True Crime Campfire - Unusual Suspects: A Halloween Horror Story

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

We’re all pretty aware of the big, obvious dangers in our lives. We look both ways before we cross the street. We lock our doors at night (at least I hope we do, after listening to a year’s worth of True Crime Campfire). We take our vitamins. We don’t walk down dark alleys alone if we can avoid it. But the real kick in the kidney is, sometimes the worst dangers are the ones we never see coming. Sometimes they sneak into our lives cloaked in darkness, but sometimes we invite them in with a smile. What happens when danger slips past us, wearing a friendly face?Sources:Nightmare in Napa: The Wine Country Murders by Paul LaRosa CBS' 48 Hours Mystery: Nightmare in NapaFollow 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] 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. We're all pretty aware of the big, obvious dangers in our lives. We look both ways before we cross the street. We take our vise. vitamins. We lock our doors at night, at least I hope we do, after listening to a year's worth of true crime campfire. We don't walk down dark alleys alone if we can avoid it. But the real kick in the kidney is sometimes the worst dangers are the ones we never see coming. Sometimes they sneak into our lives cloaked in darkness, but sometimes we invite them in with a smile. What happens when danger slips past us wearing a friendly face? This is the unusual suspect, a Halloween horror story. So campers, we're in Napa Valley, California, Halloween night, 2004.

20-something roommates, Adrian and Sonia, Leslie Mazara, and Lauren Mianza were having a fun night. They'd been out earlier in the evening, they'd handed out candy to neighborhood kids, and UdN. nod over the cute costumes, and now they were settling in in the cute little bungalow house they all shared to eat popcorn and candy and watch a DVD box set of the show six feet under. Damn, that sounds like a good time. It sounds so fun. And it's making me want popcorn and Halloween candy. Hell yeah.

So what's your favorite campers? I'm partial Teresa's peanut butter cups, but pretty much if it's chocolate, I'll eat it. Kit Katz. Every single flavor is a banger. Mm-hmm. If you have green tea Kit Katz campers or any of the Japanese iterations actually, please send them to me and I will love you forever. It's yet another reason for us to get a post office box. It's happening this week.

So I'll post the PO box. Send me Kit Katz. So they sat down to watch the show, but then Leslie ended up getting a phone call and Adrian got distracted texting her boyfriend and Lauren was getting tired. So the movie night broke up kind of early and everybody headed to bed around 11. By 11.30, they were all asleep. Lauren was startled awake around 1 a.m. by the sound of her dog, Chloe, growling. She sat up on her elbow and looked over at her, and Chloe was not happy about something. She was standing up in that rigid, hackles-up body language that's basically dog for red alert. Lauren's window looked out into the backyard, and as she was looking over at Chloe,

she saw the security light in the backyard click on and then off. And she figured, okay, it's one of the neighbors. had been through that song and dance many times before, so she just said, Chloe, chill, lay down, and settled back into bed. Yeah, I check out the window every time my dog so much as like yips, but that's because I'm a paranoid freak. But I get that like, not this again attitude for sure, especially if your dog is just one of those yappy dogs that barks at the wind blowing too hard.

Yeah, and a moment later she heard wrestling sense. from the direction of the kitchen, so she thought, okay, you know, it's one of the roommates, and again she closed her eyes and started to drift back to sleep. But a couple minutes later, there was a new noise, this time from upstairs. Kind of a thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, like a rhythmic thumping sound. Lauren thought, Leslie must have a guy over. God, the plaster's going to start falling down from the ceiling. But after a few moments lying there and listening to that noise, Lauren started to get that

prickly feeling that something was wrong. But as we so often managed to do, she talked herself out of it and tried to go back to sleep. The next thing she heard was a short, sharp sound, like a really quick shriek or a scream, but it was so fast that she almost wasn't sure she'd even heard it. She sat up in bed and just listened. And then a scream. Piercing, unmistakable, this was a scream. Chloe jumped up, barking and growling, and and ran over to the door, and Lauren just froze for a few moments, like that's so scared you can't move feeling.

And then she heard Adrian's voice from upstairs screaming, Oh, God, oh God, oh God. And underneath the screaming, she could hear the sounds of a struggle. The sound of her friend's screams snapped Lauren back into herself. She kind of got her legs under her, and she stepped out into the hall with Chloe. And then she heard glass breaking, and she realized that it was probably the glass candle holder

on the little rickety table. on the landing of the stairs. And then before she could think anything about that, she saw a dark figure come crashing down the stairs running right towards her. And Lauren's legs took over the decision-making. She just bolted, running right out the back door into the backyard.

But once she got out there, she had the horrifying realization that she was trapped. The backyard was all fenced in, and now Lauren didn't have anywhere to go. She was terrified, and she whirled around kind of bracing herself to deal with this attack. and suddenly she heard these weird, frantic rattling noises,

and she realized that the intruder was trying to get out the kitchen window and had gotten himself caught up in the blinds. But after a few moments, he got himself free, and Lauren watched him crawl through the window and just fly over the yard and jump the fence, and he was gone. He hadn't come after her. So Lauren ran back into the house. She heard Adrian crying for help, and she called out,

Adrian, are you okay? Adrian said, no, help me. Lauren ran to the kitchen for the cordless phone, but the line was dead. Whoever this attacker was, he'd cut the phone lines before he broke in. Clearly, he'd wanted to make sure they couldn't call for help. It makes it so much creepier, doesn't it? Just so premeditated. So scary.

Lauren was petrified with fear. She wanted to help her friends, but she was so scared to climb those. stairs. She called out to Leslie. Leslie, we need help. But Leslie didn't answer. So finally, reluctantly, Lauren headed up the stairs. She could see streaks of blood all down the walls in the stairwell. Finger marks in blood, just like a horror movie. There was a light on in Adrian's room. And Lauren could see her lying on the floor. There was blood everywhere. As Lauren headed towards Adrian, Adrienne, she realized that her feet were slipping in it. Oh, my God.

She was sliding around in her friend's blood. Adrienne was still alive, still breathing. For a few moments, she moaned a little, but then she went quiet. And when Lauren called her name, she didn't answer. Lauren could see her breaths getting more and more shallow. As she leaned over her friend, Lauren spotted something out of the corner of her eye. It was Leslie, lying face down on the floor, not moving. Lauren just panicked and fled.

She bolted down the stairs, grabbed her cell phone, and her dog, ran out to her car, and peeled out of the driveway, dialing 911 as she went. Later, she said, I just wanted to get away. I just wanted to get away from the house. I was scared that he would come back. Hell, yeah. Hell yeah. She didn't go far, and the 911 dispatcher stayed on the phone with her until she saw the police cars approaching.

The police who responded to the scene said later that they could feel the horror of what they were about to see before they saw it. It was that bad. It was as if whatever just happened had left a buzz in the air and they could feel it, and their hair was standing on end. They could smell the blood. And upstairs in Adrian's room, they came up on the horror scene. blood spray and blood spatter and blood pools. Adrian lay dead, her portable phone in her hand. She'd been trying to call for help.

Leslie lay dead a few feet away. The investigators didn't find any sign of a murder weapon, and they weren't sure what kind of wounds they were dealing with yet because there was so much blood. All they knew was this was a vicious crime. They found blood on those wooden blinds in the kitchen, the ones that Lauren had seen the intruder, get stuck in on his way out the window.

They very much hoped that this was the killer's blood and that they could get DNA from it. Under that same kitchen window, they also found a bundle of plastic zip ties with a rubber band around it. Obviously, our guy dropped it as he was running away. And they found something else interesting, too. In the backyard were two Camel Turkish gold cigarette butts.

This was a really new brand back then, so they were stoked. this could actually be a good lead. So they sat down with Lauren to take her statement, started canvassing, and just generally started working the case. They quickly learned that Adrian had a boyfriend, Christian, who'd just seen her earlier that night and spent the whole previous day with. So at about 7.30 that morning,

they headed over to the house where Christian lived with his parents. They didn't tell him about the murders yet. They just told him there'd been a burglar at Adrian and Leslie and Lauren's house, and that there'd been some injuries. They asked him where he'd been the night before, and he said he'd been in bed sleeping ever since he saw Adrian. So not a great alibi. And for the record, this is always my alibi.

I'm always at home in bed. If not physically, then mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. Yeah, I'm not sure spiritual accounts when they're asking you your whereabouts, but we'll try and remember that. Well, I'm just saying, like, it's my mentality. I'm just always in bed. It wasn't me. I was in bed. No, no one can confirm it.

When they finally told him Adrian was dead, he broke down sobbing. He said he couldn't believe anyone would want to hurt her. She was the perfect person. This is interesting because later on, we're going to talk about some of Leslie's boyfriends, too, and one of her boyfriend said exactly the same thing, that Leslie was a perfect person. Christian and Adrian had met at a volleyball class. That's how she met Lauren, too. They had what most of Adrian's friends have described as a very imperfect relationship.

Christian had a short fuse, and that really bothered Adrian. She was opinionated and strong-willed, and she'd tell you what she thought, but she could also control her temper, and she didn't like it when other people couldn't. So they fought a lot, and they'd argued so much over at Adrian's house, where Lauren and Leslie had overheard them, that Christian was embarrassed to go over there anymore, So he'd make excuses. If she wanted to see him, she had to come to his parents' place, which I'm sure was just super for two, you know, red-plutted young people in love.

So, anywho, Christian was uncomfortably aware that Adrian's roommates and friends didn't like him and thought she should dump him. But Adrian nevertheless was really into him. And campers, we've all been here. You know, we have all been in that situation where we were with somebody who was bad for us and everybody was telling us to bail and we just couldn't do it. Or we've known somebody who we've been telling you need to bail, and they just couldn't do it. And sometimes that's just because of really intense chemistry.

Sometimes it's because you think you can fix them or help them, whatever. But heads up on that, by the way, you can't fix. You can't fix people. Can't do it. People cannot be fixed by other people, right? They got to fix themselves, and they got to really want it and really put in the work. And you can't do it for them. And by the way, you don't get a medal for trying.

Nope. You get trauma and a bunch of bills from your therapist. Yeah, take it from someone who knows. Their big relationship issue was that Christian was a commitment phobe. Said he'd just been burned too many times. Adrian tried to understand because, you know, she loved him. But she also did a little bit of what you might call game playing, you know, just to get under his skin a little bit. For example, she joined a club called the 2030 group of Napa. It was like a young professional singles club, the kind of thing you'd see on sex in the city, you know. And Adrienne get all dressed up and go to their parties and dances and silent auctions and stuff, and she'd take pictures of herself with other guys, and then she'd make sure Christian knew about it. And Christian did the same kind of stuff to her, so they were

off again, on again. So, of course, hearing all this troubled relationship stuff, the detectives were perking up their ears like excited little puppies. But the more they talked to Christian, the more they felt like he was telling them the truth. His alibi sucked, but the guy seemed genuinely devastated. He was just sobbing and sobbing and talking about how he and Adrian had had a perfect day the day before the murder, like one of those you just remember forever. She was his best friend, he said. He'd been planning on asking her to get a place with him. So they were like, eh, we don't know. We'll keep an eye on him. But Christian wasn't exactly suspect number one. They asked him if he could think of anyone who might want to hurt Adrian and he said,

yeah actually maybe I can Leslie he said had an ex-boyfriend with the improbable name of Lee Youngblood Jr and we're going to get more into him in a few menace campers and oh boy but for now what you need to know is that Lee had a crazy ex-girlfriend TM and for some reason

according to Christian this girl hated Adrian with a violent passion not Leslie Adrian he wasn't sure why but she mouthed off about it before and you know it That was a possibility. And then there was a dude that Adrian had met at a Halloween party like two weeks earlier, and she'd apparently gotten a really creepy vibe off this guy.

But nevertheless, Christian said he really couldn't imagine anybody specifically targeting Adrian. She was just so sweet. So they took some of Christian's blood for a DNA test and released him after about four hours of questioning. Adrian's mom, Arlene, was on vacation in Australia when her daughter was murdered, and she and her friend had just gotten back to their hotel after climbing this world-famous Sydney Harbor Bridge. If you don't know, you actually have to get harnessed up to climb this thing. It's really high.

And they had been all the way to the top. And Arlene said that when she got to the top of this bridge, she'd gotten this incredible rush of euphoria, and she had thought at the time how much Adrian would love to do this herself and how she wanted to come back with her someday. And later on, she said that she believes that that was Adrian's spirit, just kind of washing over her in that moment because of this really intense euphoria that she got. When she got back to her hotel room, she had all these urgent phone messages from her other two

daughters to call them, which is just terrifying. That's like a nightmare. When you see you've missed like 27 calls and your heart just drops into your shoes. Her first thought was that something must have happened to her mother because her mother was elderly. But when she called her daughter, her daughter told her and Arlene just collapsed. and now she had to arrange for travel arrangements, and, you know, fortunately she had her friend there to fly back with her. Arlene just kept thinking as she was flying back to California that Adrian wasn't even supposed to be there that night. Adrian was supposed to be in Hawaii on Halloween night for her best friend Lily's wedding. Lily had initially planned to marry her fiancé Eric on November 1st at a destination wedding in Maui.

But a couple months earlier, Lily and Eric had a big, rip. roar and fight, and Lily broke it off. They got back together a month or so later, but they decided to postpone the wedding indefinitely. Clearly, they had issues they needed to work on first. Yeah, that's smart. You should not get married if you have doubts. Right. I have known several people who went through with the weddings that they knew were a bad idea, just because they'd already scheduled the venue and, like, already told everybody about it, and I guess they were afraid to lose face. Like, one of my friends told me, as she was walking down the aisle, she was thinking with every step, go back, go back, go back. And she just couldn't bear to do it. And surprise, those people

are all divorced now. But, you know, bless Lily's heart, her first thought when she found out about Adrian's murder was this is my fault. Because if she hadn't called off the wedding, they'd have been in Hawaii and Adrian would still be alive. And that was really hard for her, as you can imagine. But anyway, we're going to talk more about Lily in just a bit. I just wanted to tell you that because it's so sad. So sad. I actually have a friend who everyone was arriving at the destination, and she called off the wedding. Good for her. Yeah. And, like, of course, people are being nosy. And, like, to be honest, I was like, what happened? Of course you were. It's none of my business. It's like, I say friend, an acquaintance. But, I mean, listen, do what you got to do. Hell yeah. The $10,000 you're losing on your wedding is way less than divorce.

Absolutely. So Adrian's mom, Arlene, was totally broken. On the plane back from Australia, she just kept thinking, how am I going to live through this? Bless her heart. Once she got back to the States, she told the investigators, just as everybody else had, that she couldn't imagine who would have hurt her daughter.

She did tell them that Adrian had received some creepy phone calls about a month ago, you know, somebody breathing hard and saying gross sexual stuff. But that was weeks ago, and it hadn't happened since. She had no idea if it was connected. Actually, like Christian and most of Adrian's friends, Arlene suspected that the killer's main target was probably Leslie, not Adrian. Leslie was new to Napa, and she was a classic extrovert, always going out, always introducing herself to new people.

And she had a tendency sometimes to get involved with people before she really knew them. Men included. That can get you in trouble sometimes. So Leslie. On the morning after the murder, the employees at Coppola Winery gathered around the main tasting room and got the sad news that their co-worker, their friend, our Leslie, as they called her, had been murdered along with her roommate. Leslie had only worked at the winery for about six months, but she'd already made a bunch of really close friends there. Everybody loved her. Yeah, and look, I know that people say that about murder victims all the time, but seriously, people love this woman.

Like, she had some kind of magic about her. People said she exuded warmth. She made people feel comfortable. She had that famous Southern charm in spades, which is a real thing, y'all. I have just a little little sprinkling of it myself, so I can tell you. Leslie was just one of those larger-than-life presences, and when somebody like that is taken, it's really surreal for the people around them. It's like one minute they're there and they're filling them. up the space with their, you know, energy and their spirit and then they're just gone. And it's

really, really weird and sad. God, and her poor family, they were pretty much the last to know about the murderers because her mom and brothers had a different last name than hers. So it took the police a while to find them. And when they found out, they were gutted, of course. It was like somebody had turned off the lights in their world. Leslie was from South Carolina. So she had that Carolina drawl, which out of respect for my southern friends, I am not going to do an impression of. She was really striking. Dark hair, big megawatt smile. She'd won a pageant back in 2002. She wasn't really a pageant girl, per se. It wasn't the kind of thing that she'd have been into on her own. She basically entered it because one of her best friends, who was a pageant girl, dared her to.

And damned if she didn't win. She may have entered the pageant, kind of as a joke, but when she won, she decided that she really wanted to try and use it for good. So she worked with legislators in South Carolina to create Stephanie's law, which requires reports of suspected child abuse to be recorded and cataloged so that officials can detect patterns of abuse. Yeah, it was a really important law, and Leslie was heavily involved in the creation of it and the passing of it. She also raised a ton of money for the Calvary Home for Children in South Carolina, which is a place. for abuse kids. So she was incredibly dedicated to her cause. Back in Napa, people were freaked and rumors were flying. People were saying stuff like, well, she worked for Coppola winery. Could this have something to do with Francis Ford Coppola?

Is it a mob thing? Like, y'all know he's a film director, right? He's not actually in the mob, for God's sake. Yeah, the mob rumor is probably my favorite, just because it's so ridiculous. But there was also a rumor that the three roommates were gay, and this was a lesbian love triangle gone wrong. And others wondered, was it a serial killer and even has the Zodiac killer come back? Yeah. Now, anybody who spent a fair amount of time in a typical true crime Facebook group knows that there is no theory so bizarre that some super slew think going to put it out there. And then get real pissy when people point out how dumb it is. Ted Bundy did not rise from the grave

and kill this blonde middle-aged woman, Bethany. Stuff it. But BTK had just resurfaced around this time, and he was getting his gross rocks off sending the cop's cereal boxes and decapitated Barbies and all that kind of nonsense. And he hadn't been caught yet. So I guess you can kind of understand

why people might think, Zodiac. And by the way, just because I always have to say it whenever he comes up, you're the worst. Dennis Rader, you little turd. turdlet. And if you ever happen to hear this, please, please Dennis, watch that live stream I did one time where I made fun of your awful poetry. So good. Because it will wound your little feelings and it will make me laugh. Okay. So autopsy results came back on November 2nd. The cause of death was sharp force trauma and exanguination from multiple stab wounds. And Adrian,

interestingly, had far more stab wounds than Leslie. Leslie had actually been killed very quickly and efficiently, with just one or two stabs to the heart. So she died very quickly. Adrian, on the other hand, had been in a struggle. She had defense wounds all over her hands and arms and shoulders, and she had wounds on her face, she had wounds on her neck. There was a horrendous slash across her throat. Everywhere.

I mean, this poor girl was brutalized. The medical examiner described it as a frenzied attack. So, overkill, hatred, rage. Neither of the women had been sexually assaulted, at least not that the Emmy could tell, so this crime seemed to have been about something else. The detective's job was to figure out what. And this is totally heart-wrenching. Best friend Lily said Adrian had always hated turtlenecks.

But the gash across her throat was so bad that they had to bury her in one to hide it. That really hurt Lily to have to bury her friend in something she knew she'd hate. Yeah, that's awful. Forensics also discovered that as they'd hoped, the killer had left his own blood on those kitchen blinds, so they had his DNA to put into Codas and hope for a match. And even if they didn't get a match in Codas, they could start taking DNA from boyfriends and sex offenders in the area,

any suspect they could find, and maybe cuss him out like that. It was a start, and the detectives got down to business to really dig into this investigation. Meanwhile, the media was going bananas. This kind of murder never happened in beautiful, well-to-do Napa, so it was a huge story. But the families and friends of the victims really hated the way the media were portraying their girls. They started referring to Adrian and Leslie as the beauty queen and the local girl. Wow, really?

Leslie was the beauty queen because she'd won a pageant back in South Carolina. But, you know, she was a lot more than that. She was interested in going to law school. She was doing this job at the winery and crushing it. She was smart. She was a good friend. And Adrian, for God's sake, the local girl, that's the best you can do for this girl who was the mom friend of her friend group and a terrific daughter and sister and a talented athlete and a brilliant engineer. Gross. Gross. So Adrian's friend Lily and Ben and her mom Arlene and Leslie's mom, Kathy, really worked hard to correct that perception. These were amazing women, both of them. And I'm going to give you just a thumbnail sketch of both of them. and then we're going to get into our roster of postable suspects. So we'll start with Adrienne. Adrian was a born engineer.

She was obsessed with Legos as a kid. And then in the eighth grade, she took this mechanical drawing class, and it was game over after that. That was when she realized what she wanted to do with their life. She was one of those vibrant, active people whose schedules make me exhausted just to think about them. She was on all kinds of sports teams all through her school years, and she was an awesome teammate, couldn't stand to see anybody in pain.

And I love the story. When she was about nine, she went on this Girl Scout camping trip. And the girls were split up into pairs, and your partner was called your buttercup. This one girl, Amanda, was new, and so nobody picked her to be their buttercup. And she was just heartbroken about it. She climbed up a tree and, like, refused to come down because nobody wanted to be her buttercup. It's so sad. And Adrienne, bless her sweet little pumpkin heart, climbed the tree and sat on the branch with this girl and said, I'll be your better cup.

So a little Amanda came down, and they were friends forever after that. And at Adrian's funeral, Amanda actually kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye, Buttercup, which just about wrecked me when I read it. I'm just about to cry, just thinking about it. So, you know, she had that kind of a giving spirit. But she also wasn't a goodie two shoes. Her passion was volleyball, just like yours Katie, and she was throat competitive. Like she'd trash talk, she'd stomp around if she lost.

that kind of thing. So she had just enough of a little edge on her to keep things interesting. Hey, hi. Hello. Hi. If you played against me in high school, no, you didn't. And I definitely did not trash talk you. That's a different, Katie. College, I reformed. But in high school, I did not trash talk anybody. Absolutely not. And she'd overcome some serious adversity, too. In high school, she almost died in a car accident and had to fight her way back from temporary brain damage and problems with reading comprehension and coordination and depression, which has got to be really hard for an athlete in particular, whereas she was a star on the volleyball court and suddenly she was having a really hard time. But by God, she did it, and by the time she was murdered, she was working her dream job and pretty much having the time of her life. And Leslie, what most people seem to mention when asked about Leslie is her charm. her bright energy, her big, radiant smile.

She was an amazing dancer. She'd studied ballet in New York for a while on a scholarship. She was smart and obviously very pretty. But she didn't take herself too seriously. Like, she liked showing off her burping skills. She could even burp the alphabet. This again, it was impressive. And after she won the pageant, she used to call her mom and say,

Mama, I'm doing laundry with my tiara on, which I think is just the cutest damn thing I've ever heard in my life. It's so cute. Makes me want to do laundry with a tiara on. Right? She'd come out to Napa on her mom's advice to just kind of have fun for a while while she was figuring out her next steps in life. And Leslie had a lot of people in her life. And some of those people were, I think the scientific term is turds.

Leslie definitely had some kind of magic about her when it came to men. They'd always gravitated to her, and when they fell under her spell, they fell hard. And it didn't take long for investigators to figure this out after her murder. As a matter of fact, they soon found out that somebody had been sending Leslie envelopes full of cash. Like, not just a little cash, like $500, $1,000 at a time. Lauren, the surviving roommate, said, yeah, somebody's been sending her those. But she didn't know who. Nobody seemed to know.

But they suspected it was probably a guy because, according to her friends, men like to buy Leslie's stuff. Jewelry, flowers, one guy even bought her a car. Dang. And one of her friends said, look, it's not like she ever asked those guys to buy her things. They just did. Hmm. This seemed like a possible lead. and as the investigators dug into Leslie's personal life,

they discovered a whole new slew of possible suspects. The first guy who drew their attention was John DeMarco. Well, I can see why, since he clearly has a lifetime movie villain name. John DeMarco. The dashing John DeMarco, who's richer than God and makes women cry for sport. John was 35, a little bit older than Leslie. He was handsome and he projected. that he was wealthy, but some of her friends had a bad feeling about this guy from the

beginning, and after the murder, they turned the police onto him as a possible suspect. Leslie had had a date with DeMarco a day after she'd received a big bouquet of flowers from another guy. And when DeMarco saw the flowers, his eyes went black, and he got this look on his face that Leslie's friend described as pure evil. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her friends described him as a slick type, like a car salesman, a smooth talker. A few weeks before the murder, a bunch of Leslie's friends went out with her and DeMarco. He took tons and tons of pictures like you do. And later, when they got them developed, this was 2004, remember, they realized that this guy wasn't in any of the pictures.

He had been with them all night and arranged to avoid being in a single photo. later on they remembered that he would always insist on being the one who took the picture or he'd just kind of scoot right out of the shot yeah creepy why didn't he want to be photographed leslie had sent this guy an email saying that she wanted to be sure he knew that they weren't exclusive and that she wanted to see other people he freaked and he sent her this really worrying email back like i can't believe you're doing this to us very possessive and angry and he'd called her and gotten really mad on the phone and it really upset her. So he was definitely high on the list. And the detective soon discovered that this guy was in a long-term serious relationship with a woman that he'd been with for 13 years. They weren't married, but it was close. I mean, they lived together. So they thought, you know, maybe that's why he didn't want to be in the pictures. DeMarco agreed to give a DNA sample, so they took that and sent it off.

But, of course, those tests take time, even more than than now. So it was going to be a while before they had any results. So this man is in what amounts to a civil union and he's going to step to Leslie and act like she's the problem for establishing boundaries? If there is one thing that John DeMarco has, aside from a long-term relationship, it is the audacity. Aside from the long-term relationship and the Lifetime villain name. He has that too. He has three things, I guess. Yes.

Okay, so now let's talk about the Youngbloods. Oh, campers. Buckle up for the Youngbloods. So remember I told you earlier that Leslie got a phone call the night of the murder? In fact, she got two that evening, and as she went off to her room to take the call, she was like, oh, God, this guy again. Well, this guy was Lee Youngblood Sr. Lee Youngblood Jr., if you recall, was the ex-boyfriend I told you about earlier who had the crazy ex-ex who hated Adrienne. Why Adrian and Leslie? I still don't know. That's so weird.

Youngblood Sr. was Lee's dad. Now, stay with me. Settle in. We're going to get into it. So, Leslie had seriously dated this guy, Lee Youngblood, Jr. She met him in 2003 at a beauty pageant. He was judging, interestingly enough. Lee Jr. reminded everybody of Matthew McConaughey, like real good-looking, real southern, real easygoing, just all right, all right, all right. came from a prominent South Carolina family Daddy Lee Sr. was a prominent and wealthy attorney

and Lee Jr. was a player and he knew it. He was a catch. He knew that too. I wouldn't touch him with a 10-foot pole, but whatever. You know, if you're into that sort of thing, he was catnip. He wore flashy, expensive clothes and Rolex washes and he dated a lot. Had women crawling all over him because I guess they couldn't resist that Matthew McConaughey charm.

Maybe they thought he's going to rip off his shirt and start banging on a bongo drum any minute. But when he first got a load Leslie, it was like a movie. Like, their eyes met across the room and just whammo. Lee later said, I didn't know what hit me. Leslie actually turned him down for a date, though, and he wasn't used to that, which I think is just delicious. I love when that happens. He was really taken aback. Like, wait, you don't want to go out with South Carolina's Matthew McCona? Hey, I don't understand. So he just kept calling and calling and calling and Colin, and finally he sent her a big bouquet of pink roses, and for some reason, this worked, and she said, okay. And soon they were an item. Leslie fell madly in love with Lee. She wanted

marry the guy. And partly, I'm sure, this is because Lee was tré romantic. He laid it on with a trowel. He was all candles and champagne and roses, always pink. Rose petals on the floor, rose petals on the bed, rose petals in the bathtub, rose petals in the toilet probably, just rose petals everywhere. He got her a pink rose dipped in 24-carat gold, y'all. And oh, the love letters. Like just, basically, Lee Jr. was like the good guy from the Lifetime movie. The one that you end up with in the end after you realize you didn't really want the bad boy.

Lee made sure He made sure Leslie knew he'd put his player days behind him. So she moved in with him after graduation, and all was Peachy King. for a while. Pink rose petals and champagne. But then, Leslie started getting a little bit antsy about wanting to put a ring on it. She was hoping he was going to propose. They were planning a cruise to the Cayman Islands with Lee's family that year. And before they left, Leslie told her friends, if he doesn't propose on this trip, that's it. I'm out. And apparently, Lee did intend to

propose. Botterang and everything. But for some reason, he didn't bring it on the cruise. Yeah, it's weird. Nobody to this day knows why, and he hasn't been able to give a straight answer. Just, I guess, got cold feet. And then, to make matters worse, while they were on this cruise, Leslie started getting creeped out by Lee's family. In particular, Lee's dad. She started noticing that he was paying her a little bit too much attention for her comfort. She'd be on the deck in her swimsuit, and Youngblood Sr. would be right there making eyes, saying inappropriate stuff. Her boyfriend's dad was obsessing about her. And when they got back from the cruise, it only ramped up. He started calling her just to chat over and over. And if she didn't answer, oh, my God, Lee Sr. actually owned the house where she and Lee Jr. were living because, of course, he did.

Yeah. It was his house. So if she wouldn't answer her phone, he'd just show up at the house, uninvited and unannounced, when his son was not there. Good God. Okay, so imagine your significant other's parent just coming over unannounced like that. Just gives me the hebes and the jeeps. And unsurprisingly, between this and Lee Jr. not proposing on the cruise,

it all just got to be too much for Leslie. So she broke it off with Lee. And soon after, she moved to Napa. Now, Lee Jr. was sad, but Lee Sr. was devastated. He was more upset than his son was. And he kept going on about how he couldn't believe she left without saying goodbye to him. Dude. And when the Napa police looked at Leslie's phone records and found that she'd spoken with Youngblood Senior twice on the night of the murder. Now that, campers, that got their attention.

Yeah. When Leslie's friend Amy found out about that, her stomach dropped. She had been Leslie's confidant the whole time that this guy was calling and coming over unannounced. Amy's first reaction was that he was involved in it somehow. She just knew it. And she told the detectives to look hard at Lee Senior. They talked to Lee Jr. first, and he seemed completely devastated.

He kept talking about how she was the one he wanted. to marry. He was living with a roommate at the time, and the roommate said that the night he found out about the murders, he curled up in a fetal position on the floor and slept there with a baseball bat, just rambling about how he was going to kill whoever did it. Lee Sr. actually reached out to the Napa police himself. I guess he figured they were going to come knocking. So he admitted that he'd called her that day, but he denied everything that they'd been hearing from Leslie's friend. So it was absolutely not. I've been married for 35

years. I don't need to be messing with that. She was my son's girlfriend. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said the reason he'd called her twice on the day of the murder was because she'd been looking for her birth certificate and thought she might have left it in the house that she'd lived in with Lee. So he was just calling about that. Uh-huh.

So nothing but denials from Lee Sr. And they quickly discovered that he did have an alibi for the night of the murder. Hadn't been anywhere near Napa. But of course, they knew this didn't necessarily mean he wasn't involved. Murder for hire is a thing. Jeff, the one hitman, who exists, does get around. And Lee Sr. was wealthy. He was connected, and there were rumors that he'd been the one sending Leslie money. Remember those big envelopes

of cash? He denied this too, though. He said the only time he'd ever given her money was at Christmas along with everybody else in the family. But detectives were suspic. And there was an interesting detail that could support this theory that he may have hired someone to kill Leslie. Witnesses had reported more than once that on the night of the murder, and right around the time it happened, a cab had dropped off an unknown man in the area of the house. Their neighborhood wasn't a place where there was a lot of through traffic, so this struck the investigators as potentially significant. But obviously, there were a lot of potential disgruntled exes in Leslie's past, not just Lee and his dad. We have yet to scratch the surface

yet. And in fact, the detectives actually looked into quite a few guys that we don't have time to get into. So there was a guy, for example, named Grant East. Another lifetime movie name. Yeah, and so is Lee Youngblood, by the way. They're all Lifetime movie names. So Grant East was the dude who bought Leslie a car. Leslie had told him when they were dating, they'd been dating about three months, that her car was running down, and he just said, all right, let's go get you one. And he took her car shopping that day. which, holy shit. I certainly never had a guy offered to buy me a car.

Her friends were pretty horrified. They were like, look, you're already telling us that you don't want to keep dating this guy. And, you know, it's true. She was already starting to lose interest in grant at this point. So her friends were like, look, if you accept this big of a gift, he's going to assume that you're into him and you're not. And Lizley eventually ended up agreeing with them that this was probably a bad idea. So she drove the car around for a little while, but eventually she gave it back.

and after that y'all this man built a website in Leslie's honor after she dumped him he built like a cyber shrine to Leslie now if that doesn't make you go yikes I don't know what's gonna

so this website there was a picture of her in a low-cut dress and had this really gushy syrupy bio underneath about what a special person she was and then underneath that a copy of the Robert Frost poem The Silk Intent Oh my God

And then there was also a part of the page called Mortilitas Which translates in Latin to of the dead He had a picture of a dancing skeleton in a ballet pose Which is interesting because Leslie was a ballerina This was before the murders, campers, to be clear Grant, um my dude What the hell are you doing? Just yeah

Who does that? Who makes a... frickin' website for a girl who just dumped them. No. I don't like it. It's creepy. And then there's Leslie's father, also known as the skeleton in the family closet. His name is Lenny Mazara. Leslie didn't know anything about Lenny until she was 20 years old.

Why? Well, because Lenny's in prison for murder. So Lenny was a tough guy from Long Island. He met Leslie's mom when they were really young, and they were together just long enough to get married and have Leslie. But their marriage fell apart when Leslie was still just a baby, and Lenny was cool about paying his child support. He wanted to be in Leslie's life, and he was taking pains to do that. But then, in 1980, when Leslie was two, Lenny got in some trouble. He was managing the Rocco Marshall Band in Florida, and he started dealing drugs and doing some small-time crimes on the side.

Rocco Marshall apparently owed 10 grand to this big drug dealer that Lenny worked for and the dealer decided, okay, I will forgive this debt if you kill a guy for me. Now, Lenny hadn't been involved in anything like this before, but he agreed to do it. And in the process of committing this murder, a brutal stabbing. Lenny and his partner also ended up killing the Target's poor girlfriend who just happened to walk through the door in the middle of the the murder. Oh, Lord. So, a horrible double murder. Just like the one in Napa. Interesting, right? Lenny and the rest of the conspirators were caught, like, really quickly. Lenny is serving two life sentences plus 35 years for conspiracy. He says he's innocent, by the way.

We should note that. Leslie didn't find out about all this until she was an adult. But since she did, she started visiting Lenny in jail, exchanging letters with him and phone calls. They'd become buds, basically. Lenny had photos of Leslie in his cell, and obviously he's in prison with some, how you say, bad dudes. So the investigators wondered if this could be related somehow. Did Lenny have enemies on the outside? Had one of his prisonmates become obsessed with Leslie, gotten out and killed her? So they posed this question to Lenny when they went to the prison to tell him about his daughter's murder.

And Lenny told them, Yeah, that's actually possible. He did have enemies, he said. And he was crushed to think that Leslie and Adrian's death might have something to do with him. So, as you can see, campers, there was no shortage of potential suspects in Leslie's life. But of course, there was another victim, too. Investigators were also looking at Adrian's boyfriend Christian, and they were looking at the usual suspects, too. Sex offenders in the area, people with violent rap sheets, and all that

kind of stuff. And something tantalizing did come up during the investigation seemed to suggest that Adrian might have been the main target. Yeah, shortly after the murder, a young man who worked as a busboy at one of Adrian's favorite restaurants took his own life. Adrian was irregular there, but he knew her, and Leslie didn't go there. Rumor had it that this young guy had gotten a ride from a friend on the night of the murders, and the friend had noticed he had blood on him and scratches all up his face and arms. So they started looking into that. They even went to the trouble of acquiring the young man's remains and getting DNA samples,

which they sent off along with all the others. Their friends really didn't know what to think. Adrian's best friend Lily was struggling even more than most. They were really close, like sisters. Lily was feeling this crushing guilt because, again, Adrian would have been spared if Lily hadn't called off the wedding to her fiancé, Eric. They spent a ton of time together, and they talked a lot about their guy troubles. Lily had all the inside scoop on Christian and Adrian had all the inside scoop on Eric.

Lily knew Christian was scared to commit, and she knew he was quick to temper. In fact, Lily had come to really dislike Christian because she'd heard so much bad stuff about him from Adrian. Y'all have been in that position before, right? Where you've heard so much crap about your friend's significant other that you just really can't like them anymore? Oh, yes, many times. And, you know, I don't mean to harp, but I've talked about this before. and if all of your friends dislike your significant other, it's time to, like, reconsider. I have 100% agree with that.

Adrian seemed to feel the same way about Lily's fiancé, Eric. At least she didn't think he was ideal for her friend. She knew he and Lily were really different. Lily was outgoing, whereas Eric was so quiet, he almost faded into the background. He'd engage with you if you initiated conversation, but otherwise, he was kind of in Lily's shadow. Lily's last conversation with Adrian was haunting her. Lily had been sick with a bad cold the whole week before the murders, and she and Eric had been fighting a lot. So when she saw Adrian at work a couple days before Halloween and Adrian said she wanted to talk, Lily kind of

put her off until later. Yeah, in fact, on Halloween night, the night Adrian died, Lily was actually trying to get in touch with her to vent about Eric. He'd gotten super drunk. He'd gotten super drunk, at this Halloween party and said some stupid shit and embarrassed her, so they had a big fight, and Lily left their apartment and went to stay with her parents for the night. And she tried to call Adrienne, but she couldn't get hold of her. And that meant that the last time she'd spoken to her best friend was the time when she'd brushed her off. It was awful for her. Lily got really close to Adrian's mom, Arlene, after the murders.

They started having lunch together. It was comforting for Arlene. And Lily had a strange, ambivalent feeling about the murders. She told 48 hours that on the one hand she was obsessed with finding out who killed her friends, but another part of her was almost scared to have a face and a name to put on this person, to have a real live person to direct all that rage and hurt and grief at, which I completely get, actually, I could see that, like, that would be a burden to know who it was on some level. During that interview, which is really heartbreaking,

Lily pleaded with viewers to call the detectives if they knew anything. She said she had to believe that someone close to the killer must have seen something, noticed him acting differently, something, after the murders. In January, just a few months after the murders, Lily and Eric went ahead with their wedding. They just decided they needed something good to focus on. Adrian's mom Arlene went to the wedding and did a reading from Song of Solomon. They dedicated a song to Adrian. It was a really beautiful wedding, but the sadness permeated too.

How could it not? By this point, DNA results were starting to trickle in with no matches so far. Obviously, the person who did this hadn't been caught for a violent crime before. So the detectives decided to focus in on the cigarette butts they'd found at the scene. Camel Turkish Golds. They asked roommate Lauren, do you know anybody who smokes, Turkish Golds in particular? At first she said no, but then she started thinking and she realized that she did have a vague memory of somebody smoking in their house.

It took her a minute to figure out who it was, and then she's like, yeah, okay, Lily's husband Eric, the quiet guy. He smokes. So they went to try and find Eric to see if he'd give him a DNA sample, just to rule him out. He wasn't home, so they left a business card stuck in the door. On the back, they wrote a short message that they needed to talk to him and to please call them back. Then they went on about their day, not really thinking anything of it. A few days later, a guy named Brent Cople got a letter in the mail. He opened it up, and as he read the first paragraph, his heart started to pound out of his chest.

The letter read, I have a dark side no one knows about. I can no longer live with myself for what I've done, and I know that if I come forward and confess, it's going to be a death sentence. It's going to mean death. And rather than give the government the satisfaction of taking my life, I'm going to take it myself. I don't consider the suicide. I consider it justice.

The letter, both suicide note and confession, was signed Eric, his brother, Eric Cople, Lily's brand new husband. Lily, Adrian's best friend, who had postponed her wedding to this man, and as a result of that, Adrian and Leslie were home on Halloween night instead of in Hawaii for the wedding. Lily, who had said to a reporter, I'm almost afraid to have a face and a name to put to this person who took my friend, but I'm obsessed. I have to know who did it. who'd said, Somebody out there has to know something. Somebody has to have noticed a friend of theirs acting differently.

Talk about irony, y'all. Lily's husband Eric, the quiet guy in the corner of the room. The letter went on to say that he'd killed Adrian and Leslie because he was jealous of their closeness with Lily. He said he knew Adrian didn't like him. Adrian and Lily had been planning a big trip together. They'd arranged it while Lily and Eric were broken up, and they were still planning to take it. Adrian was taking his place, he thought, in Lily's life.

And Lily was, as he put it, the singular light in my dark existence. Oh, for God's sake. When your partner starts talking like that, Camper's dead is a flaming red flag. Yeah, you shouldn't be the only good thing in somebody's life. No, that is a huge red flag. Run screaming. I have a dark side. No one knows about. Damn. Also, fuck off, Eric.

Fuck right off. So, Eric Koppel's family members were all getting these letters on the same day. And it's a good thing the mail in California was quick as it was. Eric assumed that the letters would take longer to reach people than they did. And as soon as his brother got his, he immediately called the rest of the family. And they were able to grab Eric. before he could hurt himself. And then they marched him to the police station, and good for them.

Okay, so take a second, y'all. Are your mind's blown to smithereens yet? Because mine was, I did not see that coming, like, at all. Nobody did. Everybody was completely stunned. He was such an unassuming guy. So much so that Adrian's friend Ben, who had been at Eric and Lily's wedding, had to think for a minute before he recognized the name.

But later, he remembered that at the wedding when they played the memorial song for Adrian, Eric was the only person who didn't get up and dance to it. He thought it was a little weird at the time, but he figured, you know, maybe he was just too shy or too tired. So obviously, the investigator sat Eric down to take a statement. They talked to him for six hours, got him a pizza and some cigarettes,

and he laid the whole thing out. He and Lily had been to a Halloween party that night. They were playing a drinking game, and he'd gotten hammered. He ended up saying something, I don't know what, unfortunately, that really embarrassed Lily. Apparently, his drinking was something they fought about a lot. She didn't like how he got when he was drunk. So when they left the party, Lily drove him home, and she said, I'm not staying with you

while you're like this. You're being ridiculous. They had kind of an argument and Lily was basically like sleep it off dumbass and she went to stay at her parents' house. Eric claims he only remembers bits and pieces of the night after Lily

left, but he remembers that he started feeling panicked that he was losing Lily and he started thinking it's Adrian's fault she's put this in Lily's head she's trying to take her away from me Lily loves Adrian more than she loves me

I'm going to lose her so he grabbed a knife and he got in his car supposedly still extremely drunk he says he remembers standing outside the bungalow for maybe half an hour smoking cigarettes and just staring at the house trying to psych himself up for what he was going to do, I guess, or maybe trying to talk himself out of it. I don't know.

But then he entered the house. There was an unlocked window, unfortunately. He said that he remembers going up the stairs. He remembers encountering the dog Chloe and Chloe growling at him. He claims that he went into Adrian's room and, like, curled up on a pile of clothes on her floor and tried to go to sleep, which I find really weird and dubious. Mm-hmm.

And that then he saw a light go on and Adrian saw him. He says she shouted and hit him in the head with something, and then he just blacked out for a while. He said, his only thought before he blacked out was that he didn't want her to start screaming and get him into trouble. So he claims he blacked out, and then he says he remembers Leslie coming into the room and hitting him or screaming or something like that. He vaguely remembers striking out at Leslie, he says, and then the next thing he knew, he was just crashing down the stairs and cutting himself on something and fleeing out that, kitchen window. So according to Eric, he didn't remember much about the actual murders, but he said he did remember that when he got home, he made a fire in the fire pit in his and Lily's backyard and burned his clothes. He said he doesn't remember what he did with the knife. Now, some of the elements of his

story definitely do not line up with some of the evidence. So for example, he didn't mention the zip ties, or cutting the phone lines, which of course are both elements of premeditation. So if you ask me, that's a very self-serving statement. Yeah. And the whole story is, oh, will she hit me? And so I got mad and blacked out. Yeah, I absolutely think that's bullshit. Ridiculous.

He's full of shit. Yeah, I think so too. But anyway, that's his story. For a while, there was talk of taking it to trial. The DA was talking about seeking the death penalty. But eventually they came to a plea agreement. Eric pled guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, and they agreed on a sentence of life without parole.

No chance of appeal or clemency? He's going to die in prison, full stop. Adrian's mom Arlene said that she later remembered something from the day of Eric and Lily's wedding. While she was doing her reading from Song of Solomon, she said Eric was watching her really intently, looking right into her eyes, and he seemed sad. At the time, she'd found it touching and sweet

because she figured he was feeling sad about Adrian, but now, who knows what he was thinking? At Eric's sentencing, people spoke about what Adrian and Leslie meant to them, of course, and then Lily stood up to speak. And remember, Lily had gotten close to Arlene after the murders. Lily was her living connection to Adrian, and she meant a lot to her. Arlene said when she found out Eric was the killer,

it was like finding out about the murders all over again because this was Lily's husband and she loved Lily so much. And of course, we can't know what Lily was going through. I can't even imagine, but I don't think anybody expected this. One of the first things out of Lily's mouth at the sentencing was, Eric, there's nothing you could ever do. that would make me love you less. Later, she talked about how, in addition to the horrible pain of losing Adrian and Leslie, they were also now having the pain of watching an, quote, admirable and beautiful man,

go to prison for the rest of his life. Oh, my God. Lily, honey, no. Oh, my God. In front of Adrian's mom and Leslie's. I mean, I get it. You love him. It's going to take you time to process things. this, I'm not judging you for having those feelings at this stage of the game, but for the love of all that is holy girl, don't say it in public. I can't even imagine what that must have been like for Arlene. Like, it just must have been crushing. Eric spoke too. He was so emotional he could barely get the words out. He was kind of choking back sobs the whole time and kind of speaking at a whisper, talking about how he had to face the darkness inside himself. And he was so sorry

etc, et cetera, et cetera. And he definitely did seem sorry, but I suspect he was feeling sorry for himself, possibly for Lily. And about Lily, a lot of people have wondered if she knew it was Eric before he confessed. So I'm curious, what do you think about that, Katie? No, no, I don't think so. He was too obsessed with his mask to let it slip. I mean, think, I have a darkness inside of me that nobody knows about. Yeah, he didn't say no one but Lily.

Right. Right. He was a pathetic little worm that didn't deserve to breed the same error as anyone in this story. Even the weird web page guy. Even the weird web page guy. Yeah, I agree. And I know the detectives didn't think so. Lillie's reaction was just so totally stunned. And her behavior after the murders, like going on 48 hours and begging the public for help, I really don't think she had a clue. Although it is chilling to watch that interview, especially since later they did a follow-up and said that Eric was actually in the room with them when they recorded it. So he was like sitting back in the shadows listening to her say all that. It's creepy to watch her talking about part of her being scared to find out the killer's identity. So if she did know anything, I think she only knew it on a very deep subconscious level.

But that's possible, I think, that maybe on some very deep level she suspected. But I don't think it was conscious. I think he was probably trying real hard to keep that dark side hidden from Lily because he felt like she was the only good thing in his life. Some people are that good at keeping who they are under wraps. And I wish more than anything, we knew more about his background, but we don't know a lot. He was very religious, apparently. Yeah, irony. And he wanted to go into the military at one.

Point to West Point, but he ended up being so afraid he'd fail at it that he didn't go, which I think is kind of interesting. He seems like someone who was very much fueled by fear, fear of losing Lily, especially who he'd fixated on as his lifeline. And he decided it was Adrian's fault that she was pulling away, because of course it couldn't be you, Eric, and your shitty behavior. Right, asshole? And the rest, sadly, is history. And this does happen. I had an extremely close friendship. back in my high school and college days, and for a while, every single guy, either of us dated, had a huge problem with our friendship and felt really threatened by it. So, I mean, it definitely happens. Yeah. And I've had, I won't get into it because it's a very traumatic story for me.

But I have, I've had similar stories where people are just so threatened by a close female friendship. And it's like, I'm not here to step in, dude. You're fine. Yeah, it's really bizarre. One of the amazing ironies of this case to me is that everybody assumed that Leslie was at the center of it, because she was the one with all the men in her life, and so many of them were obsessed with her. But as it turned out, Leslie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, just trying to help her friend. At least her family knows she died a hero. And Adrienne did too.

She fought like a tiger to survive. Her mom still drives her car, still with her preset radio stations. It's little details like that that really bring these cases home. 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 we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons thank you so much to jess patricia colista and mermaid hair everywhere which is a great handle we appreciate you all to the moon and back and if you're not yet a patron you're missing out patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you start getting even more cool stuff. Free sticker, a rad

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