True Crime Campfire - Unearthly: The Murder of Patricia Mery

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Literature is full of snakes in the grass masquerading as friends. Shakespeare’s evil bastard Iago is disgruntled about his boss Othello passing him over for a promotion and giving it to Cassio instead. So he manipulates Othello into thinking his wife is having an affair with the guy. A pretty clever way to drive a wedge between the boss and his favorite employee—and to position himself as Othello’s most trusted adviser, while secretly tearing him down. There are lots more examples: Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, The Talented Mr. Ripley…It’s seductive to have a trusted adviser, someone who seems to admire you and have only your best interests at heart. But sometimes those indispensable sidekicks can have their own hidden agendas. Sometimes they’re not so much weaving a safety net, as they are building a web. And if you’re not careful, you can walk right into it and never come out again. Join us for the story of Anne Trovato, whose friendship with a self-proclaimed "psychic" and her daughter led to the brutal murder of her mother.Sources:Telegram: https://www.telegram.com/story/news/local/north/2007/09/27/dna-points-to-accused-in/52784450007/The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/nyregion/08teacher.htmlCourt documents: https://casetext.com/case/people-v-trovato-4Oxygen's "Snapped," Episode "Anne Trovato"Investigation Discovery's "Death By Gossip," Episode "Mother's Day Murder"Investigation Discovery's "True Conviction," Episode "Mother's Day Murder"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Literature is full of snakes in the grass masquerading his friends. Shakespeare's evil bastard Iago was disgruntled about his boss Othello, passing him over for a promotion and giving it to Cassio instead. So he manipulates Othello and to think in his wife as having an affair with the guy. A pretty clever way to drive

a wedge between the boss and his favorite employee, and to position himself as Othello's most trusted advisor while secretly tearing him down. There are lots more examples. Wormtong and Lord of the Rings, the talented Mr. Ripley. It's seductive to have a trusted advisor, someone who seems to admire you and have only your best interests at heart. But sometimes those indispensable sidekicks can have their own hidden agendas. Sometimes they're not so much weaving a safety net as they are building a web. And if you're not careful, you can walk right into it and never come out again. This is unearthly, the murder of Patricia Mary. So campers, for this one, we're in Austining, New York, a mostly pleasant little town about 30 miles north of Manhattan.

I say mostly pleasant, because up until they changed the name in 1901, the town was called Sing Sing, and it's still the home of that notorious maximum security prison. It was Mother's Day, Sunday, May 14, 2006, and the family of Patricia Mary, were starting to worry. Pat was 59, a retired high school Spanish teacher, and she lived alone in her nice big house on Yates Avenue. Her sister, Maureen, lived in Connecticut, and for the past couple days, she'd been trying to invite Pat to come spend Mother's Day with her. She'd called on Friday and Saturday with no answer and no call back, which wasn't at all like Pat. And now it was Sunday, and she still wasn't picking up her phone. So, Maureen called their younger brother Mike, who lived just across town from Pat, and he agreed to go over and check on her. On this gray spring day, Mike drove over with his wife and son.

Pat's car was in her driveway, and there were a couple of newspapers lying at the bottom of the front steps. These weren't good signs. If Pat was home, why wasn't she picking up her papers? Worried, Mike walked around the house, banging on the doors and calling out for Pat, but there was no response. Mike called his sister Maureen back and told her what he'd found, and right away she called the police. officers got there within a few minutes, but without any obvious signs of trouble, they didn't feel like they had probable cause to break into the house. It's not like there was a broken window or drops of blood on the front porch or anything like that.

So Mike told him there was one window that was always unlocked, and if they'd wait, he'd go in and look around and let the police in if he needed them. Now, Mike's worries were that Pat might have fallen down the stairs or slipped in the bathtub, something like that, that she might have had an accident and couldn't call for help. But as he climbed through Pat's window, what he found was far worse than he ever could have imagined. In the front room, just inside the door, Patricia Mary lay face up on the ground, soaked in blood. A yellow plastic grocery bag had been put over her head covering her face, but you could still see the outline of her nose. Close by on the ground were an aluminum baseball bat and a large steak knife, both bloody.

The whole room looked like a horror scene. Pat had been murdered, beaten, and stabbed to death in her own home. Frantic, Mike ran to let the police officers in, and right away, they noticed an odd little detail. On Patricia's stomach lay a handwritten note. The message was rambling, but the gist was that Pat, her brother Mike, and her sister, Maureen, had hired kidnappers to abduct Pat's two-year-old granddaughter for them, and then failed to pay them, so they killed her. Huh.

Okay, seems a little strange that killers would leave such a helpful little piece of exposition behind at the crime scene, but detectives gathered the note in an evidence bag. Despite the presence of Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Austin is a safe, kind of sleepy town, and this violent murder had people shocked and scared. Pat Mary was much beloved, a kind, friendly person, doing her best to overcome some pretty brutal hardships that Fade had thrown at her over the years. Who would want to hurt her like this? What the heck and heck was that bizarre kidnapping note all about? Pat didn't seem like the type to hire kidnappers

or to know where the hell to find some even if she wanted to. She was a retired teacher, the kind both students and other teachers loved. She had a prankster's sense of humor and she was devoted to her family and her Catholic church. She'd been divorced from her ex-husband George since the early 80s, by all accounts, a pretty nasty divorce too, but she had her daughter Anne and a ton of friends, and she needed them. I mentioned some brutal hardships a minute ago. man, this woman had been through it.

The first thing was, in 1986, her dad was killed in a plane crash, devastated the whole family. But Pat and her kids, Anne and John, who were elementary school-aged at the time, had kept their dad's last name, Trado. Managed to push through their grief and move on with their lives.

As Anne and John grew older, their family started to get an idea of their personalities. Anne was always the one who marched to the beat of her own drum. She was artistic, and she had a bit of a rebellious streak. A little later, she was the one who'd bring weird friends home after school. Also me.

Yeah, me. I bring home strays, always. John was more of just a straight arrow, a friendly kid who was liked by his teachers and had a lot of buddies, just a good guy. After high school, he found work as a volunteer fireman. And he was really close to his mom. Of course, Pat would never say so out loud, but it would. it was pretty clear that John was her favorite of the two kids. That's the kind of thing that can drive a wedge between two siblings,

but Anne and John were actually pretty tight. This was a close, loving family, which made what happened in 2002, not long after Pat's mother died, all the more devastating. John was into motorcycles, and on August 1st, he'd ridden out to take his license test, which he passed, but as he was riding home, a car pulled out in front of him, too close for John to be able to slow down or avoid it. He slammed into the car at full speed and died almost immediately. Oh, man, that really gets me because I almost lost my brother in a motorcycle accident about six or seven years ago.

He came just within a hair. He almost didn't survive. So motorcycle crashes in particular just, ugh, God, just gives me the hebes. My parents are on a motorcycle trip right now, so. Oh, shit. Okay. Let's not talk about that. I was stressed out.

This completely gutted both Pat and Anne, who handled their grief in very different ways. Pat's sibling said that her grief seemed to totally consume her for a while. She fell into a deep depression. Then, after a while, she started throwing herself back into life. She got more involved in her church. She went back to work teaching Spanish. It was definitely preferable to the depression, but people noticed that she'd do almost anything to avoid being alone.

As for Anne, she was suddenly a party girl, clubbing, drinking, finding new kind of wild friends, which doesn't fit the commonly accepted notion of grieving, but it's really not that unusual to see people, especially young people, react to horrible loss by flying off the rails like that. But Anne's new lifestyle didn't help her relationship with her mom. Pat worried about her daughter, feeling like she was spiraling into the kind of life that could only lead to trouble. And with John gone, Anne was all she had left. But although Anne still lived at home, she was 23 years old. The window where she'd be willing to change how she lived just because her mom told her to had slammed shut years ago.

She and Pat started to argue a lot, just really getting on each other's nerves. One sore point was Anne's boyfriend. The year before John's death, Anne had started dating a professional boxer, Ronnie, the Rottweiler, Kerner. Yeah, yeah, I know. Take a moment. Take just a second. The Rottweiler. And he was right by her side as she got wilder and wilder. Mr. Rottweiler was rumored to be involved in organized crime.

A rumor he'd neither confirm or deny when investigators asked him about it later. Yeah, which, come on. Like, how hard is it to deny that you work for the mob, whether it's true or not, you know? So my suspicion is what this probably tells us is that Ron liked people thinking he was connected to him. Connected. Capital C. Connected. Yeah. Yeah.

And it too. It was one of the things she liked about Ron. I mean, it's not exactly a new story. I can guarantee that rebellious girl falls for bad boy. is getting replayed in every town on earth right now. And parents are just praying the dude doesn't have a dog-based nickname. It's like, Caitlin, you are not going out with Mickey the Spaniel Smith. But, Mom, I love him.

It's like, I'm going to marry Charlie the Chihuahua someday, Dad, and I don't care what you say. Carl the Corgi, Benny the Bichon-Fries. All right. I think you're kind of missing the point here. Mani the Maltese. Now, I get it. They're supposed to be big, scary dogs, whatever. Danny the Doberman, I got it.

Now, one area of your life where it's probably not a great idea to apply your new reckless devil-may-care attitude is birth control. But Ann evidently didn't get the memo on that. And pretty soon, she found herself in a family way. she was fixing to have Ronnie the Rottweiler's pups and Ronnie was not exactly over the moon about it I don't get the impression that he and Anne were ever super serious and he certainly wasn't looking to start a family with her in which case hey Ronnie honey they have these new things called condoms

they've been around for like at least a decade maybe try one sometime so he wanted Anne to have an abortion and a couple of weeks after they had their hey guess who's got two thumbs and just took a positive pregnancy test conversation. Anne called him up to say it was done. Taking care of. He was off the hook. She wasn't pregnant anymore. And that was pretty much it for Anne and Ronnie the Rottweiler. She just dropped out of his life completely. This, though, was a big old lie. Anne had decided to have her baby, and she'd decided to have it alone. And maybe if Ronnie had reacted differently to the news, she'd have made other choices, but there it was. As her pregnancy became more and more

obvious, Anne stayed tight-lipped with her family about who the father was, telling him he didn't want anything to do with the kid, and she was never going to see him again. Now, given how religious Pat was, I'm guessing it wasn't super comfortable for her when everybody at church found out her daughter was going to be an unwed mother. But, you know, overall, she was excited. She was looking forward to having a granddaughter. It would be a little ray of light against the gloom that she'd been living in since John's death. And John was on Anne's mind, too, but in a very different sort of way. Anne didn't want to move on from her brother's death. She wanted to get in touch with him. So she went to a psychic and tarot card reader named Gloria Magnetti, looking for who

knows what, from her brother. And Gloria might as well have been running a pizza business on the side because she delivered like dominoes. Anne had barely sat down in the chair before Gloria got super intense. John was right there in the room with him, she told Anne, but his arrival also brought a terrifying vision. I see blood, Gloria told her. Blood all around you. Anne was completely hypnotized. What does that mean? She said. Gloria was quiet for a few dramatic moments. Then she made a frustrated little, ugh. I can't tell. She said, I've lost him. The connection is broken. So that was super spooky and not at all reassuring, but it was definitely an intense experience. And Anne was hooked. She bought it. Hookline and sinker.

After that first visit, she started booking readings with Gloria on the regular, readings that somehow always seemed to cut off right before the really good stuff. Oh, shoot, I lost him again. Let's try again on Friday. That'll be 50 bucks. But before long, Anne got something else out of these visits other than some dubious connection to the spirit world. She met Gloria's daughter, Carmella Magnetti. She was about the same age as Anne, and the two of them hit it off, becoming fast friends almost from minute one. In fact, I think it's worth thinking a little about just how quickly Anne and Carmela became friends. Anne had lost her brother.

She was having this baby all by herself. She and her mom were in this uncomfortable relationship. Basically, she was in a really vulnerable point in her life and kind of gullible, all of which Gloria Magnetti knew. And by the way, I want to make it clear that we're not making fun of people who would go to a psychic because they're grieving. We're making fun of these particular psychics because they're fraud. Yes. From head to toe, as you will soon see. Yeah, if you're constantly getting a little breadcrumbs and then suddenly, oh, sorry, our time's up, got to go.

Like that starts getting real, real expensive and you still haven't really gotten anything. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And all of a sudden, here's Carmela, this cool, exciting girl eager to be Anne's new best friend. Anne's family was pretty well known in Ossing as a prominent and financially well-off family. Anne's mom had that nice big house on Yates Avenue, one of the nicest streets in town. Yeah, so call me cynical, but Anne was pretty much prime real estate for a grifter.

Or a mother-daughter pair of grifters. Gloria and Carmella sure did cozy up to Anne pretty quick. In fact, there's some question about just how close Anne and Carmela got. They had the kind of joined-at-the-hip intimacy that people associate with romantic couples, and small towns being the gossip mills they are, people wondered, are they? Well, we don't know, whether they were or not. A little later, when Anne moved in, they'd share a room, and Carmela would develop what you might call a proprietary interest in Anne's life

to a level that's kind of unusual for a friendship, but neither one would ever say that they were anything other than friends. The next spring, Anne's daughter was born. Pat was over the moon. Of course, nothing could replace her John, but the grandbaby, Ariana, almost immediately became the bright spot around which Pat's life revolved. She had a new role and purpose, being a great-grandmother to this little person. The Magnettys were also excited to be a part of her life, a little too excited? Over the first couple of years of the kid's life, they treated her as if she were one of their own family.

And I don't mean in like a kind, generous way, I mean in a possessive, creepy way. Pat wasn't keen on the Magnettys who seemed to be filling Anne's head with all kinds of nonsense and who had something of a shady reputation around town. Just like Ronnie the Rottweiler, they supposedly had connections to organized crime, which is apparently all you need to get Anne Travado fan-girling like a preteen in the 60s when the Beatles came to town. Y'all know this bitch bought the Sopranos box set the second it came out. And the Magnetis clearly felt that their friendship with Anne made them honorary members of the family.

Like, close enough to borrow money from Pat. Gloria was always sidling up to Pat like, I'd really love to buy some things for Ariana and the girls, but money's been so tight lately. Could you maybe help out? Pat, wanting to keep the peace and likely sensing that she was in a competition with the Magnetys for her daughter's time and affection, agreed to loan Gloria and money. But the requests kept coming and kept getting bigger.

See, Gloria had herself a little gambling problem, and that little gambling problem had turned into a lot of gambling debt. It tends to do that. You'd think a psychic would be good at the slots and whatnot, but see, Gloria was just too damn ethical to use her powers for personal gain. Oh, that's classy. What a stand-up citizen. Yeah. Convenient, right? So she always needed money and she seemed determined to ring whatever she could out of Pat. Eventually, though, Gloria asked for more than Pat was willing and able to lend, especially to a gambler.

Yeah, I mean, you do that, and odds are you're never seeing that money again. So Pat turned her down. And after that, things started going downhill between Pat and the Magnettys. I mean, how dare she refused to lend money to her daughter's friend's mom, right? The fucking nerve. Pat tried to convince Anne to stop spending so much time with Gloria and Carmela, but she might as well been talking to a wall. Anne wouldn't listen. She took the Magnetti's side over her mom again and again, and Pat became convinced that Carmela was turning Anne against her. But it wasn't only the Magnettys who were ganging up against Pat. On Halloween night, 2005, Anne got a series of emails, from John. Her dead brother. John. He said he missed her, but then right away he cut to the chase. He was writing to warn her, he said. Anne shouldn't trust their mom or their aunts and uncles. They were plotting to take

Ariana away from her. If she wanted to keep custody of her daughter, John said, she needed to get out of the house right away and cut all ties with their mom. Now, remember earlier when we said Anne was a little gullible? Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and reiterate that, because, You can say what you like about psychics. Okay, some people believe in them. Some people don't. Whatever. I don't have a dog in that fight today.

But my guess is that most people who believe in psychic readers wouldn't buy this emails from beyond bullshit. Okay? I mean, it's ludicrous. How's he supposed to be sending them? Is this the norm for ghosts now? I'm not super up on all things paranormal, I'll admit, but have they totally, like, abandoned the flickering lights and bleeding walls and stuff

and just opted for hot mail instead? actually in 2005 it would probably still have been dial-up internet which maybe explains why John was a little bit terse with the details like sorry sis I'd say more but I'm on a metered connection and I have to spend the next 20 minutes downloading one JPEG of Jessica Alba in a swimsuit I actually looked up like who was the on the front of Maxim the most in 2005 it was Jessica Alba we here at True Crime Can't Fire are dedicated dedicated to providing accurate information in all of our podcasts. Quality

research. I just have so many questions about this. Does he have to find an open computer at like a library or something and like sit his ghost ass down in it? The liburi. The laboury. Like what provider was he using? Does AOL actually stand for afterlife online?

Oh, oh. Do the dead send like fishing email? like scam emails. Hello, dear, I am King Charlemagne, and sadly, I am currently trapped in limbo. But with your help, I can move on to my final reward. If they're not doing that, they should be. It's pretty smart, actually. Because that's like a whole new revenue stream that ghosts could be taking advantage of.

I mean, you don't know what I'm saying. It's just absurd beyond words. In my day, we had to haul the Ouija board uphill both ways if we wanted to talk to Mi Ma'am. Kids these days, but they're face faces in my books. Yeah. But Anne, and again, God bless her. We're not trying to throw shade on people who believe in the afterlife of stuff.

It's just an email, really? And Anne swallowed it lock, stock, and barrel. I have no idea why or how, but she did. She told her mom about the messages, and Pat, a human with, you know, functioning brain cells, tried to tell her it must be somebody's idea of a sick joke, but, of course, Anne refused to listen to that. For her, it was just more evidence of what John was trying to warn. her about. These emails

from beyond the grave got into Anne's head so much that before long she moved out of her mom's house and in with the Magnetis, taking Ariana with her. By the way, I wonder who was sending those emails. Hmm. It's a thinker, isn't it? The psychic friends were playing Anne like a

fast game of spades, and she was eagerly walking right into it. Poor Pat was devastated, although it seems like she was more upset about losing Ariana than she was about Anne. That relationship was really badly damaged by this point. And as the months went by, Anne kept getting more emails from John, warning her that Pat was plotting to take her daughter. Every message drove a deeper wedge between Anne and her mother.

By this point, Anne didn't even want Pat to have any time whatsoever anything to do with Ariana. She would later tell investigators that Pat had become unhinged by grief over John's death, would walk around the house talking to John as if he was still there, Anne thought this meant Pat was unfit to care for Ariana, and this was why Anne had taken. in her daughter and moved in with Carmela Magnetti because she was worried for the little girl's safety. I got to say, it's a little hypocritical to act like your ma is crazy pants for talking out loud to a deceased loved one in the privacy of her own home while you're getting chain email forwards from the same gagga, gossed. All right? A little hypocritical.

It really is. Like, I don't know. Grief, people talk to people that are grieving all the time. That's normal but like yeah that's actually not weird at all to me that makes perfect sense but the flipping emails yeah from like john especially when they have such a clear agenda yeah john ghost at aol.com like come on i would love to know what the email address was oh please please i just that's information we have not been able to find and please i want to know But nobody else reported any such strange behavior, none of Pat's family or friends. And like I said, Anne herself was fully convinced that she was receiving emails from a dead man at this time. So I don't know what to make of that.

I think she was just making it up to justify not letting her mom see the baby. I think it's as simple as that. Yeah. Or maybe Anne knew deep down that the emails were ridiculous, but the only way she could admit it was to accuse her mom of the same kind of foolishness. I don't know. Sometimes people just don't make sense. All right? Pat, of course, wanted to be part of her granddaughter's life. And she was worried about Ariana staying with the Magnettys, who she thought. thought of as weird and shady as shit. She wanted to be able to check up on her, so when Anne wouldn't allow it, Pat sued for

visitation rights. As you can imagine, the prospect of a contentious legal battle over Ariana didn't exactly improve things between Pat and Anne, especially since Anne was still getting messages from the beyond telling her that Pat was plotting to steal Ariana. To Anne, Pat's lawsuit seemed like proof of what John had been saying. Pat did win the right to limited visitation with Ariana for maybe an hour, once a month. Anne said she didn't like the court's ruling, but she'd follow it. She told investigators that she last saw Pat during one of these visitations at the YMCA on May 9th,

just two days before Pat's murder. In the few weeks before her murder, some strange things started to happen to Patricia Mary. She's called the police several times, saying she thought somebody was trying to break into her house, but responding officers couldn't find any evidence of that. Another time, her tires were slashed. And at the end of April, she called police from a gas station. Her brakes had started responding weirdly, and she worried somebody might have cut her brake lines. When the responding officer had a look, he realized that was exactly what had happened.

And that was no joke. If Pat had kept on driving, she might have had a bad wreck that could have killed her and anybody else in her path. Yeah. It must have been terrifying, knowing that somebody was out to get you. She must have been jumping at shadows. Hell, yeah. Anne would later claim that somebody had been harassing her, too. She said that a black van and a white Jeep had been following her and Carmela all over town,

that somebody had egged the Magnetti's house. And on a day when Anne was supposed to take Ariana to see Pat, they called the police saying they'd gotten a threatening phone message. It said, you bring your baby to visitation, Carmela is going to be killed. I mean, huh? What? Yeah.

What is the logic here? Who, other than Anne and Carmela, would give a crap about the kids spending time with her grandmother? And why would Carmela be killed? Like, what did she have to do with this? It's so weird. It made no sense. It just seemed like an incredibly weak attempt to skip Pat's court-mandated visit with the baby.

And then on Thursday, May 11th, Pat was a no-show at her rosary meeting at the church. She remained deeply religious, and this was not at all like her. Her absence was very much noticed. This was the first inkling anyone had that something strange might be going on. No one would see or hear from Pat for the next three days until we get back to where we started the story, with Pat's brother Mike breaking in and finding her stabbed and beaten body just inside the front door. murder is rare in awsoning. This was the first one in six years, and the local PD poured a lot of resources into solving Pat's death. Investigators in crime scene texts processing the scene determined she had likely been dead for three days, or from about the time of that Miss Rosary meeting at her church.

Pat had been brutally bludgeoned with the aluminum baseball bat, then stabbed 24 times in the torso and face with the steak knife. And let's put on our amateur profiler hats and think about that for a second. Beaten, then stabbed 24 times. That's overkill, which usually indicates the attacker is somebody with a personal relationship to the victim and has a lot of anger towards them. And then there was that plastic bag covering Patricia's face. And when a killer covers a victim's face like that, it often indicates some kind of an emotional connection. They don't want to look at what they've just done. This certainly didn't look like a random attack, and that's even before considering that bizarre note on Pat's stomach accusing her and her siblings of plotting to kidnap Ariana.

The investigators, who, you know, didn't just fall off the turnip truck, saw right away that the note was most likely an embarrassingly clumsy attempt at misdirection. And they realized that just like pretty much every time a killer leaves or sends a message of any kind, it would be a useful piece of evidence. The first person investigators wanted to talk to was Anne. both to let her know about her mom's death and to see if she might have any idea what had happened. Anne seemed completely shocked and distraught. She said she and Pat had had some tension in recent months, but they'd been in the process of reconciling.

When they asked her where she'd been around the time investigators thought the murder had happened, Anne said she, Carmilla, and Ariana had spent the day at the mall over in White Plains about 25 miles away. And conveniently, she had a time-stamped ticket from the parking lot there. And during this first interview, investigators found Anne to be helpful and forthcoming. She really seemed eager to help him catch whoever had done this to her mom.

And when they asked whether she had any idea who that could be, she came up with a name with no hesitation, Ron Kerner. She told him how she'd lied to Ronnie the Rottweiler about getting an abortion and that he was the kind of guy who, if he found out Anne had actually had his child, was capable of killing her, Ariana, and Pat. which I'm guessing struck the investigators as kind of weird right off the bat. Like, he's so mad about this daughter he didn't know about that he'd kill the daughter. And her grandma, too? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Anne was describing him as kind of a standard issue New York tough guy, but making out like he was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

Yeah, you know mafiosos, always brutally killing grannies that are tangentially related to something no normal person would be mad at. Well, I could see being mad, but not that kind of mad. I just, like, not stab somebody in the face, man. If you're mad that, if you're mad that Anne had the kid that she told you she terminated, right? If you're mad about that. Yeah, well, that's true, because he was like, you need to get an abortion. Why would you go after?

It's not like he wanted the kid. Why would you go after Pat, somebody that... It makes no sense. Has a well-documented bad relationship with her daughter and not Anne. That doesn't make sense. No, it makes no sense. So I'm guessing the investigators. took all this with some hefty grains of salt,

but nevertheless, a possibly mobbed-up ex-boyfriend is the kind of thing you have to follow up on. So they drove down to New York to talk to Ronnie. When they told him Pat had been murdered, he seemed shaken up. He'd always liked Pat. She'd been nice to him. As the conversation went on,

it became clear to Ron that somebody had pointed the finger at him as a suspect, and he just seemed baffled about it. Why would he want to kill Pat? Because of your daughter, investigators told him, because you thought Pat had helped keep her a seat, secret from you. This, just absolutely florid's poor guy. He's like,

I have a daughter? Now, this astonishment seemed so genuine that Ron was already fading as a suspect, but the investigators still asked him where he'd been on May 14th. Ron told him he'd been at a fight as a promoter. He even had pictures pinned up on his wall from it. That was a solid alibi, and that was pretty much the last thing they got from Ron Kerner during that interview. He came to the full realization that he was being investigated for murder and told him he'd be getting a lawyer, which, you know, is usually

a pretty smart move. Yeah, TCC approved move, to be honest. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Ronnie the Rottweiler seemed like a dead end for the investigation, so they turned their attention back to Pat's family. It turned out that there was not only tension between Pat and Ann, Pat was also having trouble with her brother, Mike.

In fact, they were barely even talking to each other. This stemmed from an anonymous call to the Austinian PD, the previous. year, which led to child protective services visiting Pat's house while Anne and Ariana were there. The caller claimed Ariana was being neglected to the point of abuse, an accusation that CPS found no evidence for. Anne was furious. This played straight into the fears stoked by the weird email she kept getting from John, that somebody was trying to take her daughter away from her. Pat also seemed shaken up by the visit, and she convinced Anne that she had nothing to do with the call. So Anne, with no real evidence whatsoever, accused her uncle Mike of calling CPS on her,

went right over to his house and cursed him up and down, ignoring his denials. And Pat apparently agreed with Anne. Whether she actually believed her brother had called CPS or whether she was going along with Anne, like as the only way to maintain a relationship with her, like as she saw it that way, it's impossible to say. But things got frosty between her and Mike. But frosty enough for a sibling homicide? That didn't seem likely. And why would Mike leave a bizarre note on Pat's body implicating himself in a scheme to kidnap Ariana? And besides, he had a good alibi for the time of Pat's death. He'd been out shopping for a prom dress with his daughter, with plenty of witnesses. The identity of the caller to CPS was never uncovered, but whoever it was, as paranoid

and easily influenced as Anne was, they couldn't have chosen a better way to drive a wedge between her and her family. And the further she got away from her own family, the tighter Anne got with the Magnettys. So Mike was off the table as a suspect, but it was time for another addition of finger-pointing theater. Mike told investigators they should check out Gloria Magnetti, who had been furious when Pat had refused to loan her money. And Gloria, remember, who was reputed to have mob connections too. If she hadn't killed Pat herself, maybe she knew people who would do the dirty work for her. And there was more potential motive here

than petty vengeance. Gloria and Carmella had a firm hold on Anne by this point. If Pat was out of the picture and Anne got her money and her nice big house, well, the Magnettys would get them too. And they'd get Ariana with, about whom they both remained weirdly

obsessed, God knows why. Like, it's just a kid. I mean, kids are cool sometimes, but like, it's just, she's just a kid. People lose their minds over these kids. It's unbelievable. I can see the emails now, Whitney. Two childless women saying that people are too obsessed with children.

Why? Not to murder. It's weird. This is just like, I mean, she can't be that great. It's not your kid, for Christ's sakes. She can't be that great, right? She probably was watching, what was it in 2005? She's probably watching Telitubbies.

Who cares? God. Or Bear in the Big Blue House. That show is my jam. So investigators need to talk to Gloria Magnetti, and they found her at her favorite place, at a casino, shoving quarters into a slot machine. And that, she said, was right where she had been when Pat had been murdered. A bunch of witnesses corroborated the alibi, and I bet Gloria was wiping her forehead with relief. Phew, finally, my life-ruiting gambling addiction pays off.

It's about a time I got something out. out of it. There was another Magnetti to talk to, though, Anne's bestie slash possible lover, Carmela. If anything, Carmela had even more motive than Gloria. She was particularly attached to Ariana,

treating her friend's kid like she was her own. Carmela repeated the story Anne had initially told investigators. Carmela, Anne and Ariana were all at the mall in White Plains at the time of Pat's death. And Carmela stuck with this, cocky and confident, not cracking no matter

how hard they pushed. That is, until investigators got surveillance footage from the mall. Carmella was there, sure, and so was little Ariana. But of Anne Trouvado, there was not a glimpse. Carmilla and Anne had both lied, giving Anne an alibi that was faker than the word psychic medium on Gloria's business cart. Investigators started to think that that was the whole reason for the trip to the mall in the first place. Why else would Anne, who hadn't even been there, have the ticket from the parking lot in her purse. So, police took a look at the cell phone data for Carmella and Anne on the evening of Pat's murder, seeing which towers each phone had pinged on. Carmel's phone, as expected, was in White Plains, but Anne's was back in Austining the whole time. The next time

Carmela was interviewed, she stuck to her guns when confronted with the surveillance footage from the mall. Oh, see, Anne had social phobia. She just sat in the car while Carmela and Ariana went shopping. Uh-huh. Sure, Jan. But when the interviewers, rolled out the cell phone data, Carmela cracked like a weak old egg, breaking down in tears. Before she drove up to White Plains with Ariana, she said she dropped Anne off at Pat's

house. And when she picked Anne up, hours later, Anne seemed dishevelled and upset, but Carmela hadn't pressed her on why. The answer to that seemed obvious. Further interviews revealed that Anne had been behind the harassment of Pat in the weeks before her death, and that she

was the one who cut her brake lines. Imagine cutting your mom's break lines. That is just astonishing. Police also learned that during this time, Anne and Carmelah would steal things from Pat's house, then demand money to bring them back. And the return of the stolen

swag wasn't the only thing they bargained for. They straight up asked Pat for cash in exchange for spending time with her granddaughter. Wow. You know, sometimes people really are just pieces of shit. That's just boils my mind, them ransoming Pat's stuff back to her for cash. Like, why

didn't she call the cops? I guess. I guess just because Anne was her daughter and that parental love is something else, man. Oh boy. So by this time, forensic evidence was starting to confirm what Carmelah had told him about where Anne was at the time of the murder. Turned out, not all the blood on the steak knife was Pat's. The killer had cut herself during the frenzied attack. And that blood was a match to Anne Trevato, as was a hair recovered from Pat's body. The writing on the weird kidnapping note matched Anne's handwriting, too. She didn't even try to conceal her handwriting. Good job. God, people, stick to cutting out and gluing letters from newspapers, okay?

The classics are classics for a reason. Or like, don't write letters at all. It literally only makes... Yeah, you're just giving them more. You're just giving them more evidence. It only makes you look stupid. Like, BTK did it, and look at them now, writing weird poems about peas in prison. It never work.

No. It's a bad idea. So, by now, police had absolutely no doubt as to the killer's identity. Anne Truvado had killed her own mother, beating her with one of John's old baseball bats, than stabbing her 24 times, covering her face with a plastic bag and writing a note about a bizarre kidnapping plot to try extremely badly to throw police off her trail, which again, good job. Real convincing there, Anne. When Carmela came to pick Anne up, Anne had been wearing different clothes and was carrying a garbage

bag stuffed with the clothes she'd been wearing when Carmela dropped her off, and Carmela could clearly see bloody stains on the clothes through the bag. So in August 2006, Anne was arrested and charged. Her conviction was a slam dunk, and she was sentenced to 25 years to life. I think ultimately her motive was somewhere in the mix between sincerely believing that this was the only way to keep Ariana and just flat-out greed. The combination probably change in from minute to minute. She's an odd duck, to say the least. Carmela was also arrested and charged with hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence.

She got four years, but I think her responsibility goes way further than what the state was able to prove. Turns out those bizarre emails Anne got from her dead brother John originated from Carmela's computer. Shocker, I know. And just think about what she was doing here. Driving her alleged best friend, mad with fresh grief for her lost brother, and fear that her family was trying to steal her daughter from her. It almost makes you feel a little sorry for Anne. Little, not a lot, but dang. A little.

The fact that Carmelis sent those emails makes me think that she was the one who called CPS that time. You know, just to cause more havoc between Anne and her family. It's in the same ballpark as far as M.O. goes, pulling strings and heartlessly manipulating emotions from behind the scenes. And I guess she did it so she could get the things we talked about earlier, Pat's money, Pat's house and unrestricted access to Ariana, the kid she'd come to think of as hers. Yeah. And there's no evidence that Carmilla directly encouraged Anne to murder her mom, but she should

sure as hell lit the fuse. And as for Ariana, after a DNA test to check that she was, in fact, his, Ronnie the Rottweiler seems to have surprised himself by actually wanting to be a dad after all and to look after his princess, as he calls her. He got custody of Ariana and they seem happy together. He got his pup. Yeah, he got his pup. They are actually really cute together.

I saw them in an interview. So thank God for that at least. And they have the same, like, cute little New York accent and everything. In many ways, Anne Truvado was a born sucker. I mean, the gold-plated horseshit she was willing to believe just blows my mind. And although that made her prime real estate for manipulation, we have to remember that she was a grown-ass woman who made her own terrible decisions again and again, a series of increasingly bizarre moves

that led to the brutal murder of a good woman who just wanted to look out for her grandkid. Hopefully, if she ever gets out of prison, she'll have gotten her head on straight. So that was a wild one, right, Camper? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Nicole, Kevin, Tammy, Marie, Irina, A, just the letter A, Debbie and Elizabeth. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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