True Crime Campfire - When Nerds Attack - Doomsday: The Murder of Lizzi Marriott

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

If there’s one group of folks we identify with here at True Crime Campfire, it’s nerds. Between Katie and me, we cover about six or seven different subspecies of nerd over here, from Dungeons and Dragons nerd to anime nerd. True crime nerd goes without saying. And as we’ve said before, most of the time our people are harmless, peaceful types. Just give us a special edition Blu-Ray box set of the Lord of the Rings and a pantry full of snacks, and we’ll cause nobody any trouble. But sometimes, for a certain type of personality, a preoccupation with fantasy can be…not such a good thing. Pair that with narcissism and a lack of empathy for other humans, and you’ve got a recipe for some real megalomaniac wackiness. The kind that’s so convinced of its capital-D Destiny that it starts to think it’s entitled to take whatever it wants. No matter what kind of damage it does to anybody else. Join us for the story of Seth Mazzaglia and Kat McDonough, a mismatched pair of theatre geeks who believed they shared a cosmic destiny, but whose selfish desires ended in the death of an innocent young woman.Sources:Dark Heart: A True Story of Sex, Manipulation, and Murder by Kevin Flynn and Rebecca LavoieCBS' 48 Hours, episode "Dangerous Games"https://www.fosters.com/story/news/crime/2016/09/21/murder-victim-lizzi-marriotts-sexual-privacy-case-hits-supreme-court/25404495007/Trial footageFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. If there's one group of folks we identify with here at true crime campfire, it's nerds. Between Katie and me, we cover about six or seven different subspecies of nerd over here from Dungeons and Dragons nerd to anime nerd. True

crime nerd goes without saying. And as we've said before, most of the time our people are harmless, peaceful types. Just give us a special edition Blu-ray box set of the Lord of the Rings and a pantry full of snacks and will cause nobody any trouble. But sometimes, for a certain type of personality, a

preoccupation with fantasy can be not such a good thing. Pair that with narcissism and a lack of empathy for other humans and you've got a recipe for some real megalomaniac wax the kind that's so convinced of its capital D destiny that it starts to think it's entitled to take whatever it wants, no matter what kind of damage it does to anybody else. This is your latest when nerds attack. Doomsday, the murder of Lizzie Marriott.

So, campers, for this one, we're in Chester, New Hampshire, October 11, 2012. The friends and family around UNH sophomore Lizzie Marriott were really starting to worry. Nobody had seen or heard from Lizzie since two nights before, October 9th, when she didn't come home to her aunt and uncle's house. She was living with them while studying marine biology at UNH, and while it wasn't like they gave her a curfew or anything, I mean, she was a legal adult, and they didn't want her to feel like she had to keep them informed of her every move, but she never went this long without calling. She hadn't been in touch with her girlfriend, Brittany, either. And she'd missed lunch with her work buddy Nate the day before.

No show, no call, no text. Missed class and her shift at Target that day, too. And nobody had been able to reach her by phone. All the calls just went right to voicemail. By the morning of the 11th, people were starting to touch base with each other and realized nobody had heard a peep out of Lizzie for like 36 hours. Not her aunt and uncle, not her parents, or her girlfriend back in Portsmouth, not her boss, not Nate, not even Facebook, and everybody was pretty freaked out.

This wasn't like Lizzie at all. She was deeply connected to the people in her life, and she was great about calling back. By the time Lizzie's parents, Bob and Melissa, touched base with her aunt and uncle, everybody was finding it hard to hold back panic. Bob and Melissa jumped in the car and headed for Chester, about an hour and a half away. It was time to call the police. Lizzie's aunt and uncle knew that Lizzie had planned to hang out with a friend the night she went incommunicato. According to Lizzie's girlfriend Brittany, the friend's name was Kat McDonough, and she was a former

co-worker from Target. So Lizzie's parents gave that info to the Chester PD, along with everything else they felt they should know. A bolo went out on Lizzie's car, a missing person's flyer went up, and the people who loved Lizzie Marriott hunkered down and tried their best to bear up under this awful new thing they were living through. Lizzie was the brightest light in a lot of people's lives, joyful and curious and funny and fearless. She loved people and animals and learning everything she could about the ocean.

She was the type of girl who stops her car on the side of the road to rescue turtles, and people just adored her. They couldn't imagine what their lives would be like without her. The loved ones of missing people often say that the worst part is the not knowing, not knowing where they are, whether they're hungry or cold or scared or in pain, and the idea that they might never find out is just crushing. A weight nobody should ever have to bear. But the police did have a lead to check out. Cat McDonough, the friend Lizzie had been scheduled to hang out with on the last night anybody saw her. It was a good place to start, so that's where they started.

They quickly determined that Kat lived in a studio apartment with her boyfriend, Seth Mazzalia. It didn't take Officer Nicholas McClellan long to find an address for Seth's place and a phone number. Seth picked up the phone right away. He said Lizzie hadn't been at his place on Tuesday. He'd been home until around nine and then he decided to go for a phone. run. When he got back at 10, nobody was home. His girlfriend, Kat, wasn't due there until midnight. Seth seemed cooperative enough on the phone, but there was something, even in that very first conversation, that didn't feel right to the officer. Dude just seemed off, nervous. Seth had promised

to have Kat McDonough call Officer McClellan as soon as she could, and about half an hour later, his phone rang. Oh yeah, Kat told him. She knew Lucy Maria. They used to work together at Target, and Lizzie was supposed to come over to Kat and Seth's place on Tuesday night. We were going to walk to the cemetery and go ghost hunting, Kat said. Take pictures of ghosts, you know. I wanted to prove to her that ghosts are real, Kat said. Alrighty? Photograph some or whatever.

But Kat said Lizzie never showed. She waited for her for a while, then gave up and went to the cemetery by herself for a fun solo evening of ghost photography. But there was something that struck McClellan about that story. Kat never mentioned calling Lizzie to check on her. Ask where she was and why she hadn't shown up for their cemetery hangout. If you had plans with a friend and they didn't show, wouldn't you call or text? Something didn't feel right about Kat McDonough and Seth Mazzalia, and the investigators were determined to find out why that was.

But let's put a pin in that for a minute and get some background. Seth and Kat seemed like a little bit of an odd couple. A 29-year-old man and an 18-year-old girl. So who are these two and how'd they get together? To get into all that, we have to go back a little more than a year to the spring of 2011. 17-year-old Kat was just wrapping up her junior year in high school. She was known around town as a sweet girl into video games and nerd stuff like superhero movies and Dungeons and Dragons and Renaissance fairs and Harry Potter.

Kat was the kind of kid who tended to escape into her hobbies and fandoms when things weren't going right, and things weren't going right for her at the time. Specifically, she was budding heads with her dad. They didn't see eye to eye about anything, and they were always sniping at each other. Stressful. Fortunately, though, Kat got along better with her mom, Denise. Denise was a staple in the local theater scene, both as an actress and a costume designer, and Kat wanted to be an actress, too.

So that summer, she auditioned for a community theater play called Last Rights, and she got apart. It was there that she met Seth Mazzalia. Well, initially, she met a guy who introduced himself as a person. Lex because that was Seth's stage name. Did any of the other actors in the local theater scene have stage names? No. But Seth did. And that should tell you about half of what you need to know about him right there. He's annoying, stupid, and unimaginative, which is like the three worst things you can be in my humble opinion. Lex was one of the actors in the show and he was

also the fight choreographer. He was a black belt and karate, he told her. He'd studied it since he was a kid because his dad owned a dojo. He even taught karate classes for kids. And I'm sorry, I'm stuck on the next thing. Okay, nerds, nerds, I know you want a nickname. I know. You have fantasies of someone calling you Nighthawk or something. And I don't know, slapping you on the back and like being all friendly or whatever.

But I promise you that nothing is worse or more cringe than giving a nickname to yourself. It has to come naturally and you will probably hate it. A teammate of mine in high school called me Kitty for two years, and I couldn't stand it. But guess what? It didn't matter. It stuck. Of course. I have a nickname for Whitney that she hates that I won't repeat.

And I can't stop calling her that. It's not bad. It's just she doesn't like it. And, okay, if you're warm up your Twitter fingers to explain to me that it's a stage name, I know. But I think I'm allowed to make fun of him because I'm 98% sure it was a reference to Lex Luthor, makes it about 700 times more cringe, okay? Yeah, and a stage name for a community theater actor. Like, really?

Like, oh, yeah, and this over here, this is Steed Ironheart. He's the second top guy at the county water department. And over there, that's Alexis von Noir. She works behind the counter over, piggly wiggly. Like, come on, get over yourself. And also, like, I hate to pay this guy a compliment without putting too fine a point on it. But Seth Mazzalia's a fine name. Like, it's not like, it's like, I don't know, I can't think of any of the other actors that have stage, stage names that are, like, awful.

But, like, it's a fine, it's a fine name. Shut up. Shut up, Lex. Lex had a certain air about him. He had kind of an intense look, dark hair and eyes. And he was always breaking out into karate moves as he talked, like practicing his fight choreography, which I can't stop. I can't stop laughing. I'm picturing, God bless his heart, a Star Wars kid.

Anytime Seth was talking, walking through his fucking fight choreography. Most people thought he was an odd duck, but Kat was fascinated. Did I mention that Seth slash Lex was 28 years old? Yeah. 28 and 17. Y'all see where this is going. Yeah, and look, we got to address something here, y'all, and this is not the first time this has come up. Remember the Rod Farrell episode, fake vampire chode who killed his friend's parents?

Well, the same thing happened with the reporting on that story that's happened with Seth Mazzalia. Namely, that a lot of the true crime shows on this case describe him as like charming and handsome and popular, like a star in the local theater scene. Basically, a men want to be him, when men want to be with him type. And I'm here to tell you, horseshit, okay? Because according to Kevin Flynn and Rebecca LaVoy, whose book Dark Heart is a meticulously researched account of this case. and, according to my own eyeballs and earballs, which I used to watch a bunch of his trial, this man could not be any more cringe if he made it his flipping career, okay? He's not some kind of smooth operator, I promise you.

Snapped killer couples is just lying about that. In fact, Seth struck people as socially awkward and full of himself. He had this arch, pretentious way of talking, like he thinks of himself as one of the characters in Game of Thrones or some shit, and he talked like that all the time, like when he was ordering subs at Jimmy Johns. well met good sir i would be delighted to have your establishment's finest ultimate porker and please can i procure a bag of chips and a soft drink at your leisure my good man like he works at medieval times or something so he was not the star of the theater scene okay he was

begrudgingly allowed to be part of it because of his fight choreography skills he was weird he didn't audition well and he gave a lot of people especially female people the ick I mean, I guess on paper he sounds kind of cool. I mean, there's the karate thing. And then he also had a theater degree, and he was getting trained as an EMT when he and Kat met, which is pretty cool, I guess. Seth worked hard to create a kind of mystique around himself.

Like, he was always talking about this terrible tragedy in his past, the love of his life, beautiful blonde Natasha, who he dated in college. They'd been walking together one night, he said, when a mugger came out of the shadows. When the mugger pointed a gun at Seth and pulled the trigger, Natasha, while I assume going no in slow motion, you know, like you always see in movies, threw herself in front of the bullet

and sacrificed herself to save him. She was shot in the chest and bled out in his arms right there in the street. Seth told everybody this story. But the thing was, if you were paying attention, you'd notice that he had about four or five different versions of it, and most people didn't believe a word of any of them. One acquaintance went to the trouble of searching news archives to see if there was any record of a Natasha

being shot to death during Seth's college years and surprise, surprise, bupkis. But the Natasha thing was an important part of Seth's origin story. It was the reason for a great capital D darkness within him, a darkness he allegedly worked hard to try and suppress. Ooh boy. Do you guys see what I mean, though? He's so fucking annoying and stupid and unimaginative. Like, that's the plot of like a million Law and Order episodes. God.

Yeah. and comic books. What Kat couldn't know, of course, was that Cess was all talk and no walk. He hadn't always been interested in acting. He'd originally wanted to be an electrical engineer, but he couldn't hack the coursework and ended up changing his major to theater.

Now he was a mostly out-of-work actor, teaching kids karate and picking up shifts as an EMT to make ends meet, living in a shitty studio apartment where the only decor was the odd Chotchke from Halloween Express and a bathroom that looked like it hadn't been clean since the 80s. He'd tried to become a cop

too, but none of the departments seemed to want him. But where most people thought of Seth as pretentious and weird, 17-year-old cat felt like she'd found a kind of kind of kindred spirit. Seth was into the same kind of nerd stuff she loved. He was part of a LARP group, live action roleplay for the non-nerds listening. It's like nerd football, a bunch of weirdos playing grab-ass in a field. Same difference. With swords, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He liked cosplay, just like Kat did. He was into paranormal stuff, and there was one other thing, the thing that really got Kat's attention. Seth confided in her that he felt

like he was inhabited by a whole group of spirit selves, psychic alter egos that each embodied a different part of his personality and gave him different powers. The main one was called dark heart. Then there was wild card. I know, I just cringed myself into a black hole too. Just shake it off. It's going to get worse. one the nameless one for god's sakes ruin black night scourge it's like what is this mortal combat calm down dark kaiser doomsday horror of all nightmares and i swear to god old evil brain that's my favorite one I'm sorry, I told myself I was going to laugh while you read those out, but I can't stop laughing. Because you possibly not.

I can just, it's just imagining this man looking into the eyes of his child bride and saying, I, hello, I, I am wild card, like so seriously. That's what's what's fucking me up. Dead serious about it. And I think you forgot my favorite because one of them was called Cyrus, which is just weird. We got dark heart, wild card, doomsday, and Cyrus? Cyrus. Is that his like deliverance personality?

I know. It's so strange. They all sound like super fun guys, right? A bunch of mushrooms hanging out. Our boy's just a big old teddy bear. The way he explained it to Kat was there were all these different spiritual planes, and that's where these alter egos came from. The whole thing was probably a past life-related thing somehow, though it's not really clear

exactly how. Some of the personas advised him or showed him glimpses of the future, while some would take him over and make him do bad things. Sort of a convenient devil made me do it. kind of thing, which you'll see later he liked to use to manipulate people. How? Well, it went something like this. These spirits, Dark Heart, Dark Heart especially, were pretty much in charge of Seth's life. Darkheart's job was to keep the darkness on a leash so he didn't get consumed by it and take everybody else out with him. Oh, and Dark Heart, by the way, was a dragon spirit somehow.

Makes sense, right? Yeah, that seems legit. So you can see where this is going. right? If he could convince Kat that all this bullshit was real, then he could talk her into doing whatever he said was necessary to keep the darkness at bay. Otherwise, like I said, bad things. The whole extra planar spirits thing appealed to Kat because for a while now, she'd been cultivating an alternate persona too. One, she could take out whenever she needed an extra boost of confidence. She called her alter ego Scarlet. Where Kat could be anxious and hesitant, Scarlet was fearless and bold. When she told Seth about Scarlett, he nodded knowingly and told her he'd already sensed that she had another spirit inside her. All right.

He told Cat a big bunch of hoo-ha about how Scarlett and Darkheart met each other in the spiritual plane, beyond the veil of separation between the normal world and the magical one. He told her about how she'd watched him and watched him and finally managed to tame him to become his dragon, right? Oh, Lord, Seth, honey, bless your heart. That's just the plot of Avatar. Her dances with wolves, if you prefer. It's the same movie, but Kat was probably too naive to realize that. She just ate it up with a spoon. Kat knew her parents would freak out if she tried openly dating its 28-year-old man. Well, yeah, I certainly hope so. But by opening night of last rights, she and Seth were already an item, sneaking around to spend time together.

Seth put on the full court press of Edward and Bella inspired romance. One night he messaged her, did you have any trouble sleeping last night? Kat said, no, why do you ask? Oh, no big deal, Seth said. He just felt Scarlet invading his astroplane last night. Dirty. Not exactly Edward sneaking in to watch Bella sleep, but not exactly not like that. And it blew Kat's mind, blew her mind.

Seth was a dream walker, he told her. He was really experienced at astral projection. When Kat told him about a dream she'd had a few years earlier where she was walking around Portsmouth setting fire to the buildings, Seth gasped and said he'd had exactly the same dream on the same night. What? Yeah, how they determine this, I have no idea, because it was supposed to have been years. years ago, but yeah, on the same night.

No, you know how it went. He was like, oh, was that Tuesday, October 20th? And she was like, yes, yes, it was. That's exactly what it is, because she was 17 and probably was like looking for that validation, you know? You know, because remember, this is a 17-year-old high school girl. To her, this was tantalizing stuff, a grown man who presented himself as an expert on the occult, telling her that her alter ego wasn't just some imaginary friend she'd made up to comfort herself. but a real spiritual being from the astral plane. Yeah, and it didn't take Seth long to realize he had cats full attention

and could use all this psychic stuff to pull her strings any way he wanted. He convinced her that the two of them had been destined to meet in this life, that they shared a special destiny. Seth told her that he'd read the tarot cards and asked them all about their future together, and what the card said matched what his spirits had told him, that in four years, so specific, they would take over the world and rule it together as Scarlet and Darkheart. Gee, wonder why Seth never got any callbacks

from those applications to the police department. I think maybe somebody failed the psych exam. Actually, I don't know, violent delusions of grandeur, I feel like he'd fit right in. Sound about right to me. So, okay, so all the fake psychic Rasmataz aside, here we have a 28-year-old man macking on a 17-year-old girl who's still in high school.

Still lives at home with mom and dad her brothers. Stop playing with Barbies about five minutes ago. Let me tell you something, y'all, especially any young women or girls listening, okay, because I've been there myself, and I'm sure Katie, you have too. When a much older man hits on you, tells you you've got an old soul and you seem mature for your age, let me promise you something, okay? He's full of shit. He doesn't want you because you're mature. He wants you because you're not yet. Okay, he wants you because you're too young to see what he's up to, because younger women are easier to manipulate. They just haven't had the life experience. I promise you this is true. And I know that might not be what you want to hear

because in that moment, those compliments can feel really good. Believe me, I know from experience. You love hearing that when you're a teenage girl that a grown man thinks you're mature for your age. And you very well might be mature for your age, okay? I mean, I was. But that ain't why he wants you, baby. He wants you because you're young, because you won't be as likely to see through him when he's trying to control you. And that is a 50-foot flaming red flag. Okay, so run fast, run far. And those older guys who hang around high school or college kids a lot, every single college has them. Every single high school has them run double far from those students. And like I want to mention like just because you're mature for your age doesn't mean you're an adult mentally

or emotionally. Like it just doesn't. You can be mature for your age and also not ready for adult relationships. You can be incredibly mature for your age. You still haven't had the life experience. You can learn a lot of things from books and a lot of things from intuition. But people you have to learn from experience. True. Okay? You have to learn people from experience. And that's just the truth of it. Yep. So run fast, run far. Yep. A cat had no way of knowing this, but Seth had a dark history with women. On 48 hours, one of Seth's ex-girlfriends, Catherine, would later talk about what it was like being in a relationship with him, and it wasn't pretty. Seth was controlling. He did everything he could to alienate her from her family and friends,

and he was verbally and sexually abusive. Seth was into kinky sex, but this wasn't BDSM the way it's supposed to be, a give and take of control and submission where both partners respect each other's desires and boundaries. Seth's version of BDSM was as toxic as he was. It had nothing to do with pleasing his partner or even showing the most basic respect for her.

It was all about what he wanted, and what he wanted was to hurt women, really hurt them. He convinced Catherine, that he had a foolproof method to ensure she wouldn't get pregnant. This foolproof method turned out to be, and content warning for some seriously messed up shit here, pouring scalding hot water on her genitals before sex.

Oh, it just, yeah. Um, sorry, I had to pause because I had to clench so hard that my voice wouldn't work. Because he's obviously one of those. But the condom doesn't feel. always good, whiners, which is just, you're such a pathetic little worm if you say that shit. Fuck off. Yeah, he also liked choking her.

Something Catherine made it very clear she was 100% not into, but of course he didn't give a toss and did it anyway. Sex with Seth got rougher and rougher, meaner and meaner, to the point where Catherine has permanent gynecological damage. And he got more and more controlling and abusive. When she finally got free of the relationship, Catherine felt in her gut that Seth was going to kill somebody someday. He seemed obsessed with the idea, and she didn't think he'd ever be sexually fulfilled until he did it. Of course, Cat McDonough knew nothing about any of this when she first

took up with Seth. But it didn't take him long to revert back to the playbook. This guy's picture should be in the dictionary next to the word manipulative. He started almost from day one trying to turn Cat against her parents, especially Denise, who was starting to catch on that something was happening between her high school-age daughter and this grown-ass man she knew from the theater. Seth wanted Kat to move in with him, and he took every opportunity to stir up static between her and her mom, who Seth had started calling Mother Dragon. And it worked. Shortly after her 18th birthday, Kat moved in with Seth.

She was still in high school, so her 29-year-old boyfriend would drop her off at school in the morning. Can you imagine? And once they were living together, Seth really amped up his efforts to take control of every aspect of Kat's life. She'd been planning to go to Florida after graduation. to try out for Disney, but she shouldn't do that, Seth told her. His spirits were saying she should take EMT training instead so they could work together. Well, I mean, if the spirits were saying it, it must be true, right? Oh, yeah.

He insisted Kat give him all her social media and computer passwords, too. And right away, he started educating Kat in the ways of BDSM. His version of it anyway, no safe words. He didn't even tell Kat there were safe words. Like, he didn't tell them they were a thing. She liked it for the most part, at first anyway. Even the rougher stuff, like choking and knife play, meaning actual cutting, and, of course, blood drinking. Yep, yet again, here we are with the blood drinking.

I swear to God, it's like murderous nerds and hepatitis. It's a love that dare not speak its name. One time, he texted cat, the thought of my blood in your body makes me hard. Oh, God, so gross. he liked for her to make little shallow cuts on his chest and lap it up. I'm so sorry that I had to tell you that. Hit pause if you need to go vomit up everything you've ever eaten. We'll wait.

Yeah. I think you guys probably saw this coming, but it's time for Katie's Kingshaming Corner. Oh, yeah. I saw the King Shaming Corner coming a mile off with this one. First of all, don't drink someone's blood. It's super bad for you. There's blood-borne pathogens. Like, just don't do it.

Really don't. It's nasty. It's gross. Second, if you're going to, don't. But if you're going to, don't do it in the least fucking sanitary way possible. These fucking freaks had all their juices all over each other. And then, you know, presumably used a dirty fucking knife. And then put their mouths, their filthy fucking petri dish mouths on open wounds.

don't do that please god no it's like these people haven't heard of like dr pepper you know like there's so many options we got phanta mr pib orange crush cheer wine cell ray you know even selry verners peach knee high swept snapple fago even fago okay despite its juggalo connotations anything literally anything else we have options people we're we're down with the clowns Whitney Don't say, don't say, despite the, despite the juggle. We're down with the clouds. We love them. They provide us endless entertainment for the low, low price of no dollars.

So thank you. Fucking magnets. How do they work? Oh, my God. It's a jam for sure. Kat was into the kinky stuff, though she later said a lot of it was just a desire to please Seth, who by now was pretty much controlling every facet of her life. She was even okay with it when Seth started floating the possibility of a threesome.

He made it clear to Kat that she would be his queen. Any other woman they brought into it would just be minions, as he put it. Just there to help him satisfy his animal urges or whatever. Oh, God, this man. Cat was by, so she was kind of intrigued. She and Seth both posted profiles on dating sites like FetLife. And of course, their usernames were. as insufferable as you'd expect.

Cat was rogue temptress. And Seth was Dark Kaiser. Uh-huh. I think Dark Heart was probably already taken if it was on Fetlight. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, for sure. You can't swing a dead cat on Fetlight without hitting a Dark Heart. Death Heart 1 through 100.

And our dear Darkheart described a himself in his profile as, quote, in a word, enigmatic. Vegimatic, more like. Yeah, I don't think you can call yourself enigmatic, by the way. It's the same thing as giving yourself a nickname. Yeah, that's not for you to decide. You're not in it, you're not enigmatic to yourself either. You know, like you understand yourself.

It's other people that describe you. Oh, okay, I can't, I can't get into, I can't get into my English, English degree right now. I can't. It's like how I can, it's like how something. can't be sort of unique, right? It's either unique or it's not. You can't be a little bit pregnant, you know what I mean? It's, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, surprise, surprise, Seth didn't find any takers online. He wasn't giving up on the idea, though.

In fact, he got more and more obsessed. He'd always been obsessive about sex. Oh, yeah. He had this friend named Roberta Gerkin, a woman his own age, amazingly enough, who fancied herself a psychic. She read Seth's tarot cards a lot, and they talked a lot about all his BS alter egos, Dark Heart and Wildcard and Cyrus and the whole squad. Anyway, he was always calling her up all urgent about psychic storms plaguing him.

Psychic sprinkles, more like. Seemed like some psychic baddie or other was always after the poor guy because it couldn't just be that he was a creepy asshole, spent way too much time fantasizing about murder and mayhem, right? No. It was the darkness threatening to take him over. The Big D. Seth confided in Roberta and in Cat McDonough that the best way to keep the darkness in his cage was to have, you know, sexual release.

Please never say that yet. Now, if that ain't a scam and a half right there, that's a new one on me. One day he actually said to Roberta during one of their tarot readings, which I'm pretty sure this ain't supposed to happen in a tarot reading, okay? He said, look, you got to give me a blowjob or the... the darkness is going to come out. And Roberta bless her heart, bought this bullshit, did it. She just hit her knees right there as a tarot table.

She, you know, serviced his Gurkin. Thereby averting disaster for another day, I guess. Roberta Gerkin, the hero Gotham deserves. He did this all the time to Cat, too, by the way. Okay. Again, I do not want to compliment the guys, so do not take this as a compliment anyone. I have to say that it's slightly more creative than

but blue balls hurt babe like it's it's not that much more creative because it's just not true but but it is a little bit this man is the Voltron of every shitty boyfriend anyone has ever had like just all the worst bits rolled into one greasy little theater gig

Voltron of all the shitty boyfriends that's a terrifying image right there Jesus I imagine I imagine all my exes like Now, when Kat had moved in with Seth, she told him right from the get-go that she'd committed to be a counselor at a theater camp for a few weeks in the summer of 2012, but when the time actually rolled around for her to pack up and leave, Seth was increasingly grumpy about it. He tried his damned us to talk her out of going, just like he'd talked her out of trying out for Disney. But Kat had a tiny little spark of rebellion left in her.

Her mom had been coming to Target to talk to her every chance she got, beg her to move back home, and it had gotten to her a little bit. Some of Kat's diary entries from around this time definitely suggests that she was having some doubts about her relationship with Seth. I mean, she was still ass over tea kettle about him, but she was starting to chafe a little at how much control he had over her life. And how brutal the sex was getting. So uncharacteristically, she stood her ground about the summer camp. She really wanted to go.

So Seth made a deal with her. If she could find him a sexual surrogate, a minion to service him while she was gone, then he'd let her go to camp. I hate this guy, y'all. I hate him so much. So Cat tried. She posted all over the bondage sites

trying to lure in a partner for Dark Heart. Finally, she got a bite, a lady from one of the kink sites who agreed sight unseen to meet up with Seth at the apartment a day or two after Kat left. So begrudgingly, Seth took her to the bus station

and saw her off. And as he was saying goodbye to her, he said, and I quote, Until the tides bring you back to me. God dang This man This man has fedora written all over him Like he might not actually wear a fedora

But it's there nonetheless Okay the fedora is in his soul This man has definitely unironically worn a fedora He absolutely has He might even have said Malady at some point Yeah and he has Renfest written all over him too But not that that's necessarily a bad thing But no.

Anywho, but this hookup that Kat had supposedly arranged for him didn't work out. And I kind of suspect that this lady never existed in the first place and that Kat just lied so she'd go to summer camp and if so guff of her. And that, coupled with the fact that Kat wasn't allowed to use her cell phone at camp and was barely able to keep in touch with him while she was gone over the next few weeks, just infuriated Seth. He got more and more like ragey and worked up every day she was gone. He told his friend Roberta Gerkin that if Kat didn't stop her. communicating with him more often, somebody was going to die. Yikes. And toward the end of her time at the camp, he sent Kat a message that chilled her to the bone.

She'd been a bad slave, Seth wrote, and when she got home, he was going to punish her severely for failing to give him what she'd promised. He outlined a whole list of violent sex acts ten times worse than anything he'd ever done before. Some stuff he knew she was very much not into. Made Cat feel sick to her stomach. And it didn't stop there. He was also going to make her, quote,

choose a friend. I may do anything I wish with her while you watch and assist. He ended the message, I think it would be fitting if the first thing you saw me do when you got back is pleasure one of your friends until they died of orgasms. And then, only then, turn my brutal attention back to you. Romance, Camper's. I have been ruminating on what TCC cartoon punishment this man deserves.

And I was initially deciding whether to throw him in the wood chipper or down a flight of stairs or maybe even fling him into the sun. But I think what I'm actually going to do is tie him to some train tracks dick first and rub my hands together menacingly while a train whistle gets louder and louder. Okay, hear me out. Kick him down a flight of stairs into the wood chipper. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. How about that? I like it.

Because this, oh, this sick fuck. This sick fuck. And it's so much worse. Like, you don't even know how much. stuff we've had to leave out. Like it, the book goes in, I don't know how they got all this information. The authors must have had a lot of conversations with Kat is what I can imagine, but they, they had just excruciating, like more detail than you ever wanted about their sex life. And some of it is just truly disturbing. It's, it's gnarly. And when Kat got back from

camp, Seth didn't waste any time. The sex was rough, rough, rough, painful rough. And then with Cat humiliated and in pain, he demanded she make good on the second part of the punishment. Playtime was over. She owed him a friend of hers to play with. If she didn't make it happen, he said, then the doomsday spirit would come out. They'd both be in trouble. Kat had always been eager to please Seth, but now she was starting to fear him a little bit, too. So she tried her darnest, working her way through a bunch of rapport, unsuspecting friends. Some of them just gave her a flat, hell no. A couple others came over to Seth's place to watch movies, watch movies,

and ended up getting sucked into a little bit of something when Seth and Kat just started doing it right in front of them. But in every case, Seth was disappointed. Aw, poor puppy. Because hilariously, the women who did join in wanted nothing to do with him. They just put all their attention on Kat, which is how these things tend to go a lot of the time, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Seth was determined to find his unicorn, though. He wasn't going to take no for an answer, and Kat knew it. And then she started getting to know a new co-worker at the Target where she worked. A fun, pretty adventurous marine biology student at UNH, who was open about her bisexuality and seemed to like a lot of the same nerd stuff Kat did, like Harry Potter and D&D. Her name, of course, was Lizzie Marriott. Kat arranged for the two of them to meet one afternoon when Seth came to pick her up at Target. and he quickly focused in on her as the one.

Lizzie liked Kat, so she was happy when Kat invited her to come over to her and Seth's place on October 9th. They could watch a movie, Kat said, maybe play some D&D or video games. Lizzie was still pretty new to the area, so she was happy to make a couple new friends. She said she'd be over after class. And by the way, we want to make this clear. As far as Lizzie knew, she was going over there to watch movies and play D&D or something. Kat didn't say anything about sex.

On her way over to Seth and Kat's apartment, Lizzie texted playfully back and forth with her girlfriend back in Portsmouth. You're so cute, she told her. It was the last text Lizzie would ever send. Two days later, her family and friends would be in full panic mode, and the Chester PD would begin investigating her disappearance. So, like we told you earlier, the investigators were on Seth and Kat pretty much from day one. They just had the stank of guilt all over them. And it didn't take them long to take them to talk Seth into coming in for a chat. In the interview room, it didn't take long for Seth to start cracking. I feel like something might have happened at my apartment when I wasn't there, he said. And I'm afraid Cat might be involved. I know. I know, y'all. Take a moment to recover. I know. We all

thought their love would last forever. And now, here's our boy, throwing Cat under the bus. He wouldn't say what he thought happened, of course. He was nice and vague about everything except the fact that he wasn't there and didn't do it, whatever it may turn out to be. There's plenty of room under the bus, though, so at some point Seth decided to throw a couple friends under there too. Seth's suspicion, he told the detectives, was that cat and a kinky couple they'd recently befriended were all together at the apartment with Lizzie,

and something, TM, happened, something bad. but he was reluctant to give any more detail than that, he said. He could bear the thought of getting his beloved friends in trouble. Uh-huh. For all his black belt wannabe cop fight choreography, psychic power bravado, though, Seth was crumpling under pressure like a tin can under a bus wheel. The investigators didn't buy his bullshit for a hot second. They'd done a little research on Seth and Kat,

and they had a theory that this was some kind of sex game gone wrong, and they sensed that Seth was ended up to his eyebrows. Cat, by the way, once saying shit. She was just lawyer and clammed up. Much smarter than her boyfriend. But over the course of the next few hours, Seth just kept on cracking. His story went from, I wasn't there. I was on a run.

To, okay, I was on a run, but I think Kat and our two friends might have done something bad to Lizzie. To, okay, I think I was there, but I don't know what happened because I blacked out. To, okay, okay, it was just me, Kat, and Lizzie. We were having sex, and I was using a soft roe. rope to choke her, which she liked, but I guess I must have pulled too hard and she started having a seizure. And we put her body in the Piscataqua River. They dumped her car near U and H, she said, and disposed of her clothes and other stuff in various dumpsters around town. Sergeant Joe Ebert put Seth under arrest. Soon, investigators found some of Lizzie's clothes on the rocks near where

Seth said they dumped her body, along with a few strands of blonde hair. In the trash outside Sess apartment, they found a pair of men's leather gloves, and some of what eventually turned out to be Sess underpants. Forensics would later identify Lizzie's DNA on the inside. Kat was arrested for her part in helping dispose of the body, and for interfering with the investigation. The book gets into way more detail about that if you want it, and she was released on bail. It took her a while before she finally gave up the truth about what happened. At first, she spun a big web of bull-ish about how she was the one who killed Lizzie by accident, by sitting on her face during sex.

It was silly nonsense, designed to try and get Seth out of trouble. But finally, after her attorney scored her a promise of immunity from prosecution on the murder charge, she finally told investigators what really happened, and it was a story that actually did fit the evidence they'd discovered. Seth had intended to try and lure Lizzie into a three-way from the minute she got there, of course. So he and Kat had suggested a fun game of strip poker, and Lizzie agreed. I mean, we all played that in college, right?

So a few clothes came off, a few pieces of jewelry and whatnot, and then Seth and Kat tried something that had worked for them a few times before. They just started making out in front of Lizzie, hoping she'd get turned on and want to join them. But Lizzie wasn't interested. She said, no thanks, and no thanks again when Seth tried yet again with a little more pressure to get her to try and make out with Kat. Lizzie was faithful to her girlfriend. She wanted no part of this, and she said so. And as you've probably already noticed, Seth doesn't like to be told no. Seth stalked away for a moment, and Kat and Lizzie turned back toward the TV, which was still playing a movie they'd put on earlier.

Cat glanced back to see Seth, with a determined look on his face, putting on a pair of black leather gloves and picking up a length of rope. And then, in a swift motion, he looped the rope around Lizzie's neck and strangled her. It took minutes and minutes, and before he let go of the rope, he made Cat check for a pulse to make sure that Lizzie was dead. And then it got worse. Cat went to the bathroom to splash cold water on her face, and when she came back, Seth was having sex with Lizzie's body, swearing at her and calling her names.

Sick piece of shit. At some point, he put a couple plastic bags over her head, too, either to make sure she was dead or to cover her eyes so he didn't have to look at them. And when he finally finished and realized the gravity of what he'd just done, Seth freaked out. He curled up in a ball on the futon and started rocking back and forth, repeating,

I've gone too far, I've gone too far. You think? And not long after that, Seth's psychic friend Roberta Gerkin got a frantic call from Cat. We need you to come over. You have to help us. Please come. Roberta and her boyfriend, Paul, took one look at the scene, a mostly naked young woman on the floor with plastic bags over her head. Seth rocking back and forth in the corner mumbling to himself. And they noped the fuck out. Turned right around and got the hell out of there.

Seth was on his own. And for that part, I don't blame them a bit. I mean, look, I love my friends. but I'm not going to help them dispose of a body. No, thanks. Sorry. No, no. If you've got a dead body on your hands, you need a lot more help than I can give you.

So Roberta and Paul did the right thing walking out. But unfortunately, that's where the good judgment ends, because rather than going straight to the police and reporting what they'd just seen, these super loyal little puppies decided to, quote, let Seth decide on his own to do the right thing. Yeah, because he's demonstrated that so well up to now, right, that he's Mr. Morality. It's not like, he's not a fucking toddler that drew on the walls.

And you're like, who drew on the walls? And the toddler's like, not me. No, he's a grown-ass man that murdered a girl. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, it's ridiculous. So as Seth and Kat frantically got rid of Lizzie's body, driving it to a cliff and pushing it over, Seth's two buddies just turned around and went home.

Didn't do shit. And as a result, Lizzie's remains have still never been found. Never returned to her mama and daddy because psychic friend and her boyf couldn't make a fucking phone call. By the way, that's an unfortunate name, Roberta Gerkin. I wonder if kids called her Bobby Pickle in school. Not that I'm suggesting anyone should do that now. I mean, that would be rude.

Funny, but rude. Which is the best kind of funny, in my opinion. It's awful, by the way. When they threw Lizzie's body over the cliff, it didn't go into the water. It hit the rocks. So Seth made Cat get out of the car, go down to where the body landed, and push it into the water. Couldn't be bothered to do it himself.

He was far too upset, pussy. That river, by the way, has a strong current that carries out to the sea. And that is most likely why Lizzie's body has never been recovered. It was carried out to the ocean, far beyond the reach of the people who loved her. Kat's story rang through the detectives, especially when Roberta Gerkin and Paul Higgins. Aycock corroborated their part. It fit with the rope they found and with Seth's DNA on Lizzie's underwear and with the black leather gloves they found just like the ones Kat described. It was time to take Darkheart to trial. Kat testified for 10 days, six on direct examination and four on cross.

Predictably, the prosecution portrayed Kat as more victim than perpetrator, whereas the defense painted her as a BDSM obsessed vixen who had Seth wrapped around her little finger. I think y'all know which of those we think is more accurate, though. We certainly won't try to argue that Kat is innocent in this. Cat had suffocated Lizzie during kinky sex, Seth's defense attorney argued, and all Seth did was help covered up to try and save the woman he loved. The jury didn't buy it. They found Seth Mazzalia guilty of first-degree murder by strangulation, first-degree rape and murder, and two counts of conspiracy. On a phone call with his mom, Seth later complained that he didn't want to go to the sentencing hearing. He didn't want to have to listen. He didn't want to

listen to Lizzie's family, quote, bitch and complain. Listen, he did, though, and Lizzie's family did a spectacular job of telling Seth just what a piece of shit he was, reminding them what he took from them, and reiterating that he would never again get to enjoy a sunset or a swim or a really great dinner with friends. For his part, Seth's contribution was to stand up and beat the same tired old drum as defense attorney had beaten at the trial. I did not rape and murder Elizabeth Marriott, he said. I did play a part in covering up her death, and for that I am.

am truly sorry. Fuck off, Seth. Fuck off, Seth. The king of dodging responsibility, everyone. The judge's only reply to this was to sentence him to life without parole. As for Kat, under the terms of her plea deal, she served a few years for interfering with the investigation and was released from prison in July of 2016. Although a lot of people felt like she deserved way more prison time than that, Lizzie's family are surprisingly forgiving of Kat. They feel like she was a kid in way over her head, embroiled in a toxic, abusive relationship where control had been systematically stripped away from her and she didn't know how to get out. And you know, I think they're right for the most part,

though I wouldn't have hated seeing cats serve a little more jail time than she did, but it's incredibly classy of Lizzie's parents to have empathy for her. So it's what kind of family Lizzie grew up in. Now, there's a bizarre little PS to this story, which happened before Seth's trial. We just saved it for now because we wanted to go out with a bang. So our boy had all kinds of crafty little schemes for getting himself out of trouble while he was in county lockup waiting for trial. He had a cellmate he liked to play chess with, and they started talking during the games, and eventually Seth told him all about these two witnesses that were screwing up his case. This being, of course, Ms. psychic friend Bobby Pickle and her boyfriend Paul Hickok, who came over

and saw Lizzie's body on the night of the murder. It'd be a huge help to his case if those two could just like, you know, disappear, Seth told his cellmate, would he happen to know him away to make that happen? Seth would pay him for his trouble. A thousand bucks. Ooh, big spender. The cellmate, who was in jail for heroin possession and thought Seth was A, bat-shit nuts and B annoying, told him, sure, sure, I can probably make that happen. Because, you know, a thousand bucks. It's not like Seth's going to go to the cops and be like, hey, I paid this guy to kill somebody for me and he didn't do it. He's just going to take his money and run, you know. But before long, Seth Ixnade the murder plot in favor of a better idea. Or what he

smooth-brained hippopotamus that he is considered to be a better idea. Instead of having Roberta Gerkin and Paul Hickok killed, he'd just break out of jail instead. Okay, listen, hear me out. Cess said to a cellmate, this'll work, this will work. Once you get released, you're going to take that thousand dollars I give you, right? And you're going to use it to buy drugs. Sell them on the streets, turn that thousand bucks into $5,000, and now you got enough money to buy the stuff to break me out of here.

what kind of stuff you ask oh nothing major just guns explosives fake passports two getaway cars disguises in a flipping boat yeah five grand ought to cover it right so anyway Seth's plan was to fake six so he'd end up in the hospital unit of the jail in his opinion the easiest place to escape from probably because he saw it in a fucking movie his opinion by the way was dead wrong that unit had the toughest security in the damn place but whatever facts don't matter matter to Seth. Once he got himself transferred to the medical unit, Seth would sneak out through an emergency exit where he'd use explosives to blast a hole in the fence, then shoot any guards who tried to get in his way as he made his way past the prison wall. Peeu, peon, peon. He'd disguise himself, pick up cat, zoom off in their brand new boat, then use the fake passports to start a brand new life somewhere far, far away where they don't extradite to the States. Just digest that for a second. Does this Cho think he is? Jason Bourne? Hey, dark fart. How's your boy supposed to pass you a bunch of

guns and explosives while you're sitting in jail, huh? Blowing a hole in the prison wall is so Arkham Asylum, I can't even stand it. Like, chill the fuck out, Mr. Freeze. No, I guarantee you he got the idea from a Batman comic. I guarantee. 100%. Lex Luther strikes again. Oh, and of course, he was keeping cat in the loop about all this stuff too. He used codenames for everybody in his letters. He was Bishop, Cat was Queen, and his cellmate accomplice was Murphy, for some

reason. And the escape plan... It's always so weird-ass name that doesn't fit. What the hell, man? I don't know. Learn to... Like, it's like, he must have grown up watching those, one of these things is not like the other things on Sesame Street and really liked is it's always, with all his weird... It's always. It's always. And the escape plan was Bishop's vacation, which, Again, like, also, why did he call himself a bishop?

Like, maybe it's because it's like the second most mobile piece on a chessboard. Because, God forbid, he didn't want to call himself queen. That's why. Right. He didn't want to call himself queen because even though you know he really wanted to. Kat's job was to research security around the marina and train station they need to use for the caper and to figure out how to get them both fake passports. And Kat shouldn't worry.

Because if this plan didn't work, they could just carry out a suicide pack. then hook up again in the other world. Okay. Okay. Mm-hmm. He wrote out a whole set of instructions for the ritual that would make this possible, by the way. And that shit has to be seen to be believed. It's too gross to get into here.

Suffice to say that, according to Seth, for the suicide pact to work so that they could hook up afterwards in the astral plane, Kat had to, wait for it, seduce her brother. Oh, yeah. And he, I mean, he gets into, like, clinical detail about how it is so disgusting. I couldn't bear to put it in there. I just couldn't you. Read the book if you want to see the whole thing, but it's disgusting. It's, I mean, this guy, he needs to be put.

This guy just ain't right. He just ain't right. I mean, he's in jail, but he deserves to be put in horny jail and on top of. He needs to be under the jail, in my opinion. In a, in a cement box with no windows, fuck off. Oobliette, spider-filled obliette. The cellmate, of course, secretly found all this escape shit, hilarious, as one should. It was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard in his life, but he wasn't above playing along with Seth,

at least long enough to lay hands on that thousand bucks, which he did the same day he got out of jail. Went straight to Kat, who handed over Seth's ATM card. Mr. Murphy took every penny out of Seth's bank account, and that was that. And not long after that, they arrested Kat and the whole thing came unraveled. Y'all know the rest. And later, they found all these letters in Kat's room at her mom's house. Seth had told her to annihilate them after she read them, but I guess she couldn't be bothered. Or she just didn't know what annihilate meant.

Right, right. Because, of course, he had to be cute about it and he couldn't just say, rip them up and burn them. Yeah, no, no, no, no. Yeah, there's a lot of couldn't be bothered going on in this case. And just to bring it back to where it belongs before we wrap up, one of the main things I felt as I was researching this case was how much I would have liked Lizzie if I'd known her. Like, I really feel like we'd have been friends if we'd known each other. There's this picture of her that they showed at the trial.

She's holding this little frog in her hands, and she just looks so delighted. And it made me feel like I knew her a little bit looking at that, because that is exactly the look I'd have on my face in that situation, too. I mean, I never even met the girl, but reading about her, even I felt a sense of loss, knowing that she's gone. I can only imagine what that's like for her family. Yeah. But Lizzie's parents have tried their best to make something meaningful out of this awful experience. They set up a scholarship in her name, the Lizzie Marriott Intrepid Ocean Explorer Fund, for students like Lizzie who dream of becoming marine explorers. But her mom says she still can't go to the ocean. It's too hard. It hurts my heart for her and for Lizzie's dad too, and her

and her friends, everybody who loved her. Our hearts go out to you all. And we hope the ridiculous monster who took her never sees daylight again. He and all his dipship personas are right where they belong. 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 as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Tui, Olivia, Nancy, Alicia, Lisa,

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