True Crime Campfire - When Nerds Attack: Badfellas - The Murder of Jared Whaley

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

On the HBO series The Sopranos, retired mob boss Uncle Jun says, “Some people are so far behind in a race that they actually believe they’re leading.” He was talking about hubris, I think, the temptation to convince yourself you’re king of the mountain, when really everybody’s snickering behind your back. What goes hand in hand with that kind of arrogance, of course, is a seething well of jealousy and paranoia. Commit the unforgivable sin of being cooler, or smarter, or stronger than me, and I won’t be able to rest until I’ve cut you down to size. Sources:Movie "Casino"Movie "Goodfellas"Movie "The Godfather"Salon, "Killing Jared" by Vanessa GrigoriadisInvestigation Discovery's "Murder Among Friends," Episode "Dead Lift"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/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. On the HBO series The Sopranos, retired mob boss Uncle June says, some people are so far behind in a race that they actually believe they're leading. He was talking about hubris, I think, the temptation to convince yourself you're a king of the mountain

when really everybody's snickering behind your back. What goes hand in hand with that kind of arrogance, of course, is a seething well of jealousy and paranoia. Commit the unforgivable sin of being cooler or smarter or stronger than me, and I won't be able to rest until I've cut you down to size. This is our latest when nerds attack. Badfellas, the murder of Jared Whaley. So, campers, we're in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada, October 14, 2003.

A little boy was out exploring a dry lake bed with his dad when, drawn towards a horrible smell, he stumbled upon a decomposing human foot sticking up out of the ground. Poor kid. He ran and got his dad, and dad quickly realized that there was an entire human body, probably a male judging by the size of the foot, poorly buried in the sandy dirt. Badly shaken, with his kid in tears, he called 911. When investigators got there, they were actually surprised that the body was buried at all.

It's really hard to bury somebody in the desert. Even harder to do it in a dry lake bed. The ground just isn't conducive to it. So it didn't take much to unearth the dead man. A young white guy, naked and covered in black trash bags. He'd been brutalized, his face broken and destroyed. He had a six-inch laceration on the back of his head and pellets from a 20-gauge shotgun embedded in his skull and stomach.

Most gruesome of all, most of his teeth had been forcibly removed. As one detective put it, chopped out. Oh, my God, that's awful. Yeah. The detectives who responded to the scene have since said it was one of the roughest they've ever seen, and that's saying something coming from Vegas homicide cops. Yeah, that's home of a CSI, so they've seen some shit. Investigators also found some odds and ends of physical evidence,

a few rivets from a pair of Wrangler jeans, souls from a pair of blue van sneakers partially burned, and weirdest of all, not far from the body, they found a big hole, clearly man-made, about six feet deep and eight feet long. It looked very much like a grave, but why? Was there supposed to have been a second victim, but for some reason it didn't happen that way? Or maybe hadn't happened yet? Creepy.

And interestingly enough, if the body they'd just discovered had been buried in that hole, it probably never would have been found. So who was there young John Doe? He looked to be in his teens or early 20s, So the investigators scanned recent missing persons reports to try and find a match. And it didn't take them long to find a possible contender. A 17-year-old high school student named Jared Whaley. He'd been missing for four months, listed on the report as a probable runaway, and this was the main thing.

In addition to being the right age and weight range as the body, he'd been last seen wearing a pair of Wrangler jeans and blue vans. Bingo. So they made that difficult trek to Jared's mom, Patricia. house. Patricia was obviously worried sick about her boy, and when they asked her for his dental records, she got them immediately. Now, I know we told you the poor guy's teeth had been cut out, but the killer or killers didn't manage to get them all. There were a couple still left way in the back, and that's all a forensic dentist needs to ID a body. This one easily confirmed that the murdered young man was Jared Whaley. His mom was devastated beyond words,

hyperventilating and sobbing so much that people worried she might pass out. Bless her heart. For Patricia and everybody else who had loved Jared, this was the beginning of a long, surreal nightmare. For detectives Jeffrey Lompry and Jerry Stone, two Vegas cops right out of central casting, it was time to get to work. Who was Jared Whaley and who had wanted him dead?

What could this 17-year-old kid have possibly done to piss somebody off this much? At Silverado High School, Jared was known as a gym rat, a capital A athlete. He was huge. and laser focused on strength training, big, strong guy, good looking, too. And he was the kind of dude who was good at everything. He was funny, smart, charismatic.

You can imagine how this probably pissed some of the other guys off, right? I mean, come on, suck at something, please. Can't relate. I'm good at everyone. I'm just kidding. He wanted to join the Marines after high school. Don't get the impression that he was a goody two shoes, though. He wasn't super fond of responsibility or of rules, his moms or the schools or anybody else's. He'd never been in real trouble, but he liked to kind of run wild. According to Vanessa Gregoriatis, whose salon article killing Jared, was one of our sources for this case.

Jared had changed a lot in the past few years. Before he and his mom moved to Vegas and he hit puberty, Jared had been a little bit hyperactive maybe, but he'd also gotten straight A's. and won awards for gymnastics. But for the past couple of years, ever since he started hanging out with his new friend group, the cheese had been slowly sliding off Jared's cracker. He started rebelling against his mom about pretty much everything, even small, stupid stuff.

Like, he seemed to go out of his way to defy her, just to irritate her, I guess. And unsurprisingly, his grades dropped down from A's to C's. He and his mom argued a lot. Patricia was a single mom, and she worked her ass off to support the table. two of them. She wanted what any mom wants, for Jared to grow up, take life by the horns, make his dreams come true. But Jared wanted to run around with his crew, drink, party, and

stay out past curfew. He wanted a car, too. He was way into NASCAR, but Patricia wasn't having it. Hell no, not until he straightened up and started taking things more seriously. So they thought about the car, too. Big old, ugly fights. Ugh, God, poor Patricia, I would so not handle having a teenager, it would be ugly. One of the first kids Jared had befriended when he moved to Vegas was Matt Baker. Yes, campers, we have yet another Matt Baker for you. And believe me, we are so annoyed that we already use the nickname Twat Baker because this guy deserves it just as much as our sinister minister did.

It's okay, though, because we've got an even better name for this one. Actually, quite a few. You'll see in a couple minutes. Jared and Matt had some stuff in common. For one thing, they were both raised by single moms. Their dads weren't around at all. Matt and his mom had moved around a lot. He'd lived in 12 different places by the time they finally settled in Vegas.

They both liked goofing off, and they both hated following the rules. At the time our story began, they were talking about maybe dropping out of school. What attracted Matt to Jared was his brashness and confidence. While Matt was shy, Jared wasn't scared of anybody. If he wanted to hang out with somebody, he'd just go over to their house and walk right in. He could talk to cute girls like it was nothing. He could have everybody laughing their asses off inside of five minutes. And while Matt could think of a really sick burn to drop on a kid they didn't like, he could never bring himself to actually say it. Jared would. He had the muscle to back it up. Matt

didn't. Like most kids, Matt had tried on various identities before he'd settled on his thing. For a while, he was a goth kid. But then, and I can only assume he heard a choir of angels the first time he saw. But he discovered the movie Casino. And it was all over, man. From that moment on, he was all about the mob. The Godfather, Goodfellas, and especially Casino. He was obsessed. He started dressing like Robert De Niro at school.

Dress shirts, black slacks, shiny shoes, slick back hair. He'd make sure everybody knew the shoes cost 300 bucks. Good, googly-moogly. We're talking about a 16-17-year-old kid. Listen. Even if you're wearing Marlin Brando cosplay, you're still wearing a suit to school, and I hate to break it to you. It makes you a nerd. It cracks me up that he used to be a goth, by the way.

Like, going from goth kid to friggin tiny soprano just does not seem like a lateral move to me. Like, how does that happen? You know, can you imagine how Vito Corleone would have reacted if his son had turned up in black eyeliner and like a cradle of filth t-shirt? all I'm saying is that little dickhead would have ended up wearing concrete shoes over his Doc Martins and the godfather would make it known that he'd whack anybody who mentioned the kid's name ever again You broke my heart! You broke my heart! So what would be the mob nickname for like a got got Gauph Pizond, you know? It's like, so introduce me around, you know?

Yeah, we got Big Eddie, Little Eddie, Tommy Three Fingers, Legs Nickedelli, Mickey DeMullet, don't ask it. Okay, well, who the freak is that guy on the end? Oh, yeah, that's Lord Greg of the Out of Darkness over there. We don't really talk about him. You know, he's Don Pistorri's stepson, so he says it's just a phase, you know, and if not, we can always whack him. I think it would go something like that. I think so, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And seen. Yep. Great accent. Great accent work, Whitney. For Matt, the mafioso stuff wasn't just cosplay either. He wanted to live the life, man. He had a fake ID with the name Vincent Scorsese. It's just, that's the best he could come up with.

Vincent. Scorsese? Really? Like Martin Scorsese, you know. I guess he's more interested in the movies than the reality. I don't know. He and Jared and the rest of their crew like to hang out at what they call the drinking hill. A little on the nose, but okay.

Most towns have some. someplace like this, right? In the town where I went to high school, it was a little bridge over a creek a couple miles outside town. Some place where all the kids go to drink and smoke weed and do things that in my day, we were lucky enough not to have any social media sites to put them up on. Thank God. For the Silverado High Kids, it was the drinking hill, a dry lake bed surrounded by sand dunes. They'd go out there and party and do ill-advised shit like drag race with some brainiac trying to surf on the roof of one of the cars, and they're all lucky to be alive. And for Christ's sakes, if you're a teenager listening to this, do not try to

stand on top of a moving car. Okay? Just listen to Auntie about this one thing. We love you. I actually have a cautionary tale about this. I'm sorry. I just remembered it. Please tell. In my tiny, tiny college town, that happened to one of the football players. He was standing on... Of course it did. Yeah, he was standing on a car on Saturday night. He fell off the front and they ran him over. broke both his hips, ruined his career. He had, like, he could barely walk for the next 12 months. That's horrible. And like, that's horrible. Yeah, it's awful. So don't, don't do it. Yeah, really don't do that. Really don't, don't try to teen wolf it on top of the car.

No. It's not smart. So I'm guessing Matt's pitiful little maid man persona had a lot to do with the fact that he wasn't as, you know, swole as Jared and the other big old weightlifting behemist they hung out with. We're going to get to the rest of the crew in a minute, so don't you worry. And I mean, we already told you about the shyness. So I guess transforming into the odd father was Matt's equivalent of like when our little five-pound cat sees our giant Maine Coon and puffs up her fur like a chia pet so she'll look bigger and tougher. Doesn't work, Matt. He just looks at her like he's kind of embarrassed for her and then he walks away. But the thing is, our Maine Coon is a good deal smarter than the kids in Matt's crew, so it actually did kind of work for him.

He seemed to want to transform his ragtag group of friends, kids who didn't really fit in with any of the established cliques at the school, into some kind of junior varsity crime ring. So let's give you a rundown of the squad here, and then we'll get into the shenanigans that Matt had him involved in. We've got Matt and Jared, obviously. Next up are the two brothers, Shane and Cody Myers. Cody's nickname was Plato, because he was so easy to manipulate. I swear to God, that's why they called him Plato. So you could talk Plato into absolutely anything, which for a guy like Matt, makes him prime real estate to recruit as one of the crew. And the name just kills me.

Like, did he know they were making fun of him? Or did he think it was a cool nickname? Did he think they were saying Plato? Yeah, he thought it was the philosopher. Oh, my God. Delightful. Plato's brother was known as Shane the Viking, an objectively better nickname, right? Like, it had to piss Plato off.

Plato Corleone, every time he thinks he's out, they pull him back in. They called Shane the Viking because he was a blonde wall of muscle, basically. And like his brother, he wasn't the brightest bulb in the box. So again, perfect fodder for Matt's little Fisher Price crime family. Viking and Plato had known Jared and Matt since they started at Silverado High. Then there was Gerald Wilkes, a ginormous dude who hardly ever opened his mouth, Grout, basically. We don't know a lot about Gerald,

and we don't know his nickname, unfortunately. Well, I'm calling him Groot. Grude. Last but not least, we have Shane Johnson, the new kid, called Skinhead, because, well, he was a skinhead. Shane had grown up in a rough, dysfunctional family, and before he moved to Vegas,

he and his brother had been members of a, quote, unquote, KKK spin-off group called the International Clans of America. Yeah, that feels a little bit mutually, exclusive, right? International Clans of America. I mean, yeah, exactly. It's kind of like how the Major League Baseball Championship is called the World Series when it's just North American teams playing. Like, what world are you talking about? Yeah, and how the Miss Universe pageant is just Earthwomen. I mean, come on. Yeah, they need to bring in the aliens for that. Exactly. What I think is that this group needs to pick a name that describes what they really are. Should have

just called themselves racist sar-us, or super weenie club junior, or a group of mouth breathers that deserve to have their teeth curbstomped out of them. I'm not picky. Yeah, I like all of those, actually. In the salon article, Skinhead Shane spoke about all the good memories from his time with these white-hooded human skid marks. It was fun, he said. We went to lots of barbecues, told jokes, ate good food. I'd have bad home life, and it gave me a new family. God, I would have hated to hear some of those jokes. But that's one way fringe groups get followers, of course, love bombing, which I'm sure the KKK wouldn't like to refer to it that way because, you know, love is for cissies and

all. But a lot of kids like Shane end up in those groups. It sucks. Content warning on the next 15 seconds or so for some racist awfulness. He also said that to earn this place at the IKA, he had to draw blood from a black man. Oh, my God. And they're recruiting teenage kids for this shit. It's so disturbing.

So that was the crew, capital C. That's what they called themselves, because they weren't clever enough to come up with anything more accurate. Like, little fellas, for example. La Cosa Chodstra. The mafiono. That's the best one. A girl who went to high school with the crew told Salon, that was their clique. They were wannabe gangsters, wanksters.

That is the sickest burn I've ever heard. This girl is a camper 100% whether she knows it or not. I'm so pissed off I didn't think of it myself. That's just, beautiful, wanksters. That is precisely what they were. So what kind of shenanigans did Matt have the crew getting up to? Well, at first it was selling weed.

Matt had a connection, meaning one of his neighbors sold weed and had some extra lying around, so he got his minions selling dime bags at school. But that wasn't enough for Maddie. He had big dreams for his crew. crew. Next, he launched what I'm sure he considered a well-oiled Ocean's Eleven-style shoplifting operation. He and the crew would go to Vaughns or wherever. One would be the lookout. One would create a diversion by acting suspicious to draw the attention of the security cameras or whatever, and one would fill a shopping cart with beer and just stroll out the door, where a crew member

would have the car idling and ready to peel out. You can just hear the Mission Impossible theme in the background, can't you? Meanwhile, instead of Andy Garcia, it's a bored 17-year-old running the cash register, just popping her gum and scrolling on her phone. I'm sure, like, she side-eyed him and was like, just steal whatever you want. I'm making $8 an hour. Exactly. But as far as Matt and his boys were concerned, it was the friggin Wells Fargo heist every time. They'd take their loot to the drinking hill and feel like kings of the world. Jared liked to set fires out there, burning up the scrubby desert plants or whatever junk they came across. And it went on like that for a while, with Matt getting more and more wrapped up in his mafia movies

and his dreams of being Silverado High School's Cheeto Corleone. And then... Thank you. And then one fateful afternoon, Matt got rejected by a sophomore girl he had a thing for. And it seemed to touch something off in him. He ramped up his fantasies about turning the crew into a force to be reckoned with. He wanted to graduate from selling weed to selling meth, he said. He wanted them to get their hands on some guns.

Suddenly, he was obsessed with violence. Murder. God, it's so pathetic. One girl turns him down, and suddenly he's Iceman Kuklinski over here. Talked about killing all the time now. Seemed like he couldn't wait for his chance to fight somebody, take somebody out, and before long, all this weird rage focused itself on a specific target. His old buddy Jared.

Why? Well, ostensibly it was because he thought Jared was going to be the weak link, the one most likely to rat him out once they start. started doing serious crimes, the one least likely to be okay with the kind of hardcore shit Matt had in mind for the crew. I mean, Jared was rowdy, but he was basically a good kid. He wasn't into anything really bad. It wasn't his style. Plus, he wanted to be a Marine, and you know, you can't be a Marine with a record. Nope. Right? Not that kind of record anyway. But in reality, I suspect Matt was just so jealous of Jared he could barely stand it. For all his ambitions

of being the dawn of their friend group, Jared was kind of the center, the one way. with all the flash and charisma. If Jared decided to try to turn Plato and Viking and the rest off of Matt and his criminal ambitions, he might actually succeed in doing it. And then what would Matt have going for him? Lubkiss. He'd just be a dork in $300 shoes. And Matt's fragile self-image could not take that.

So Jared had to go. He started working on his crew, getting in their heads about how the minute Jared got popped for selling weed or stealing beer or setting one of his little fires, he'd roll over on the rest of them and they'd all go down. They couldn't move forward with the criminal enterprise with Jared around. The first one he recruited for the murder mission was Viking, Shane Myers. They decided to try putting a few bottles of Vizine in Jared's beer that night at the Drinking Hill.

Matt had heard it could kill you, which it can, by the way, if you use enough of it. People used to talk all the time about putting a bottle of Vizine in somebody's drink as a prank to, like, give them explosive diarrhea, and there have actually been a few cases where somebody tried that and ended up. up killing the person. So really dangerous stuff because you never know how somebody's body is going to handle that. Exactly. So they tried this on Jared and it did make him really sick. He had to stay home from school the next day with nausea and vomiting. His mom just thought he had a really nasty bug. Who knows how it could have affected somebody less enormous and strong as Jared. It could have worked. When the vizine didn't work, Matt tried a new poison. He took chewing tobacco and

liquefied it in hopes that the nicotine would kill him. Again, he put the noxious stuff in Jared's drink that night on the hill. But once again, it didn't work. It was at this point that Skinhead Shane threw his hat in the ring, or his hood. Same difference. Skinhead was by far the biggest badass in the crew. He carried around a taser and was always zapping people, just for fun, including himself. Yeah, and I'm sure his history with the International House of Racist Pancakes or whatever the hell it was, only added to his cachet. Ihorpe. Ihorpe.

That's way funnier than KKK. It really is. Makes it easier to laugh at them, racist pricks. Skinhead was always up for a little of the old ultraviolence. So when he got wind that Matt wanted to whack Jared, he was all for it. He started bringing it up all the time, like, are we doing this or not? What's taken so long? And this is bananas.

Bananas. According to that salon article, one day they were all sitting around the cafeteria at school, and Skinhead started joking around about how they should make a Christmas card. They'd go out to the desert, dig a hole, just like in casino. They'd strip him down to his underwear and throw him in the hole covered in ketchup. Matt could pose by the hole holding a gun. The card would say, welcome to Las Vegas. Charming.

Yeah, this is like one of those photo ops at amusement. parks where you dress up like in western clothes, except worse. You're hard motherfuckers, but you think ketchup looks like blood? For God's sake. Not long after that, Matt told the crew, well, everybody except Jared, obviously, it was time to go dig a hole. So they loaded up some beers, found a good spot way out in the desert, and got to work digging.

They ended up with a big grave-shaped hole, eight feet long and six feet deep. Matt said you had to dig the hole ahead of time, so you didn't have to stick around the crime scene any longer than necessary. He'd learned that from the movies. Allegedly, both Matt and Skinhead got cold feet and wanted to call the whole thing off in the days before the murder. But neither of them had the nerve to say it. I don't know if I'd buy that or not, but that's what they told Vanessa Gregoriatus. It's possible. I mean, they were kids and murder's a big thing, but what matters is they didn't call it off. They invited Jared to go off-roading with them.

the desert, and they knew he wouldn't be coming home again. Jared snuck out of his house to meet them around midnight, and he noticed right away that the vibe was off. Everybody was uncharacteristically quiet. Jared was like, what? What's wrong with everybody? Poor kid. Oh, God. They drove him to the lakebed near where they thought their pre-dug hole was. They drank for a couple of hours, probably screwing up their courage, and then somebody asked Jared to get a fire going. And while he was crouched down, lighting the fire, Matt gave the signal. First, Skinhead tased him in the back of the neck because he'd heard it could stop your heart if you hit it there.

But it didn't. It didn't even knock him out. All it did was piss him off. Jared came up off the ground like, what the fuck did you do that for? So Jared and Skinhead got into a scuffle, tussling around on the dry desert ground, and while they were down there fighting, Matt turned Viking. Hit him. Viking picked up a tire iron, came up behind Jared and hit him.

But again, Jared was a big guy. It was going to take a hell of a lot to take him down, and now he was furious, still not quite comprehending what was really going on, just really mad. He kept saying, What the hell are you doing? And for a minute, it seemed like the plan was going to get called off. Skinhead walked over to Matt and said, didn't work, let's not do it. But Matt was all in at this point. No way. They'd come too far. They had to see it through. And Jared was starting to realize that too. something in the air had changed, I suspect, and it must have hit him like a bucket of ice water. He looked at his friends, one after the other, and he said,

I know what you guys are doing. I know what you're going to do, and if you take me home right now, you won't get in any trouble. Matt signaled for Plato to get the shotgun out of the car. As always, Plato did as he was told and handed the gun to Matt, who promptly shot Jared in the stomach. Then in the head. afterward viking stood over Jared's body and said you done fucked up you done fucked up real good fuck off nerd did you rehearse that in the mirror ugh this big gregarious kid whose only crime had been making matt baker jealous what a waste

for all their tough guy bravado not all members of the crew handled it particularly well plato just screamed and screamed and big guy's skinhead leapt into the car as if for a second there he was going to just peel out and leave it everybody else in the dust. Matt was more keyed up and ragey than they'd ever seen him. He ordered them to get their shit together and strip Jared's body. As they took off his underwear, Matt said, Guess he didn't have a reason to brag after all. Yeah, fuck you, you pitiful little twat. As if it hadn't been awful enough already,

Matt then picked up a landscaping mall and cut out most of Jared's teeth, hoping it would make his body unidentifiable if it was discovered. See, for that to work, you have to get all of them, dumbass. It was all going off without a hitch by now, except that Tiny Soprano and his little band of misfit toys couldn't find their pre-dug grave. Where's the fucking hole? Matt screamed. They didn't know. It was dark. So they had to dig another one. Drunk. In the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, they did a shitty job. And afterwards, Skinhead Shane went over to Matt's house and puked his guts out for a while.

Real tough guy, right? Matt was squirrely after the murder. They didn't talk about it at school, but Matt did. did tell a close friend, a dude named Stephen Stringfield. Stringfield helped him get rid of his bloody clothes from the night of the murder. Real smart, man. But Matt told the crew to keep their mouths shut if the cops came sniffing around. When his mom sent him to his uncle's house in California for a while for wrecking her car, he came back later with some meth, some cash, and a handgun.

He told shithead Shane that he'd made some contacts in the biker gang The Devil's Disciples, and they would fuck skinhead up bad if he snitched, which, You're talking to a literal skinhead, man. He was already part of a violent gang. But if he snitched, Matt said, quoting from the salon article here, the devil's disciples were going to come up behind him one day on four motorcycles with sought off shotguns and blow out all the wheels of his pickup truck.

They'd march skinhead to the roadside and snuff him out right there. Which just seems kind of inefficient to me for a gang hit, you know? You're going to make a big splashy scene with a car chase and shooting out the tires, and then you're just going to take. take him out execution style by the side of the road? I don't know, man. I mean, I'm not trying to backseat drive y'all or anything, but anyway. Backseat assassinate. Also, why would they care about a murder you committed before you were associated with them? Whatever. Whatever. It doesn't matter. So the morning after the murder, Jared's mom, Patricia, went to wake him up for school, but his

room was empty and his bed was still made. She'd assumed he'd just gone to school to hit the wait room. that a lot. For all his extracurricular shenanigans, he was still dead serious about his strength training. But when he didn't come home after school, Patricia started to worry. She called around, but nobody had seen him. She went to the police station

and filed a missing person's report. And as they so often do in these cases, the police assumed Jared had run away or was staying with some friends. Patricia wasn't convinced. She said, his birthday is next week. He wouldn't want to miss that.

But partly because she trusted the cops, and partly because the alternative explanation was way too scary, Patricia seemed to convince herself that they were right. Maybe Jared had run away. He'd had a rough couple of years since they moved to Vegas. Maybe he was in Texas with old friends or even visiting one of his military friends in Japan. He'd talked about doing that. Anything would be better than the reality. Yeah.

But Patricia didn't really believe he'd run off. She had a bad feeling down to her bones. She was like many parents of missing teens and adults, she started to look for him herself. And soon, Jared's friends lent a hand. Aw, wasn't that nice of him? So nice. Matt Baker was one of the first to show up with the crew in tow. They came over every day after that.

They helped Patricia put up thousands of missing persons flyers with Jared's face on them. And they consoled her, hugged her, told her they were sure it was going to be all. all right. Ugh, little shit stains. Mm-hmm. When Jared's body was discovered, four months after he first went missing, Matt was one of the first to show up at Patricia's door, with his mom, by the way. Matt hugged Patricia.

His mom said, I want whoever did this to fry. Ugh, that's some dark irony right there. Sure was. Patricia was, of course, a train wreck, and she spilled out her grief and pain to her dead son's alleged best friend. Matt sat and listened, weirdly flat and emotionless. And then he just asked her one question. What was the condition of the body?

What did it look like when they found it? The body. God, that's creepy. Then he asked to borrow some CDs from Jared's room so he could make a mix tape for Jared's funeral. It was 2003. Mix tapes were still a thing. I miss mixtape

He left with several of Jared's CDs Real reverential Funeral type stuff like Incubis and Papa Roach But at the funeral a couple days later There was no mixtape So basically he just wanted to steal a couple of Jared's CDs Right Oh Jesus Murphy Brown

This kid is the worst Really going for the Oscar Matt went up to Jared's grandmother at the funeral and hugged her He said Grandma, you know Jared always loved you best do best. He was probably picturing himself like Don Cole or Leon at the funeral of one of his business associates. Patricia told the detectives that Jared hadn't had any enemies that she knew of, but something had occurred to her, something she thought might be related. She told them about the

day, about a month before he went missing, that Jared had gotten violently ill and had to miss school. In fact, it was so unusual that Patricia had marked it on the calendar. Our instincts try to get our attention sometimes, campers. Obviously, Patricia had no way of knowing at the time that Jared's friends had just tried to kill him with Vizine, but I wonder if the reason she noted it on the calendar is because a tiny little alarm bell was going off in the depths of her subconscious. When she told the police about it, they immediately realized that this could have been a prior murder attempt. Somebody had had it in for Jared Whaley. So they pulled Matt Baker in for an interview. Who could be a better source of info than Jared's best bud?

All they really wanted from Matt at this point was to get an idea of what Jared's school and social life was like, if he had any feuds going with any other kids, if he was into anything dangerous, that kind of stuff. But of course, Matt being Matt, he showed up for his interview in full Robert De Niro form. The detectives were a little taken aback, as I'm sure anybody would be by the spectacle of Matt in his black suit and slicked back hair. All he was missing was the violin case with the gatling gun inside. Detective Lomprey later said he seemed like an odd duck, but not menacing. On the contrary, Matt seemed eager to help. He said Jared had made plenty of enemies at Silverado High.

He had a mouth on him and a bad attitude. And because Jared could probably give the Incredible Hulk a run for his money, other big weightlifter dudes saw him as a rival. The picture he painted was of a guy who could have easily flapped his mouth at the wrong person and ended up paying with his life. Matt was cool and unflappable during that interview, But behind the scenes, he was flapping like a drunk seagull. He googled, evidence needed to convict for murder.

He started smoking meth like it was his job. Just what you need when you're already paranoid you're going to get caught for murder. He started telling the crew that they might need to clean house a little, just to make sure nobody said anything that could lead the cops back to them. There were a few people he was worried about, like Jared's good friend Matt Bada, who knew some of what had been going on with the grocery store thefts and whatnot. He told Skinhead he should post up on the roof of a building

near the guy's house and shoot him. It might make the cops think Jared and Bada's murders were drug-related. But Pinnhead Shane had had enough at this point. That was going to be a hard note from him. So Matt started researching how to set off a propane explosion outside Bada's house. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe you don't do your best thinking when you're in the middle of a meth binge. Just a thought.

Just a thought. We're not your mom. We're just saying. Not your moms. Anyway, the detectives didn't know about any of that yet. Right, and after their first interview with Matt, they moved on to the rest of the crew, heading over to Plato and Viking's house to question them. Viking was, in the words of one detective, aloof.

He said he didn't know nothing about nothing, and that was about all they got out of him at first. So they tried Plato, who struck them accurately, I'm sure, as a little brother type, the type who might actually be willing to help if they played him right. Plato said he didn't know anything either, but then, as the detectives were getting ready to leave, they glanced into the Myers' open garage and spotted something. A gun case with shotguns inside. So they asked Plato, hey, could we take a look inside that gun case?

And with that, Tweedledee and Tweedledork immediately started digging their own graves. Viking was like, yeah, I know you're probably thinking it was us because, like, I heard he was shot with a 20 gauge, and we just happened to have a 20 gauge in there. Oh, my God. Dude, shut off. Right? But of course, he pinky swore. He and Plato had nothing to do with this. 20 gauge or no 20 gauge. The detectives who must have felt like they'd just been handed a winning powerball ticket were like, hold up. Hang on. We didn't tell anybody there was a shotgun gun involved. And Viking was like, oh, sure you did. You told Patricia and she probably told us. Yeah, she definitely told us. And the detectives were like, no, we definitely fucking did not tell

Patricia or anybody else. So how the hell do you know? Whoops. Now, campers, what makes this extra delicious? Is that shotguns can't even be matched for. forensically. Nope. So if yaking would have just kept his fucking mouth shut, they probably would have been fine. Oh, man. When they opened the gun safe, it was immediately obvious that one of the shotguns had been used a lot more recently than the others.

They all had a thick layer of dust on them except one. Not good, boys. Not good. Got to clean all those guns after you commit a murder. you turnips. Meanwhile, Stephen Stringfield, the champ who helped Matt dispose of his bloody clothes after the murder, was next on the cop's list of Jared's friends to talk to. Now, this guy was barely involved, really.

All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. But as we've seen so many times before, teenagers are apparently incapable of this. Ironically, Stephen was the one person who wasn't on top. Matt's list of possible stoolies to whack. But when the police got him into an interview room and started ramping up the pressure, Stephen broke like a piece of rotted wood. He was so scared. He spilled everything he knew. Plus, some stuff that didn't even happen. Like, he told them he'd acted as a lookout for the crew, which he didn't. Yeah, this is why torture doesn't work campers, because when people are terrified, they might tell you bits of the truth, but they'll often throw in some total

bullshit, too, just because they think it's what you want to hear. Mm-hmm. Big, quiet, Gerald Groot Wilkes spilled his guts next. Then Plato. He said, Matt just tells everybody what they're going to do and when they're going to do it. Matt's in charge of the crew. He also spilled about the grocery store heists and everybody's role in them. He just couldn't tell them enough, apparently.

Good old Plato, living up to his name. And the next day, it was time. for the old habeas grabbis. They got Viking and Play-Dow at a bus stop. Pinhead Shane was arrested while he was at home watching news coverage of Viking and Plato's arrests.

And Matt. Oh, Matt. Non-Corleone was hiding in his room when the SWAT team got there. Of course he was. Probably pilled in his britches, too, just like Mark Twitchell. Ruin those fancy Italian shoes. We can only hope. And this is

delightful. When Matt got to jail, he used his phone call to ring up that sophomore girl who rejected him and let her know he was innocent. I swear to God, we're not making this up. God, that poor girl, can you imagine? She must have been like, what? What are you doing calling me? Right? Call your lawyer. What the hell? When you call from jail, you get like a pre, like, a pre-recording that's like, you're receiving a call from so. Do you accept the charges? She probably just said yes out of like sheer terror or possibly just curiosity. I don't know, but bless her heart. Oh my God. So now they had the whole sad, sack crew in custody, all charged with murder, except for a Stephen Stringfield who ended up getting a six-month sentence

for helping Matt after the fact. As for the rest, they all pled guilty to murder. Cody, Plato, Corleone Myers, who hadn't actually struck any. of the blows on the night of the murder got five years for conspiracy. His brother, Shane the Viking, got 25 to life. Skinhead Shane got 20 to life. And as for Matt, his career as a crime boss was cut short before it even really began. He was sentenced to 35 years to life in prison. Later, he told Salon reporter Vanessa Gregoriatis that his saddest memory was the day he got arrested. He said it, quote, marked the end of my childhood. Well, first of all, you were 18 at the so your days of playing G.I. Joe's and capture the flag were already behind you.

But also, seriously, your saddest memory is being held to account for the brutal, premeditated murder of your alleged best friend. Not, you know, the murder itself. That's lovely. You're a dumpster fire. And we'll leave you with this, Camper's. During the investigation, the detectives discovered that Matt had been plotting to kill Jared's mom and grandmother. Because they had the audacity to want justice for Jared, I guess, because he was worried they might be suspicious of him and share those suspicions with police? I don't know, but that's messed up. Also on the hit list was Jared's friend Nicole, the absolute queen who called Matt and his crew wanksters at the start of the story. So I'm very glad she got the last laugh on them. Me too. And apparently, Matt hates prison,

like a lot. And I wanted to be sure to tell you that because I knew how much you'd like knowing it. Mm-hmm. So just think with me about that for a minute, won't you? How much Matt hates prison. Ah, just like hugging a pile full of puppies. 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 grateful shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Fallon, Ursula, awesome name, Jamie, Amy, Carolyn, and Sidon. Sydney. We appreciate you all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're

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