True Crime Campfire - TCC LIVE on the Crimewave Cruise!

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Last week, we did our first-ever live show on the Crimewave true crime cruise! We covered three cases, a sort of "sampler platter" to give new listeners an idea of what kind of stories we usually tell on TCC. Case 1 is the bizarre story of a parody website that ended up bringing dozens of would-be killers to justice. Case 2 is the murder of chef Dan Brophy by his mystery-novelist wife. Case 3 is the true story of Stede Bonnet, bumbling pirate wannabe and possible boyfriend of the dread pirate Blackbeard. Thank you so much to IRL Events for the opportunity to perform live--it was a blast! Thanks too to Royal Caribbean for hosting us all. Note: There were some visual aids that went along with these cases, so sometimes you'll hear the crowd laughing at those. Patreon supporters will also have access to the half-hour Q and A session we hosted after the live show. 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.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Can everybody hear me? Probably not. It's a cacophony in here at the moment. Everybody shut up. I have something to say. So, hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors.

I'm Whitney. And I'm Katie. 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. Woo! This is normally where the music goes, but we're coming to you today from the middle of the ocean on Royal Caribbean's Beautiful Liberty of the Seas, and this has been the most fun I have ever had in my entire life. 100%. It's so fun. It's been amazing. It's been incredible to meet some of y'all in person. It's amazing getting to hang out with these other rock star podcasters. It's just been absolutely surreal. And we know some of y'all today have probably never listened to us before. So we wanted to give you kind of like a charcutory platter of the kinds of stories that we usually do. One bizarre story, one murder, and a little bit of history at the end. So settle in, get comfy, and we'll start. start with case one. The dark web's not safe, but we are. Some of the most important discoveries

in history happened by accident, like penicillin. A scientist was so much of a slob that when he went away for a few days and came back to his lab, he found mold all over his petri dishes. And then he noticed that the mold seemed to be repelling bacteria. And bada-bibum, we got life-saving antibiotics. My point is, sometimes we set out to do one thing and end up with something much more spectacular. When he and a few college friends decided to start a cyber security business together, Bob Ennis had no way of knowing that their website would one day lead to FBI and ATF investigations and dozens of arrests. This is the sordid tale of rentahitman.com. Bob Innes initially wanted to solve crimes for a living,

but at the time he graduated from the police academy in 1999, no departments were hiring. So he shifted to Plan B, IT. He and a few of his friends decided to start a company offering basically White Hat hacking services, meaning they would try and hack your company's website to find the weak spots, and then they would tell you how to fix them. So for less than $10, Bob bought a domain name for their website. Rentahitman.com. Hit just meaning like visits to the website, right?

It was just supposed to be a funny, attention-grabbing name that he thought might attract clients. But the company didn't really go anywhere. Everybody kind of dispersed. And in 2005, Bob tried unsuccessfully to sell the domain name. But for some weird reason, nobody wanted rent-a-hitman.com. I can't imagine. Why not? So he just left it alone and, you know, kind of forgot about it.

But before he did, he posted an email address for potential buyers to contact him if they were interested. And that was it for years. So the site just sat there with this email address. And he didn't look at it until 2010. In 2010, he decided just kind of out of curiosity to check the email and see if anybody had gotten in touch and, oh, my God. What he found were hundreds and hundreds of emails from people wanting to hire a contract killer. Now, some of them were obviously jokes, but a lot of them were not. So just imagine what this must have been like for this poor man.

Like never in his wildest nightmares did he expect anybody to actually think, He was running a hitman for hire service on the surface web, for God's sake. Like, who would be dumb enough to do that? And who would be dumb enough to try hiring them, right? Well, lots and lots and lots of people, apparently. The first email that stood out to Ennis was from a lady named Helen, and it was just pages and pages of not super coherent desperation. She said she was from Great Britain, but she was stranded in Canada now

because her family had built her out of all the money she was supposed to inherit from her dad. And she wanted three of her relatives murdered. So she was trying to get bang for her buck, right? And the next part of the letter just gave in a chill. She described each person that she wanted murdered in great specific detail, along with their addresses. And this was freaked out, but he didn't respond initially

until Helen sent a second email, this time with the subject heading urgent and even more information about her intended targets. So he's like, all right, screw it. He reached out to Canadian police. And it turned out this was not Helen's first rodeo. She was already wanted for some fairly major stuff in the UK. So the Canadian cops arrested her.

She spent like four months in jail in Canada before they shipped her back to the UK to face her charges there. And this was the first arrest and conviction for rentahitman.com. And I'm sure Bob Ennis hoped it would be the last. You know, he had no idea how many more were coming. He decided to give the website a makeover. And we're just going to show you this because it's, right? Yeah, take a second, I know, yeah.

It's hilarious that anyone on planet Earth is dense enough to fall for this shit, right? Like, how? As you can see, he writes the whole site as, this character, Guido Finnelli, who's basically like a cheesy Timo Tony Soprano, and he says stuff like, Rent a Hitman's got the muscle to make you trouble sleep with the fishes. Really, people? And he offers senior and military and group discounts, just like, it's like hitman group on, and he promises total confidentiality, 100% HIPAA compliant. And HIPAA, of course, meaning hitman, information, privacy, and protection act of 1964,

which, as I'm sure all of you realize, is not a thing that exists for the love of God. Come on, people. Reading comprehension is at an all-time low. That is unfortunately true. But as ludicrous as this website is, people have been hitting it up for years, right up to the present day, to try and, avail themselves of its services. Some people want asset extraction, meaning like just getting somebody to cough up money or products, items, whatever. People have written in from the U.S., Europe, the U.K., even Indonesia. And for some reason, he said he's gotten a really

weirdly high number of emails from Indonesia. So he must have gotten some press over there or something. And one British lady wrote in asking Guido Finnelli if he could set her up with one of his operatives. She really liked the idea, I guess, of dating a hitman and having him teach her the ropes along the way, like it's Mr. Smith or something. My girl was trying to use this website as her own personal combo of OKCupid and course careers. Okay, stupid. Of course, there were plenty of kids who wanted to kill their parents, so those of you all who have teenagers, I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that. And in 2020, a 52-year-old one, woman named Wendy Wine had a seriously pissed off the bee in her bonnet about her ex-husband,

which is not an unusual thing, but what was unusual was that our girl Wendy decided she was going to go on the old interwebs and find herself a hitman to take care of it for her. Because, you know, if you want to hire a contract killer, it makes sense to just Google it, right? I mean, preferably on your home computer. Wendy surfed around for a few minutes until she landed on rentahitman.com. and look legit to her, right? I mean, everybody knows that guys with names like Guido Finnelli have a direct line to a whole Facebook of skilled murderers for hire.

You can just pick one. So she checked out a few of the website's reviews from satisfied customers. Like the one left by a lady named Laura, who said she'd caught her hubs cheating with the babysitter and, well, you know, had him taken care of. Wendy filled out Rent a Hitman's helpful request for service form and included a long, rambling explanation.

Basically, the man she wanted iced, her ex, had stolen allegedly 20 grand from her. So Ennis passed on the info to the police in Wendy's town, and they took over the case. They picked out a detective to play the hitman, and they set up a meeting with Wendy in a parking lot. And I might be wrong about this, but I literally think it was a Wendy's parking lot. I think it was. I have to check. she showed and she brought a down payment and that was what they needed to arrest her because if any of you all are familiar with hitman sting operations when money changes hands

that's when the suspect proves to them that they're serious so wendy was caught red-handed she eventually pled guilty and she was sentenced to seven to 24 years in prison for attempted solicitation of murder and this is my favorite part of Wendy's story the judge at her sentencing who is obviously one of our people took a minute to roast her dumbass he said if the intent wasn't so serious here this would be almost comical but it's not obviously is i mean come on a little a little it's a little funny nobody looking it could have believed this website was real the judge said but you did damn so not only did wendy get caught committing a serious crime, but she got caught being an absolute goober about it, which I don't think it gets any

worse than that, honestly. And of course, there's more. It was hard to pick just a few for this episode. There's Deanne Parkin, who tried to hire a hitman to take out the woman she blamed for the breakup of her marriage. And this was just last year, 2024. Yeah. Her ex-husband had had an affair with this lady, and at the time Deanne discovered when a hitman, they were living together and Dian just couldn't take it. I can't have this get to the cops or no one. I can't loose my kids, she told an undercover detective and a text message was, you know, do you want to embarrass yourself in front of the hitman? It takes two seconds to do a spell check. Lose my kids. Anyway, I'm a writing teacher. It irritates me. So in a voice call over WhatsApp, Dian said she was

willing to do anything to get this woman out of her life, even if it meant killing her and burying her in a six-foot hole. When the undercover asked if she had any ideas about how to carry out the murder, Deanne said, whatever's easiest, you know, if you want to make it look like a suicide. She was really persistent, and eventually the detectives set up a meeting to seal the deal. And Deanne showed she brought a diamond ring and a hundred bucks cash as a down payment, and she negotiated with them that she'd pay the rest on a payment plan, which I think is nice, right? I didn't know Hitman had Buy Now pay later.

Can you clarn a hit? I hear you can clarn a Domino's Pizza now, so maybe. God help us all. Deanne ended up sentenced to 90 months in prison and an extra few years of probation. And then we have Leif Everett Heyman, who thought his girlfriend's mom was too controlling. I know, right? He told Rent a Hitman he wanted her gone off the fucking earth. but he only wanted to spend like $200.

When an undercover ATF agent told him he'd have to pay for the gun, Leif was like, I have knives, I have a rock you could smash her head in with. Direct quote, he's just frugal, he's a frugal guy. Leif Heyman ended up sentenced to 10 years in federal prison with three more probation once he gets out. And y'all, these are just a tiny little droplet in the bucket. There are so many more of these cases. There have been dozens of arrests from this website, but not everybody writing to rent a hitman was interested in hiring a hitman.

Some of them wanted to be one. In early 2023, Josiah Garcia was 21 years old, an Air National Guardsman with a baby on the way and in need of a job. So like any of us would do in that situation, he went online and started looking for something that would fit with his interests and skill set. you know, mercenary jobs, basically, you know, just standard stuff. What he found was rent-a-hitman.com, specifically the careers section. Which reads, why join us?

Rent a hitman, your point-and-click solution, TM, is an equal opportunity employer. And we mean equal. We don't even ask about your family history. Our onboarding process, piece of cake. It's as simple as whipping up a Sunday gravy. Just fill out the form, keep it honest or close enough, and our onboarding specialists, who might know a guy who knows a guy, we'll take it from there. Got special skills? Maybe you're good at cleaning up messes. Don't be shy. Lay it all out there. I am obsessed with the idea of mobster HR.

Do you think they have to watch, like, cheesy videos about sexual harassment, like the rest of us? Like, I'm obsessed. You know they would. It's all very corporate. And this, that I just read you, this seemed legit to Josiah. Bless his heart. I mean, why wouldn't it, right? It's not like you're going to find this shit on LinkedIn. So he filled out the application for a field operative position.

He attached his resume with his Air National Guard work front and center. He put himself down as an expert marksman. He attached some identification documents with all his real personal, Info. I know. There are people this dumb out there, y'all. They walk among us. Oh, also one of the fields you have to fill in on the application is date, you can start smashing kneecaps. Convincing, right? Josiah said he wanted to start as soon as possible. He also wrote a few paragraphs to really try and sell himself, and here's just a little excerpt of his essay. I'm looking for a job that pays well

related to my military experience shooting and killing the marked target so I can support my kid on the way. What can I say? I enjoy doing what I do so if I can find a job that's similar to it, such as this one, put me in, coach. And he had one more thing to add to his application. He wanted Guido to know that in the guard

his nickname had been Reaper. You know, because of his insanely accurate marksmanship. I bet it was actually Beaker, like from the Muppets, but I can't prove it. And you know he gave himself that nickname. 100%. You know it. Yeah.

Come on, guys. You supposed to call me Reaper. Remember? I told you. No, nicknames cannot be requested. They can be bestowed. Otherwise, it's sad. Now, initially, Bob Ennis thought this one might be a joke.

I mean, put me in coach seriously, but it quickly became clear that this dip shit was dead serious. So Ennis passed on his info to the FBI and an undercover. agent took over communication as rent a hitman's field coordinator first the agent tried to give josiah an out he was like you know you have a lot going for you are you sure you want to do this he wanted to know if josiah thought he could handle the psychological impact of murder like could kill 50 people and still live with yourself josiah said that's rookie numbers for the reaper And I'm sure the agent died a little inside from cringe because I did. Okay, the undercover said, well, what about torture?

What about like taking a finger or an ear as a trophy if that's what the client wants? Could you do that? Josiah was all for it. He was like, yeah, if it's possible and I can do it, I'm, yeah, no problem. This guy's expecting a baby. It's scary, right? And after some back and forth, Josiah agreed to perform his very first hit for the company. for a fee of $5,000.

And on a Wednesday morning, our guy met up with his contact at a park. The contact, of course, being the undercover FBI agent. The agent handed Josiah a dossier on his intended target, just a guy they made up out of thin air. It had pictures of the guy, info about his routines, and an upfront payment of $2,500. He'd get the rest after the job was done.

And our boy did not bat an eye. He was just like, okay, you need a picture of the body for proof. That's some cold shit right there, right? Yikes. So needless to say, once the money changed hands, agents moved in to put the habeas grab us on our aspiring hitman. And I wish I'd been there to see his little face when he saw all those FBI jackets coming at him, you know, like out of the tree line.

Get down on the ground. Oh, so fun. Despite initially trying to weasel out of consequences by saying, I was just going to take the money, I wasn't really going to do the hit. Josiah eventually pled guilty to using interstate consequences. commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire. He could have gotten 10 years in federal prison, but because he took the plea, he got off super easy. He got five years of probation, two of which he has to spend in like a halfway house

type of place, which I'm sure is no picnic, but it's a lot better than 10 years locked up. So if you ever happen to listen to this, Josiah, honey, my advice to you is get smarter. So, yeah, a parody website leading to real arrests and prosecutions and saving hundreds of lives. You cannot make this shit up. Bob Innes' day job, ironically enough, is in pest control, which is hilarious to me. Because if I were going to take out like a Craigslist ad as a hitman for hire, I would 100% put something like discrete pest control in the title. The killer catch in business has taken its toll on Bob, though. A few years ago, he told ABC News,

it really makes you wonder who's out there. Are they your neighbors? Are they your business associates? Are they your ex-spouses? You never know. And it is unsettling, right? Like, remember to catch a predator with Chris Hansen, like in the early 2000s. That's how I felt after watching that for the first time.

Like, these creeps are everywhere. And you don't know who it is. There's no way to know. And according to an Australian study, about 2% of all murders are murders for hire. So there are a lot of these folks out there, more than we'd like to think. So I think we're lucky to have people like Bob on our side. We absolutely are.

And now we move on to case two. This pen is the barrel of the gun. So campers, for this one, we are in Portland, Oregon, June 2, 2018. That morning, a professor walked into Dan Brofey's cooking class at the Oregon Culinary Institute. 63-year-old Dan was a born teacher. He loved his students. They loved him right back. Right?

Yes. This was a guy who everybody agreed could easily be working as an executive chef anywhere he wanted. But that really wasn't how Dan rolled. His attitude was life's not about money. It's about doing the things you love with the people you care about. He worked part-time at a friend's restaurant as a head chef for like some extra cash, but it wasn't his passion. He loved gardening. And his garden was so prolific that he could sell herbs and vegetables to his students for their projects or just like for their home.

He also raised chickens and turkeys for eggs and meat. And this picture is my absolute favorite picture of him with him cradling his red hen and a chef's jacket. It's just so cute. He was also first in line to do a job for someone at a discount or even free. And he constantly gave back to his community. He was a truly curious soul. and he embodied something that I think is an important quality in a person, which is just doing it.

Yeah. Like, he was interested in mushrooms, so he learned how to forage. He wanted to learn how to dig for clams, so he figured out how to do that. He wanted to learn how to make a natural insecticide, so he started growing tobacco in his own garden so he could experiment. He would later teach these skills to his students to connect them with the food that they were cooking. Dan was like that sweet, crunchy wizard and Lord of the Rings, you know, like Radagast. think was his name, just good vibes all around.

Like, I would not be surprised if this man had birds landing on his shoulder like Snow White. Just a sweetheart to the core. If not birds, just chickens, I think. Maybe chickens, yeah. That morning when one of Dan's colleagues stepped into the kitchen for a chat, a smell hit him. The kind that puts your lizard brain on high alert, sharp and metallic. There on the floor was Dan Brophy in a pool of blood. Shot once in the back, and as the force spun.

him around, shot again in the chest. Investigators were frustrated with the crime scene pretty much from minute one. A search of the kitchen and the school turned up nothing. The killer had clearly brought the gun. And then Dan's wife, Nancy, showed up in her gray Toyota minivan. Someone had called her to tell her that there was police activity in the institute, and she sped over there in a panic. When she introduced herself, the police didn't even ask why she was there,

just pulled her to the side and asked her to weigh. and when they told her that her husband had been killed, she seemed devastated. And as they drove her home, investigators couldn't help but feel sorry for her. The poor woman just lost her husband. Who would have done something like this? Investigators weren't suspicious of Nancy at first. And if you look at her, you can see why. She kind of looks like the grandma whose entire personality is being a grandma.

Like, this woman absolutely owns a shirt that says, my favorite people call me grandma, right? You are right about this, but I will point out, she looks like somebody's me-ma until she opens her mouth and you figure out what a condescending hosebag she is. It's very true. We will find out about that in a moment. As far as anyone knew, Dan and Nancy were happy, even though they were opposites. Dan was reserved. Nancy was talkative. Dan was a planner. Nancy was spontaneous. Dan was frugal. Nancy was a spender. Dan was a little bit country, Nancy was a little bit rock and roll.

They made it work, though. And Nancy had the same can-do attitude that Dan did. When she started a catering business, it took off like a rocket. Some tax returns reported the company making more than $500,000 some years. She also wanted to be an author. So she started a blog and began self-publishing books. Her focus was romantic suspense. And while it was certainly her passion, it never seemed to take

off. Her Amazon, Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Her Amazon reviews were good, but there were only like 10 of them, and there's only 10 of them to this day. And

listen, I don't think they belong in the kinkshaming corner, all right? But it's certainly kinkshaming adjacent. Yeah, it's like kinkshaming breezeway, you might say. And like I said, the police didn't suspect her at first. When they asked her where she'd been on the morning of the murder,

she said she and Dan had like puttered around for a while until he left around 10 after seven. After that, Nancy insisted she hadn't left the house until she heard about the incident at the Culinary Institute. They asked her if she and Dan owned a gun. They did, but it was just collecting dust on a shelf. They never used it. When the police took her home, they asked to see the gun. It appeared to have never been fired, which I actually didn't know was possible to tell, but apparently it's a thing. The Culinary Institute didn't have any security cameras, which is nuts to me, but the restaurant next door did.

And in the surveillance video, they saw what appeared to be Nancy Brofey's gray minivan driving by at 708 a.m., driving towards the Culinary Institute. And then again, at 7.28 a.m., driving in the opposite direction. direction. According to the police's timeline, Dan was killed a little bit after he disarmed the alarm system at 7.22 a.m. So, yes, that's interesting, no. Interesting. And I want y'all to remember that this woman is a mystery writer, okay, one who apparently is unaware that places have security cameras. So they decided to do a little more digging on Nancy Brophy and y'all, they found a gold mine. The first thing they noticed were the money problems. Nancy and Dan had almost no savings and they were living paycheck to paycheck. Nancy's catering business had taken a hit after 9-11 and

they'd had to downsize considerably. A fire had destroyed Dan and Nancy's house and they had to wait for over a year for it to be rebuilt. Really? A fire, huh? That's interesting. Hmm. Yes, yes it is. I don't have any proof that there was anything shady about this fire, but it is. is interesting. Yeah, and by interesting, I mean, yep, she started that for the insurance money. Allegedly. Allegedly. We would never, we would never say anything like that. So, yeah, money was a problem. Nancy was a spender. If it was in her account, it was hers to spend. In fact, her and Dan's retirement was totally drained. And these are people in their 60s. Terrifying. Dan had mentioned money troubles to one of his work friends, but he didn't seem more

worried. If he had to work until he dropped, he was completely fine with that. He wasn't stressed. But we don't know how much Dan actually knew about his wife's spending habits. Nancy had thousands of dollars in credit card debt. They were struggling to pay their $1,500 a month mortgage, and they'd taken out a loan against a life insurance policy. One of the things that stuck out to the investigators was that they were paying $1,000 a month on life insurance. That seemed awfully high for a couple struggling to make ends meet. Yeah, you can't make your mortgage, but you're dropping a grand a month on the life insurance policy.

That is sketchy. Then almost immediately after Dan's murder, Nancy filed her claims with the life insurance companies. And apparently, one of them asked if they could get some kind of confirmation from the cops that she wasn't a suspect in Dan's death, an exoneration letter. She got real squirrely about it. And when she asked the detectives about it,

they were like, yeah, we're not doing that. Nancy must have realized they were suspicious of her at that point. And then, and then, there was Nancy's blog. On there, she promotes her books, talks about writing and ruminates about her life. In her about section, she wrote, I live in the beautiful, green, and very wet Northwest, married to a chef whose mantra is, life is a science project.

As a result, there are chickens and turkeys in my backyard, a fabulous vegetable garden, and a hot meal on the table every night. For those of you who have longed for this, let me caution you. The old adage is true. Be careful what you wish for. When the gods are truly angry, they grant us our wishes. Here she's talking about the 10 pounds she gains every year from his cooking. But like, what weird wording, right?

Yeah. Yeah, Nancy, I'm sure the gods were furious when they sent you this amazing man that cooks restaurant quality meals for you every night. You poor thing. Yeah, she later testified she didn't cook a night in their marriage. Come on. That's a dream. That's gold right there.

The most interesting post was a guest essay she wrote for a friend's web website. She called it How to Murder Your Husband. Yeah, yeah. It is a doozy. As a romantic suspense writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about murder and consequently police procedure. Do you? Really? Here's the thing. Okay, Nancy. If you're going to publish a blog post called How to Murder Your husband, I'm sorry, you're screwed. You can never do it because they are going to be on to you immediately. Like we know we're screwed. Like we can no matter what, never do anything out of him because the first thing the detectives are going to see is true crime podcasters. So we're, you know, we're out of the game. Okay, she continues. After all, if the murder is supposed to set me free,

I certainly don't want to spend time in jail. And let me say clearly for the record, I don't like jumpsuits and orange is not my color. And I'll read you a couple of examples from her motives list. It's a weirdly long pose. Money, divorce is expensive and do you really want to split up all your possessions?

Or if you married for money, aren't you entitled to all of it? The drawback is that the police aren't stupid. They're looking at you first so you have to be organized, ruthless, and very clever. Husbands have disappeared from cruise ships before.

why not yours which one of y'all's thinking about it stop it not on my watch crime of passion in anger you bash his head in or stab him with a kitchen knife most of the time there's a trail that leads directly to you every murder leaves clues a crime of passion does not look like a stranger was involved

and who is left to clean the blood from your carpeting And then under options to consider, he's a full-service advice columnist, I think. She lists a whole bunch of possible murder weapons, and I'll just read you a couple. Guns, loud, messy, and require some skill. If it takes 10 shots for the sucker to die, either you have terrible aim or he's on drugs. Poison. considered a woman's weapon. Arsenic is easy to obtain and worse, easy to trace.

It takes a month or two to kill someone, plus they're sick the entire time. Who wants to hang out with a sick husband? Which I think this is interesting because y'all are true crime nerds. You know what I'm talking about? That shows how little she understands about murder and criminal psychology. Because for a lot of poisoners, watching the process is part of the fun for them. It's a way that they can torture their victim. without laying a hand on them, and some of them will draw it out on purpose.

I find it easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them, but the thing I know about murder is that every one of us has it in him or herself when pushed far enough. Okay, Whitney. Do you have any critiques? Just a couple. My main critique is how delulu she is about her own intelligence. Like, baby, you could not have been worse at getting away with murder if you'd done it on purpose. But you go ahead and give us some advice on how to slip under the police's radar. She just kills me with us. And her tone is so smug.

It always is, yeah. Now, the police were 99.999% sure they had their girl. The money problems, the life insurance, and the blog were painting a pretty clear picture. The only problem was the murder weapon. But then the police seized Nancy's computers and they found mountains of research into ghost guns. Now, this is one of the scariest things I researched for TCC ever. A ghost gun essentially is a gun you build yourself from a kit.

The advantage for a murderer? And this is illegal now. But in 2018, these guns were not required to have serial numbers. Yikes. Getting your hands on one was as easy as buying one of the kids. kit. So Nancy just went to ghostguns.com. Yeah. Clicked add to cart. And when the police searched her storage unit, they found the kit. Only the barrel had been taken out of the box. It looked like Nancy took the barrel from the ghost gun and put it on the handgun that she and Dan owned and used

this Franken weapon to kill him and make it look like their gun hadn't been used. And so when the cops asked her about the kid, she told the detectives she bought the gun for a book she was writing, like for research. She wanted to learn how it worked. Uh, okay, the detective said, where's this book then? Outline? Um, it's not written yet. I keep all my plots in my noggin until it's time to write them down. Okay, Nancy. sure. What about your appearance on the surveillance tapes around the time of the murder? Detective,

don't you know that trauma causes memory loss? And I just don't remember. If I left the house, and I'm not saying I did, it was to go right at a Starbucks. So that's probably where I was. Cool, Nancy.

What Starbucks? I don't remember. To be fair, there are approximately 17 Starbucks on every city block in the Pacific Northwest, so she might have been telling the truth about that one. She gets one. That's fine. She gets one. These wishy-washy explanations went over like a lead balloon, and it gets worse. When the cops talked to Nancy's friends, they said she'd been telling them that Dan had been

killed by a homeless person who walked in off the street. Why had she said that? Well, that's the only thing that made sense. Is it, though? Is it? Now, it didn't take long for them to put the grab-us on old Nancy and charge her with secondary murder. At trial, Nancy decided that she was going to take the stand in her own defense. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Every time.

Every time. Exactly. And, y'all, it is a master class in not reading the room. Like, first of all, she gets up there and she's giggling and laughing. laughing. Yeah. Like she's, it's like she's on a convention panel and not her own damn murder trial. And her lawyer tries to establish like some kind of affection for Dan, but it sounds like Nancy just wants to focus on herself. That poor defense attorney was fighting for her life during that directs exam. She was trying so hard to like wrench this woman away from the mirror for two

seconds and talk about Dan, the victim in the case, but it was just a no-go. Yeah, when she did talk about Dan, it was always in relation to her. I'm sure she thought she was coming across as charming and believable, but context matters. And the context is that you are testifying about your husband's murder at your own trial. Not exactly the time to try to sell yourself as an author. Every answer she gave was paired with what I'm sure she thought was a charming story about how in love she was. It all sounded very well rehearsed. But on cross-examination, the mask slipped. Clearly, Nancy felt she had better things to do. Every question the prosecutor asked was just so stupid to her. She couldn't believe the audacity. And this bitch refuses to give a

straightforward answer. Like, the first thing the prosecutor asked her was whether she owned a purse at the time of the murder. And she just goes, no. He goes, okay, did you carry a wallet then? No. Finally, he just asked like how she carried around all her shit. And she like kind of smirks and she goes, I kept all my cash and my cards in my bra. Ew. Man, do not pay anyone with your boob sweat covered money. Were you raised in a barn? She needs to be under the jail just for that. And several times during her testimony, Nancy insinuated that the other people testifying just must be remembering wrong.

Meanwhile, her entire testimony hinged on her memory not being accurate about the day of the murder. Like she has this true narcissist allergy to looking bad. And even when she does admit fault, like when she talks about her spending habits, she frames it as like a cute quirk, not life ruining addiction. She thinks she's adorable, like narcissists often do. It's so annoying. The prosecutor pressed her on the gun kit that she bought and how each piece worked. And for every question, it was, I don't know. I don't know.

The answer is, I don't know. Sure, Jan. I guess all that internet research was for nothing. As the cross-examination continued, Nancy got more and more irate. This did not do her any favors with the jury. and that was obvious to everybody except her. It's clear that Nancy thought she was the smartest person in the room. And I think she was the only one surprised

when she was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Which doesn't bring Dan back. But one of Dan's students, one of the many who loved him like a father, continued his annual pie bake-off tradition in his name, every holiday season, just like Dan always did, She has her students bake pies for people in need. Last year, her high school students made and collected over 1,000 pies, which were donated to 16 nonprofits around Portland. Dan's legacy lives on in every slice of pie, every neighborhood garden, and every act of kindness.

Nancy Brophy can't do anything about that. Right. So for our last story, we're going to be right here in the Caribbean, but we're going back in time about 300 years to the golden age of piracy, when ruthless captains fell up on the transatlantic trade routes with terrible efficiency. But ruthless and efficient aren't really the best adjectives for the subject of our story. Maybe try cringe or dumber in a bag of hammers, one of those who probably work better. Steed Bonnet was born into a life of luxury in 1688 on his family's Barbados sugar plantation. His parents died when he was six years old and he inherited their entire.

a entire 400-acre estate. And for the first 29 years, he just lived a boilerplate life for a young aristocrat, wife, kids, and then, just before his 30th birthday, he ran a way to C to become a pirate. Now, why?

We don't really know. People could make huge amounts of money from piracy, but Steve was already stupid rich, so it seems like he just did it because he was bored. Aw, honey, was it tedious, having everything money could buy. But Steed doing something weird was not necessarily a surprise. Charles Johnson wrote his famous book

A General History of the Pirates, Pirates with a Y, just a few years after Steed Bonnet's career. And according to him, Steed's friends thought, quote, that this humor of going a pirating proceeded from a disorder of the mind, which had been but too visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking, and which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts he found in a married state. Translation, A, the cheese had been sliding off the man's cracker for quite some time, and B, snobby folks on Barbados really like to gossip about each other's marriages. We didn't have Wi-Fi back then, so.

Johnson also notes that Steed knew shit-all about seafaring. Everything he knew came from books. He loved to read, even set up a library in his cabin on the new ship. He read to his mostly illiterate crew every evening, whether they liked it or not. not. Come on, chaps, gather around. I'm going to read you a story. This one is called Winnie of the Pooh. I bet they pretended to hate it, but they secretly looked forward to it all day. Yeah, you know they brought their little pillows and blankets, snacks. Rita's the one about Mary and her little lambs, huh? Ar, I don't know how pirates are. I actually

kind of suspect this whole banana pants scheme of running off to join the pirate. came from Steed reading really romanticized pirate and sailor stories as a kid. But just to reiterate, at this point, this is a grown-ass man. So don't read books, kids. It'll turn you into pirate. And also, don't have more money than common sense because it'll enable you to actually chase after the dipshit daydreams. You got no business chasing.

So Steed bought a sloop. He armed it with 10 guns and hired 70 men to sail with him, paying them a regular salary. Now, none of this was correct, okay? Pirates stole their ships. They didn't buy them, and the crew worked for shares of the loot, not a salary, but, I mean, they weren't going to turn down easy money, so one night, Steed's new ship slipped silently away from Barbados. He called her the revenge. If Steed actually had anything in his pampered life to feel vengeful about, it is lost to history,

but chances are he just kind of thought the name sounded cool, which I have to admit it does. I'm not going to lie to you. Initially, the revenge actually had some success, plundering five ships off the eastern seaboard. But the crew was uneasy. It was obvious that Steed was in way, way over his head. I mean, look at the guy. Yeah. And they've just gotten lucky so far.

And that luck ran out off the coast of Florida when Steed ordered an attack on a Spanish merchant ship. But it turned out the merchant ship was actually a well-armed man of war and assumed, as the revenge raised their black flag, the Spanish started blasting. Steed was knocked unconscious, almost immediately. Oh, bless his heart. Half his men were hurt or killed,

and the revenge barely escaped to limp away to Nassau, known as the Republic of the Pirates. It wasn't a republic, of course. It was controlled, if at all, by powerful pirate captains who agreed on a shared code of conduct to keep everybody civil. I mean, for a pretty loose definition of civility, basically don't commit murder in the street. Fair.

It was all bars, brothels, and gambling houses. The whole wild place kept from falling apart by only the authority of the captains. The arrival of a weird aristro like Steed Bonnet, half dead and on a half-destroyed ship, got a lot of attention. And Steed in particular caught the eye of a captain who had recently carved out a terrifying reputation, Blackbeard. Blackbeard, or Edward Teach, was once an officially sanctioned privateer who retail upon enemy shipping during one of the Anglo-French wars. And when the war was over, he just kept on plundering. Blackbeard was a big, intimidating guy, but he was also

sharp as a pin. And early in his career, he figured out that if he developed a scary enough reputation, he could avoid a lot of hard, potentially fatal work. Ideally, ships would just surrender as soon as they saw the flag of the terrible pirate Blackbeard. And Blackbeard really knew how to play up the scariness. He wore six loaded pistols strapped to his chest. He tied colored ribbons in his long black beard. And sometimes he would hang thick, slow burning fuses over each ear, so they glowed red on either side of his face. Which, I mean, to me, sounds like a good way to set your beard on fire, but dude. So if you were superstitious, he looked demonic, and if you weren't, he just looked

dangerously insane. But either way, these little bits of theater really work, you know? And like, listen, you got to admit it's kind of cute. Like, I just imagine him, like, getting ready in the morning before a raid, hyping himself up, tying his ribbons in his beard. and prepping his guns. Like, he's just getting ready for his day on stage, you know? I think he gave himself a little peck talk right before, you know, like, it's like, okay, who's the biggest, scariest pirate? You are?

That's right. Now go out there and slay. He is 100% the theater kid of piracy. Yeah. He was a big dude, too. So just imagine you're on the other ship and you see this giant figure with, like, a ratted beard with ribbons in it. And then all you see is these two red things at eye level, like, oh,

my god, that's terrifying. I would poop myself. Seriously, though, how many times do you think he said his beard on fire? Like, had to have it at least once. At least. At least. Ships would surrender as soon as they heard that the dread pirate Blackbeard was after them. Blackbeard wanted loot, and he wanted to get it with as little fuss as possible. A fierce reputation was a lot more useful for that than a cannon. And although there's no question at all that he was a tough son of a bitch, Blackbird's tally of murders on the high seas was actually zero. Yeah, so he would threaten murder and he kidnapped and robbed and extorted. And one time he chained and whipped a captain to make him tell him where he'd hidden the money on board the ship.

We're not making a case for St. Blackbeard here. This is a bad dude. But actual murder, as far as we know, this cutthroat did not actually cut any throats. As Blackbeard and Steed got to know each other, Blackbeard could immediately tell that Steed knew jack shit about captaining a ship. He talked to Steed's crew, and with their consent, put one of his own men in charge of the revenge. And then Blackbeard brought the injured steed on board his own ship. In his book, Charles Johnson said that because Steed wasn't used to all the hard knocks of pirate life, Blackbeard convinced him that he'd be better off coming to live as a guest on his ship instead. He could do whatever he wanted. He wouldn't have to work, and he'd get to

sail, the high seas, and see the world, which sounds kind of nice. Steed could take it easy and recover from his injuries, and his new friend Blackbeard would take care of all the nasty hard work of actually being a pirate captain. Of course, Steed might not have had any say in it. Yeah. It could have been a case of do this, or I'm going to leave your dumb ass in Nassau to fend for yourself. And Steve was like, hmm, sure.

So Blackbeard, with no struggle and no blood spilled, added a nice new ship to his little pirate fleet. So what was going on here? If you've seen the show, The Fantastic Our Flag Means Death, you'll know that in their version there's a romantic relationship between Blackbeard and Steed, which like a lot of pirate stories, is based on evidence that's kind of flimsy, but still compelling. It's pretty much from two things from Johnson's book that we already shared. the part about Blackbeard bringing Steed on board his own ship and treating him surprisingly, gently, and kindly. And the quote, where Steed's former neighbors gossiped about him being, quote, uncomfortable in marriage. If you were a writer in the early 1700s and you wanted to let your readers know that a fella wasn't exactly as straight as an arrow, saying they were uncomfortable in marriage, might be how you did it.

Uncomfortable in marriage, wink, wink, right? Like, hey, you know that guy, Derek? Yeah, I hear he was uncomfortable in marriage. He left his wife to go join the Pirates. Go join the Pirates would actually be a good euphemism. I think we should see if that'll take off. I agree. So if Steed and Blackbeard were in a relationship,

they were probably in one of the safest situations in the whole Western world for a gay couple. There's some debate about how prevalent and accepted gay relationships were on ships at the time, but it seems fair to say that the answer was more than onshore. Now, we're going to go off on a quick little tangent here before we get back to Steed and Blackbeard. Pirate ships were known as almost exclusively male societies, but we're going to tell you what we know about the life of one of the few female pirates we know of. And based on what we know about her, we think there are probably a lot more of them that we've never heard about.

Mary Reid had a hell of a life, and we don't have time to do her justice here, unfortunately, but here's the short version. Mary was a woman, but from an early age, she dressed and presented herself as a boy so she could presume men's careers, first a sailor, then a soldier. There, she fell in love with the guy she shared a tent with. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that initial conversation. They got married, and when her husband died, Mary moved to the Caribbean. And she wound up as a pirate on the ship of Captain Calico Jack Rackham, where, unbeknownst to her, she was crewing alongside another woman.

disguising herself as a man, Rackham's lover, Ann Bonnie. And this led to some serious soap opera-style drama on this ship. See, Anne Bonnie was a fiery lass, and by fiery, I mean horny. So Mary Reid is laying low on this pirate ship pretending to be a dude, and this other lady, also pretending to be a dude on the pirate ship,

develops a crush on her because she thought she was a guy. So she sidles up like, hey, handsome, guess what? I'm a lady. I just love this so much It's hilarious In that moment Mary realized She had to come clean to Anne Bonnie Like ah shit I'm sorry I'm lady too

When Captain Rackham got wind of his girlfriend's little crush He was like I'm going to cut his throat So to calm him down And had to let him in on the secret too And just imagine how much this blew Captain Rackham's mind Like oh yeah no don't worry man He's a lady too Like at that point he has got to wonder just how many of his

men, you know, ain't. It was probably just him and like 57 women, just him and a bunch of ladies in drag. The Shakespearean messiness of all this aside, both Mary and Anne were completely successful at passing for men. The only people who knew the truth were the people they told. It wasn't until they were arrested and found to both be pregnant. that the secret came out. And think about the craziness of this.

These two ladies, on all the high seas, just happen to bump into each other. Like, what are the odds of that? Well, we don't know the odds because we don't know how many women led similar lives without ever being discovered. I imagine a lot of them because, you know, what else are you going to do? Sit at home, work on needlepoint? Fuck that. I can understand why women would do this.

Yeah. Especially if you're poor, if maybe your husband died and you don't have a way of making money, cut your hair, wrap up your boobs, get dirty, wear some pants, and hit the high seas. I mean, ur. All right. So back to Blackbeard and Steed. Steed leaned into it. He read his books and wandered around the deck in his bathrobe.

Was he free to leave? Probably not. But he also wasn't just tossed over the side or marooned on a desert island. Blackbeard already controlled Steed's ship, so why did he keep Steed around? Blackbeard was absolutely not just a nice, helpful guy, always helping out dudes in trouble. So if he kept Steed around, it was because he liked being around him. Whether that was a platonic connection or gay as hell, we will never know for sure. Unfortunately, but I know what's in my.

head cannon. Same. Yeah. By now, Blackbeard had cemented his rep as the big daddy pirate of the Caribbean, culminating in him taking on the whole damn city of Charleston, South Carolina, blockading the port until they gave him the precious treasure he wanted. Not gold or jewels, but medicine. Now, medicine at the time included some new American things like tobacco, coffee, and chocolate, although not always in the way you might expect. Want to know where the phrase blow smoke up your ass comes from? No. Too bad.

Back in the day, if you went unconscious, they used to literally take a bellows and blow tobacco smoke up your ass to try and revive you, which I imagine was very effective. And in addition to all the fancy new American things, medicine at the time also included some old European favorites like stag penises and the ground. skulls of people who died violent deaths. Given the choice, I think I'd go for the chocolate doctor rather than the stag penis doctor, you know, to each their own. It's probably just like the difference between an MD and a DO or something,

but I feel like I would want to check the certifications. Like, okay, did you go to Stag Petus University or really Wonka's chocolate factory? So anyway, what medicine Blackbeard needed is lost to history. But when the wreck of his ship the Queen Anne's Revenge was found

in 1996, one of the discoveries was a metal urethral syringe with traces of mercury inside it because for centuries injecting mercury up the dickhole was a common treatment for syphilis. I think I just saw everybody flinch a little. Yeah. Good old 18th century medicine. Yeah. And soon after this, the Queen Anne's Revenge ran a ground on a sandbar in Beaufort, North Carolina.

Now, if there is one thing Blackbeard was, it was a damn good sailor. He would not make this kind of mistake on accident. This was on purpose. It's like, oh no, we have run aground. We are helpless here on the sandbar. The Queen Anne's revenge could no longer be sailed. Another of his ships, the adventure, was almost entirely wrecked. So Blackbeard sent Steed inland to speak to Governor Eden and get pardons for them both,

while Blackbeard stayed back to recover whatever he could from the grounded ships. Most likely, he just wanted to feel out whether this whole pardon deal was going to happen. or if Eden would just, you know, string, steed up. But Governor Eden was really happy to grant the pardons, though, if they promised to give up piracy, and Steed, his job well done, headed back to Beaufort. When he got there, he found that Blackbeard had done him dirty. And not only him,

Steed's whole crew and hundreds of Blackbeard's own men were abandoned on the sandbar. Blackbeard had taken everything of value from the two wrecked ships and then plundered and damaged Steed's revenge for good measure, and sailed off in one of his still-functioning ships, which just, you son of it, how could you do your boyfriend like that? Blackbeard had betrayed Steed and hundreds of sailors, all of whom were p-est.

Yeah. They wanted to knock the now more aptly named revenge back into shape and go get Blackbeard, which would negate that shiny new pardon Steed had in his hands, but it turned out that Steed wanted petty vengeance more than he wanted to return to a safe law-abiding life, which I think we can all understand.

Yeah, absolutely. I kind of can't blame him. Like, I'd want to go get his ass too. Like, first, the revenge got back into plundering game to try to make up for the booty Blackbeard had stolen from them. And now that he was fully committed to it, Steed turned out to be a pretty good pirate captain. Like, they took ship after ship.

And, you know, he learned from the best, right? Right. But Steed Bonnet would never get the chance to go after Blackbeard. The revenge was cornered. in the Cape Fear River by two ships commanded by a colonel Rhett. All three ships ran aground on sandbars in the low tide and for the next six hours traded musket fire. Rett's ships were lighter, though, and when the tide came in, they floated free first. Steed's position was now hopeless.

He told his men to go down and set fire to their powder stores so that the revenge and everyone on board would go up in one spectacular explosion. He's like, come on, chaps, let's go out in a blaze of glory. No, thank you. We're good. His crew was like, no, no, we're not doing that. And instead, when Rhett got close, Steed meekly surrendered. He had a brief moment of freedom after he bribed his guards, and he and one of his crew ran off disguised in women's clothing.

But they were chased down once again by Colonel Rhett. recaptured. 29 of Bonnett's crew were found guilty of piracy and hanged. Steed received the same sentence, but his execution was delayed seven times. Yeah, mostly because the people of Charleston had come to pity him. Steed's sanity, which had never really hung from the sturdiest hook, had slipped entirely since his imprisonment. But finally, Governor Johnson of South Carolina was like, look, we just got to do it so we can

stop talking about it, stop arguing about it. and he ordered that the deed had to be done, and Steed was hanged. He was buried alongside his crew in unmarked graves in local marshland. This was about 18 months since he'd given up his life of permanent ease and comfort on Barbados to run off and play pirate. I can't think of many better examples of fucking around and finding out, right? Steed Bonnet, our Fafo King. So there you have it.

a little sampler platter of the kind of stuff we like to talk about on True Crime Campfire. It has been so much fun to do this live. It's our first live show ever, actually. Thank you. We're so excited. And we want to shout out IRL events for making this happen for all of us. The staff have been working their asses off. We just appreciate them so much.

And the biggest thank you in the universe for our... our campers. We love you to the moon and back. So that was a wild, first ever live show. Wasn't it campers? We'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming next week. So lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we can get together again around the true crime campfire.

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