True Crime Campfire - With Friends Like These: The Murder of Matthew Silliman

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Helen Keller once said “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.” Friendship, when it’s done right, is one of the joys of life. Most of us hope to find a group of true friends, people who will be happy for us when we’re happy and, like Helen says, walk through our darkest times with us. Most of us would never expect to be confronted with a life or death situation that we needed our friends to pull us out of. But for the people in this case, that’s exactly what happened. Would you put your life in your best friends’ hands? Sources:Investigation Discovery's "Murder Among Friends," Episode "Murder Circle"Masters of True Crime: Chilling Stories of Murder and the Macabre, R. Barri Flowers, Ed. https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/8291262/https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsNotMeet/comments/2gm3bc/i_almost_attended_my_friends_murder/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] 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. Helen Keller once said, I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light. Friendship, when it's done, right is one of the joys of life. Most of us hope to find a group of true friends. People who will be happy for us when we're happy, and like Helen says, walk through our darkest times with us. Most of us would never expect to be confronted with a life or death situation that we needed our friends to pull us out of. But for the people in this case, that's exactly what happened. Would you put your life in your best friend's hands? This is with friends like these, the murder of Matthew Silliman.

So, campers, we're in Apex, North Carolina, December 3, 2008. 911 received a call from a woman who said she wanted to remain anonymous. She said, there's a body, a young man. in an abandoned trailer outside town. The caller gave directions to the trailer and then hung up, apparently not willing to identify herself or how she knew about any of this. So dispatch sent a couple of patrol officers to investigate. They easily found the trailer based on the mystery caller's directions.

It was a nice double-wide, but it looked like it hadn't been lived in for quite a while. The grass was all overgrown around it and it looked abandoned. As the officers approached the trailer, the hairs on the back of their necks stood up. In the side yard was a big hole in the ground, full of rainwater. A hole very much the shape and size of a shallow grave. One of the officers picked up a stick and kind of poked around in the hole long enough to feel sure that there was no body under the water, and then they proceeded into the trailer. Inside, they found what looked like the remnants of a small gathering.

There was an empty bottle of red wine and a few empty wine glasses on a table, along with discarded food wrappers, cigarette butts, incense, and ashes. Then there were two vials of liquid diazepam, the generic name for the sedative Valium. And two 250 milligram bottles of potassium bromide, the label of which read, for veterinary use only. A veterinary sedative? Weird. There was also an empty pill bottle from a local pharmacy. It's label read hydrocodone, an opioid pain reliever.

Huh. Next to the drugs lay some plastic tubing, a few syringes, and a needle. Somebody had been having quite the party. The officers also found an odd array of other things, plastic trash bags, two knives, a roll of duct tape, Polaroid photographs of the inside of the trailer itself, and a video camera with video of the scene as well. Creepy. And strangest of all, four books on the tarot, cards that people can use to gain mystical or spiritual insights into their lives and futures. A deck of tarot cards was laid out on a table as if someone had been giving a reading.

The death card lay in a prominent spot among the others. Gave the cops an eerie feeling. They explored the trailer poking their heads into the bedrooms, the kitchen, and then, in the bathroom, they found what they'd been sent there to find. A sleeping bag lay on the floor. It was zipped all the way up, and there was a suspicious lump inside. And when they unzipped the bag, they found the body of a young white male. He had a clear plastic bag secured over his head with a zip tie and duct tape over his mouth.

He was bound at the wrists and ankles with more zip ties. The officers noted what looked like a bloody wound on the back of his head. Rigger Mortis had set in, so it was obvious the guy had been dead for some time. One of the officers happened to be carrying around a picture of a 17-year-old boy who had gone missing a little over a week earlier. He checked the body in the sleeping bag against the picture. It was him. High school junior Matthew Silliman had been found,

but certainly not the way people who loved him had hoped he would be. Matt was pretty much what you'd find in the dictionary if you looked up the phrase All-American boy. Smart, blonde, friendly, handsome, an Eagle Scout. His parents had adopted him as a baby, and they just adored him. Matt had a girlfriend, Michelle, who by all accounts he was goo-goo over and vice versa. She was just as gold in a girl as he was a boy. Artistic, blonde, popular, got along with her parents.

They were super cute together. Perfect match. So, of course, investigators got called in, and they brought in Matt's parents to make a positive ID. I can't even imagine what that would be like, and I don't want to, so I'm not gonna. I mean neither. Matt had gone missing the night before Thanksgiving. He'd gone to meet his girlfriend, Michelle, and he just never came home. Oh, God. They'd been frantic ever since. Instead of sitting down as a family for Thanksgiving dinner, the Sillimans had spent their long weekend filing a missing person's report and frantically calling everyone they could think of trying to find him. Now, the bottom had fallen out of their world.

Matt's parents couldn't imagine who would want to hurt their golden boy. Everybody loved Matt. He was everybody's best friend. One of those rare folks who really care about other people and will go out of their way to help them. The autopsy showed that Matt had died from asphyxiation, the plastic bag, but he'd also been hit in the back of the head with a blunt object, possibly a hammer or a crowbar, and dosed with valium and horse tranquilizers. Jesus, Louise. He'd vomited into the duct tape covering his mouth. And this is so bizarre. Someone had written on him, I love in all caps on one arm with a Christian cross, and the word fail on the other. What the hell? That's so weird. It's creepy. That plus the tarot cards in the living room with

the trailer made investigators wonder if this was some kind of ritual or culty killing. It had that feel about it. Definitely. Since Matt's parents said he was last known to be with Michelle, the investigators hauled her in. At first, they didn't tell her they'd found Matt's body. All she knew at this point was that her boyfriend was still missing. Michelle was polite and cooperative, and she seemed genuinely worried sick about Matt. She told them that although they'd worked it out for the most part, they'd been fighting quite a bit in recent weeks. Their fights were almost always about Matt's history with another girl. A girl named Allegra Dahlquist.

Despite being named after an allergy medication, Allegra Dahlquist had it going on. She was beautiful with dark hair and pale skin and startling green eyes. And she was talented, too. A bit of a fashionista. She liked designing and sewing her own clothes with a kind of goth aesthetic. Her friend said it seemed like Allegra was in, as one girl put it, in that FU stage of life.

trying to, quote, find herself. We've all been there. The boys at school were crawling all over her, but Allegra was taken. She was dating Ryan Hare, a charismatic, popular guy who was kind of the center of their group of friends. Ryan had been in some trouble the year before and got kicked out of school. Why, you might ask? Well, for shooting at a school bus with a paintball gun. Yeah, good times.

He'd opted not to go back to a different school and had just been working at a sub shop instead. Ryan had quite a hold on Allegra. But then Ryan had a hold on just about everybody. He just radiated cool, the type of guy who is always coming in hot with something big and dramatic and entertaining going on, some idea for how to have fun or stir shit up. What small town teenager doesn't love a guy like that, right? You know, something to do other than watching that Texaco sign turnaround. Yeah, there are three activities in rural towns,

sporting, drinking in a cornfield, and watching signs move. Sometimes you do all three at once. Oh, slow down. Trust me. I went to college in one. That is literally what we did. You're forgetting about cow tipping. I grew up in a small town too.

And getting pregnant. That is the five things. Oh, and getting pregnant. Yes. All right. So Ryan got bored easily, hence shooting at a bus with paintballs, I guess. And he couldn't tolerate boredom. For Ryan, boredom was kryptonite.

So he made sure something was always going on. Oh, my God. What have I said in the past, y'all? if you're bored, you're boring. My grandmother used to say that, too. So we'll come back to Ryan, but let's get back to Allegra for the moment. So in addition to school, Allegra helped her mom with the family's pet sitting business, and she rode horses competitively in those equestrian competitions.

She was really good at it, and she loved her horses, her family was well off, people liked her. But despite having so much going for her, Allegra had some mental health issues going on, which of course is not at all uncommon for teenagers. She had problems with depression and anxiety, and when her parents found out that she'd been self-harming, so she was cutting herself, they checked her into an inpatient facility called Holly Hills for some treatment. Now, this is how she ended up bonding and having an affair, if affair is the right word for a high school kid fooling around on her boyfriend, with Matt Silliman.

I think the word du jour is entanglement, thanks to Will Smith's wife Jada. Ew, I hate it. It reminds me of Paltrow and her conscious uncovering. It's exactly like that. Let me never miss an opportunity to bag on Paltrow. Okay, anyway, moving on. Matt had had his own issues with depression. In fact, the previous summer, he'd freaked everybody out by making a bizarre series of posts on social media and then attempting suicide.

Now, the suicide attempt was less about wanting to die and more about letting his family know, I'm in trouble, I need help. And Matt's parents had gotten him help straight away, also at Holly Hills, where Allegra now found herself. And since he came out of Holly Hills, everyone agreed that Matt had been doing 100% better. He was getting excited about stuff again. They'd gotten his medications right. He was thinking about the future. He was happy. But he'd never forget what it was like to be in that dark pit of depression. So he related to Allegra. And he wanted to help. He was that kind of kid. and while she was at Holly Hills, he visited her every day. So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that after a week or two of those daily visits,

Matt and Allegra caught feelings for each other. One night, they got busted by Holly Hill staff for sneaking up to the roof to have sex. Ooh, true romantic. I'm sure for Allegra, it was a welcome distraction from what she was going through. I don't know where Big Shot boyfriend Ryan was during all this, by the way. like whether he was also coming to visit her every day or not maybe he was just too busy with his new career as a sandwich artist i don't know but matt was definitely visiting her every day so this thing between matt and allegra quickly flamed out as teenage's romance tend to do but not before rumors started flying and then right about the time that allegra got released the shit hit the fan so matt's oldest friend was this kid named adele con a deal was known as a sweet kid kind of shy kind of evil eager to please. He was one of those kids who desperately wanted to be one of the cool cats but

just didn't quite know how to get there. See, I never wasted my time caring. I didn't care about being cool. I've literally never in my life given a shit about being cool, which I'm not saying that in a like humble braggy way. I really like, I'm just awkward and I own it. Yeah, you got to. Yeah. So anyway, I guess I shouldn't say never. When I was in like elementary school, I cared. But beyond that, like by the time I got to high school, I was just like, okay, I'm Weird, whatever. So anywho, he didn't know how to get in with the cool kids. He couldn't really talk to girls. He was kind of socially awkward. He'd gotten bullied a little bit at school. And despite his close friendship with Matt, a deal wanted more than anything to get cool guy Ryan's approval. I mean, they all did, really. The kids all seemed to feel like if they hung around with Ryan long enough, some of his effortless cool might rub off on them. That and the eye-watering musk of Axe body spray, of course. Yeah, Axe Body Spray is actually the gateway drug to misogyny. Well, on punching holes in the drywall.

So, anyhow, one night, when the two of them were hanging out, Adiel told Ryan about Matt and Allegra's little fling. Which, I mean, if one of my friends was cheating on their spouse or a significant other, I'd probably do the same thing. It's not like I approve of cheating, but my motive would be to spare my friends from greater pain down the line. A deal's motive in Narcan on Matt and Allegra seems. to have been a little bit less noble. Adil just wanted Ryan to like him.

So, of course, Alpha Dog Ryan flipped right the fuck out. He was pissed, furious. He promptly dumped Allegra, who was completely devastated. One of Allegra's friends has described her as one of those people who tends to fall in love with anybody who shows her attention. Despite her beauty and talent, she was an insecure girl. And now she'd lost Ryan, the bad boy, all the good girls wanted, and she couldn't have Matt now because he was already with his new girlfriend, Michelle.

Allegra had gone from feast to famine in one fell swoop, and she did not like it. And to make matters worse, the whole kerfuffle had created all kinds of weird tension in their friend group. You know how that is, right, campers? Yeah, you remember how crazy close your friend group was in high school and college? I mean, I'm still close with my friends, but once you all start getting out of school and starting career, and getting married and, you know, maybe having kids and all that rasmataz, things just kind of tend to change a little bit. You're not quite as knitted up together, not quite as involved in all the tiny little minutia of each other's bidness, you know, well, except for you and me, obviously,

because we text each other about what we're having for lunch, like, literally. Yeah, I think I forgot to tell you, I had leftover hot chicken and potato salad for lunch today. That hot chicken that made your whole face go now? Yeah. Girl, why are you a glutton for punishment? Other night she's texting me, this is my brother made me. hot chicken and my whole face is dumb and now you're just doing it to yourself it's you know we like as humans we like spicy food for a reason it releases serotonin the heart wants what it won so we do it

but you know not necessarily most grown adults but when you're young it's all pretty intense and it's a delicate ecosystem one little disruption like friend a cheating on friend b with friend c can throw the whole thing into chaos and suddenly everybody's picking sides and everybody's pissed off at everybody else and i mean it can be a shit show exactly that's what was going on with Matt's friend group once everybody found out about their little indiscretion. God, you'd think these people were getting married or something. Right, it's high school nerds.

It's like they say in that movie, Clerks, like, that's what high school's all about. Bad food and infidelity. Chillax, children. Jeez. And Allegra was not okay. She was pining over Ryan, and she was also really hurt by how quickly Matt had moved on to another girl, which just cracks my shit up. because you were moved on. You had a boyfriend. I know. You have a boyfriend. You were cheating on said boyfriend.

What are you pissed off about now, Allegra? She just wanted him to be hung up. Allegra begged and begged for Ryan to take her back. And the thing was, as pissed off as he was with Allegra, he was still infatuated with her, too. His ego had taken it on the chin when she'd cheated on him with Matt, but it was also pretty fun for him to have her begging and pleading for him to her back. Oh, don't you know. What kind of egomaniac doesn't love that? So, after he'd punished her for a little while, Ryan agreed to get back together with Allegra. And it didn't take long after that for him to reach out to Matt, too. Matt apologized profusely and sincerely. He said he wasn't sure

he'd ever forgive himself for what he'd done to his friends and how he'd created all this tension in their group. He said he wanted to do whatever he could to make it up to them, especially Ryan and Allegra. And after a little while, Ryan was cool. He was like, look, man, it's water under the bridge. Apology accepted. Brose before hose and all that. Ryan and Matt started hanging out together again. Matt forgave a deal for ratting him out. Allegra seemed cool with Matt dating Michelle. There was peace in the valley. Except. So we said we'd come back and give you a little bit more info about Ryan, right? Well, Ryan and his pathological aversion to boredom had gotten into a little bit of a pickle. Specifically, he'd gotten involved with this dude named Roger Pollard, who was

Bad News Bears. Yeah. Roger was older in his 20s. Which is a red flag right there, 20-something hanging out with a high school kid. Not good. No kidding, right? And Roger was into like 17 different kinds of shady shit. Drug dealing, robbery, fencing, stolen property, illegal weapons, name it, Roger was into it. Apparently, Roger had bragged to Ryan that he was a hitman, too. Though Ryan said he wasn't sure if he believed that part. So when the paintball incident happened, Ryan told his friends and presumably also his parents that Roger was actually the one who shot the paintballs at the bus. Ryan was just driving and suddenly Roger started firing out the window and laughing like a

maniac. It didn't save Ryan from getting expelled because ain't no way Ryan was going to dime this guy out just to save himself from expulsion. I mean, Roger was a batty, and Ryan's friends were all starting to get a little worried about how involved he seemed to be with this guy. For example, Ryan told his ex-girlfriend Sarah that Roger had gotten him involved in, I shit you not, bomb making. Here we have another teenager, just like in the love bomb case. Remember with Marcus Tone's murder? Another teenage kid making flipping bombs!

Oh my God. A type of explosive called a hot box. Ryan had made him, Roger had sold him on the black market, and they'd split the cash. Ryan's friends weren't sure what else Roger had gotten him into, but they were pretty sure it wasn't anything good. And Ryan was kind of secretive about the guy, never brought him around or anything. They got the impression that it was more of a business relationship than a friendship, but Ryan did seem to spend a fair amount of time with this guy. And for some reason, when Ryan told Roger about how his friend Matt had slept with his girlfriend while she was into, you know, depression treatment at Holly Hills, Roger wigged right the fuck out. now who knows why maybe roger had a similar incident in his personal history like a friend who betrayed him and stole his girl or maybe he thought matt was taking advantage of a girl who was not mentally well or something i don't know what for whatever reason roger just became fixated on matt and what a piece of shit he was for doing the dirty on his little protege ryan and he just stewed about it brought it up all the time confusing the hell out of ryan who couldn't understand why he cared and then finally one night as they were driving

driving around on some shadowy errand or other, Roger turned to Ryan and said, you need to kill him. And Ryan's reaction, of course, was like, I'm sorry, what? But to Roger, this was icily logical. Look, Ryan, if you don't kill this guy, you're sending a message that people can walk all over you and you'll just lay down like a little bitch and take it. How do you ever expect to get respect if you don't make an example out of this clown? Plus, it'll show your girl what'll happen if she ever steps out on you again. Okay. Wow. So Ryan pretty much felt like he'd been kicked in the head. And he was like, uh, Roger, I cannot kill Matt. That's insane. It's all good now, man. We worked it out. Allegra and I are back together. It's fine. Dude apologized. But Roger, he wasn't having it. No, man. It's not fine. You got to kill this kid. And if you don't do it, I will. How about that? And I'll kill you too while I'm at it. the funniest possible reaction to any inconvenience. Like, kill it.

Whitney, I stubbed my toe today and it really hurt. And you're like, oh, oh, I'll cut it off for you. Just fucking bananas, y'all. Actually, this is what my husband and I literally do. Like, if one of us has a headache and like, maybe you tried hitting it with a hammer, would you like me to cut it off? Okay, but that's funny. This is, this is a joke.

It's not a sincere offer like this crazy motherfucker. In reality, this is. just fucking terrifying. But like, I can't help it laugh because it, like, it went from like zero to a hundred. Yeah, it's like that escalated like immediately. So clearly, Roger was unhinged and for some reason fixated on the fact that some kid he'd never met had slept with his friend's girl. Or maybe, was this some kind of test? Was Roger grooming Ryan to be more involved in all this organized crime stuff he was involved in? So far, Ryan had only dipped a toe into that world here and there, but maybe Roger was planning on bringing it, you know,

on a much bigger scale, and maybe he wanted to see what Ryan was made of, whether he could kill on command as some kind of a initiation like gangs do, right? So the idea that Roger was a hitman was sure as shit seemed a lot more plausible now. That's for sure. Whatever Roger's motives might be, one thing was obvious. He wasn't going to let this go. Was Matt's life in danger now? When Ryan failed to kill him because of course he wasn't going to kill him. Would Roger really go through with his threat to do it himself? Would he kill Ryan do? Yeah, it was pretty much a flippin nightmare. Like you've just got this crazy person who's determined to see this happen. So a few nights after that conversation in the car, Ryan Allegra Adiel and their other friend Drew Shaw,

and we haven't talked about Drew yet. He's sort of like a class clown type. Like not exactly the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but a lot of fun to hang around with. that's true so all the friends invited Matt to come hang out at the park where they usually partied and they sat him down and Allegra told him about Roger and I assume that Matt must have thought it was a joke at first but then they were also serious and so like obviously scared and worried so now this high school junior who had just gotten his life back together after his bout with depression had to worry about some crazed maniac of a hitman coming after him Ryan told Matt that of course he wasn't going to do what Roger told him to.

He'd much rather sacrifice his own wife than kill a friend. And when he said that, Allegra burst into tears and they all tried to comfort her. It was just an awful scene. Now, Camper's, if any of y'all are the parents of a teenager, you need to prick up your ears here. Okay? Because despite the fact that Matt Silliman had just gotten the news that a grown-ass criminal, who at minimum, we know bought and sold bombs, was after him. it apparently did not even occur to him to tell his parents or any of his teachers or the police and it didn't occur to any of these other kids to do that either so just be aware if you have a teenager in your house they will not tell you anything okay anything ever so they will lie to your face and they will not tell you if literally there's someone trying to kill them so keep your head on a swivel because holy shit good god

I don't know how many times we have to scream about this, because instead of going to the first available adult for help, Matt and his friends put their heads together and tried to figure out of this mess. I mean, obviously, they were well equipped to deal with possible violence. They were juggles after all. Yeah. We've kept this little detail under our hats until now, but at least a few of this crew were big fans of Detroit. its own insane clown posse and considered themselves part of the dark carnival. As most of you know, I have an infatuation with subcultures, and the juggaloes and juggolettes are no exception.

Oh, of course, we can't forget the juggolettes. Nope. Juggaloes are what fans of the horrorcore rap band Insane Clown Posse call themselves. The band themselves, made up of Violent J and Shaggy Too Dope, perform kitschy, violent music that I cannot stand, but is apparently popular enough to... make them a mainstay for Detroit's music scene since 1989. I like that song, Miracles. Because it's the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Like, we'll post it on our social media if y'all want, but I swear to God, it includes the lyric, fucking magnets, how do they work? Like, meaning that they're a miracle. Yeah, they are, it's, every single line of that song is like, open a textbook. Please. It's like, fucking magnets, how do they work? Well, they're oppositely charged particles. Did you not go to high school?

Violent J. Really? Anyway. Sorry, that song just kills me dead. It's great. Juggalo is also usually mainly listen to bands that are signed on ICP's record label, Psychopathic Records, which includes such big names as Twizzed, Tech Nine, and more recently, Vanilla Ice.

Oh, my God, vanilla flippant ice. I thought he was, like, dead or something. No, he's just, for a while he was doing, like, a. house renovation show on HGTV. Are you fucking kidding? No, and I think he got arrested for robbery or something. Of course, of course. Yeah, that's on brand.

And I like Tech Nine, so this is like very painful for me to admit. Psychopathic records. Yeah. They dress in Gothic-type clothes and paint their faces like clowns with black and white face paint and have an unnatural obsession with the flavored soda, Fago, which is Detroit's answer to Fanta. They have giant music festivals called The Gathering of the Jugglers.

Most of them are harmless, gathy teenagers and adults that just like having a place to fit in. Sure. But when they go bad, they're very, very bad. They're known for violence, vandalism, petty, and felony theft, and just all around being nuisances. I could probably name you, like, literally without even having to try 10 different murder cases that have involved jugglers in, like, the last five or 10 years. And seriously, every single crime show has a ripped from the headlines jugglo episode, every single one. In fact, they've recently been classified by the FBI as a gang. They can get intense.

One thing the band did to create this community is create a concept called the Dark Carnival, which is the band's own reference to religion. The Carnival is where evil souls are sent to face judgment, and each of their albums makes a reference to a separate card in a tarot deck. They preach against pedophilia, racism. bigotry, domestic violence, greed, and sexual abuse. Oh, good for them. I don't know. Overall, it's pretty bland, moralistic stuff. But the band makes references to this dark carnival throughout their discography.

And, of course, their fans take it to heart. Shaggy and Violent J have been explicit about their belief in God, the Christian God, and have said that they use the language of the streets. That's a direct quote, to break through to their fans. So they and their juggaloes are an insular community with their own language and their own belief. system. What could possibly go wrong? All that being said, you might be wondering, Katie, you said you don't like this fan. Why do you know so much about them? Dear campers, I am a fundamentally broken person that has an incestant need to know things. We're moving on. You're awesome. Also,

Dr. Phil claims to be a huge fan of Insane Clown Posse, which I just is a goddamn lie. And I will say it to his face you are not a fan of insane clown posse lying mustachioed athole they have weird they have a song referencing chris bonois they have a song like to catch a predator that's about like killing pedophiles so like they have weird kits like i said they're kitschy weird songs i just cannot imagine dr phil no he had him on his show one time to like try and talk some idiot into like not leaving his young child and wife to become a horror core rapper at age 45. And he introduced him as, you know, oh, they're so talented and I am a big fan. I was just like, you're just a damn liar.

Philip McGrath, shame on you. Anyway, he's irritating. Sorry. So you, bless your heart, are a veritable fountain of weird ass knowledge, Katie, and we love you for it. But I'm not going to lie. I can't imagine anybody I'd want on my side more in a scrap than a juggalo. I mean, the black and white clown makeup alone is going to scare away most aggressors.

Then you add the Fago fumes and you're home free. Yes, me, I'll take a juggalo any old. That peach shit will take the pain off the walls. So the kids or juggaloes all put their heads together and they came up with a plan. And y'all, when you got a juggalo think tank in full effect, you better step back. They decided the best thing to do. to get Roger off their backs was to make him think that Ryan had killed Matt. Ryan said, Eureka, we can tell him I already did it.

And Matt can lay low out of town for a while so Roger thinks he's dead. Allegra said, no, no, we won't just tell him you did it. We'll show him. They could fake murder Matt, she said, film it, and show Roger the tape. A plan to make Violent Jay and Shaggy Too Dope proud, don't you think? Oh, absolutely. But it would take some time to throw this all together. They were high school kids. They lived at home with their parents.

They needed to figure out where to do the fake murder, where Matt could hide out all the logistical stuff. In the meantime, life went on. Matt was terrified. His girlfriend Michelle noticed he seemed troubled, but he wouldn't tell her what was up. She had a sinking feeling that it had something to do with Allegra Dollquist. maybe he still had feelings for her. And then in one night in mid-November, Allegra, Adelaidele, and Matt were riding around in Allegra's car,

just listening to music and talking. Adel apparently needed relationship advice. Matt was in the passenger seat, Allegra was driving, and Adelaide was in the back. Suddenly, two things happened in quick succession. A deal reached up and shoved something hard into Matt's side. And Matt heard this awful crackling sound, but he was wearing a heavy hoodie and he really couldn't feel the thing well enough to figure out what it was.

Then, out of nowhere, Ryan popped up from the back seat, quickly slipped a zip tie over Matt's head, pulling it as tight as he could. And Matt didn't even know Ryan was in the car, so this must have been completely baffling, not to mention terrifying. Uh, yeah. Ryan was trying hard to get that zip tie to cinch tight around Matt's neck, and Matt was kind of clawing at it and saying, please stop, what are you doing? And quickly, it became obvious that Matt's thick hoodie was blocking the tie from doing its job. So Ryan, realizing this wasn't going to work, gave up. And as Ryan pulled the zip tie off Matt's head, Matt looked over and saw a deal holding a camcorder. Filming this shit for some reason.

So, of course, after he'd had a minute to recover, Matt was confused, I imagine, freaked out. And he was like, what the fuck was that? What were you doing? Was that a stun gun? And Allegra was like, so here's the thing. Don't get mad. We decided if we were going to fake your death to fool. Roger, it had to look real. So we were just going to, like, choke you out, film it, show

Roger the film of you and Clashis, and there you go. Roger's taken care of. And if Matt hadn't been wearing that thick-ass hoodie, well, it would have worked. So Matt was understandably pretty shaken up. But even he had to admit, it wasn't a bad idea. But he said, look, guys, I want to be in on the plan next time. Okay. Very reasonable. Yeah. So, Alecra's parents owned a double-wide trailer way out in the country outside Apex, kind of a little vacation house.

It had been sitting empty for a while now, and the friends figured it would be a perfect place for Matt to lay low until they could set up the fake murder. They'd bring him food and supplies and come visit him as much as they could until they could figure out how to execute the plan. So on the night before Thanksgiving, Matt asked his girlfriend, Michelle, who apparently still didn't know about most of this. I think he had told her Roger was after him, but didn't know anything about, like, faking his death or anything like that.

He asked her to meet him at the park. When she showed up, Matt was waiting for her, and they sat in her car and talked for a while. And he told her, look, I can't tell you why, but I have to leave town for a few days. Michelle said, why can't you tell me what's going on? And Matt said, look, it'll be better for you if you don't know. He asked her to trust him. He told her he loved her. then a car pulled up behind them

Allegra Dalquist was in the driver's seat Adiel Ryan and Drew were all there too Matt got into the car and Michelle watched as it drove away it would be the last time she ever saw Matt alive Matt hung around the trailer for days mostly by himself Allegra Ryan Adele and Drew popped in now and then to bring him food and fine-tune the fake murder plan for now Matt was just marking time until everybody was ready to stage the scene

and then helped Matt get out of town He was on board with the plan, but all this time alone in the trailer wasn't doing his mental health any favors. He'd been doing so well ever since he got out of Holly Hills. He'd even been thinking about looking up his birth parents, trying to find out a little bit more about where he came from. But now, as he sat and watched the shadows creep across the floor of this anonymous trailer way out in the country, Matt felt uneasy, scared. Something just felt wrong. He couldn't shake a feeling of impending doom, like no matter what he did. he wasn't going to make it out of there alive.

By the time November 30th rolled around, and Ryan, Allegra, Adelaidele, and Drew showed up with the camcorder and some other supplies. Matt was in bad shape emotionally. Allegra comforted him. She sat him down on the couch and said, look, we're almost done here. It's going to be fine. We're going to get you out of this. And then she took a deck of tarot cards out of her bag. Come on. Let me do a reading for you. Adel and Drew were fiddling around with a video camera. were always playing with, setting it up on a tripod as Allegra set out Matt's cards.

The first one she turned over was death. Now, as tarot readers never tire of telling you, the death card doesn't actually mean death. Not necessarily. It's more like an indicator of change. So although it looks creepy and sounds like a bad omen, it's not necessarily a bad card. In fact, Matt took it as a sign that the fake murder plan was his only way out. As he sat next to Allegra listening as she told him his future, Matt said, suddenly felt a sharp pain in the back of his head, saw stars.

And when he took his hand away from his head, he saw blood. He whipped around to see Ryan, standing behind the couch with a hammer in his hand. Matt was like, did you just hit me with a hammer? And Ryan just kind of shrugged. He was like, dude, this has to look real. I thought you'd go unconscious for a couple minutes and we could show the tape to Roger. I didn't want to tell you because I knew you were going to flinch. It's got to be convincing.

Fortunately for Matt, Ryan hadn't hit him that hard. He was bleeding, but it didn't seem serious. Drew had a curfew, so he asked Allegra to take him home. When she got back, Matt was still pretty freaked out. I can't imagine why. The friends had brought some painkillers in red wine, and they figured maybe that would chill Matt out a little bit, so they could figure out how to move forward with the plan.

Matt agreed to take a few of the pills to try to bring his anxiety down, and to have some wine. So they left him on the couch nursing his bloody head and went to the kitchen for the wine. and for a few minutes they all just sat around drinking and trying to calm Matt down and before long Matt seemed to be really feeling it getting groggy slurring his words he was saying something about knowing he was going to die tonight and then he started hugging everybody one by one as if he were saying goodbye after the last hug he stood back and swayed on his feet a little bit

and then he slumped to the ground not moving There was a moment of silence. Then, the three friends, Ryan, Allegra, and a deal, looked at each other, picked Matt up by the legs and underarms, and carried him together into the windowless bathroom of the trailer. They laid him down on the floor, and as they did, Matt started to convulse. You see, they'd put some horse tranquilizer in that wine they gave him. Now he was starting to overdose. Quickly, efficiently, the three friends cinch zinches. zip ties around Matt's wrists and ankles. Matt, still unconscious, started to vomit. And a deal,

his oldest friend, ripped off a piece of duct tape and put it over his mouth. Matt started to choke. Allegra and Ryan sat him up. And then, working together, they slipped a clear plastic bag over Matt's head. Ryan handed Allegra a zip tie and she slipped it around his neck and pulled, hard. But she wasn't strong enough to pull it as tight as it needed to go, so Ryan took over. And this time, there was nothing to keep them from following through with their plan. The first plan, of course, had been to kill Matt in the car, hence that shit show with the stun gun and the zip tie a week or so before. After that first attempt on Matt's life had failed so miserably, Ryan and Adele spent several evenings digging a grave-sized hole near Allegra's

parent's trailer. Allegra held a flashlight for them. Plan B was on. Unfortunately for the Keystone killers, though, it poured rain for a couple of days after they finished digging the grave and filled it to the brim with water. Couldn't bury him out in there, at least not until the water dried up. So they made sure they had a sleeping bag to zip him into. They'd stash him in the bathroom of the trailer until they could put him in the ground. Okay, let's go back in time a couple months, because some of you might be understandably confused. See, when Ryan agreed to take Allegra back after she cheated on him with Matt, he did so with some, let's say, conditions. The main one being that they would have to pay Matt back somehow for trying to steal her away.

They were all big video gamers and big fans of MySpace, which, oh, MySpace. And they chatted with each other on both of those forums a lot. And allow me to give you a little Snapchat of their online personas, because it is too good not to share. On Adele's MySpace page, he described himself as an anarchist, and he said he believed in his own kind of justice. Oh, I can just hear the eyeballs rolling all over the world right now, can't you? Every high school student that's on the outskirts of the social circles is an anarchist. Just because you think your principal is a dick, it doesn't mean you can tear down society as we know it, kids. It's like, I don't like my teachers, therefore the purge.

On Ryan's page, he spoke of, quote, attacking a world full of love and peace because they'd never expect it. Oh, so edgy. Also, what fucking world of love and peace? What world are you living in, dickhead? You fit right in, asshole. Trust me. Well, I mean, juggalo's. Whitney, without their edge, what are they?

I don't know, just receptacles for weed and fago. Fair enough. So they were all chatting a lot about this recent drama with Matt, and it started like it so often does in cases like this. As a joke. What are we going to do to get Matt back for trying to steal your girl, Ryan? Well, we could run him over with a car. We could beat the shit out of him.

We could kill him. Ha. Ha. Before long, it wasn't a joke anymore. Ryan and a deal in particular spent hours talking out possible plans online. Soon, they brought Allegra and Drew in on the plan, though Drew has always claimed he didn't think they were serious. Ryan let Allegra know that if she wanted to be with him, if she wanted to show him she still loved him and didn't have any leftover feelings for Matt,

this was the price of admission. No excuses. And Allegra was willing. And once everyone was on board, Ryan revealed a little secret to his crew. Roger Pollard, Ryan's scary criminal mentor, wasn't, strictly speaking, real. Get out. Roger was just an invention, an alter ego for Ryan to scapego when he needed to get away with something. Roger was Tyler Durdon.

If Tyler Durdon was a lame, petty criminal that had nothing better to do than hang out with high school burnouts. Some of them had already wondered about this, and now they knew. Ryan told Allegra it would be her job to convince Matt that Roger was out to get him. Yeah, he probably knew that this would be

kind of a hard sell. I mean, if you think about it, campers, how flippin' dumb is this, really? Like, why in the hell with some adult man, a player in the criminal underworld of Apex, which is a dumb enough idea on its own, by the way, why would he give one solitary shit about some high school kid trying to get in some other high school kid's pants? Just makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah. I think the only reason he did by the story, to be honest, was that Allegra was the one selling it. I think he still had some feeling. locked away for her. At the very least, he considered her a good friend

and he cared about her and thought she cared about him. Bless his heart. God, I hate that bitch. I mean, I hate all these little shits, but Allegra is in particular just vile to me. Most definitely a candidate for the true crime campfire woodchipper T.M. Or the Trebyshame maybe. We could fling her into a mountain. I'm not sure

which I like better. We'll think on it. I propose a true crime campfire guillotine for her. And her grody little friends. Yes, please. I like that. So they all put their stupid little heads together and hatch this plant. And some of the sources we've seen said there were multiple, multiple previous attempts on Matt's life before his actual murder. But the only specific description we could find of one of these attempts was the one in the car with the zip tie and the sun gun.

In the months leading up to Matt's murder, several of these dipshits were dumb enough to talk about wanting to kill someone. At a party, Ryan and Drew went on and on about all the different ways you could kill someone, including getting them so drunk and high that they pass out, making it easy to strangle them. That sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? And Ryan actually told one of his friends that he wanted to kill Matt specifically. Unfortunately, this kid didn't know which Matt he meant because every high school has an abundance of mats. So typical moron teenage killers playing themselves before they even commit the crime. Now, I need to talk about a deal for a second, because if I don't, I'm just going to pop like a grape.

I swear to God, this kid, this was Matt's oldest friend. And as soon as he started getting a little bit of attention from Big Dog Ryan, he just flipped on him without a second thought. What a piece of shit. And there are some chat logs available of the conversations between Adele and Ryan while they were planning this awful thing. And at one point, Adel has the nerve to say that part of him would be a little sad when they murdered Matt, since, you know, they'd always been such good friends. But he said he had it coming. A deal wrote, You take my girl, I take your life.

And Ryan wrote back, Nice code to live by. I wonder how this code felt about betraying your best friend. That's just fine, I assume. Yeah, that wasn't a fine print. He didn't read that part. And Campers, it's important to know this. The amount of time that passed between that first jockey,

ha-ha, we could kill Matt comment and the actual murder, two months. That's it. It just never fails to amaze me how fast a charismatic personality like Ryan can turn people, convince them to do stuff that they would never dream of doing in a million years otherwise. Just like Dyson Koft and Linda Henning, it was like four weeks, right, between meeting him and killing his wife for him. Just crazy. So how did all this shake down in the end?

Well, as you know from the beginning of the episode, on December 3rd, a little over a week after Matt went missing, 911 got an anonymous call about a body in a trailer. After they found Matt's body, the investigators did a trace on that call, and it came back to the home of Drew Shaw's grandmother. So the detectives paid her a visit, and before long, she was spilling the whole story. She and Drew had been driving together somewhere, you know, just the two of them, when suddenly Drew had looked over at her and said, Grandma, what would happen if you knew about a murder? Like, you didn't do it yourself, but you knew who did and you knew where the body was? Would you get in trouble?

Nah, you're fine. and it didn't take long after that for his grandma to get the story out of him at least some of it and after agonizing about what to do for hours she finally made that anonymous call so they haul drew in for questioning at this point they'd already spoken to allegra and ryan neither of whom knew yet that matt's body had been found you know in allegra's parents trailer allegra had told them about her little dalliance with matt and how ryan had been mad at first but forgave him and then ryan had tried to sell him on roger this guy's bad news he wanted to hurt Matt, we've been trying to warn him. I have no idea what happened. Blah, blah, blah, blah,

bullshit. Just a tip to criminals out there. Investigators are generally pretty good at determining if someone is real or fake, by the way. It doesn't take that long to verify an identity, especially since you gave him his last name, you absolute fucking moron. I think he thought that would make it more believable, but, like, you've given a full name. fucking jackass for your small ass town good job

insane and y'all are going to love this drew who was 16 at the time and was the youngest and possibly dumbest of the group tried to tell the investigators that he had just said all that stuff to his grandma as a joke

a joke so somehow drew managed to pull a joke out of his ass that just happened to match the exact location of Matt's body? Yeah. Dude, are you...

Drew, are you psychic or something? My buddy, my dude, Drew, just know. What's his heart? Right? Like, generally jokes have punchlines and are funny.

Not, I committed tax fraud. You've been pranked. So, very quickly, they let Drew know that, you know, they weren't buying any of that nonsense. And Drew finally cracked. But, see, Drew wasn't at the house when Matt was murdered.

He had gone home for curfew, remember? Also, he said that he was freaked out after Ryan hit Matt with the hammer. He wanted to get the hell out of there, especially when Ryan took him aside, handed him a baseball bat, and ordered him to stand outside the door of the trailer. Ryan said, if he tries to run, hit him with this. It was right around that time when Drew had suddenly remembered his curfew.

And this little worm went home knowing full well what was probably ready to happen to Matt. And he didn't say a goddamn word to anybody. He could have saved that kid's life. And he didn't. But because Drew hadn't been there when the actual murder went down, he couldn't tell the investigators everything they needed to know. But in a room down the hall, after hours and hours of questioning, Allegra Dahlquist finally did. In as casual a tone as you might use to order a sandwich from Subway, Allegra recounted the whole ugly story.

At one point, she said Cooley, we wanted to make sure he died. We hated him. We all did. And interestingly, later on in court, she'd managed to figure out how to squeeze out some tears. Oh, good. On the witness stand, she claimed. she hadn't wanted to be involved in the murder, but she was scared of Ryan under his control. Yeah, sure, Jan. A deal was the next to crack. He took the investigators to the hole he and Ryan had dug,

the one that had filled up with rainwater before the murder, so they couldn't use it. He also led them to a dumpster where they'd tossed some of Matt's stuff from the trailer. And during all their conversations with him, the investigators said, A deal was as cool as a fridge full of cucumbers. One said that talking to a deal was like listening to somebody describe a movie they just saw. Not even a movie they particularly liked. Just, eh, a movie. No emotion whatsoever, just like Allegra.

Oh, creepy little fuckers. Unsurprisingly, Ryan was last to break. But finally, after a long moment of silence in the interrogation room, he dropped his head into his hands and said he needed to die. Yeah, speak for yourself, shit-stain. Anywho, Drew, Allegra, and Adelaide all agreed to plea deals on the condition that they tell the complete truth and testify against Ryan, who, of course, insisted, because he's a narcissist twat, ongoing to trial. Ryan's defense was that Matt's death was an assisted suicide. His attorney trotted out Matt's struggles with depression and his previous suicide attempt and argued that Ryan's only sin was not doing anything to stop Matt from killing himself, as if he could get himself into the flippin zip ties and plastic bag induct.

It's just ridiculous. Absurd, but there you go. Prosecutors argued that this was a classic case of revenge murder. Ryan was furious with Matt for trying to take the girl who, as Ryan had once written in one of his online chats, was worth protecting with his whole life. Gross. Allegra had the face that launched a thousand jugglers. Or at least three of them? So, unsurprisingly, Ryan was convicted and sentenced to life without parole.

Allegra pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to. a minimum of 30 years, maximum of 37. A deal, who was the most difficult witness and kept quote-unquote forgetting key details, I assume because he was still wanting Big Man Ryan's approval. Jesus, Murphy, how sad. A deal was sentenced to a minimum of 32 years and a maximum of 41 for second-degree murder. Did you get picked, a deal? Did you?

God, you're a pathetic little subhuman slime. He could not get picked. That's the saddest part. And he kept saying in court that he was scared of Ryan. Yeah, your chat logs beg to differ, dude. God. Drew, who was the least culpable according to the letter of the law, only served three years and change under an Alford plea of accessory after the fact.

They're all in their 30s now, and all are still sitting in prison except for Drew. And if Drew hadn't told his grandma, we might not be talking about this case right now. So what I have to say to that is dumbass. You know, I think, pack murders freak me out the most of all the different kinds of crimes. Yeah, it's creepy. Because it only takes one narcissist to find the right mix of followers, and suddenly they become freakishly dangerous. Although I will say that old adage about three people only being able to keep a secret of two are dead rings extra true in cases like this.

Stop talking about your crimes. I haven't said anything about what happened in 2000. And all I got to do is wait for the statute of limitations to run out. And I am home free. So I'm keeping my mouth shut, y'all. It's really that easy. You're doing great. That's a joke, Grandma.

I've never committed any crimes. And speaking of grandmas, other than Matt's family, the people I feel bad for in this case are the parents. I mean, here are these parents thinking their kids are, you know, nice kids with the possible exception of Ryan Hare, who was into some shit before this. But these parents probably just thought their kids were going to school, doing their homework, going out for ice cream. And then they find out there's been a flipping murder plot happening right under their noses for two months with like previous attempts. I just can't. How would you process that as a parent?

And in particular, I think I feel the worst for Adelaal's parents because they just seemed like absolutely broken by this. Of course. And just this was so not what they envisioned for their kids. So I feel really bad for the families, all of them. but especially, of course, for Mats. Because here was a kid with his whole life ahead of him. Sweet kid. A kid who, yeah, maybe did something a little shitty to his friend,

but he genuinely felt bad about it. He apologized from his heart. And, you know, Ryan was just such a narcissist. His little man ego was so fragile that it couldn't take, you know, another man moving in on his lady. And here we have a life just snuffed out. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

So that was a wild one. Right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a shout out to a few of our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Casey, Liz, Keeley, and Laura. 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 a free sticker.

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