True Crime Campfire - Wild Ride: The Carriage House Murder-for-Hire

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

In game theory, there’s this thing called the Hawk-Dove game, better known to most of us as “chicken.” It’s when two players get themselves into a sort of standoff—a situation where it would be better for everybody if somebody would back down, but nobody wants to be the first to give up. So they both just keep going, with no regard for their personal safety, until finally—hopefully—somebody’ll say uncle at the last possible second. It happens on the road sometimes—often with bloody results. And sometimes, it happens in business. Join us for a story of pure greed and ego, set against the unlikely backdrop of the horse-drawn carriage business in 90s Kansas City, Missouri.Sources:Court papers: https://casetext.com/case/us-v-ldonnaKansas City Star: https://account.kansascity.com/paywall/subscriber-only?resume=217844680&intcid=ab_archiveKansas City Pitch: https://www.thepitchkc.com/carriage-lady-returns/CBS' "Pink Collar Crimes," Episode "Clash of the Carriages"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://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. In game theory, there's this thing called the Hawk Dove game, better known to most of us as chicken. It's when two players get themselves into a sort of stand. a situation where it would be better for everybody if somebody would back down, but nobody wants to be the first to give up. So they both just keep going with no regard for their personal safety

until finally, hopefully, somebody will say uncle at the last possible second. It happens on the road sometimes, often with bloody results, and sometimes it happens in business. Join us for a story of pure greed and ego set against the unlikely backdrop of the horse-drawn carriage business. This is Wild Ride, the carriage company murder for hire. So, campers, for this one, we're in Kansas City, Missouri. Dwayne Green thought his mom was losing her mind when she came home one day in 1979 and announced she'd just bought an antique carriage. I don't know, she said I just wanted it. Dwayne rolled his eyes, but his mom, Mary Goodall, knew what she was doing.

Before long, the whole family, Mary and her two grown kids were running a brand new business, the Pride of Kansas Carriage Company, giving horse-drawn carriage rides to tourists on the Country Club Plaza. Mary ran the business, Dway and his sister Sherry each drove one of the carriages, and they were making money hand over fist. Having fun doing it, too. There are lots of pictures from those early days. Mary and her daughter are looking elegant in evening dresses. Dwayne in a top hat, standing next to Mary's favorite horse pride.

Mary and her daughter were both gorgeous, and I'm sure that didn't hurt business. I mean, who wouldn't want to ride around in a horse-drawn carriage driven by somebody who looks kind of like Catherine Zeta Jones? Everything was pretty much peachy for the first few years, but then the way Mary Goodall tells it, one sunny afternoon in 1981, some competition popped up right out of the blue, popped up about six feet away, too, just plonked their ticket stand right next to Mary's, And then a pretty, friendly-looking blonde lady came bouncing up and introduced herself as M.J. Ladonna, owner and proprietress of Surrey Limited. Despite her chirpy little, hi, I'm M.J., Mary said, it wasn't long before Ms. Ladonna started doing whatever she could to put a chokehold on Mary's business. Years later, Dwayne told CBS she could have went anywhere else in the city. The other end of the plaza, we didn't care.

But for whatever reason, MJ had set up shop right next to them. It does seem a little aggressive, doesn't it? And before long, the two ladies were in an all-out feud. Yelling across the sidewalk at each other, trying to undercut each other's prices, filing complaints about each other, trying everything they could to lure each other's customers away. Our drivers are safer, one would yell,

or our rides are longer. Come over here. Park security was dealing with some bullshit out of one or both of them almost every day, to the point where the security guards got sick of the sight of them. A lot of it was just petty, mean, girl's shit. Like according to Mary, on her 50th birthday, MJ hung up a bunch of balloons that said happy 60th birthday, Mary. Meow, right? Don't know what that was supposed to accomplish other than just sticking it to Mary a little bit. Oh my God. I feel like shit like this sets feminism back

about 50 years. Like I know, I know it was the 80s, but Christ, ladies, your business owners. I know. I can just hear the two dudes that got a hold of a couple of microphones talking about this right now about how women be and like how men would never do shit like this like thank god thank god there were no podcasts back then yeah when you when you hear the security guard talking about it like that's definitely the attitude like these you know cat fight blah blah blah that's very gross before long they became notorious in kansas city at one point both carriage companies came under fire by protesters, animal rights activists who objected to the business on principle, after one of Mary Goodall's horses spooked and ended up kicking and freaking out and damaging a bunch

of parked cars. That was in the news, obviously, and it got the attention of the animal rights community, and for a few days there were protests. Mary Goodall's response to that was to go up to the protesters and say, look, what we're asking our horses to do really isn't that hard for them at all. And then she demonstrated that by pulling one of her carriages herself, with a full load of people in it. Did it in high heels, too, which, damn. Now, I'm not convinced that a stunt like that would change anybody's mind about whether carriage rides are bad for horses or not. I mean, whether the thing is heavy or not probably isn't the point.

But according to Mary, anyway, it did change some of the protesters' minds. And once she saw that, MJ Ladana decided to copy Mary's idea. But she called the media to come out and film her doing it, giving Surrey Limited a little freeze publicity. which I'm sure made Mary's blood boil since it was her idea in the first place. I mean... Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. I would be so fucking mad.

And, like... That's infuriating. This is, you know, no one had TikToks in the 80s. So, like, it's not like you could prove that you did it first. Yeah, exactly. Ugh, infuriating. Another point of tension circled around a local street preacher named Michael Wheeler. Dude liked to dress in a blue and red get up with a cape.

kind of like Superman and preach at people as they walk by, you know, stuff like, you can call a cab and you can call a taxi, but don't forget to call in the name of the Lord. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know who else struggled to pull a burden like these horses? Jesus Christ. Sorry, that was my, that was my youth minister impression. Michael and Mary Goodall got along great, but apparently the street preacher took a dislike to MJ the first time he laid eyes on her. He later told filmmaker Sharon Lee's, M.J. would make me uneasy because her spirit wasn't right. I felt a demonic spirit working in her. According to MJ, Mary liked to send Michael over to her side of the street to preach at her customers and run them off. And one day, as Michael was ranting about the evils of witchcraft to a long long long time,

line of MJ's potential clients, MJ called the cops. When Mary saw a cop passing Michael, she crossed the street to see what was going on, and ended up in handcuffs right along with him. Mary said later that MJ was close with that particular cop. Who knows if it's true, or if Mary got arrested because she tried to get up in the cop's face as he questioned Michael Wheeler or what. But she spent a few hours in jail, and her son had to close up shop for the day and bail her out. I guess the arrest was enough to make Mary Goodall change tactics because in 1988 she decided to offer MJ an olive branch.

She suggested what she called a lady's agreement. On even number days, MJ and her people would work on the plaza. And Mary and her drivers would work on the odd days. For a little while, it worked so well, in fact, that when Mary got married, she invited MJ to the wedding. Both the women were making money. Nobody was going to jail or anything. Now, there are two stories about what broke the truce, Mary's, and MJ's. According to Mary, one day she got a pissed off phone call from a lady asking what the hell she was supposed to do with the gift certificates she'd bought from her now that she was going out of business. Going out of business, Mary said. What are you talking about?

The angry lady said she'd talk to a blonde lady at the ticket booth on the plaza, and she said Mary was shutting down business for good. Oh, my God. After that, Mary said all bets were off. No more ladies' agreement. MJ, surprise, surprise, tells a different story. She said that one day she was doing business as usual, on one of her even-numbered days, when suddenly Mary showed up out of the blue and started selling rides. No notice, she said later. No discussion at all. Which story is true? Who the hell knows? They could both be true.

Mary could have shown up on one of MJ's days to retaliate for MJ's little, she's going on a business stunt. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle with a feud like this. Yeah, exactly. And both women have people who vouch for them and say they were nice and charming and great to work with, whatever. So we can't know for sure what happened, but we do know that after the ladies' agreement went tits up, The tension escalated. And when we say they had a feud, y'all, we mean a feud. Frickin Hatfields and McCoys, okay? This shit went on for 10 years.

Something happened almost every day, Mary's daughter Sherry said later. Every day, something would happen to infuriate you, which just what a nightmare. Jesus Jones, I couldn't stand to live like that. I don't care who's right and who's wrong. I'd have been out of there so fast. But it's very clear to me that both these women have type A personalities. And by type A, I mean type ain't going down alive. Yeah, I think it's strange, but some people really do thrive on that kind of like drama,

like high drama in their life. Like, they get bored so easily. And so, you know, if they can bitch about the lady in the cubicle next to her or the carriage lady across the street, they're just fulfilled. They get excited about it. They started filing complaints against each other ad nauseum over various code violations, over how they treated the horses, whatever they thought they could get away with.

And if one filed a complaint, the other would file a counter-complaint. On and on, until everybody, from the security guards at the plaza to the staff at City Hall, probably wanted to fire them both into the sun. According to one former security guard, everybody tried to talk them

and to taken it down a few notches, but as he later put it on the CBS show, pink-collar crime, I roll at the name, they didn't want to bury the hatchet. They wanted a bigger hatchet. Oh boy So I got to tell a story here

Okay When I was in college There was this girl named Heather Who was sort of like on the periphery Of our friend group She was a little older than we were And before she moved to our town She lived in Chicago for a while

And she'd worked as a carriage driver And she was always talking about carriage drivers As if it was like Universally well known what carriage drivers were like So she'd tell a story And then she'd be like But you know carriage drivers Like no

We don't Are we supposed to? And we used to make fun of her for it because it seemed ridiculous at the time. But now I think I was dead wrong. I think I owe Heather an apology, wherever she may be, because apparently she was right. Carriage drivers are insane.

Heather. Heather, on behalf of True Crime Campfire, we are sorry Whitney ever doubted you because, holy shit. If you're out there, Heather, we get it. I do know carriage drivers now. Holy shit. Holy shit, Heather. So it went on like that for a while.

Sometimes the local news would show up and cover the feud. One of their cameras caught a snippy little back and forth outside the City Hall one time. How many times have you been to jail, Mary? M.J. taunted her. Just a once, as far as I know, for the record. Then Mary's son Dwayne jumped into the fray. He was like, well, we have all our taxes paid. You were shut down from the beginning of the year for not paying enough taxes. I was in a car accident, MJ yelled back.

Oh, no, you weren't. Mary said, you had a facel. God. Whoa, what did I tell you? Mean girl shit. But it wasn't just bitchy little verbal slap fight. Stuff started to get dark. According to Dwayne, somebody loosened the lug nuts on his truck in the middle of the night

and he almost ran off the road the next morning. He couldn't prove it, but he suspected MJ or somebody working for her. Mary later told CBS that a lot of this kind of stuff happened over the next few years. Cars were stolen from her, tires punctured on some of Mary's vehicle. her horse trailer was sabotaged. But they could never catch anybody in the act. They couldn't prove anything, so their hands were tied. Before long, everybody on both sides started carrying guns,

because that's just what this situation needs, right? For all these people to be armed. I know this isn't the time for my shenanigans. Oh, God. But were the horses also carrying little guns? as well do you think where would the horse carry a gun i don't know use your head and their teeth like where they don't have hands no they don't have thumbs like kangaroos fingers to pull the trigger i don't know where they're going to keep a gun delightful little visual of horses with holsters

god sakes so probably not for her part mj claims somebody loosened the lug nuts on one of her carriages, and it lost a wheel right in the middle of the busy Christmas season. She also claims that Sherry, Mary's daughter, once pushed her ticket booth, which was a little carriage in itself on wheels, into the middle of the street with her in it. She couldn't push it back off the street herself, MJ said, so she called her carriage house and asked them to send somebody to help her. And they sent her a guy who introduced himself as Sean Butner. Buckner had been helping out around the carriage house lately, visiting another one of MJ's employees, and he seemed like a nice enough guy. About 29 years old, wife and kids,

Butner helped MJ move her ticket booth out of the street where Sherry had dumped it. And after that, he started driving her back and forth to work. Okay, so I want to interrupt here for a second and talk about this story about how and why M.J. met Sean Butner. Okay. Now, I've seen Mary's daughter Sherry and I've seen M.J. Ladonna, and they're both like normal-sized ladies, if anything, a little petite. Now, MJ's claim is that Sherry pushed her out into the street inside the carriage. And Sherry, and Sherry, wasn't like a bodybuilder or anything. They look pretty similar to me in terms of like size and muscle mass and stuff. So why couldn't MJ push the thing back across the street by herself? Especially now that it was empty? I mean, she just did the exact same thing for the press to prove it wasn't too hard on the horses, but this is the story MJ tells about how and why she met Butner. And I just find that I'm going to call it interesting. By which I mean, I suspect it is grade A bullish.

And y'all will see why that matters in a minute. Right. Now, this. was at the height of the feud. Everybody was armed, intentions were ratcheting up by the day. So MJ's staff felt like it was a good idea for her to have a driver, almost sort of a bodyguard. So Butner signed on for the job. And of course, they got to talking on those drives to and from the plaza. I helped a lot of my employees, MJ said later. I had a soft heart, so I would give him money to just drive me back and forth to work. Once, she said, Butner drove her by his house so she could see where he and his family lived. What he was asking for was money, she said, to buy groceries. My feeling was these people needed help. Well, bless her hard. Isn't that sweet? Mm-hmm. M.J. claims not to have

known anything about Butner's past, specifically that he'd been in and out of jail quite a bit. To her, she says, he was just a good guy, down on his luck. Somebody she could work off some of her soft heart on. Butner tells a slightly different story. In a 2018 interview, from jail on a parole violation for something or another, he told CBS that MJ could be a charmer, sweet as can be. She knows how to get what she wants, he said. Everybody likes being around her. That's how she puts off, but she's money greedy. And one day, Butner said, as he was driving her home from work, MJ made him a little proposition. She wanted him to kill Mary Goodall for her. She'd pay him for it. Mary was taking up most of her.

business, Butner said later. If it was just her out there, she could buy Mary out and she could have the whole run around there in Plaza. Now, who knows what Butner's actual reaction was to this? This guy is far from an angel. It's possible he just didn't think she was serious. Like a lot of people don't in this situation. Or it's possible he kind of thought about it for a while or maybe he was just horrified and didn't know what to do. That first conversation didn't. didn't really go anywhere, but not long after that, M.J. brought it up again. But this time, she'd changed her mind about the plan. She didn't just want Mary good-all dead. She wanted button her to kill her stepdad, too.

Oh, Jesus. You see, MJ's mom was married to a wealthy man. For years, she'd been sitting pretty, but now MJ's mom and her hubs were about to divorce. Bye-bye, Daddy Warbucks. But if they got rid of the guy, mom would inherit and hopefully be willing to share the wealth. She'd be free of Mary and rolling in cash. But apparently, RMJ is an indecisive little scamp because the next time she and Butner got together, she changed the game plan again. God, this bitch is all over the place.

Make up your damn mind who you want to kill for Pete's sake. The man doesn't have all day. This time, she felt like she'd nailed it. This was the plan. She wasn't going to knock off Mary Goodall or her stepdad. she was going to kill off her boyfriend, John Ensel. Okay. Why? Well, because John had a life insurance policy, MJ said, with her as the beneficiary.

By now, Butner had apparently realized she was serious. Whether he thought about actually doing it for a second, we'll never know. But the way he tells the story, he was horrified at the idea that MJ would ask him to commit a murder. He told CBS years later, I'm not a murderer. I'm dirty and a lot of stupid stuff, but I'm not a but she knew what she was doing. She knew exactly what to do and hide it out and everything. It's like she'd done it before. She was in the wrong and I'd done what I had to do. And what he had to do, Butner said, was go to the ATF. And why not the police? Well, because Butner can't stand cops. He had a few too many run-ins with him, I guess. And on January 8th,

1998, Special Agent Ron Getty took his call. And very quickly, he realized that this sounded like the real deal, that three different people might be in real danger. if they didn't act soon. So he asked Butner to wear a wire and try to get MJ talking. They wired him up with a hidden microphone and all that and he made arrangements to meet up with MJ. She'd made up her mind who she wanted bumped off, she said. Definitely John Ensel, no need to do anything to her stepdad or Mary Goodall. This would do it. It kind of made sense, at least in MJ's head. If she killed Mary Goodall, her son and daughter would still be there to run the carriage company. Plus, MJ would be suspect number one. But if she killed her

boyfriend and collected on his life insurance, she'd have a bunch of money to put into her business. She could crush her competition into dust. As the tape recorder rolled, she said, I'll have some money and she won't. She's really broke. As the ATF agents listened in, Butner said, you're getting $50,000? She was actually slated to get $250,000, but you know, Butner didn't need to know that. It's better to lowball a little bit, so he won't ask for as much cash. Our girl was nothing, if not frugal. I don't know how soon it'll come. come through, M.J. said. Getting down to business, Butner said, hey, um, you think five? I mean, like, will five grand break you? I mean, that's only if you get it. I mean, if you don't get it,

I guess I'll get nothing, but if you get it, just play our game right. Don't act suspicious about anything. Oh, no, MJ said, like, please, of course not. She was insulted. Butner pressed on. I mean, don't start laughing when you find out. M.J. seemed annoyed at the suggestion. I won't. I know. I'd play the role. I'm smart enough. know what to do. Later in the conversation, they got down to the nitty-gritty, the murder method. Just make sure you don't do something in a public place, MJ said. Make sure nobody sees you.

John was going to be at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on January 18th, MJ told him. Why not go to the room? Butner didn't like that idea. They'll hear the gunfire, he argued. Well, there's other ways, MJ said. There's pillows. Which girl, really? You want to send a man to kill another man with a pillow?

Do you know how many ways that could go south? I mean, her boyfriend was a perfectly able-bodied adult dude. Like, he wasn't just going to lie there and, like, allow himself to be smothered to death, was he? Probably not. Dumbass. Like, that would have been an epic struggle, and she's just like, pillow. It's just so ridiculous. Later, Agent Getty told filmmaker Sharon Lee's that MJ's attitude reminded him of the way drug dealers take out hits on their rivals.

Just ice cold. She didn't care how Butner killed John Insull. She just wanted him dead so she could get him. her pause on that money. For her, it was nothing more than a business transaction. Now, as I'm sure y'all know by now, after listening to us cover, like, a bunch of these murder-for-hire cases, that this kind of talk isn't enough for an arrest. It's suspicious as hell, obviously, but it's not proof of intent. Because people talk. People say stuff they don't mean. People change their minds. So what they need in a case like this is something concrete. Either a

or something else, like the suspect hands the hitman a picture of the target or a murder weapon. On the tape, M.J. made clear that she couldn't get Butner his five grand until after the murder. She had to collect the life insurance payout first. So Agent Getty wanted to see if Butner could get MJ to hand over a gun. So they set up another meeting. Wired Butner up again, the whole thing, and lo and behold, there she was with a gun. handed it right over. And she made sure Butner knew that John Ensel's body needed to be found. Otherwise, she said the insurance company would make her wait seven years before she could collect on the money.

They ironed out the final details. MJ agreed to give Butner five grand for the hit as soon as the payout came through. You can count on it, she told him. And that? The transfer of the gun, the mention of the money, was enough for the habeas gravis. When they plucked her off the plaza and put the handcuffs on it, her, M.J. seemed totally shocked. But when the story hit the news, it was the best day ever for Mary Goodall in her family. They were so stoked to see their nemesis and an orange jumpsuit

that they made a day out of it with a cooler of beers and a game of horseshoes. Yeah, sounds like one hell of a party. Yep. I mean, I'd love to see any one of my many nemesis wearing those silver bracelets. I'd crack open a cold one for sure. M.J. was facing two felony charges, solicitation of murder and providing a firearm for the use of murder. And this is bonkers. According to Mary's son, Dwayne, the police told him they found voodoo dolls of him and his mom and sister in MJ's house, like with pins stuck in up. Like, he even claims that they did DNA testing and found out she'd attached real strands of their hair to the dolls. Like, we can't prove this, obviously. This is just according to Dwayne, but if it's true, we're not. true? Dang. You know, I actually feel like that's very on brand for MJ, but I mean, who

the hell knows? I have to say, from watching that TV show about the case, I got the distinct impression that all these people were, you know, strong personalities, TM. I mean, I'm sure Mary gave as good as she got in the feud. The difference is, of course, Mary and her kids never tried to have anybody killed, so big diff. Yeah, it rings true to me too, but maybe that's just because we just covered the stouties who dabbled in witchcraft and then prior to that don bennett who tried performing a shut the fuck up ritual on our enemies like that's right something about power hungry women and dabbling in the supernatural i don't know what it is um it's a love affair it's a love affair maybe it's like it's almost like a quick get rich quick scheme except it's like a get

revenge quick scheme i don't know anyway i can only imagine what this was like for poor John Insull. I know. MJ's boyfriend slash target. According to Butner, John came up to him after MJ's arrest and thanked him for saving his life.

John was, in Butner's words, a good dude. The trial was a media circus, as you can imagine, especially when they started playing the tapes. There were a bunch of them with hours and hours and hours of conversations between MJ

and her would-be hitman. Plenty for the media to sink their teeth into. especially once they realized that MJ herself was going to testify. Now, MJ claims her attorney encouraged her to take the stand. Maybe he did, but I know a lot of attorneys would never. And having gotten a taste of MJ on that CBS show, I cannot fathom how any attorney with two brain cells to rub together

would have thought it was a good idea. Like, definitely was not. But anyway, her story is that she didn't really want to testify, but her attorney pressured her into it. And it, um, did not go well. Yeah. Yeah, MJ didn't even try to dispute the tapes or the gun.

Her story was that she and Butner were just playing a little game. She thought he's just Joshin, basically, and she went along with it. It's like, girl, what? Oh, right, just playing a little hyper-realistic game of murder for hire, like everybody does now and then with their employees. With a guy, in fact, that she later described as a sad sack who she felt sorry for because he was poor

and who she'd been given money to out of the goodness of her sweet, big heart, so he and his wife and kids could buy groceries. My point is, she never described this guy as a friend. He was an employee. He was her driver-slash bodyguard. He was a charity case. She helped out because she was so soft-hearted. That's how she described him.

So why on God's Earth, even if she were inclined to play murder games, would she be playing him with him? Not to mention how toweringly dumb it is to suggest that a game like that would involve the transfer of a real gun. Just no. Bitch, please. And as she seems to realize now, our girl didn't do herself any favors on the stand. Yeah, I mean, that's actually.

how I joke with my friends. Like I explained to them that I need a few people offed, change my mind a bunch of times, and then provide a promise of money and also a potential murder weapon. Right. That's what I do on days that I don't play D&D. It's like I'm larping like Goodfellas. Yeah, why not? As for the tapes, the show, Pink Collar Crime, just, everybody just, oh, paid them, made much ado about the fact that the tape recordings weren't the best quality. Like the jury had a transcript to follow and the defense made some suggestion that maybe the actual tape didn't really match it or whatever. But it seems like there was plenty enough clear audio to dig MJ's grave. And the thing is,

if the tape was that big of an issue, then why did MJ take the stand and verify the damn thing by saying, oh, it was just a game we were playing? Like, she didn't say, I didn't say any of that. I don't know what you think you're hearing, but I was just giving him my recipe for Pekan Sandy. Like, she didn't even attempt that. So I count this to be a big bunch of nothing. I mean, this kind of audio was always kind of crappy back in the 90s. The jury heard more than enough. Like, for example, they heard this fun little exchange.

Katie, you be Butner, okay, and I'll be MJ. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You want me to bring you the body when I'm done? No, thank you. I don't want a finger. His ear? I don't want an ear. I don't want any part of him.

You could put it on the freaking shelf. No, not even. And then you better make sure the place where you dump the gun is a long way away. Charming. So the jury found MJ guilty after a five-hour deliberation, and the judge sentenced her to 10 years in the clink. MJ later told CBS that as the deputies were leading her out of the courtroom in handcuffs, Mary Goodall leaned over from her seat in the gallery,

grinned and said, you'll never make it out of their life. Oh, boy. Nasty. But, you know, the woman did try to have her killed, so fair enough. guess. Mary didn't get to celebrate for long, though. She had the plaza to herself for a little while, but then somebody else took over MJ's company, and the competition was back again. Womp, womp, womp. So MJ was off to serve her time, but oddly enough, that's not the end of this banana pants story, because of course it's not. So, you know, Butner, you know, the would-be hitman

who got the ball rolling on this case in the first place by going to the ATF with the story? Well, thing was, Mr. Butner had himself a little skeleton in the closet. Namely, that about a year before, Butner had been a witness for the ATF in a big trial where six firefighters died as the result of an arson. Butner was a paid informant in that case. And here's the real kicker. He did all that under the name, Tom Butner.

Which, it turns out, is his real name. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Take a second. We know. Dude's real name is Tom Butner. Sean Butner, the name he'd been using, was a stolen identity. A cousin of his with a cleaner record and no active warrants.

Our Butner did have an active warrant, and he didn't want to get arrested. Right. And when he showed up a year later, under the name Sean Butner, offering info in a totally unrelated case, he didn't get on the radar of any of the agents who knew him from the case a year earlier. Unbelievable. So this meant that during MJ's trial, when he testified that his name was Sean Butner, he'd committed perjury.

He actually went so far as to say that it was his brother who testified in the earlier case. And apparently, nobody bothered to check, which... Oh, my God. Bananas. So, of course, they went after him for perjury, and he ended up doing 10 months in prison and a year of probation. But of course, MJ's defense cried foul, especially when they found out that Butner

had been given some, quote-unquote, subsistence money during the trial as compensation for his work for the ATF. According to them, it wasn't much. And he didn't know in advance that he'd be getting anything. But, I mean, come on. He'd been a paid informant before. He had to know it was a possibility, at least. Uh, yeah.

Could he have made this whole thing up just to score some cash? Of course, that's what MJ's attorney tried to argue. They filed an appeal as fast as they could type it up. But here's the thing. Was it shitty that Butner lied about his name? Of course. Was it incompetent that the state didn't figure that out? Probably definitely also, yes.

Was the man most likely doing this for money or brownie points with the police or both? Hell, yes. Well, yeah, like he's kind of a dirt bag. We know this. But does that make MJ innocence? Nope. Know how I know? Because we have it on tape.

And because even she didn't dispute the tapes in court, she just tried to spin them to look like a joke. Right. I mean, this was a slam dunk case. They had a mountain of evidence on this woman. Butner or no Butner. So unsurprisingly, despite these icky shenanigans, the appeals court upheld MJ's conviction. And MJ served out eight years of her 10-year sentence.

For her part, Ms. Ladonna still maintains her innocence, swearing up and down that her conversations with Butner were just a little game they were playing and that she never intended to hurt anybody. In 2018, she told CBS that her carriage company days were one of the best times her life, which goes a long way toward convincing me that this woman is stuffed full of more shit than a Thanksgiving turkey. The way she tells the story, it was a nonstop, decade-long roller coaster ride of threats and frustration and shady dealings, so much so that she felt like she had to have a bodyguard and driver, so much so that she had a 45 handgun with her

wherever she went. That was the best time of your life? Really? We've talked before about leakage, how sometimes a liar will accidentally slip up for a second and let a little bit of truth trickle out. I think this is a great example of that. I suspect maybe this was one of the best times of MJ's life, because I get the feeling she's one of those people who thrives on war, you know, the kind who can't be happy unless they're trying to maneuver on somebody else. Anyway, MJ's out of prison now. She served her time, and now she works as a home health care provider for the elderly, which, yeah, we'll just leave that alone, but Jesus. Just watch

your memos and papaws, y'all, which is good advice at the best of times. 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

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