True Crime Campfire - Until the End of the World: The Children of Thunder Pt 2

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

When we left you at the end of Part 1, former Mormon golden boy Taylor Helzer had decided on two disciples who would aid him in his weird scheme to bring about a planet-wide spiritual awakening through a network of self-help groups fueled by sex and drugs, a plan he called Transform America. These disciples were his quiet younger brother Justin, and Dawn Godman, a vulnerable young woman convinced that Taylor was divinely inspired. But Transform America needed a lot of money to get off the ground, and there were no limits to what Taylor, Justin, and Dawn were willing to do to reach their goal. Join us now for part two of “Until the End of the World,” the cult of the Children of Thunder.Sources:Unholy Sacrifice by Robert ScottInvestigation Discovery's "True Crime With Aphrodite Jones," episode "The Children of Thunder"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.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. When we left you at the end of part one, former Mormon golden boy, Taylor Helzer, had decided on two disciples who would aid him in his weird scheme to bring about a planet-wide spiritual awareness. through a network of self-help groups fueled by sex and drugs, a plan he called Transform America. These disciples were his quiet younger brother Justin and Don Godman, a vulnerable young

woman convinced that Taylor was divinely inspired. But Transform America needed a lot of money to get off the ground, and there were no limits to what Taylor, Justin, and Don were willing to do to reach their goal. This is part two of until the end of the world, Taylor Halzer, and the Children of Thunder. With Don and Justin rounding out his Trinity of Transform America leaders, Taylor decided they needed a cozy little place of their own to plot and scheme in. Not that he was planning on paying any rent himself, obviously. Don and Justin would have to keep working to take care of that. So Justin went to check out a three-bedroom rental house on Saddlewood Court in Concord, a quiet neighborhood where nobody would be up in their business.

The rental agreement stipulated that only Justin was supposed to live there. When the landlord asked why he needed three bedrooms, Justin said he was going to use one extra bedroom as a gym and the other for meditation. But this was bullshit, of course, and Taylor and Dawn moved in right away. It was right around then that they started using secret code names in their Transform America, plans. Taylor would be Jordan, Justin would be Jason, and Dawn would be Sky. Taylor and Justin picked the J-names as a callback to John and James, two apostles that Jesus had called the Children of Thunder, which I admit sounds kind of middle. But I think it's worth mentioning that Justin, given the chance to reinvent himself any way he wanted here, came up with Jason. Justin, Jason. Dude, you could have

picked any J name on earth, you know, and you come up with one that sounds just like how you'd say your own damn name if you were a little bit drunk. Just bless your heart, man. Not one of California's great creative minds was our Justin. Why the hell they didn't just pick John and James, I have no idea. Taylor still needed money to kickstart Transform America, and his plans to get it had finally crystallized. From his days as a financial advisor, Taylor knew plenty of people who had money. If they kidnapped five of these people, forced them to transfer their funds into somebody else's bank account, and then transferred it from there to Taylor, they'd have enough to get their master plan rolling. Yeah, just digest that for a second, money laundering through a total of

one intermediary account. Genius, Taylor, they'll never catch on. Now, once all this was done, they'd kill all five of the kidnapped victims, plus the person who opened the intermediary account. No witnesses, no problem. Step one, of course, was to find their intermediary, somebody who'd be willing to open a bank account in their own name and then give Taylor all the money. This had never been a problem for Taylor before. Charm and manipulation were his two highest character stats.

And it didn't take him long, at a rave where he was selling ecstasy, to find the perfect mark. A young woman named Selina Bishop. Now, to get to know Selena, we're going to have to time travel back to 1974, when a teenage Jenny Valeran went to the Stanford Amphitheater to catch a show, the great blues

and rock and roll guitarist Elvin Bishop. It was a fantastic show and possibly an even better after show because Jenny got to go backstage and meet Elvin and the rest was history. They fell for each other, hard. Such a wild story. It's just like every fan's dream

and it actually happened for Jenny. You know, it's like giving the Swifties everywhere like the boys who are in love with Taylor Swift Hope. Yeah. Yeah. Bishop wrote his hit song, Fooled Around and Fell in Love About Her,

which, I don't know, would y'all want your significant other to write you a love song that starts with the line, I must have been through about a million girls. Because I'm not sure I would, and not to get all Neil deGrasse Tyson about it, but given Elvin's age at the time, we'd have to be talking like 250 ladies a day

to even get close to that number. How would you have the strength to stand, let alone play guitar? But anyway, I'm sure it was the thought that counted. In 1977, same year I was born, Jenny and Elvin had a daughter, Selena. Everything was great for a while, but turns out being involved with a touring musician comes with as much frustration as it does fun, and by 1980, Jenny and Elvin had separated. But Selena stayed close with both her parents, even if mom and dad kind of couldn't stand each other anymore.

Jenny and Selena moved around a lot, but spent most of their time in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. When she started school, every morning, Selina would stop at a cute little place called the two-bird cafe and get a cup of hot chocolate while she waited for the school bus. Jenny worked as a housekeeper, a nanny, and also started to make her own jewelry with semi-precious stones. And it was this little side hustle that would lead her to a guy called Jim Gamble. Jim had been a weatherman in the Air Force for a while,

then an electrical engineer. But after his second marriage broke up in the early 80s, he developed an interest in rocks and gemstones. liked going to Jim shows, and that's where he met Jenny. They started a relationship, but right from the start, it was more of a friendship than a great passion. Little Selena liked Jim a lot. Most people did. He was kind and generous, just a good dude all around. When Jenny got a serious boyfriend, she followed him back to Pennsylvania, but before long,

the whole thing went sideways, and Jenny was stuck out there with no car and no money to get back to California. So Jim drove all the way across the country to pick her up and help. her move home. Back in Marin County, Jenny and Selena were doing well. They developed one of those mother-daughter relationships that are more like friends than anything else. Selina got a waitressing job at the two-bird cafe, the same place she used to stop for hot chocolate before the school bus. She also liked to party sometimes, and in April 2000, she and a buddy went to an underground rave. Selina went looking for some ecstasy. She bought it from a tall, thin guy who really stood out from the crowd. Rafe kids like to dress in rainbowy colors and sling glow sticks around, but this guy was

in all black, and Selena was intrigued. She spent most of the night talking to him. When she met back up with her friend at 3 a.m., she couldn't stop talking about the guy. His name was Jordan, she said. Jordan, of course, was Taylor Helzer, and he'd zeroed in on Selena's sweet nature like a heat-seeking missile. Sweetness can sometimes come with a side of naivete, but Selina wasn't entirely taken in. She knew that Jordan wasn't Taylor's real name, that he was keeping his identity a secret from her. When he started whining and dining her, he was free with the cash, but never told her where it came from. Selina just assumed he was being all cloak and dagger because of the drug dealing, and it didn't really bother her. She kind of liked that he was mysterious.

Oh. Baby, no. We've all been there, but no. Dark and mysterious is going to end in tears. I promise. Yep. The mystery is never like him being a secret millionaire. It's always something like he doesn't have a car and has bedbugs. And also, these mysterious guys never do dishes. No, it interferes with their mystique. They also never clean up the sink after they shave. That's another thing this mysterious dudes never do. Anyway, just don't do it. Just don't do it. Not even once. Taylor turned the love bombing up to 11 and Selena fell for him hard. She'd see him every chance she got, she was the only one who got to see him. Taylor made a point of not meeting Selena's friends or family. They wanted to at least see a picture, but he refused to let her take one. He was protecting

her, he said, from his drug ring. They could be very dangerous people. He encouraged her to get a place of her own, so she rented out the downstairs of a split-level house. I'm sure it never occurred to her what Jordan's motivation was for this, that when it came time to eliminate Selena, would be easier to do if she was living alone. One of the few people in Selena's world who did get a good look at Taylor was her mom, Jenny, who barged in one morning when she knew Taylor was there, determined to get a look at her daughter's new boyfriend. She wasn't very impressed.

All she told her friend was, he was cute, I guess. From the very start, all that Taylor Hilser wanted from Selena was to use her. He would use her to open bank accounts to help siphon money from his other victims. and then he would kill her. Every second he spent charming her and taking her out and telling her how much she meant to him, he knew that he was ultimately going to kill her.

Don and Justin knew it too. The four of them went out to a reggae show one night and although Justin was his usual monosyllabic self, Don was bright and friendly with Selena. We prayed that God would send the right person, Don would say later, and that person would give up their life for a greater cause. I guess horse shit like that let Don

convince herself that the three of them weren't monsters. The truth, of course, was that Selina wasn't going to give up her life. Taylor, Justin, and Dawn were going to take it from her. Selina was completely enthralled with her cool, mysterious new man. She told her best friend that she hoped Jordan would stay with her, and that she was proud to have her own place and had never been happier. To get her to open the bank accounts, Taylor told her he was about to inherit $125,000 from a great uncle and needed to hide it.

from his ex-wife so the cash would temporarily sit in Selena's new accounts. And for her trouble, he'd pay her $25,000, and then the two of them would be able to move in together. So, with Selena firmly under Taylor's thumb, the three stooges needed to decide who their wealthy kidnap victims were going to be. In anticipation, at the start of May, Taylor had Justin go in by a handgun. Justin chose a 9-millimeter Beretta, telling the clerk at the sporting goods store that it was the same one he'd used in the military police. Don't believe I would have said that. But, as you'll see, at pretty much every stage of this conspiracy, these idiots would find

some way to make themselves completely memorable to witnesses. Just like they wanted to get caught. It's bonkers. The three shitheads knew they were going to have bodies on their hands, and they were making plans for what to do with them. In June, Don bought a reciprocating saw and replacement blades from seers, then two tasers off eBay. The next month she bought three ski masks, three

pairs of gloves, and weights. Seems like Visa or MasterCard could have used Clippy, the murder detective again. Yeah. The Murder Detective paper clip. We need Clippy. Clippy, save us. I know. They adopted three dogs,

a Rottweiler, a border collie, and an Australian shepherd. They also adopted a fourth, a huge 180-pound mastiff, but after paying to have her spade, they never bothered to pick her up. Poor baby. I hope she went to a good home. Dawn, whose country upbringing made her by far the most handy of the group, started building a dog run behind the Saddlewood Courthouse. The dogs were intended for a specific purpose. Taylor wanted to see if they would eat chopped up human remains.

Now, this wasn't the main body disposal plan. They were planning to use the weights Dawn had bought to weigh down duffel bags that they'd toss into the California Delta. Really just seems like Taylor was excited about the idea of feeding human body parts to a dog, and by now, he'd totally convinced himself that if a thought was pleasing to him, that must mean it came directly from God. Every day, the three of them would sit in a circle and pray. Then Taylor would bring out his latest idea, and they'd discuss it. Even though Transform America was already well underway by now, with the tools for kidnap and murder purchased and ready, Taylor, who had the attention span of a gnat, was already obsessing about a new plan.

He called Brazil. The three of them would adopt Brazilian orphans somehow, you know, like you do. And once they were back in the U.S., the kids would, and again, the how part of this was fuzzy, be trained as lethal assassins, loyal only to Taylor. Now, how you train someone to be a lethal assassin

when you are not a lethal assassin and you know no lethal assassins, I'm not sure, and neither were they. Like I said, it was fuzzy. But these terrible teens would kids the entire leadership of the LDS church, presumably making their getaway on their bikes, with the Mormon leaders sitting on the handlebars, I guess. I just can't help but, like, think of him doing, like, the wax-on, wax-off routine.

With the kids, right? With some, like, poor, like, poor kids that just, like, got uprooted and moved to America. You told us you were going to buy ass walkmen. What the hell? What the fuck? Can we go to school, please? What is this? Taylor would force the kidnapped leaders to leak to the media that it was actually the U.S. government who'd kidnapped them, causing chaos across the country, and especially in Utah.

And although Taylor was massively overestimating how many people would fall for this, you know there would be something. Oh, yeah. There is nobody easier to scam than a conspiracy theorist. Like, did you hear this one that, like, people with brown eyes, they're actually, like, related. to like ancient giants and like earth gods. Okay. Did you, did you hear that, Wendy? No, but if you read it online, I'm sure it has to be true.

I'm trying to, I'm trying to start out, I'm trying to start a conspiracy theory my own. I think there's good money. I'm going to become a grifter. We need to work on that. Yeah, I think, I think there's good money in it. So in the middle of this chaos, Taylor would have the kidnapped president of the church declare that Taylor Helzer was the new president of the LDS.

Yes, he'd have Justin and Don as his counselors and appoint 12 apostles. The old Mormon leaders would be immediately killed. And I am not going to claim to be an expert on the LDS church. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that. It's not like Highlander where you just kill someone and absorb their power. Although, maybe I'll ask the next plucky missionary that knocks on my door. I think that'd be... That can be only one.

Yeah, I think it'd be a good direction to take the country. conversation. So this whole thing was bug nuts crazy. And as I'm sure some of you have noticed, this was the second of Taylor's plans that involved the exploitation of vulnerable children. Maybe he wasn't a prophet of God so much as a creepy pervert. It's a theory. Yeah. Experiments with soup bones revealed that the three dogs weren't going to work out as a body disposal method. So they took the border collie and the Australian Shepherd out to Bay Point and just dumped them and drove away, as if we needed another reason to hate these three shit weasels, right?

We don't know what happened to the dogs after that, but those are two breeds smart enough to do your taxes, so I'm guessing they did fine until they found somebody to look after them. Yeah. They kept the Rottweiler Jake, because even if he couldn't use a dog to dispose of a whole body, Taylor still wanted to watch a dog eat a part of a person. I hate these people. Ugh. A fairly regular visitor to the house on Saddlewood Court was Deborah McClanahan, who'd met Dawn at an LDS meeting and later made friends with Taylor and Justin.

Deborah dressed in a colorful bohemian kind of way and described herself as a white witch, even though she still attended LDS services. Mormon campers. Is the church okay with witchcraft? Because I'm pretty sure the church is not okay with witchcraft. Like, it's like a 98% sure. I wouldn't think so, no. Deborah took Wicca far more seriously than she did the LDS faith. And of course, Taylor charmed her, though a post-rave one-night stand was as far as any romance went.

Well, sort of. Deborah liked to give massages, believing they had great spiritual value. And a lot of the time, she liked to end the massage with a highly spiritual hand job, which she did for all three of the Children of Thunder. So we have the sad hand job, and now we have the spiritual hand job. Okay. Must be some, H.J. Do you think it makes your junk glow?

Deborah was never brought into the inner circle, but Taylor shared some of the less crazy aspects of his plans with her. Outside of the three of them, she was the person the Children of Thunder trusted most. She even met and got along with Taylor and Justin's mom, Karma, who was a massage therapist. They like to talk massage techniques, though I assume Deborah didn't share all her trade secrets. Hey, Karma, I gave both your kids handies last week. Gross. Quick side note about the Hells are boys' parents here, by the way.

Jerry and Karma were still married and living together, but apparently they'd gotten into some new age stuff, as one cousin put it. Yeah, and Taylor's playboy model. Lex Terry said Taylor had once given couples counseling to his mom and her boyfriend, Donald, who she'd met at that creepy impact program. So it seems like maybe getting into New Age stuff was basically just a euphemism you use when you don't want to come right out and say, Uncle Jerry and Aunt Karma are swingers now. I don't know.

It's just a theory. Karma, by the way, who already had an unbeatable New Age name and started going by Teone. And Taylor kept a quote from Mama Teone and his. his room that said, there is one temple in the universe, and that is the human body. Which, I'm going to file under things that might be perfectly healthy in some context, but that most of us probably don't want to hear their mom say. It might be worth pointing out that the boy's younger sister, Heather, seems entirely sane and normal for the record and chose to go to college in Alaska

3,000 miles away from her family. Good call, Heather. Godspeed. Anywho, happy-ending massage friend Deborah even offered to help raise money for Taylor's plans, saying she could start appearing in adult movies for $2,000 a shot, but Taylor, who'd had Carrie, strip, and wanted her to have sex for money, got all prissy all of a sudden. He told Deborah, is that what you want to be known for? Like, I love how he's suddenly all moralistic.

Like, what the hell, man? Justin was more enthusiastic, though, saying he wanted to film the movie himself. Not be in it, film it. Maybe that was one of the steps on his road to becoming a sexual lover, as he put it in part one. But the porn movie idea went nowhere. Taylor wanted to keep a safe at Deborah's place, so they made a deal that Deborah would get an old washing machine of dons if she agreed to keep the safe. I can't think of a lot of legal reasons why you'd want to store a safe at somebody else's house,

and sure enough, turns out Taylor kept a bunch of drugs in there. Taylor was getting increasingly edgy and snapped a lot, partly because he'd started doing a hell of a lot of meth, even by his standards, and partly because the children of thunder were about to put their plans into action. Their targets would be elderly people, in theory, because they'd already lived long lives, so killing them would somehow matter less. Yeah, these are not good people, but more likely because they might be easier to overpower than younger folks. The victims would have to live in a quiet neighborhood, preferably close to a freeway. Taylor's records from his time as a financial analyst provided several likely targets.

The plan initially was to keep the victim subdued with rohypnal, and then, after they'd signed checks transferring money to Salina Bishop, the dose would be increased until they stopped breathing. Selena would also have to be taken care of. Taylor told her he'd take her on a trip to Yosemite the first week of August, fully intending that she would never come back. For the abductions, Taylor and Justin would bring briefcases with the pisses. pistol, two tasers, handcuffs and leg irons, and a blowtorch, just in case they needed more than

the rohypnal. The top target was a gentleman by the name of Bob White. He had the most money of Taylor's former clients, and he lived alone. On the morning of July 30th, Taylor, Justin, and Don sat in a circle and prayed. In the afternoon, Don went to Deborah's place, gave her $100 and asked her for a favor. That night, Deborah was to go to the movies and buy four tickets for X-Men. Then she was to go to Denny's, buy four meals, and keep the receipt. Deborah knew she was creating alibis, but assumed they were for some drug-related business of Taylor's. She went along. While Taylor stayed home and drew a flowchart of the plan, Dawn went out and bought wine and cigars for a little bit of theater that Taylor had planned to get inside Bob White's

house. He was going to tell Bob he'd just made a ton of money for one of Bob's neighbors, so he just thought he'd pop by to celebrate. Which is definitely a real human thing that a real human being would do, right? Like, why would he show up at Bob's house? Has nothing to do with Bob. It's such a dumb plan. But fortunately for Bob, he was thousands of miles away in San Antonio that night, so nobody came to answer the door as Taylor and Justin stood outside with wine and

cigars like a couple of schmows. Eventually, tails between their legs, they went back to Justin's pickup where Dawn was waiting and talked about what to do next. Don and Justin wanted to call it quits for the day, but Taylor was keyed up and wanted to move on to the next targets on his list, Ivan and Annette Steinman. Ivan and Annette met in Southern California during World War II when Ivan was in the Coast Guard and got married in 1945. They loved each other and their daughters very much. Ivan was the quiet one, where Annette was more energetic and social. We loved animals and had a ton of pets.

cats, dogs, birds, chipmunks, even a monkey one time. Their daughter, Judy, described them as each half of a whole. Ivan worked in the credit card division of Chevron and in real estate after he retired from that job. He and Annette had put together a nice nest egg and had timeshares in Hawaii in Lake Tahoe. When they invested money with Dean Whitter, Taylor Helzer became their financial advisor. As he usually did, Taylor befriended his new clients, even inviting them to, to go whitewater rafting with him and his dad. The Steinman's daughter, Nancy, remembers Taylor being gentle and patient with Ivan on that trip.

On July 30th, Ivan and Annette had a long lunch date with friends and then went home to enjoy the rest of their lazy Sunday. At 8 p.m., the doorbell rang. Taylor and Justin drove Taylor's Saturn to the Steinman Street, with Don parking the pickup truck down the road. The Helder brothers got out and started walking down the sidewalk in dark suits carrying briefcases. A passing motorist saw them and thought they must be Mormon missionaries, then changed her mind when she saw they had ponytails and one was smoking. When she got home, she joked to a friend. I think I just saw some hit men walking down the street. Wow. It's like Gavin De Becker says. Dark humor can hide the truth. It's one of the ways our intuition tries to

get our attention. The Steinman's across the street neighbor also saw the Hellzers approach the house. He thought they must be missionaries too, so he moved away from the window so he could pretend to not be home if they knocked on the door. Yeah, that's probably what I'd do too. What happened inside the Steinman house, we don't know. Nancy happened to call her parents that night and her mom didn't sound like herself on the phone. She was short with her, just said, we have company and hung up. Out on the street, Don waited nervously in the pickup, chain smoking cigarettes and flicking

the butts out the window. A woman, called Risa, had come out to smoke while she waited for a friend to pick her up, and noticed Don seemed really agitated and twitchy. When Reese's buddy arrived, the two of them stood on the lawn and talked about the weird woman in the pickup truck. Should they try to sneak a picture of the truck? Maybe even call the police? Then a white van pulled out from a house down the block,

the Steinman's van, stolen by Taylor and Justin, with the Steinman's bound and gagged in the back. The van stopped beside the pickup, and Risa and her friend heard Dawn say, Did you get it? They didn't hear the answer, but they didn't hear the answer, Then Don said, I'm right behind you, and the van pulled away. But Don had noticed the two ladies giving her the eye, and she got out of the truck and walked over.

I saw you watching me, she said. A friend of mine was buying some weed from some shady people. I was the backup. Why are you hanging out with shady people, Risa said. It was a last resort, Don said, and got back in the truck and drove away. I get out with these people. So while trying to make herself inconspicuous, Don had instead given these ladies a story. They were clearly going to remember for the rest of their lives.

And as you will see later, this is not the only time Dawn does something like that. Like all three of these turnips have a talent for the shit. It's unbelievable. Back at the house on Saddlewood Court, Ivan and Annette were handcuffed and made to sit together on the couch. Justin sat across from them with his barretta. I'm in some trouble, Taylor told them. I need money to leave the country. He was going to have them sign some checks, he said, then leave them handcuffed to a bed.

Three days later, he'd call the police to come rescue them. Taylor brought a mattress into the living room and told them to go to sleep. Justin stayed awake all night watching them. I'm sure they barely slept. In the morning, Taylor had Ivan and Annette start signing checks. Dawn went out and got coffee for everybody, and Ivan, who had been polite his entire life, thanked her. At this point, Taylor decided to give him. each of the Steinman's six tablets of rohypnal,

theoretically to make them more compliant. But they were already compliant. I think he just wanted to see what it would do because he's a sick piece of shit. What it did was make them drowsy, too drowsy to sign any more checks, even after Taylor tried to wake Annette up by blowing meth into her nose.

So he had Don practice copying Annette's signature, and when he thought the result was good enough, Taylor had no more use for Ivan and Annette. He dragged them into the bathroom, both so groggy that they were practically asleep, which is a small mercy. To avoid getting any evidence on his clothes, Taylor stripped down to his underwear and had Justin and Dawn do the same. He and Justin first tried to suffocate the Steinmans with their hands, then the sheets of plastic. When they realized their victims were still breathing, Taylor and Justin started just banging their heads on the bathroom floor. Ivan likely died of a heart attack at this point, but,

Annette still fought, so Taylor stabbed her twice in the chest, then slid her throat. Ten minutes later, Taylor had Don dress up to go deposit the first check. If that one cleared, the rest would follow. Taylor was acting like nothing had happened. Justin wouldn't look at or talk to anybody. The Helzer brothers covered the bathroom floor and tub with plastic sheeting and started trying to cut up the bodies of their victims with the reciprocating saw, but soon discovered that the saw wasn't really up to the job.

They had to cut away the tissue with knives before they could use the same. saw on bone. The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse by the time they were done. They divided the body parts between different plastic bags. Later that night, Deborah McClanahan started awake to find Taylor's standing silently over her. Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you, he said. I need the key to the safe. She told him where to find it, then a little while later came down to have a cigarette and calm her nerves. Taylor was futzing around with the safe. Before he left, he asked for a garbage bag, then hugged her and said,

You're my best friend. On August 1st, Don called around to try and hire a watercraft so they could go out and dispose of the remains on the Delta. Justin went to get a trailer hitch fixed to his truck, which meant he had to get a cab home, and the cabby happened to be a fellow MP from Justin's National Guard days. Children of Thunder were really flying under the radar, as you can see.

And to keep that gravy train going, Don turned up at the Cal Fed Bank in a wheelchair, wearing a lime green pantsuit and a cowboy hat. See, Taylor, divinely inspired genius that he was, had this theory that making someone more conspicuous would make it actually harder to ID them, which is just, wow, yeah, I guess the CIA was way off base with their little gray man theory, Taylor, you crack the code.

All this ridiculous costume achieved, of course, was to make the teller immediately suspicious, so they palmed on off onto the branch manager. Vicky Sexton. Don gave her a complicated, dramatic story. The Steinman's granddaughter, Selena Bishop, needed open-heart surgery down in San Diego, but she didn't have medical insurance, so the Steinmans were going to have to give her a hundred grand. And she handed over two signed checks totaling that amount. All this was weird enough that Vicky wanted to speak to the Steinman's, so she called the phone number on the checks and got Ivan's answering machine. The criminal

masterminds of the Children of Thunder hadn't considered this possibility. so Don said, oh, they just moved. Here's their new number. But this just made Vicky even more suspicious. The new number led to another voicemail message claiming to be Ivan Steinman, but the voice sounded much younger. It was Taylor Helzer doing a bad impression of an old man.

Oh, my God. Vicky told Don she'd need the Steinman's social security numbers to go further, and Don said she'd go find out what those were. Then she left going out the front door and down 16 steps in her wheelchair. Other wheelchair users took an elevator to the parking lot. It's like, clunk, clunk, clunk, clon, clon, yeah. Well played, Don, well played. So, so subtle, so inconspicuous.

As soon as Don left, Vicky put a hard hold on the two checks, meaning she was the only person who could clear them. With the transfer of the money stalled, Taylor was getting even more twitchy and pissy. off, yelling at Dawn, that she must have screwed things up. His plan had been to take Selena up to Yosemite and keep her there until the money transferred into Selena's account. Then he would kill her. Now, though, in his agitated state, he worried that Selena would suddenly go to an ATM, see that she had a hundred grand in her account, tell somebody, or just take off with the money. He decided she'd have to die sooner, although he did have a moment's pause, writing, She is becoming a better person by being around me.

I had a realization that people are changing for the better by just being around me. Yeah, right. This remember was right after he'd had two people help him savagely murder and dismember an elderly couple. Taylor had Selena come down to meet him on August 2nd, telling her his ex-wife had just given him a treasure chest of gems and rings, which he wanted to have a praise. Definitely a thing that happens in real human divorces. right? Maybe his ex-wife was a dragon.

Right. It sounds like a romance scam. Like, my chest of gold and diamonds is stuck in Nigeria. Well, Taylor did actually want to have a couple of things appraised, but it was the Steinman's wedding rings. That evening, they joined Justin and Don at the Saddlewood Courthouse and played a card game while everyone except Justin smoked some weed. Then, Dawn wanted to show Selena at the bathroom they were remodeling, meaning they'd ripped out the cabinets and shower curtain that were stained with the Steinman's blood. The plan was that as soon as Selina turned her back on Justin, he'd hit her in the head with a hammer and keep on going until she died. But she didn't turn her back on Justin, so they all went back to playing cards. Taylor got them all some wine and

put crushed rohypnal into Salinas, but she noticed the powder floating on the surface, so Taylor had to get her a clean glass. Eventually, he took her into the family room to give her a back rub, making sure she laid down facing the window. Now, content warning on the next minute and a half or so, this is very rough, so listen at your discretion. Behind her, Justin waited with his hammer in his hand. After he'd worked up the nerve, he stepped forward and brought the hammer down hard on Selina's head. She cried out and lifted her hand to try and ward off a second blow, which broke her finger on the way down. Justin hammered at her six times until she was still. Then he and Taylor dragged her into the kitchen because she was bleeding all over the carpet.

Taylor told Dawn to start cleaning the carpet and Justin to start getting the bathroom ready to dismember the body. Then, in the kitchen, Selena started moaning and moving. Taylor ran in and hit her three more times with the hammer. He and Justin rolled her in a blanket and carried her into the bathroom, where Taylor called Don to come in. Spirit says you get to know this is not a dream, he told her. What the hell does that mean?

And then he slit Selena's throat. Blood gushed out so much that despite the awful trauma to the head, Selena must have still been alive at this point. Finally freaked out, Don hurried back to cleaning the carpet. Taylor and Justin put plastic sheeting in the bathtub, then put a couple of saw horses in there to rest Selena's body on. Then Don heard the saw start up as they started to dismember her body. Taylor cut off a small piece of tissue around a tattoo

Selina had and fed it to Jake, the Rottweiler. He just wanted to see if the dog would eat human flesh. The rest of her remains went into garbage bags for now. It was messy, of course, and the boys discovered they couldn't get rid of the bloodstains on the faucet. Taylor had Dawn go to a hardware store to get a new faucet and handles, and she replaced the bloody ones while he and Justin started trying to burn Selena's clothes in the fireplace.

When the job was done, there was still plenty of blood on the floors of the kitchen and the family room. The three of them sat in there around the bloodstain on the floor, the only light in the house coming from the fireplace. Taylor's mind was jumping all over the place, and he started obsessively worrying about Jenny, Selena's mom. She'd barged in that one time and met him. She could identify him. And worse, Selena, trying to add a little mystery of her own to her side of the relationship.

relationship, had once lied and told Taylor that her mom was a private investigator. She'd also told Taylor that Jenny would be house-sitting her apartment while Selena and Taylor went up to Yosemite. She'd be over there, right now. Taylor decided in an instant that Jenny Valeran had to die. So the dipshit went and dressed up like the dollar store version of Neo in the Matrix, grabbed Justin's Beretta pistol, and went out with Dawn to murder the mother of their most recent victim. Jenny wasn't alone, though. Her friend Jim Gamble had come down to visit with friends at the Paper Mill Creek Saloon where

Jenny worked, and by closing time he'd had a couple too many drinks to drive home. Jenny said he could stay with her at Selina's place. One of Selena's landlords, Leora Soliday, who lived right upstairs, heard them come back at 2.15 a.m. and go straight to bed. She knew they'd gone straight to bed because Jim was snoring so loud that Leora had to go to a spare bedroom to get sleep herself. On the drive over to Celine's apartment, Don took all the bullets out of the barretta, cleaned any fingerprints off them, and reloaded the gun.

They parked a little way from the house. It was a quiet neighborhood in the woods. Taylor got out and walked into the shadows. A little later, six gunshots exploded into the silence. The Solidays were startled awake by the gunshots in the bottom half of their house. Jay Saladay yelled down, What's going on down there? In his first sleepy moments, he thought kids were throwing firecrackers at his house.

But as he woke up more, he was sure they were gunshots. He grabbed a flashlight and went down to the garage. Campers don't do this, please. Just call the police and wait. Absolutely. In fact, a neighbor had already called 911. The door to Salinas' apartment was in the garage, and Jay could see that it was standing open. He called out, what's going on in there?

He thought he heard a faint moan in reply. He tried to push the door open, but it was blocked. Pushing harder, he could see a man's arm blocking the door. He hurried upstairs and called the police. A sheriff's deputy was there in a few minutes. He found Jim Gamble dead on the floor by the door, and Jenny Valeran dead on the bed nearby with blood on the pillow beside her. There were no signs of any robbery or forced entry.

He found one shell casing by the bed, then froze the same. scene for further investigation. Taylor drove Don back to Concord at silence. He was stewing. Justin was supposed to have met them at the Two Bird Cafe, where they were going to break in and look for the address of a co-worker of Salinas, probably to go find them and kill them. But Justin hadn't showed. I was asleep, he told Taylor when he and Don got home. The next day, Taylor called both the Two Bird Cafe and one of Salinas' friends, asking where she was to try to build a cover for himself, but he was so twitchy and angry on the phone that he just made everybody suspicious. They'd all thought Salina was with him. By this point, Taylor probably hadn't slept in two or three

days, and he'd mostly been living on coffee and meth. So in just a couple of days, the Children of Thunder had killed five people, but so far the police only knew about two. They were taking those very seriously, especially when they learned that Jenny Valeran had been house-hitting for her daughter. Jenny and Selena looked alike, and the police wondered if Selena had been the intended target. Fearing for her safety and having no way to know that it was too late to save her, they started urgently trying to find Selena Bishop. Jenny had been shot twice in the head and had almost certainly died without ever waking up. Jim had probably been killed as he jumped up out of bed, shot four times, once in the calf, twice in the chest, and once in the neck, and had lived for a few

minutes after the shooting. There was a purse and a wallet in the bedroom, both still holding healthy amounts of cash. In Selena's journal, a detective read about how much in love she was with her new boyfriend, Jordan. Other detectives visited the two-bird cafe and heard about the weird call Jordan slash Taylor had made there. A waitress told them that she thought Jordan had given Selena a pager that he used to get in touch with her. In fact, Selena had left the pager at the cafe, something she'd never done before. The owner handed it over to investigators. Both Jenny and Selena had a wide network of friends and family who loved them, and they were all shocked by sudden grief for Jenny and fear for Selena. Jim's brother Larry drove for hours to reach

his mom and tell her before she heard about Jim's death on the news. When he got in and turned on the light after midnight, his mom said, Jim? All the victims in this case were good people who had real love in their lives, the kind of human connection and sympathy that Taylor, Justin, and Don would only ever know a weak mockery of. And this part is gnarly, okay? So skip ahead about 15 seconds if you don't want to hear it. It's just gory. Taylor wanted the teeth removed from the heads of his victims to make them harder to identify. He didn't want to do it himself, of course. Dawn had to hold the heads while Justin knocked out the teeth with a chisel. The teeth were put into plastic bags, along with the rest of the remains, were divided between nine duffel bags,

weighed down with gym weights plus some stepping stones from the rented house on Saddlewood Court. They slung the duffel bags into the back of Justin's truck and drove north to the Delta, where they hired a big three-person jet ski with runners down the side where they could rest a couple of the duffel bags. In multiple trips over the course of a few hours, they sunk the duffel bags all around the California Delta. Then they returned the jet ski and drove home, stopping off for dinner on the way. Back at Saddlewood Court, they hosed out the back of the truck. Following Taylor's instructions, Dawn and Justin took the Steinman's van to a part of Oakland that they considered to be shady, i.e. it was working class, and brown people lived there,

and left the van with the window open, the radio playing, and the key in the ignition. I guess they were assuming it would just be stolen within hours, the investigators. Then they abandoned Selena's car up in Petaluma, leaving Ivan Steinman's wedding ring on the front seat in the hopes of adding yet more confusion. Yes, by all means give them more evidence, Taylor. You got this, my man. On the way back to the house, they stopped at Deborah McClan's apartment to borrow her steam cleaner. Dawn was agitated and obsessively read Deborah's newspaper for any info on the murders. A couple days later, Dawn said she needed to store some drugs in the safe that Deborah kept for the Children of Thunder. She did put some drugs in there,

but unknown to Deborah, she also added IDs and jewelry from their victims, and the knives and pistol that had been used to kill them. She told Deborah, if the authorities ever ask you any questions about us, get rid of the safe. Later, Deborah said, at that moment, I thought, oh shit. Yeah, definitely. Dawn started spending more time at Deborah's. She didn't want to go back to Saddlewood Court. She hated the smell of death there. She combed the newspaper every day and recorded a news segment about Jenny and Jim's murder on Deborah's VCR. After the news, she prayed, convinced the plan wasn't working out because she'd made a mistake, because she hadn't understood Taylor well enough. Justin had gotten professional cleaners in to take care of the

bloodstains. We spilled Kool-Aid, he told them. Right. Nancy, Ivan and Annette's daughter, was getting worried about her parents. They weren't answering their phone and their answering machine wasn't picking up. On August 3rd, she went to check on them. A few newspapers had piled up outside their door.

Inside, there was a plate of moldy food on the kitchen counter, something she knew her mom would never let happen. When her parents traveled, they kept their two cats in the big garage with food and water and litter boxes, but they weren't there. Nancy went upstairs and found the cats

shut in a bathroom, frantic, with no food or water or litter. her. Nancy, knowing her parents would never treat their cats like that, spoke to a neighbor, then called the Concord Police and reported Ivan and Annette missing. So, we have two separate police investigations at this point on opposite sides of San Francisco Bay, one in Marin County, into the murders of Jenny Valeran and Jim Gamble and the disappearance of Sleena Bishop, and one in Concord into the disappearance of Ivan and Annette Steinman. It wouldn't take long for them to tie them together. Detectives already knew from her friends

and coworkers that Selena's boyfriend, Jordan, was from Concord, and the number of the pager he'd given her was also from there. Phone records showed calls from a number registered to Justin Helzer of Saddlewood Court in Concord. With that name, detectives also got DMV record showing that Justin drove a white Nissan truck. Selina's landlords had told them a white Nissan truck had been used to help Selena move in. Investigators also found that Justin had recently bought a 9mm Barretta. They're most likely candidate for the weapon used to kill Jenny and Jim. On August 6th, a white van caught a police officer's eye on Martin Luther King Way in Oakland. It was parked weird. The window was open, the radio was playing, and the keys were in the ignition.

Contrary to what the Children of Thunder had assumed, it had sat there, unbothered and unstolen, for days. The officers called in the plates, then notified the Concord Police that he'd found the van that they were looking for. Marin County detectives showed pictures of the Helzer brothers to friends of Selena, and the one who'd been with Selena on the first night she'd met Taylor IDed him as Jordan. In the early hours of August 7th, investigators requested a search warrant for the house on Saddlewood Court, and by 6 a.m., a SWAT team was in position for a raid. Detectives hammered on the door and announced themselves, then the SWAT team swung their battering ram and charged in.

Justin and Don were detained in their bedrooms, but Taylor jumped out of his bedroom window and made a run for it. Officers and canine units quickly brought him back, wearing a black shirt and boxers. And if you're a fan of good police work, I've got to tell you, this next part might hurt a bit. A detective sat Taylor in the front seat of her car so she could talk to him face to face. He was cooperative, of course he was. The one thing he was good at was talking to people. After about 40 minutes, the detective lowered the windows halfway so they could get some air.

Then she got a call from a sergeant. And the second she answered it, Taylor threw himself out of the half-open window, hit the ground, and started running. Yeah. Desperate to get away, Taylor knew he needed to find a car. He burst into the house of a gentleman called William Sharp, who was having his morning coffee with his cockatoo. Sharp later said, he was a tall young fellow he proceeded to scuttle from one sliding door to another i thought this guy's screwy i love this too a plus eyewitness testimony no notes i love it it's like i

i can envision this man in my head you know what i mean and the cockatoo as well and the cockatoo yeah imagine the cockatoo was on his head at the time obviously taylor made a gun shape with his finger and thumb and pointed it at Sharp, I'll kill you, which nothing says that I don't have a gun like pointing finger guns at someone. It's like the least threatening like motion. He could have like done the across his neck thing. No, pointed his finger guns at him. God. So he goes, I'll kill you if you don't give me your car keys. Sharp said, you could have all the keys you want, but the cars don't work. He's like, is that finger loaded son? just then his dogs a border collie and a malamute my theory is that it's actually the

border collie he abandoned um coming back for revenge i hope so i hope it was so these doggies came in to see what was going on and taylor ran off and jumped over the back fence guess he wasn't quite dumb enough to wrestle with a pissed off malamute while in his underwear rare w from the bad decision king of the southwest A couple streets away, Mary Mazzachi was calling Enterprise rental to arrange a car while hers was in the shop. Her son was upstairs sleeping. Taylor burst in, grabbed a knife off the kitchen counter, and then threatened Mary with it. Again, he asked for car keys, but Mary showed him the yellow pages open at Enterprise's number and told him her car was busted.

I'm like, you got to, like, I feel like you have to try to fail this hard, and boy, was our boy putting in work. Taylor had Mary give him some of her husband's clothes, then demanded a pair of scissors, which he used to snip off his ponytail. You come with me, he ordered Mary and stepped outside. No, she yelled and slammed the door on him. Good for her. I love these two people so much. It's so good. Taylor took off running. Mary turned and saw her son standing with a cell phone at his ear. He said, Mom, I've been on the phone the whole time with nine on one. And sure enough, Taylor was swarmed by police officers pretty much the second he got outside. He was not going to get away this time. In the house, investigators found bloodstains

on the family room carpet, with fans still running to try and dry them off. They found a rolodex with information from Taylor's Dean Whitter clients. They found notes on renting a jet ski on the California Delta. The first of the nine duffel bags would be found later that same day. In the garbage was a receipt for handcuffs from a sex shop called Not Too Naughty, and in a day planner on the kitchen counter, another receipt for leg irons. In Taylor's messy room, LDS scriptures and discourses were piled beside porno mags and sex catalogs, one of them folded open at an ad promising a bigger and better penis. Priorities, y'all.

There were also a bunch of weird flowcharts and scribbled lists that Taylor put together about his schemes. One note read, Alibi, Bob pulled a knife. He grabbed gun from me and shoot, panic. I know this dude is like on a cult leader amount of meth, which is a true crime campfire verified scientific measurement. But that doesn't feel like a plan you need to write down. Yeah, no kidding, right?

What was your short-term memory like, dude? His brain was Swiss cheese by this point. So much meth. Just all the meth. Taylor's first target before the Steinman's remember had been Bob White, luckily away in San Antonio. Another note was a to-do list. Call Vicky, Mexico and taxi, wake up at 5.30 a.m., date rape drug, head and teeth, two hours.

They also found notes mentioning Ivan and Annette Steinman and started to connect their disappearance to the Children of Thunder, although they still didn't know how everything fit together exactly. The slow discovery of the body parts would help with that, as with the testimony of Deborah McClanahan, who, after wrestling with her conscience and her fear of getting into trouble, finally came forward. Taylor, Justin, and Don were all facing the death penalty, and initially there was no shaking their loyalty to each other. But Dawn's defense team recognized something of what was going on with her and brought in an expert in cult deprogramming. After weeks of work,

Dawn was prepared to testify against Taylor and Justin if she no longer had to face the death penalty, with the understanding that she would still spend the rest of her life in prison. And with Don talking, investigators finally learned how all the parts of this weird case fit together. Her testimony matched up with the mountains of evidence they'd already accumulated, and there was very little doubt that Taylor and Justin would be found guilty. Soon there was no doubt at all in Taylor's case, when before jury selection, he suddenly decided he was going to plead guilty, without any deal in place and still facing the death penalty. Justin's was the only contested trial, and he, predictably, was found guilty.

All that remained at this point was the sentencing, during which Justin calmly declared, I want this life to be over. I want to die. I just want to die. The judge, of course, ordered the jurors to disregard that statement. Four years after the murders, though, Justin Helzer was sentenced to death for the murders of Ivan, Annette, and Selena, and got an additional sentence of life without parole for his involvement in Jenny and Jim's deaths. Dawn was sentenced to 37 years to life and will almost certainly be in prison for the rest of her life. Taylor remains on death row at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, incarcerated alongside the likes of Sirhan Sirhan and Tex Watson from the Manson family.

I'm sure Tex, at least, will be familiar with Taylor's particular brand of bullshit. In 2010, Justin attempted to take his own life by stabbing a pair of pens into his eyeballs, which is one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. He survived, but was blinded and suffered brain damage. In 2014, he hanged himself with bed sheets in his cell and died. It's sad to me that he didn't feel like he could have his own identity, always found himself trailing along behind his more charismatic brother. I think his story could have turned out really differently

if he'd had the courage to strike out on his own. Same for Dawn, and same for so many people we've covered before who just don't have a strong sense of who they are and end up seduced by charisma and big promises. Look where it got them. So look, try and learn to trust yourself, y'all. And believe me when I tell you, the people who seem like they've got it all figured out,

nine and a half times out of ten, they're the biggest messes on earth. They're just really good at hiding it. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe. until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And shout out to the butterfly girl in the hat that my parents in Telluride, Colorado this weekend,

at the Blues and Brews Fest, campers, I am not kidding when I tell you that the kink shaming corner brought them together. The world truly is a magical place. I'm so jealous. I wish I'd been there. That would be so much fun. Me too. God. I'm so mad.

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