwarted. There were woods not far behind Monkey Mountain, and soon all the staff of the zoo were racing out there to try and catch the monkeys before they reached the trees. They only caught the two slowest monkeys. The rest, well over a hundred macaques, vanished into the branches.

The zoo called the police, which is hysterically what the police going to do, you know? It's so funny. Just to see them in handcuffs. So fun. This whole thing is just. hilarious to me. Well, not the whole thing. You'll see it a minute. There are a couple sad parts, but just holy shit. The zoo called the police, and a patrolman Goebel nabbed two of the monkeys right away, grabbing them from a tree branch. Good job, man. The Times story doesn't give him any details, but presumably he had a car, right?

Macacques are only about 15 pounds, but monkeys are strong, and I can't imagine he could drag two of them down to the police station. Just throw them in the back seat, and if they pee and poop in there, well, anyone who, spent some time watching police body cam videos, we'll know that that's not an unusual situation for a police car. I watch body cams, y'all, it happens all the time. If you ever have to sit in the back of a cop car, wash everything, just burn the clothes that you were wearing. Just burn them and shower for about 15 hours straight, okay?

Because people are barfing in there, peeing in there, pooping in the every possible bodily fluid. It's nasty. Another patrolman, William Docherty, described by the St. Louis Post Dispatch as one of the new brainy generation of cops, because he used peanuts to lure a pair of monkeys close enough to grab. E equals MC squared, right? At 4 p.m., about 50 monkeys swarm down onto the Long Island Railroad,

where about 100 men were working. 50 chattering macaques erupting from the woods would be, I would say, a little startling to say the least, and the workers just dropped their tools and fled. Good choice. Long Island isn't exactly replete with fruits and nuts, and I kind of suspect the little guys were just hungry and had gotten used to being fed by people, so we're just looking for a snack.

Anyway, an eastbound train soon leapt to Massapequa, but shrieked to a stop when it reached the monkeys frolicking on the tracks. Apparently, under the leadership of one big macaque dubbed Al Capone, The train crew and some of the passengers got out and tried to shoe them off the tracks with no success until someone found a couple bunches of bananas in the express car and tossed them to the side of the tracks. The monkeys accepted their bribe and scuttled off into the brush, allowing the train to keep moving. Congratulations, everyone, you've just taught Al Capone how to profit from crime.

But crime has its dangers. The Long Island Railroad had an electrified third rail. and a pair of unfortunate macaques got electrocuted, poor little babies. If you're looking for another gripping, thoughtfully researched crime show, check out blood and water from ABC News in 2020. In 2001, Leslie Prier was found brutally murdered, her body left in the shower of her home in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C. Investigators initially set their sights on Leslie's husband as the prime suspect,

until bombshell DNA evidence revealed the presence of an undemned, known male at the scene. With extensive access to the original police tapes and interviews with the cold case detectives who work to solve the crime, blood and water tells an in-depth story of the decades-long wait for justice for Leslie's daughter and the cutting-edge investigative techniques that finally caught the killer. Catch the whole series wherever you get podcasts. Just search for blood and water. From the parents behind law and order comes a mystery the whole family can enjoy. Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries. Step into the whimsical world of Patrick Pickle Bottom, a precocious 11-year-old,

with a love for reading and an uncanny ability to solve mysteries. Inspired by the beloved children's book of the same name, this podcast vividly brings Patrick's tales of deduction and everyday adventures to life as he unravels baffling enigmas and solves clever cases. Patrick Picklebottom Everyday Mysteries is perfect for kids and is just as entertaining for grown-ups who love a good mystery. The whole family can listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. As dusk fell, about 30 of the escaped monkeys had second thoughts about a life of liberty on Long Island.

I mean, the property prices are ridiculous and the commute's no fun at all. So they scuttled back to the jungle camp and leapt onto the moat surrounding Monkey Mountain to swim home. It wasn't easy to do a headcount of the monkeys still at the zoo, but the staff estimated that about 170 had escaped, so well over 100 were, still at large. All across two counties, people kept their windows shut at night despite the summer heat. And to be fair, as cute as they are, I mean, I wouldn't like to wake up to a monkey screaming in my face. I feel like that might cause some trauma. Although, to be honest, that would probably be a lot more effective than my alarm app. You know, you can't hit the snooze on a monkey.

There's a couple of versions of what happened to Sidney Milo the next day. In one, he was out driving on Seaford Avenue, turned a corner, and saw 30 monkeys blocking the road. He swerved to avoid them, turning his car into a ditch, where sadly one monkey had been sitting and got killed by the car. Oh, man. The other version, told later by the post-dispatch, is the same, but instead of the monkeys sitting on the road, they leapt down onto Milo's car as he drove under some trees, and he drove into the ditch in a panic. I'm guessing either Milo or a journalist decided to punch up the original story. Why would 30 monkeys jump onto a moving car? Why wouldn't 30 monkeys jump onto a move? Have you met monkeys? You can't predict what 30 monkeys are going to do, Katie, come on. I wouldn't put anything

past them. They might have stole the guy's hat and his cigar and taking a shit in his passenger. See, like, they're capable of anything. Yeah, it's the monkey to monkey communication. They have to watch out for because it's like they're a flock of birds. They just, they all decided it wants to jump onto his car. The zoo was offering free season passes to anyone who captured one of their monkeys. Okay, good way to sweeten the pot, folks. I guess, okay. Man, you can tell this is not current because can you imagine the lawsuits, Lord have

mercy. They weren't thinking that way back then, I guess. No, I guess. Like, yes, I want to come to your zoo where mothers. Like monkeys freshly escaped. So anyway, they were offering free season passes, and Milo tried to cash in with the one he'd hit with his car. But the zoo wanted no part in that. I guess they didn't say dead or alive.

No. If they started handing out awards for dead monkeys, things on Long Island would get real dark, real fast. Sydney Milo apparently stalked away from the zoo under a dark cloud, muttering about suing them. Good luck with that, man. And you know what's really fucked up is that, like, today, somebody would sue if they hadn't said dead of life. They probably would. Oh, the Lord. Or they threaten to sue.

Lawsuits are, like, expensive and tedious, so. Around 30 more monkeys tripes back to the zoo that morning, but about 20 of them, instead of heading back to Monkey Mountain, shimmied up a tall flagpole. The zoo called the fire department who leaned a big ladder against the flagpole. Volunteers went up and prodded the monkeys with bamboo poles until they grabbed onto the rope, used to raise and lower the flagpole, and then the people on the ground just lowered them down the same as they would have flag, and grabbed them when they were close enough. The visual on that is delightful. Overnight, the power into Amityville had been knocked out for half an hour, and engineers found two sad monkey bodies at the bottom of a utility pool, having climbed up and swung onto the wrong wires.

The Times, in its sober way, reported that this is the first time that the Long Island Lighting Company has ever blamed monkeys for the failure of its system. But it wouldn't be the last. The first time, really? You don't say. Two 14-year-old boys nabbed a couple of monkeys by throwing their coats over them. A local ice man, John Sotio, hung a basket of apples in the back of his truck and was able to get six monkeys to jump in and be caught. Macacs are social creatures who live in large groups in the wild. More and more just came home of their own accord. Soon, there were just a few monkeys.

left at large. Capone's crew, you know, the real hardened criminals. The zoo tried a supposedly surefire method of catching them. You take a coconut, cut a hole in it just big enough for a monkey to squeeze a paw inside and pour rice inside as bait. The monkey reaches in for a fistful of rice and then gets a coconut stuck on their hand because they're not willing to let go of the rice. Replace rice with a fun-sized snicker and that might work on like us. It's a TCC trap. Oh, yeah.

But the monkeys were too smart to fall for the trick. The problem is, is I think they probably tried it on the monkeys at Monkey Island too much, or Monkey Mountain too much. Like the monkeys got wise to it. The zoo got a letter from Montreal where a man claimed that a park up there had managed to recapture 18 escape macaques with an Irresistible bait, hard liquor. At night, the jungle camp zookeepers went out into the woods and put saucers of bourbon beneath the trees where they thought the monkeys were roosting. So theoretically, the curious monkeys would come down to sniff the saucers and according to their man in Montreal, would immediately drink themselves into a stupor.

So in the morning, the zookeepers went out, hoping to find dozens of sleeping monkeys, but instead found only three very sick ones, unable to stay. and not interested in the world at all, beyond puking and trying to start fights with each other. They took them back to the zoo's veterinarian, where they soon made a full but presumably unpleasant recovery. But, you know, to be honest, I feel like this is the best possible outcome. As bad as I feel for those poor hungover monkeys, I mean, drunk monkey is probably not a fun time for anybody. Now, you may have noticed that we haven't mentioned one name in particular during these monkey shenanigans, that of Frank Buck himself. Frank was over in Asia stealing more animals,

but a couple weeks after the escape, he swooped back into town to play his favorite role, that of a competent animal handler. Eventually, under Frank's leadership, Capone and his crew were recaptured, or quite possibly just came home by themselves, like most of the other monkeys, but that wouldn't fit the image Frank was trying to sell.

Which kind of brings us around to the question, Was this actually an accident at all? Frank Buck, famous Animal Man, was largely created by his skill at handling the media, which was something he was much better at than actually caring for animals. The monkey escape was big news, and the zoo sold many more tickets than they ever had before.

And the whole thing happened to coincide with Frank setting sail from Asia with a fresh load of animals for the zoo. About a week after the escape, the New York Times ran a story that started, if the keepers of Frank Buck's Zoo at Masapiqua, New York think monkeys on the loose are a lot of trouble, they've not seen anything yet. The noted animal catcher disclosed today that his shipload of jungle animals now approaching New York contains about 2,000, among them, some of the fiercest on earth. Great. It then quotes Frank boasting about bringing home an armored rhinoceros, an orangutan, and the biggest tiger in captivity.

You can't buy that kind of publicity, but you can apparently create it by releasing a couple hundred monkeys. What can't you accomplish that way, really? Like, there's nothing you can't do by releasing a couple hundred monkeys. That is the answer to everything, I think you'll find. The year before, at the World's Fair, a couple of Frank's monkeys had made an apparently genuine escape and got plenty of newspaper coverage after they smashed up a pottery exhibit, and the owner sued. sued the monkeys or how do you sue a monkey?

I'm sure that's stuck in Frank's mind. Frank Buck's jungle camp flourished for a while, but eventually he sold most of the animals on to other zoos, just keeping some for his personal collection. During World War II, the jungle camp was briefly converted to a small arms factory, hopefully after all the animals had gone. Macacs are very cute, but I don't want to see a monkey with a gun. After the war, Frank sold the land, and his jungle camp was replaced with a much more sedate petting zoo slash drive-in movie theater.

Interesting combo for about 20 years before the whole place was raised for a mall to be built. Frank Buck intended to go on another animal-stealing quest after the war, but he got sick and moved back to Texas, where he died of lung cancer in 1950. So that's the sordid tale of the Monkey Revolution. I don't know if we should really take notes. I feel like they could have done a better job if they'd had better leadership, but what else could we expect of Al Capone? So moving on now to Case 2. Audacity, the crimes of Allison Gou.

For this one, we're in, well, various places. Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Texas. It was the early 2010s, and a couple of con artists were busy doing what con artists do. Fraudsters are a special breed. kind of people who'll take a flamethrower to your life if they think it'll make them a buck. In some ways, I think they're worse than killers. The typical kind of killer anyway, who flies into a rage and commits a crime of passion. A lot of killers would never kill again. Circumstances arose that pushed them to a breaking point, and they made the worst possible decision in a moment

of fury. Con artists, on the other hand, scammers and fraudsters, will strike again and again and again. Take the last penny of an old person's life savings. These people are scusbags. And Allison Gou and her boyfriend Matthew Abel were no exception. They were identity thieves and mortgage fraudsters, among other interests. To pull this off, Allison and Matthew pillage the identities of dead children. This has always been a common tactic used by people who want to create a new identity, either to stay under the government's radar or to steal money. And this is so gross, one of the identity she stole was that of a kid who died in a 1989 school shooting in California, as if that family hadn't already been through the deepest depths of hell. It's especially

disgusting when you find out that Allison has three kids of her own. There's just a total absence of empathy there. Allison and her boy, Matthew, used these fake identities to commit mortgage scams and defraud banks to the tune of about $1.6 million. They took out mortgages in other people's names on houses scattered all over the country, from Connecticut to Texas, and lived pretty high on the hog for a few years in the early to mid-2010s. And then our girl took it a step too far. She decided to apply for a U.S. passport with this fake identity. Allie Lynn Koo, which is just to corrects me, I was like, Allison Goo. Allie Lynn Koo. We could have told her that, this was a bad idea, but she didn't ask us for some reason.

Right. How many times do you need to hear this? Do not fuck around with the federal government. You don't want that smoke. You might get away with it for like a little bit, okay? You might. Yeah. But you won't get away with it forever.

No. You don't want to deal with the IRS and you don't want to deal with an investigator from the diplomatic security service, which is the agency that will be up your ass if you try to get a fake passport. But Allison apparently wasn't worried about any of that. She waltzed into a Vermont passport office one day and turned in an absolute turkey of an application. Wrong name, fake social security number, fake ID, fake temporary driver's license, fake high school, and fake itinerary from JetBlue Airlines showing an upcoming trip to Jamaica.

The guy in the passport office smelled a rat pretty much right away, which tells me that Miss Allison is not as slippery an eel as she thinks she is. You have some understatement of the century as you'll soon find out. Like, you have to be, like, pretty bad for, like, a government employee that's, like, seen 12 passport applications that day to be like, hmm, something's a miss. He did a little more digging, and then he called in Scott Rogers from the Diplomatic Security Service, who crawled up Allison's ass in a very thorough and governmental way, then determined that she'd tried to perpetrate a fraud on the U.S. government,

which he did not appreciate. Next step, grand jury indictment. The government charged her and Matthew with all kinds of nasty stuff, bank fraud, identity theft, fun stuff like that, and she went to trial. Matthew, you'll notice, did not go to trial because Matthew decided to take a plea deal and leave his lady love behind.

the cheese stands alone, as the nursery rhyme goes. Now, one thing you're going to learn about Allison Gou, if you haven't already, is that she is the top candidate for the worldwide queen of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down. Oh, yeah, she's probably like sesquitilian down at this point. Allison's motto is never surrender, even when you really ought to just go ahead and surrender because you're embarrassing yourself. At her trial in the fall of 2017, Allison took the stand in her own defense and just kept on doubling down. She said it wasn't her in the passport office that day. This was beyond absurd.

There was security footage of the whole transaction. She also came up with some pretty priceless explanations for some of the evidence detectives had found in her house. For example, on her computer, they found a downloaded instruction manual on how to create, create false identities. Allison tried to blame this on her opair, Beau. Gee, thanks.

Needless to say, she was convicted on all counts. The judge sentenced her to concurrent 12-month prison terms on the first two counts and two consecutive years on count three. So she'd serve three years, and once she got out, she'd have three years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay back over 200 grand. Matthew, by the way, only got six months. Pleadiels, man. So Allison Gou, or Allison Goober, as I like to call her, reported to prison. And she served her stretch. She got out. She could have put all this behind her. But our girl, Allison, wasn't prepared to let the case go. She wanted to clear her good name. So she filed an appeal, claiming ineffective assistance of counsel, meaning my lawyers suck, so you have to vacate my conviction. You know, I feel like Allison needs an accountability.

Like, girl, you got to stop blaming everybody else for everything. The opair? Really? Is the opair the one with a whole bunch of fraud cases in their closet? No, I think that was you. Based on what we know about Allison so far, I suspect it won't surprise you all to hear that she's been through seven defense attorneys over the years.

She's fired a few of them. A few have withdrawn from her case. I wonder why. And she's filed complaints against most of them. them. Allison. Pudin. This is going to be hard for you to hear, honey, but when you can't get along with anybody, it's you. Okay? It's you. Now, here's the thing about appealing based on ineffective assistance of counsel. This is my very favorite thing about this story. In order to appeal on those grounds, Allison Gou had to waive attorney-client privilege so her lawyer could defend herself.

Yeah. Generally, not the greatest idea, I'd say, and Allison was about to find that out in major way. The war is over and both sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust. Now the survivors claw to what's left

of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame

dies, something else rises to finish the job. This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make. This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back. Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the Shadow Dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on YouTube.com slash the Glass Cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day. See what everybody's talking about, and join us in the dark. A 24-year-old burning alive inside his own apartment. Police waited outside for 38 minutes.

Was this an accident? A suicide? A specific section on both wrists unburned. Hours earlier, he would tell his parents that if his wife found out he was leaving, she would go ballistic. That's our episode, She'd Go Ballistic, the suspicious death of David Elmquist. This is Crime Salad. I'm Ashley.

I'm Ricky. Search for Crime Salad wherever you listen. So let's go back to the fall of 2017 to Allison's trial. Defense attorney Lisa Shelcred was already having some issues with her client. They were clashing on strategy. For example, whether Allison should take the stand, whether they should call her ex-Matthew Abel to the stand. Lisa said, no, he already pled guilty and told them everything about like both of your roles in the case. And he'll be under oath, so that would probably not be smart.

Allison wanted to put her three kids on the stand as defense witnesses, including her autistic adult son, a thing that many defense attorneys would probably advise you not to do, just for the optics, if nothing else. It says a lot about Allison that it didn't bother her to put her kids through that. By the way, it came out later that at least one of the kids had perjured themselves, with their mom's full knowledge, of course. Most kids would probably lie for their moms in this situation if their moms asked them to, and I can just imagine she probably cried and said, You know what mommy to go to jail, do you?

Just, ugh, gross. Another point they couldn't seem to agree on was which witnesses to call and what to ask them. And that's where the story of Alice and Goo goes from, ah, another con artist's story, to bitch dead what? A few days into the trial, Attorney Sheltret was sitting around in her office

chatting with a few of her witnesses when one of them said something like, it's for the movie. It sounded like maybe the guy was on the phone with a friend, like, oh, I just have to do this thing for the movie, and then I can meet you. It wasn't clear from the sources, but that's what it sounded like to me. It's like, a movie? Shellcourt was like, what movie? Probably beginning to get a real sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. The witness looked confused. Wait, he said, are you a real lawyer? Um, yes, she told the witness, I'm a real lawyer with a real counselor. The real counselor. The real

case and a real client, and we're going to real court on Monday, and you're going to be under oath. This witness sat there for a second with, like, the thousand-yard stare, just watching his life pass before his eyes, and then Lisa started firing questions at him and the other witnesses in the office. There were like three of them there that day. He was an actor, he told her. He'd come in from New York for a role in a movie. He seemed baffled that Lisa didn't already know that. After that, it didn't take long for the truth to come out. Lisa Shelcret got several more of Gu's witnesses

together, and they spilled the beans. They were all Chinese American, and they'd answered an ad in a Chinese language newspaper looking for actors. None of them knew anything about the actual case against Allison goo. She'd coached them all

on what they were supposed to say in the courtroom scene that they were going to be in. God, all right. She'd given them dossiers with information and photographs of the different characters to prepare them, plus pictures of Allison's various houses and other evidence in the case, like fake IDs and stuff that police had uncovered. Until Shelkrit had discovered what was going on, they absolutely believed that this was a work gig. Y'all, there were seven of these people, seven fake witnesses.

And you want to know the best part? None of the actors had been paid yet. They were supposed to get their money after the project was over. Now, do you think they were going to see a dime of that money? Hell no. She was for sure going to sift them, poor things. And do you think that she paid them a cent to get from New York to wherever? Yeah, probably not.

She's probably like, you have to make your own way here. And poor Lisa Shalcrit. Like, let's just take a moment of silence for this attorney. who is apparently very good at what she does and is a very highly regarded attorney. Here she is, right smack in the middle of trial and she finds out her witness list is pure fiction. Defense attorneys out there, by the way, please tell us in the comments, have you ever had a client like this? Somebody you just dreaded the side of after a while because you knew they were a scumbag and defending them made you feel like you needed a shower? Have you ever just had a client

tried to get you to lie in court for them? How often do you think, attorneys lie on behalf of their clients, whether their defense attorneys or prosecutors lying behalf of the state. The absolute audacity of this little caper just fascinates me. Like, how did she think she was going to get away with this? Right. Like, the fact that there were seven of them, seven is crazy. Seven is, I can, like, I can almost see one or two, but seven is nuts. you can't just give somebody a script to follow and plop them down on a witness stand for questioning. Even if they hold it together on direct examination, the prosecution is going to make a meal out of them. And you can't anticipate every possible question. They won't have any idea what they're supposed to say. Somebody's liable to stop mid-sentence and say, I'm sorry, everybody, lying? Oh, and also, where are all the cameras? Not to mention the horrendous position this puts these poor actors in and her attorney.

This woman is absolutely devoid of conscience and common sense. What kind of legal bog is this, too? Like, certainly the prosecution couldn't charge these people, right? No, they didn't know. They didn't know. But, God, how horrific. God. And just imagine if she'd actually put him on the sand. We're going to get into that in a minute. I think she thought she was a criminal mastermind to hire actors who spoke English as a second language.

If they stumbled a little in court, people would just think, oh, well, it's the language barrier. She's such an idiot. Yeah, because interpreters don't exist, right? Like, she's just, this woman, bless her heart. So anyway, Lisa Shelfred, probably very shell-shocked at the moment, summoned Allison to her office the next day and confronted her with the actor's claims. And Allison didn't blink. What? What are you talking about? What's an actor? Allison swore up and down that she'd know nothing at all about this tomfoolery and she was as shocked and appalled as her lawyer was. Later, in her appeals paperwork where she claimed ineffective assistance of counsel against Lisa and her other attorney, Allison claimed that at some point during the trial prep process, someone had drugged her.

So, obviously, this was a nefarious plot with her as the innocent dupe rendered unconscious and helpless to protest all this unethical behavior. She didn't say who drugged her, by the way, just someone. It was all very cloak and dagger, but what we were supposed to believe was that Allison wasn't responsible for any of it. There are wheels within wheels, man. and you don't know how far up this goes. She definitely seemed to want to suggest that some kind of conspiracy was afoot to frame her. She tried to get her lawyer to put this Connecticut attorney on the stand,

a guy she'd worked with briefly before, to testify about one of the prosecution witnesses having some kind of shady criminal dealings overseas. And there was no evidence of this whatsoever. And Allison's attorneys, of course, refused to put this guy on the stand to just spout a bunch of bullish. Right. She was also mad at Lisa for not putting a detective on the stand to testify about one of the first times he talked to her about the case. She lied to him about her name that day, said it was Allison Ling or something like that. But Allison said she'd only done that because she was terrified of her stock or ex. She was in fear for her life. So that meant she had to lie to the detective about her identity for some reason.

Makes perfect sense to me. These were not the only shenanigans Allison had pulled on her lawyers. During the lead up to her trial, Allison kept telling them she had evidence that would prove her innocence beyond any doubt. They just had to get a hold of this private investigator she'd hired in New York, a Mr. Wong, and he'd give them everything they needed. But any time Shelcret asked her to cough up the guy's contact info or, like, put her in touch with them, Allison refused. She'd always have some excuse why she just couldn't do it right then. And eventually, Shelcourt realized this guy probably doesn't exist. None of Allison's fake witnesses had ever heard of this guy either.

She just pulled this entire fake man out of her ass, which must have hurt. Again, this woman might not have much going for her, but she does have some audacity. That's for damn sure. And her appeal years later, Allison argued that Lisa Shelcrit was wrong for not putting some of those fake witnesses on the stand. Apparently, a couple of them hadn't admitted yet that they were actors, probably just because Shilkrat hadn't managed to get in touch with them yet, because there were seven of them and there were only like four there that day, right? And Allison thought, she should have been able to use those ones. You know, who cares that they're actors?

They didn't come right out and admit it to you before you sent the whole crew home. So you should have just put them up there and let them lie for me. Like she actually said this in her appeal. It makes you wonder what her attorney meant when they told the court, we helped her pursue a definitive psychiatric diagnosis, which I can share in greater detail if the court deems it necessary. I'm sorry, Guy, but asshole is not a psychiatric diagnosis. So now Allison's appeal is denied because it was ridiculous. Her lawyers absolutely did the right thing.

And I want us to remember, again, why all this shit came out? Because nobody was ever going to find out about her fake witnesses. and her invisible private eye. But she just had to file that appeal. After, she'd already served her time. She just had to give into her ego. And it was this genius move that brought out the whole torrid tale. Before my girl waived privilege,

this was all attorney-client stuff. It had to stay between her and her attorneys. But now, they could shout it from the rooftops, which I bet felt really good, to be honest. And now, everybody knew what a duplicitous hosebag, Allison was because obviously the media picked this up all over the place and how she tried to defraud the federal court. Oof. Embarrassing, right? On top of that nice public humiliation, in 2022, Goober also violated her federal parole or probation or whatever, got busted for writing a bad

check to a plumber doing thousands of dollars of work on her house, and for obtaining two driver's licenses with fake identities. This meant she had to be a woman. She had to be a plumberer. She had a had to get her ass right back to prison and serve out another 10 months. Oh, and surprise, surprise, as of a few years ago, the most recent reporting we could find on her, she still hasn't paid a dime toward her restitution. Gross. So there you have it, folks, two audacious dickheads who didn't think they needed to play by the rules. One brought down a rain of monkeys on an unsuspecting Long Island town, and the other, well, I imagine she gave a lot of defense attorneys some serious. trust issues. We'll put her picture up on our social media, by the way. Make sure you think twice

before you do business with her. Now, before we go, don't forget about our two amazing live shows coming up. First, we've got Summer Camp, September 10th through the 13th, an amazing four-day festival in Equinoct, Pennsylvania, hosted by Dan and Lindsay Cummins of Time Suck and Scared to death. We'll be performing live alongside them and the podcast, Astonishing Legends, in addition to a roster of awesome stand-up comedians and local bands. Go to bad magic productions.com for more info and to buy tickets. Then we've got our true crime cruise, Crime Wave 2.0, February 8 through 12th, 2027. If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like case file, true crime garage last podcast on the left and scared to death, here's what you got to do.

Tickets are on sale now and they're going fast. So if you want to go, make sure you you get over to crimewave at sea.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP. You'll get $100 off plus a private meet and greet with us. The great thing is you can pay all at once or set up a payment plan and pay it off over time. So get on it, y'all. That's crimewave atc.com slash campfire. So that's 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 camp fire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank you so much to Mac, Heidi, War Nord, I love it, Valerie and Chasity. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes more, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you join the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker, a rad enamel pin, or fridge magnet while supplies last,

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