True Crime Campfire - When Nerds Attack: The Bellevue Murders

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

We’ve said it before on True Crime Campfire: We’re nerds. And so are most of our friends. Nerds can be the very best people. All most of us want to do is to read our comics or cosplay our favorite characters from Final Fantasy VII, or learn to speak Klingon. We’re harmless. Most of us. But every category of person has its dark element. And for some people, fantasy is anything but harmless. For them, it can fuel a sense of superiority and separateness from ordinary life—provide a sort of storyline for them to follow, where they become the dark hero of their own little movie. When two such nerds come together, it can make for some toxic dynamics. Especially since human beings tend to do things in groups that they might NEVER have the nerve to do alone. Join us for the story of one of the Seattle area's most horrifying multiple murders--the 1997 slaughter of the entire Wilson family, by a pair of teenage killers who just...kinda wanted to see what it felt like.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. We've said it before on true crime campfire. We're nerds. And so are most of our friends. Nerds can be the very best people. All most of us want to do is read our comics or cosplay our favorite characters from Final Fantasy 7 or learn to speak Klingon. We're harmless, most of us. But every category of person has its dark element. And for some people, fantasy is anything but harmless. For them, it can fuel a sense of superiority and separateness from ordinary life. Provide a sort

of storyline for them to follow, where they become the dark hero of their own little movie. When two such nerds come together, it can make for some toxic dynamics, especially since human beings tend to do things in groups that they might never have the nerve to do alone. This is when nerds attack, the story of the Bellevue murders. For this one, we're in the leafy city of Bellevue, Washington, a she-shee suburb just across the lake from Seattle. January 4, 1997. It was a chilly day, but sunny, too, a welcome break from that Pacific Northwest winter gloom. A little group of 12-year-old boys were taking a shortcut home through Water Tower Park,

when one of them noticed a splash of blue among the dark bushes. At first, they thought it was a pile of clothes, and then, of course, a mannequin. Here we go again. Poor kids. You're right. They didn't get too close and soon just went on their way, but for some reason it's stuck in their heads. And the next day, two of the boys came back to investigate. This time, they got close enough to realize that whatever the thing was, it was definitely human-shaped, not a pile of clothes.

A mannequin, then, right? The kids worked up the nerve to poke at the thing with a stick, and it wasn't a mannequin. It was a person, lying still under the bushes, unresponsive even when they poked at her and called out, hey, are you okay? So the kids ran home to one of their moms who came back with them to see what was going on. Mom quickly realized that this was not just a person, but a dead person, and sent her kid racing home to call the police. When the investigators arrived, they saw that the body was that of a young woman, Kimberly Wilson. Initially, they thought the kids had stumbled upon a suicide. Kimberly had a length of rope tied tightly around her neck with the end broken off, so it looked

like maybe she'd hanged herself and the rope broke. But there was no rope tied to any of the tree branches nearby, so that theory started looking pretty unlikely, and their scenes suddenly became a bit more complicated. Record showed that Kimberly's family lived just a few blocks away from the park, and Bellevue PD investigator Jeffrey Goams and Deputy King County prosecutor Patty Ekes set off to perform the awful task of notifying the family. Most investigators will tell you this is the worst part of the job. Nobody likes having to do it, so Eeks and Gomes were already a little tense as they headed over to the Wilson's house. But when they got there, a nice suburban house with three cars in the driveway and

Christmas lights up outside, something almost immediately felt off. This was the middle of the day, the driveway full of cars and all the holiday lights blazing, but the inside of the house was dark. And when they rang the doorbell, nobody came to answer it. Detective Gomes got that prickly feeling that experienced investigators get when they've been at it long enough to sense trouble. He looked over at prosecutor Patty Eakes and said, have we got probable cause? I think I need to go in. She nodded. Her spidey senses were buzzing, too. Gomes was spooked enough to draw his gun as he eased open a sliding glass door on the side of the house. One foot in the door and the coppery smell of blood hit him like a slap. The house was stuffy and most of the lights were turned off. He called out

Bellevue PD, anybody home? No answer. Gun drawn, he moved carefully through the quiet house, and in a bedroom off a third floor hallway, he found the first body. A young woman, lying in a pool of blood. She looked to be in her teens. Later, he'd identify her as 17-year-old Julia Wilson, Kimberly's sister. Gomes was an experienced detective, but imagine coming across a sight like that, not knowing if the person who did it was still in the house. might jump out of a closet and come at you. Might be watching you right now, just out of sight. So, gripping his gun, Gomes continued on through the house,

on red alert for either more victims or the person who'd killed them. In the master bedroom, he found two more bodies, a middle-aged man and woman, Kimberly and Julia's parents, Bill and Rose. Rose was still in bed, as if she'd been attacked while she was still sleeping. It was clear that the killer, or killer, had used at least two different weapons to kill her. She had blunt-forced trauma to the head and multiple vicious stab wounds to her neck.

The bed was soaked and splattered with blood. Her husband, Bill, lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, looked like he tried to run and fight. He had horrific blunt-force trauma to his head and stab wounds to his face, neck and chest. Most disturbing of all, on the back of his t-shirt, clear as could be, was a boot print in blood. contempt, Detective Gomes thought.

The killer took an extra moment to show us how little he thought of his victim. The print looked to be from a lug-souled work boot. The CSIs would be able to use that eventually. So basically, the Wilson's normally peaceful house had become a horror movie set. Three brutal, bloody deaths and another body in the park a few blocks away. This was not the kind of thing they usually saw in Bellevue. But of course, Goams and Eag's new murder could happen. anywhere, anytime. This was a weird one, though. The three victims at the house had all been

stabbed and bludgeoned, but Kimberly, Kim, as everybody called her, had died by ligature strangulation. Despite the fact that they hadn't been able to find a rope in any of the trees near Kim's body, investigators initially wondered if they might be looking at a family annihilation, a triple murder or suicide. Maybe Kim Wilson had murder her family, then taken her own life in the park. But if that were the case, she'd had help. Bloody footprints at the house showed that there had been two attackers there. The bootprint on Bill Wilson's back was too big to be from Kim's Little Foot. If they were going to figure out what the hell happened here, investigators needed to get a detailed picture of who the Wilson's were. Bill Wilson was an accountant for a big construction

company, and his wife Rose worked in the library at the University of Washington. They were good eggs, liked and respected by their co-workers and neighbors, active in their church, considered warm, open, and welcoming. On paper, they were pretty much the platonic ideal of the perfect suburban family. Their younger daughter, Julia, was a great kid, smart, sweet, kind of shy. She'd just been accepted to Central Washington University, so she was caught up in all that exciting first taste of independent stuff. Plenty our schedule for her first semester, thinking about what to major in and how to decorate her dorm room. As for Kim, she was kind of the family rebel. Just about every family has one.

Kim's high school years featured lots of classes with her parents and teachers. She missed so many classes her senior year that she almost didn't graduate. But she wasn't a bad kid. She just marched the beat of her own drummer, like a lot of smart people do. And she was a strong, world person. So she tended to push back when she felt like her parents didn't get it. I was the same way. I mean, with my parents anyway, I was a little bit of a Lisa Simpson in school.

I can't lie about that, but... But Kim wasn't like a mean, angry person. She was really open and loyal, the kind of friend who'd come pick you up on the side of the road at 4 a.m. if your car broke down. And she had a lot of friends. She had a pager on her belt, Hello 90s.

And when she met somebody new, more often than not, they'd have her pager number by the end of that first meeting. Kim took friendship seriously, whether you needed her to talk you through a bad breakup or just wanted to hang out. Now, at age 20,

it had been looking like Kim was starting to get her life together. She was visiting her folks from her job in San Diego, California, where she worked for AmeriCorps, which is a national service program that would earn her a college scholarship after a certain number of years. But her relationship with her parents was still a little unpredictable. It could be volatile sometimes, because nobody can push your buttons like your family, right? They just know you too well. They know exactly what to say to reach right into your soul and pull that lever that says primordial rage. at least that's the way it is in my family. God love them. And just a week before the murders,

in fact, the cops were called out to the Wilson's house for a domestic disturbance. See, Kim couldn't drive right then. It wasn't clear from our sources why either she'd let her license expire or gotten it suspended, something like that. So she needed either one of her parents or her sister Julia to drive her around in Bellevue. And one night she went into her parents' bedroom where they were already tucked up in bed watching TV and demanded they take her over to her friend's place. Freaking rude, right? Like, once I'm in my pajamas, game over. Don't even ask for anything, unless your hair's on fire or something. They were already in bed, for God's sakes. So, of course, it started a fight. And the fight escalated and escalated until finally

Bill Wilson was like, hey, if you don't calm down, I'm going to call the police. Now, he was bluffing. Okay, this was her dad. He didn't really want to call the cops on his daughter. But for a dramatic effect, he like slowly, obviously dialed 9-1-1 and then like just quickly hung up the phone. What he didn't realize was that any time you complete that call, even if you hang right up after that second one, the call goes through. And the cops are most likely going to respond in some way. Sometimes the dispatcher is just going to call you right back and say, is everything okay? But in this case, they just sent out a squad car. And a pair of officers showed up at the front door a few minutes later. So true crime camp fire hot tip.

If you ever super pissed off at somebody and you're tempted to fake dial 911 just to scare them, don't. Unless you're willing to let that nosy bitch Charlene from next door see a cop car pulling into your driveway at O'Dark 30 in the morning. Because you know that mean old hose bag is going to ratchet out to the homeowners association. Like that's minimum what she's going to do. She's probably going to post about it on next door too. It's like a picture of the squad car in your driveway and like your house number clearly lit up by the red and blue lights. and it's just going to be ugly, just so just don't do it. And Charlene's going to post all innocently.

Like, anyone know what's going on? Oh, yeah. And then everyone in their mom, and probably me, sorry, is going to be speculating on what kind of illegal shenanigans you're getting up to. Yeah, and the story will get like worse and worse, the more it's told. It's going to be a freaking nightmare. So this really wasn't a police matter. But even so, this little scrap of evidence of recent family discord got on the investigators

radar because they'll take anything they can take at the beginning, any lead, and the possible murder-suicide angle stayed for the moment on the table. Looking into Kim's personal life, they soon discovered she hung out with kind of an edgy crowd. Now, it might be tempting to describe these folks as your basic, standard 90s goths, and it's a temptation we're going to give into. People in their teens, early 20s, torn black clothes, piercings, nine-inch nails, and Marilyn Manson cassettes in their walkmans and into Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire the masquerade and smoking cheap weed and those clove cigarettes you buy at the head shop when you've lost all sense of human dignity.

Look, I smoked them in college. Okay, that's how I know. So don't come at me. Those things are fucking gross. Well, how else were you supposed to telegraph that you were cool and Artie and flouted authority, though, Witt? Well, that's why we did it. And we shredded our lungs in the process.

So, like all young goths were legally required to do in the mid to late 90s, Kim and her friends like to get together at Denny's. You know, to take up a huge table for seven hours and order nothing but coffee. Like, maybe one order of mozzarella sticks to share. Real popular with the waitstaff, I'm sure you can imagine. Like, oh, another 79 cent cup coffee? Okay. How about you eat something?

Can I get you a grand slam? Moons over my hammy? Just a coffee Great Great They called themselves The Saturday Night Denny's Club Hey

All that supposed goth creativity and that's all they could come up with Not the Denny's army of darkness Not eggs and evil What about bacon and dregs? Come on, y'all I thought of all of those just now

Bacon and dregs is so good Oh my God I was a teenager in the 90s, and if you were too, then all this seems probably pretty excruciatingly familiar to you. Like, when I close my eyes, I can still smell that, like, thick thug of Marlboro lights and friar grease, mop water, and dracharnoir. These were the dark days before social media, y'all. You had to, like, bind places to get together and physically interact. It was hell. Ew.

Once investigators started looking into this crowd, it didn't take them long to realize that there were two guys in particular who seemed to warrant a closer look. This was the odd couple, Twatman and Robin style duo of David Anderson and Alex Baranii, both 17 years old. Now, to me, David Anderson looks like a smug little jerk wagon, but in teenage Bellevue, Washington, especially amongst the Bacon & Degg's Denny's crowd, he was considered hot shit. He was kind of a short kid who spent a lot of time in the gym. And he had shoulder length, blonde Hansen hair, which he was super vain about. By Hansen hair, by the way, we mean the boy band, not Chris Hansen. Yeah.

Because with true crime folks, you got to specify. Correct, yeah. Two different, very different hairstyles. And David was charming. Seriously, again and again in our sources, people. use that same word and if there was ever a guy who proved the line about charm being a verb something you do to people it is this dude mm-hmm given that we're talking about teenagers spending a lot of time hanging out together after dark it shouldn't come as a surprise that he

applied most of his charm to you know getting into girls pants right right the uh the denny's crowd did a lot of shagging i mean after all who can resist the erotic allure of country fried stick and eggs at 3 a.m. Imagine the smell of him. Gross. And a lot of the Bellevue girls couldn't resist the allure of goth jock

David Anderson who would shower them with compliments and endearments, a.k.a. love bombing. Until he got what he wanted, the aforementioned shagging. He had a type. Girls, he couldn't easily manipulate and control. The kind

who'd be grateful for his attention and wouldn't challenge him. And our boy, David, had a predator's eye for these girls. He could pick one out of a lineup in 10 seconds flat. If you were a smart teenage girl with low self-esteem and something to prove, David Anderson probably knew about it before you did. But it wasn't just his peers that David charmed. At this point, he had dropped out of high school and had been kicked out of his dad's house for stealing cash to fund a trip to Canada, to get weed, of course. Of course. So he slept pretty much wherever he could.

This included a brief period of crashing at Kim Wilson's house. Kim's parents didn't approve of a lot of her friends. Thought they seemed sketchy, but they liked David. He was the knows how to talk to parents' kid. He charmed them really easily. Which is so creepy to me. It's like sometimes we really cannot see these people. coming. That predator charisma is just incredibly powerful, and you can never convince yourself

you're immune to it because nobody really is. I mean, some of us have better radar than others, but if you think you couldn't get got, you're wrong. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. David wasn't the leader, per se, of the Denny's gang. It wasn't that kind of crowd, but he was charismatic, and he found he could control people when he wanted to. Now, if David Anderson was an accomplished social manipulator. His friend Alex Baranii was a social black hole. At Denny's, he would sit silently in the booth, glaring at his coffee cup, just sucking all the joy out of the room like bad feng shui. The moons over my hammy held no allure for him, Katie. He was an intellectual. Did you capitalize that? It sounds like you capitalized that. I did actually

capitalized that. And admittedly, Alex was a smart kid. At 18, his IQ tested just a few points below genius level, with pretty solid talent at writing and art, but as he progressed through school, he began to hate it more and more. He didn't do the work,

didn't study, and started scraping by with D's. Finally, when he was old enough, he dropped out. David had dropped out a few weeks before, and by now Alex followed David in everything. Like a grumpy little lemming. dibs on grumpy little lemming for my goth industrial shoegaze band

Alex was an intimidating presence grim and looming with greasy long dark hair and you didn't have to spend much time with him before getting the sense that there was something definitely a skew in his connection to human society in general not only was he creepy and sad he had some real trouble separating fantasy from reality and only really got animated in activities that removed him somewhat from the real world games both video and role-playing books movies stuff like that now look as our regular campers will know we're both nerds we like video games yeah we like fantasy novels and role-playing games yeah we like creeping around public parks in the middle of the night trying to

whack our friends with swords made out a PVC pipe and duct tape yeah wait what David and Alex were both into larping live-action role-playing now this is where a group of people, often in costume and in character, get together in person and play a live-action role-playing game. It's like Dungeons and Dragons, but you actually act out the roles. Now, it can be fun if you play with the right people. Like in college, I used to play a live-action vampire game with a big group of theater majors, and we got to play in this old theater on campus, and that was fun. LARPing was a lot less fun when David Anderson and Alex Barani happened to be playing, though. They were always getting kicked out of the games for

taking things way too far and breaking all the rules that limited physical contact. Like, yes, you might be playing a game where your characters are supposed to be sword-fighting, but you're not supposed to haul off and bludgeon your friend with a PVC pipe until he cries. Hmm, it's frowned upon. Now, in Alex's case, my guess is he just got too wrapped up in the moment. In David's case, he just liked hitting people. So Tweedledum and Tweedle Dumber would play their own games. Just the two of them, at night, in the park.

by the moonlight and the occasional street lamps stalking each other through the underbrush, like a couple of sneaky little ferrets or something. One night, as they battled it out with their PVC swords, Alex was struck by a sudden inspiration. A new name for himself, one that fit way better than the one his parents had given him. He took off running, yelling, I am slicer thunder clap, God of evil. I am immortal, you fool. I will never die. I will never die. And from that night on, Alex was Slicer Thunderclap, sometimes a god of evil, sometimes a cyborg mercenary, which, come on, dude, your genre jumping here. Whatever the specifics, Slicer was Alex's go-to character, a cold, deadly, unkillable, bad Mammajima.

And I know this is going to shock you. He didn't confine Slicer T to the role-playing table. Am I going to get the urge to bully our friend Alex here? Oh, boy. he started calling himself that in real life. Ugh, I know. I know, it hurts. Okay, we're right there with you.

Just ride it like a wave campers, the cringe will subside. Folks, if you're looking for a sign that maybe your nerddom could have gone to scosh too far, when you start going by a Skippy the Thundercutt and actually expecting your friends to play ball, that's when the alarm's going off. Okay, just a tip, not because we want to run your lives, but because we love you. We're not your moms, but also, please, if you come up to me and tell me, you want me to call you slicer thunderclap to my face during a normal non-LARP interaction, you are not allowed to be upset when I laugh directly at you and then tweet about it for the

rest of my life until I die. Thanks to author Putzada Riyang for that hilarious yet disturbing little peek into Alex and David's Larp style, by the way. Her book, Deadly Secrets, was one of our sources. for this one, and I hope I didn't butcher her name. If I did, I apologize. Now, interestingly, David often liked to play mischievous dwarf and gnome characters, tricksters, rogues, sly types who were never quite what they seemed. Hmm. I wonder why. Interesting. David and Kim had known each other a long time. His family lived right across the street from the Wilsons when the kids were

little, and even though he was three years younger than Kim, they became friends. They met up again when David reached middle school and dated for three summers in succession, which is not something you see a whole lot, a high school girl dating a middle school boy, but friends have described Kim as kind of a late bloomer romantically, and David was just the opposite. Dating older girls wasn't unusual for him, and he was already starting to get pretty well practiced at using girls for sex. But that was one thing he didn't get from Kim. Not then, and not when they dated briefly again a few years later. This wasn't a big deal to Kim. Was it a big deal to David that a girl actually had the audacity to say no to him? Well, here's where we start taking a little peek under Mr. Charming's

hood. Kim thought David was one of her best friends, really the only friend she'd hung on to from childhood. And dating and breaking up did nothing to change that as far as she was concerned. Why should it? She still spent a lot of time with David. and he still acted like her buddy. But to David, Kim refusing to put out was a blow to his pride. And from a girl he thought should be grateful for his precious attention, which I assume is the name of his dick, David Anderson had a lot of anger in him.

And this rejection stung. He said, sorry for the language. This is a direct quote, that dumpy bitch must be a D-sler or something. I just want to kill her. Of course, nobody took the teeny, tiny, little incel seriously. So this was how duplicitous David Anderson was, and how little you could trust his charm. Kim had no idea what kind of seething venom she'd awoken by hurting David's little p-p-p-fee-fee's,

because the two-faced prick was still all sweetness and light to her, but behind her back, I want to kill the bitch. By the way, bonus points there for that tired old. If she doesn't want to bone me, she must be a lesbo thing. Grow up, David. Well, yeah, Whitney, he was nice to her, and she wouldn't reward his, let me check my notes, basic human decency with her genitals. Clearly, if she didn't want our short king, David, she wasn't attractive to men.

That was it. Not that she's a person with autonomy that might not include boning you. David. If anyone consistently got to see the real David Anderson, it was Alex Baranii. The not-so-dynamic duo met in middle school soon after Alex moved to town. Now, if you're a weird, quiet, socially awkward kid, starting a new school might as well be one of the inner circles of hell. And I'm sure the experience was only improved for Alex by meeting David on his very first day. If you think I'm about to tell you a sweet story about the new kids sitting alone in the lunchroom and the popular guy coming up and inviting him to sit with the end crowd, you're going to be disappointed. Aw.

Nope. David bullied the shit out of Alex on his very first day, like immediately, like a hawk on a titmouse, just dove right for him. David liked bullying. It was kind of his hobby, his passion project, if you will. And he soon discovered that no matter how hard he pushed him, no matter what names he called him or how many times he punched him in the mouth, Alex Baronyi wouldn't fight back. David liked that.

He had found a punching bag. He picked on Alex every chance he got. And as bizarre as this sounds, after a while, Alex got to kind of like it. He'd been a friendless loner pretty much his whole life. and having one of the most popular kids in school, Borderline, obsessed with him, was kind of thrilling. So obviously, this ain't exactly a case of two healthy, well-adjusted kids here. And as with every case like this, it always sucks to think what might have been done to help him before things got past a point in no return.

Anywho, at some point between nosebleeds, I guess, David and Alex actually started talking to each other. Maybe during the pre-bullying warm-up or the post-bullying debrief, I'm not sure, but they discovered that they had a lot in common. They liked the same sci-fi and fantasy books, the same video games, and had similar obsessions with knives and swords. By the end of that year, they were practically joined at the hip. And as they got to know each other a little better,

they also discovered a shared interest in violence. They talked about who they'd like to kill, how they'd kill them. And they talked about it a lot, and not just amongst themselves. The Denny's gang heard a lot of this bloody-minded chit-chat, too. But it was a crowd where pitch-dark humor was pretty much the norm, and they were by no means the only kids into blades and blood. Now, even though David and Alex had become friends, and David wasn't

wailing on Alex every morning before home room anymore, their relationship still wasn't on equal ground. Like, at Denny's, David'd be macking on some girl and he'd look over at Alex like, let's go, smokes. And Alex would just jump right up and get his smokes, like Trevor from Trailer Park Boys. O'ey.

Aside from Denny's, they spent a lot of time at Sun Villa Lanes, a bowling alley. David liked to hit on girls there, and Alex followed along like a grim little puppy the way he always did. Once David had zeroed in on a target, he'd tell Alex stay here and go over to a group of girls with his big smile and even bigger bag of of bullshit, and Alex would just lurk in the darkness by the arcade machines, pumping quarter after quarter into Mortal Kombat 3 and House of the Dead.

Alex wasn't exactly a smooth one with the ladies. He was always kind of stumbling and awkward and strange. I know, get out of town, right? On the few occasions when he did work up the nerve to talk to a girl at Sun Villa, David would inevitably appear and give the girl the full court press of flirting and charisma till he got her phone number and Alex would just kind of skulk into the background. A flunky's got to know his place after all. David probably reminded him on a regular basis. Dude, you're not here to pick up chicks, you're here toadie. So just stand over there and tote.

Of all the girls David hung out with, Alex seemed to really resent Kim Wilson. They didn't get along from pretty much day one. The first time David introduced him, Alex basically ignored Kim. Wouldn't look her in the eye, so she decided he was being an asshole and gave him the same treatment. And she got to know him better, Alex creeped her out more and more. There was just something about him she found unsettling. Although he was pretty inert most of the time, Alex was prone to these sudden rages if he felt insulted by anybody other than David, and Kim thought he was dangerous. He scared her. And Alex disliked Kim for two reasons. First and foremost, because he was jealous of all the time David spent with her, especially

while they were dating. It bugged him that David would badmouth her behind her back, but still hang around with her all the time. Which could have been for a couple of reasons. Kim was a type of person who liked to look after people, something that had been largely absent from David's life, and there might have been enough left of his shrivel little soul for him to take comfort from her company. Or maybe he was just still hoping to get in her pants. My money's on the ladder, for what it's worth. So that was one thing, but I said he didn't like her for two reasons. And for the second reason, campers, we have to take a brief detour into the exhausting, sweaty world of teenage romance. David had an older brother, Mike, and Mike had a girlfriend named Sarah. She was a pretty

slender blonde girl, part of the Denny's crowd. Up until he met Sarah, Alex hadn't had much use for any humans other than David Anderson, but he was immediately, hugely smitten with her. And after Mike and Sarah broke up, she and Alex actually went on a couple of painfully awkward dates before she noped the hell out of there and backed away. But the smitteness did not fade, and Alex called her and paged her even after Sarah stopped responding. He bought her flowers and wrote her love letters in a very Alexy way, of course, about how the world sucked and he wanted to kill himself. You know, tré romantic. And these he signed Slicer Thunderclap because, of course he did.

It's not even a good name, Alex. God. Slicer? Oh, no. Slicer? I know. It's unfortunate. It's like he watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and was like shredder, shredder, slicer.

Splinter. Slicer. Sarah somehow resisted, rushing back into his arms, and before too long, she started dating someone new. Kim Wilson. Now, this wasn't a world-shattering romance or anything. Kim and Sarah went out for a couple of months, and then they broke up, but it drove Alex nuts. Not only was his big crush seeing someone else after rejecting him, it was, gasp, a girl. and a girl he already couldn't stand.

And here's a spooky little post script to this teenage soap opera. After Kim, Sarah got back together with Mike Anderson, David's older brother, with whom David was now sharing a house. Alex slept over a lot, crashing in David's room. One night, David woke up and noticed Alex wasn't in his sleeping bag, so he got up to try and find him and make sure he was okay because Alex had been kind of acting weird that day. He found him in Mike's room, just standing by the bed, holding a knife over Mike while he slept. Holy shit. When he saw David, Alex kind of grinned and said, he was just going to give Mike a good scare. He just laughed and went back to David's room, knife still in hand.

Yikes. David didn't sleep much that night, as you might imagine. After all, you did not have to tax the old brain box too greatly to come. come up with scenarios where it was David sleeping beneath Alex, knife and hand. Right. But David was also excited? Sure, he and Alex had talked a lot about violence and murder, but now he realized Alex might actually kill someone.

David could use that. In fact, he already had somebody in mind. Kim Wilson was about to move to San Diego to start with AmeriCorps, and as is often the case with a big move, she could really use some extra cash. The main reason she was short on funds in the first place was that she'd loaned a bunch of money to her friends. One friend in particular, David Anderson. And now she needed some of that back. David claimed to be shocked by this request, saying he thought all those handouts were gifts.

Now, y'all, if this is a contest of, who do you? think is telling the truth, Kim Wilson or David Anderson. I'm pretty sure Kim wins hands down. Yeah. But David is clearly the type of dude for whom you loaned me this instantly transmogrifies into this is mine now in his head. You know, they borrow a DVD and three years later, there it is on their shelves with all their other DVDs and they'd act all like shocked Pikachu face if you mentioned it. The worst. But somehow, Kim, got David to sign a contract, agreeing to pay her back $350 by a certain date. She even got her sister Julia to witness it, which again tells you she really had no idea

just what kind of mulling, thin-skinned little man baby she was dealing with here. To be forced into signing a promise by a girl he had contempt for and have it witnessed by her sister, this would not stand. After the contract, whenever anybody would mention Kim's name, David's face would go beat red and he clench his fists, just an instant flick of the switch to rage. Kim Wilson was going on The List. See, David and Alex kept a not-so-secret record of people they like to kill. Just normal everyday adolescent behavior, you know, keep a scrapbook, make playlist for your friends, share your kill list with the freaks at Denny's. And they did share it.

They enjoyed pushing the limits, seeing if they could shock their cynical little crew. Now, like we said before, the Denny's goths like pitch-dark humor and fantasies, but like, come on, guys, the two creepy boys with the short tempers and blade fetishes start flashing their murder bucket list and y'all just shrug? How hard is it to drop an anonymous tip to the 5-0? Right? Nobody thought to do that, apparently, or to warn any of the people on the hit list. And there should have been a little bit of urgency about making that anonymous call because there was a time clock ticking. See, David was just about to turn 18. And for some reason, bless his heart, he'd gotten into his head that if he killed somebody before his 18th birthday, he'd be tried as a juvenile. And if he got convicted, he'd only go to jail till he was 21.

Uh, excuse me? Do what now? Oh, my goodness. Now, nobody knows where he got this idea. Maybe he saw one of the law and orders where things go all wrong and the judge gives the killer of sweet. sentence and Jack McCoy looks all sad and constipated in the final shot, you know, and it's like a message about our flawed system or maybe he was just really as dumb as he looks. I don't know. But regardless, should you need any evidence that charm and common sense don't necessarily

go together, this firmly held belief of David is that he could premeditatedly slaughter somebody and serve three years for it should be enough to convince you. By the way, I love how he just assumes he's going to get caught. Like, way to believe in yourself, man. He's like, I can do three years standing on my head. Jesus. So obviously there was a plan beginning to take shape and a timer had been set. Okay, so back to the bloody scene at the Wilson House and the body in the park. Autopsies on the four victims revealed a few interesting findings. First, it quickly became clear that as well as ligature injuries around her neck, Kim had internal injuries consistent with being severely beaten, and that is not something you see in a suicide.

So the idea that Kim was involved in her family's deaths in some kind of murder-suicide scheme was circling the drain. Second, small metal fragments were found inside both Bill and Julia Wilson, chipped off of a blade when it made heavy contact with bone, which is just, oh, that's horrifying. And it was a testament to the violence and force of these murders. The medical examiners determined that the metal in both bodies came from the same blade, which was likely either a long knife or a sword.

And third, it was determined that Julia Wilson was still alive and breathing when one of the stabbing injuries in her neck severed her trachea, which is horrifying to think about, but it also meant that she quite likely exhaled a significant amount of blood droplets, which would be hard to avoid for anybody standing close to her. Translation, if they could identify a suspect, they might find blood evidence on their clothes or their shoes. Four days after the bodies were found well into their investigation of the Denny's crowd by now, the investigators went to talk to David Anderson. This was, however, a slightly different David than the one they'd encountered if they'd talked to him just a week before. Because two days earlier, one of the girls

in the Denny's crowd had run into him in the parking lot and was surprised to see that his blonde shoulder-length hair, which he was always so vain about, had been cut short and dyed black. He cut his Fabio hair, y'all. Uh-oh. wonder what could have happened to inspire this fun little hair adventure. Could there be some reason why David wouldn't want to look the same today as he did a few days ago, or could he have gotten something yucky in his hair? Anyway, when the investigators arrived at his house, David was still asleep, and he didn't seem fully awake during the interview either.

He was calm and kind of sleepy through the whole conversation, apparently completely unfazed by the violent deaths of his friend and her whole family. He said he hadn't seen Kim since before Christmas, and he'd spent the night of the murder with his friend Alex, playing video games. After David, the investigators went over to see Alex Barangie at the house where he rented a room. And as you can imagine, Alex's grim little basement room was, let's call it odd. There was a chair that looked like it had had a run-in with a T-Rex, and a life-size cut out of Mel Gibson's character from Braveheart with its head missing.

Both of these, Alex cheerfully admitted, had gotten some attention from his sword and knives. He showed them one of his knife catalogs, talking about all the ones he liked best. Smart, man. Make sure those homicide detectives know exactly how obsessed you are with cutting things. Good thinking. So it may come as a surprise that the investigators came away from these initial interviews thinking, these aren't the guys. They did take Alex's sword to see if it matched the metal fragments

recovered from the autopsies, which it didn't. But their general feeling was that David and Alex might be weird, but they were far too calm for teenagers being questioned about a recent brutal murder. Which is actually not that unreasonable. I mean, how many times have we seen it, campers? A couple of high school-age killers get hauled in for questioning, and before their asses hit the seats,

they're sweating like Humpty Dumpty at the top of the Eiffel Tower. But not these kids. These kids were as cool as cucumbers. Alex backed up David's story that they were playing video games all night. The investigators checked out their shoes, looking for a match to the print on Bill Wilson's back, but they didn't find one. Alex claimed his yellow work boots were the only shoes he owned,

which was believable. One look at Alex told you that concept, like new clothes and laundry detergent or soap were completely alien to him. David and Alex were starting to look like dead-end suspects, but not for long. A couple of days later, a detective Thompson went over to talk to Alex again. Alex was out, but another surly-looking kid answered the door, and Thompson noticed he was wearing lug-sold boots, just like the ones that made the print on Bob Wilson's back. He asked to see the bottom of the boots, and sure enough, the treads looked like a match for the print.

Thompson felt a little jolt of adrenaline. He just stumbled on the killer. And then he had a hunch. He said, hey, does Alex have a pair of those boots? The kid nodded. Oh, yeah, Alex saw me wearing these, liked him, and got a pair just for himself. Alex had told the cops he only owned one pair of shoes. Lie number one.

The surly kid's aunt, Chris, was another tenant in the house, and when Thompson asked her if Alex had been home all Friday night, she said no. She had seen Alex and David Anderson drive off in a dark-colored truck at 10 p.m. She knew the time because 2020 was just starting on TV. So, not playing video games all night after all. Lie number two. Whoopsie Daisy. Being caught in a double lie about your already flimsy alibi to a multiple murder is the absolute best way to get the cots crawling up your butt again.

And this time, David and Alex were brought in for full interviews at the police station. Whomp, womp. Now, David probably thought he aced this interview, calm and collected. He didn't change his story, though. They were right, he said. He wasn't playing games with Alex that night. He actually spent the whole night cruising with his girlfriend Marcia in her dad's truck. And why had he lied initially?

Oh, well, he was just trying to protect Alex. He didn't know what his best bud had been up to that night. He said all this as confidently and casually as you could possibly want. And then, I swear this is true, he leaned in toward prosecutor Eakes, looked into her eyes, put his hand on her leg, and said, so how are you doing? You know, with all this awful violent stuff.

Yeah, take a moment. And prosecutor Eakes, who looks like the real life Olivia Benson from Law & Order SVU and seems impeccably self-possessed and poised. Even years later in an interview, like you could just feel how much it fucking creeped her out. Like you just

practically hear her skin crawling through the TV. She said it was in that moment when she knew in her gut that she was dealing with a psychopath. God knows what David was hoping to get out of this. Maybe Eeks would get all flustered and think, oh, he's so young, so handsome. If I go easy on him, maybe he'll go out with me. But it turns out that techniques honed on lonely teenage girls

do not translate so well to 33-year-old prosecutors, and all he managed to do was convince Ekes that he was guilty as hot-buttered hell. But of course, they got nothing remotely like a confession from David Anderson, and they still didn't have any direct evidence connecting him to the murders. So for now, they had to let him go. So how about old Alex?

How'd he do in his interview with Detective Gomes and the team? Well, the problem with involving unstable weirdos in your criminal schemes is that your continued freedom then relies on an unstable weirdo being able to keep it together under pressure. And Alex, it could not. He cracked like an egg in a clothes dryer. And over the course of the next three hours, he treated the detectives to a stumbling, sometimes weepy confession to all four murders. His story was that for years he'd been wondering what it would be like to take a human life with his own hands, and he'd chosen Kim because

he couldn't stand her. He said he called her up and got her to come to Water Tower Park, and when she showed up, he strangled her with the length of rope he just happened to have with him. He took her wallet and her glasses and put them in his pocket. After dragging Kim's body into the bushes, he said, he went and sat in her car. His mind was spinning, and he suddenly realized that Kim might have told her family where she was going and who she was going there to meet, so he drove her car to the Wilson's neighborhood, parked a safe distance away from the house, and sat there, waiting for night to fall. When it was dark enough to suit him, he snuck into the Wilson's house through the garage. There was an aluminum baseball bat leaning up against a wall. He already had a knife

with him, but he grabbed the bat anyway, he said, and skulked quietly through the dark house. He came to Bill and Rose's bedroom first, quickly killing Rose in her sleep. When Bill Wilson stumbled out of bed, still groggy and confused, Alex dropped the bat and just kept stabbing him with the knife until he fell. When he came out of the room, he saw 17-year-old Julia standing in the hallway. Terrified, poor Julia's instinct to freeze kicked in as she saw him coming toward her, and she just dropped to the ground. He stabbed her then, and when she didn't die quickly enough, started to her.

beating her with the bat. When she was still, he dragged her body back into her room. After the murders, he dropped Kim's car in a parking lot and walked home, discarding his jacket and weapons on the way. Then he went to sleep. The whole thing, he said, had felt like a dream, like he was watching someone else do it. Now, a lot of this fit with what the investigators had put together from the crime scenes, but there were some notable gaps. Most importantly, they knew there had been two attackers in the Wilson's home, and all the victims had injuries beyond what Alex described. So they kept him in the interrogation room. And finally, Alex admitted they were right. He did have an accomplice, somebody who had kicked Kim while Alex strangled her,

had wielded the bat while he stabbed Julia Wilson with a knife. But as for who that person was, Alex absolutely refused to say. But the Bellevue PD were not, in fact, thoroughly stumped by the great mystery of Alex's accomplice, they knew it was David Anderson. They told him they knew it was David, and they told him that David was just down the hall, blaming the whole thing on him. But Alex wouldn't give him up. He said, if David was in the other room saying that I shot 50 people in Oregon last week, it wouldn't matter. Pathetic. This took the detectives by surprise. I mean, usually it doesn't take much for Tweedledee to roll on Tweedledum. So they asked him why. Alex's answer was simple,

he said, because he's the only person I've ever liked. Jesus Murphy. You know, I like you, KT, but I'm not doing life in prison for you. Sorry, dude, but if we go all Thelma and Louise and you decide to dine me out, you are most definitely going down with me. Just telling you now. Likewise. Likewise. It's kind of pathetic to let your accomplice sell you down. the river and refused to implicate him. Like, my respect for both of these little aberrations was already ground level, but, uh, Alex, you want to lick David's boots while you're down there? It's the only thing you can reach.

So Alex was arrested in charge, of course, and preparations began to take him to trial. But no matter how often he was interviewed, no matter what deal he was offered, he refused to incriminate David Anderson. It was so frustrating. But fortunately, there was another avenue to explore with David. Remember the black truck he'd been driving around in, the one that belonged to his girlfriend's dad? Well, when he got the truck back from David, girlfriend's dad had found something strange in it, a length of rope. One of the shakier parts of Alex's confession was the idea that he'd killed Kim with a rope he just happened to have in his pocket.

And when they sent the rope from the truck to the crime lab, they discovered, it was the same type as the one used to strangle Kim. This put David Anderson in possession of a likely murder weapon, and it put Bellevue PD into habeas-grabis mode. A second fly in David's Chardonnay was the refusal of a judge to transfer the case to juvenile court. Apparently, contrary to David's strongly held opinion, you can't actually annihilate as many people as you want

before the age of 18 and get out of jail at 21. because a fucking course you can't you absolute fucking knob end especially not when you're like a month away from your 18th birthday anyway it's it's not Cinderella at the ball you don't hit midnight and suddenly become culpable you're not going to turn into a pumpkin so the case against Alex was by far the strongest and he was tried first and swiftly convicted the judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole and even through all of that facing the rest of his natural life behind bars, he still refused to implicate David in any way at all. Without testimony from Alex, the case against David was quite a bit shakier. Prosecutors had the

rope, but they were only able to show that it was the same kind as the one that killed Kim. They couldn't prove that the ligature had been cut from the exact same piece. Now, it was still a pretty strong circumstantial case, but not quite strong enough, and after a couple of months, the trial ended in a hung jury. Detectives had continued investigating the case, though, and soon they hit pater. A fine spray of Julia Wilson's blood on a pair of boots recovered from David's closet. Asperated blood, which could only have been transferred as David stood over her while she lay dying, breathing her last breaths. Bless her heart. And it was that piece of evidence that sealed the prosecution's case. David's second trial was pretty much a slam dunk, despite his

defense attorneys doing what defense attorneys do, claiming the real killer must have stolen David's boots and then returned them without his knowledge. Like, dude, come on, take a knee already. Her blood's all over his shoes. Just like his little buddy, David was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. From the start, investigators had considered him the most likely mastermind behind the murders. That had always been the dynamic between the two of them. David was the leader, Alex was the follower.

And David's anger at Kim had always had a more obsessive, kind of urgent edge to it than Alex's. Alex seemed to just find her more annoying. He disliked her. whereas David had a seething rage. Seemingly, just because she didn't want to sleep with them. And had had the gall to ask for the money back that she'd loaned him. How dare she? It was this, the wound to David Anderson's thin little man-boy pride

that led to the slaughter of an entire family. And they were a wonderful family. On the show, The Real Story, with Maria Elena Salinas, a friend of Kim's talks about how warm and welcoming they were, the kind of parents who, if he came over to see Kim, she wasn't ready to go yet, you could just plop down on the couch and chat with them. The kind you could play board games with. Good eggs. And Julia was bright and curious and full of life and just right on the cusp of becoming whoever she wanted to be. And they're not here anymore

because of these two little num-nut pieces of shit. It's just so sad and pathetic and pointless that it makes me want to puke a little bit. Oh, God. Now, a few years ago, the Supreme Court made a decision that I actually agree with. They required resentencing here. for any juvenile offender who'd been sentenced to life without parole. And I agree with this. I really do. 99% of the time we shouldn't be sentencing people to spend the rest of their lives behind bars when their brains are not done developing yet.

You know, Lord knows, I'd hate to be held to account for the rest of my life for some of the dumb shit I did when I was 17 years old or 18 or whatever. But in this specific case, this makes me nervous. At some point, these guys are going to have a chance at resentencing. And I don't know. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live down the street from either one of them. of them. Would you? Mm-mm.

Ugh. 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 this week, we want to send a special happy birthday shout out to our superfan, Alex, whose friend Leah took the time and trouble to email us on her behalf, which I think is lovely.

Alex, Leah says she loves you more than life itself and wants to thank you for everything you do. Aw, I love that. We all deserve a friend like that. You know, y'all are so sweet. And, as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Becky, Christina, Kim, Allie, and Leah. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out.

Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early, sometimes more, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. a free sticker at $5 a rad enamel pin while supplies last at 10 virtual events with Katie and me we just had one last weekend it was awesome you got to see my cats and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you so if you can come join us