Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding? And Other Crimes - S3 E18 Doggy Bag - Part Four

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

After asking listeners to submit their own versions of this story, we start building a global timeline. One that tracks how this story mutated and spread across borders and decades.Then we find it. A newspaper article from 1904. Suddenly João is the least of our problems. And just as we're ready to give up (again)… a key witness steps forward.The finale of Doggy Bag is out on 26th Feb.Support us on Patreon http://patreon.com/whoshatontheflooratmyweddingFollow us on Instagram @whoshatontheflooratmywedding for case evidence and behind-the-scenesSound design by @juanthummler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previously on Doggy Bag. Are you ready to join me in the biggest wormhole I have ever experienced? Is Juel Real? Is John Real? We put a shout out to all of our listeners to submit any information about similar stories that they've heard. This story appears in a new country, Denmark. And they were walking the streets of Paris, and all of a sudden, their star kind of like stiffens up and down. out of nowhere. It was just outside a Louis Vuitton store.

Germany. And the acquaintances of the hairdresser went shopping in Dusseldorf in Germany and all of a sudden the dog died. So they entered a restaurant and ordered a schnapps. When they were ready to leave, they realized that the bag was gone, including the dead dog. I got the story from a podcast and the story was set in Munich. The dog was a puck. By the way, suddenly the dog died and it was in front of a The whole thing is outrageous. We have to try and turn the heat up on Tony. Tony, we really need to get in touch with Johanna. We think she might be closer to the dog owners than we originally thought.

Interesting. The thing is that Johanna and I, we studied in this international program. And we do have some friends in Germany, by the way. Oh, I could actually see the Germany link. So you're saying that Joanna could potentially have initiated the story in Germany as well? Yeah. They were walking up and down from the Lezé, and in front of a Gucci store, the dog died. If you had to put a month and a year on when you heard this story.

It must have been two years ago. Hang on, hang on, hang on, sorry. November 2023, are you saying? Yes, I think so. Uh-oh. Shit. The Dutch line wasn't the beginning of this. If it is truth, Luca is the closest we've got to this dog owner.

What percentage do you think the story is true? Oh, like 90 for sure. Some friends, you know, they could kind of make up a story or exaggerate just for attention. Johanna is definitely not a type of friend. There's two top of the range, unqualified detectives that are willing to give at least two weeks of their time to get justice for Janus. There could be a version of this that is true. I know. Which is insane.

This is Doggy Bag. Part 4. So after we got the Danish and the German, fans reaching in with their accounts of their stories, I got literally hundreds of other people reporting in stories that had happened to a friend of a friend or, you know, another friend of a friend. And it gets pretty fucking weird. For two full weeks, Karen immersed herself in this story,

logging every detail, marking the alleged dates, the claimed locations. Every element was pinned down, cross-referenced, treated like evidence. But as the timeline took shape, the research began to expose something larger. Something we hadn't anticipated. New variants surfaced. Old news reports emerged until finally, buried among the archives. One article stood out.

A single news story that would change everything. I have tracks. the evolution of this story as far back as 1904. What? 19... Oh! Outside a Louvreton store? No.

Oh, I don't even want to know how that story began. 1904. Yeah. 1904. So are we historians now? I've become a historian, yeah. Oh my God, there's no end to the skills that we need to take on for this bloody podcast? The original from 1904, it wasn't a dog.

Oh my God. It all started. Can I guess? Yeah. Wombat. Definitely not, no. Cat? Yes.

Oh. Okay, that wasn't as fun as I thought it would be. There is an article from the New York Times, again, starts with journalism, bizarrely. It is based in New York, that crime. So it's started in New York. This is one of the coolest things that we've done, you know, because I've just managed to unarchive the original article. It's quite cool, actually. I've just been transported back to a completely different era reading this, to the point where I didn't think. fully understand the English, but I've just spent the last 15 minutes checking a few meanings of words and I've got the original version and then a layman version, which is just easier

to understand. Do you want me to read out the layman version? Yeah. Source, New York Times. Date published February 6th, 1904. The title was, in Capitals. Man trying to hide dead cat accidentally gifts stranger a feline surprise. So there's this man in New Jersey. who breeds pigeons. Sadly, the local street cats started killing off some of these prized pigeons. So he decides to get rid of these murdering cats

in order to protect his birds by murdering them. So one day, he camps out with a gun waiting for these cats and he sees one. Coming over towards his pigeons, bang, down goes, one very dead cat. So he's there thinking, brilliant, success, but what do I do with this dead cat? He doesn't want to bury it because the neighbours might think he's disposing of something a bit

weirder than a cat. So he wraps it up like a dodgy Christmas present and plans to lob it off the ferry the next morning when he's going to work. So he takes the train, which he needs to take in order to get to the ferry. But as soon as he boards the boat, he bumps into a group of friends that he couldn't escape from. So there just wasn't the right moment. So he ends up dragging the dead cat in the bundle to his office and he hides it in a cupboard there. So after work, he takes this dead cat bundle out the closet and when he's on the train, he puts it down and when he's about to get off at his station,

he picks up a package and then he gets home. He finally gets to the cook that he's hired and says, very casually, can you just bury this in the garden for you? I don't know how you casually just say bury this in the garden to one of your employees. There's a dick here. Could you just deal with us? But then the cook comes back two minutes later looking confused, going, sir, this isn't a cat, it's just a lovely leg of mutton. So it turned out he picked up to someone else's package on the train.

So some poor sod got home, opened theirs and found a dead cat instead of dinner. So yeah, that's where all started. That is outrageous. I don't know. It's so elaborate that story. It's so unnecessary, like all the different movements he made before the cat was swapped for a leg of mutton. I know. What was the cat wrapped in again?

They just wrapped it in, it doesn't really specify, like just paper or a bundle of something. Silk? Silk. Because, I mean, we've just heard the German variant. They put the dog in silk wrapping and in the prada back. Do you think it's linked? I think the nature of it, like the essence of the story,

is still there, where there's an animal that's misplaced. and something outrageous happens to get rid of that animal. There's a few key elements missing, but I do think the essence of the story is there. There's no schnapps. There's no Louis Vuitton. There's no bug.

There's no bug. There's no grammar. I think the silk wrapping helps if we assume that is silk rather than paper. You're obsessed with the silk wrapping? I really am obsessed with the silks. You're hoping that the detail of the silk scarf is genetic. just gone down the DNA many generations afterwards and then some great great great granddaughter has told the story

and remembered from her very DNA that they were linked to this journalist and they just know that there was a silk scarf because the silk scarf hasn't appeared for centuries. No, no, it's like a dormant gene, the silk scarf. So it's like late, it's like been dormant for a century and then it's cropped back up in the German version. A mutation. It's a mutation of the original dormant very.

The question is, is this actually connected? As we peel back the history of this story, the questions start closing in. Did the dead cat in a bag ever exist? Was it a lie or was it the spark? The one real incident that triggered a cascade of fabricated variants. At the end of Doggy Bag part three, we were convinced that the Parisian version might be real. Now that certainty has collapsed. Doubt returns.

Everything is back on the table. And then, in the middle of one of our many spirals, a WhatsApp message arrives. Okay, so I just spoke with Anna. From our Slovenian friend, Luca. He has finally been in touch with Anna, the person who told him the story, the person who claims to know the dog owner.

Anna does not want to talk to us, a type of rejection that we are becoming quite familiar with. She's also not comfortable with giving us the contact details of the colleague who told her the story. But she told me who this person was and plot twist. It's my brother's very good friend's mother. She said she's okay with me, contacting my brother's friend directly

and telling her this. so that's what I will do. Luca is certain. He knows who the real dog owner is. Slovenia is small in a very beautiful way. 1933. We're in Massachusetts. Oh my God, I can't deal with this.

It's wild. I actually can't. No. So there is something called the Fitchbird Massachusetts Sentinel, and this was an article or a story from the 23rd of October 19, 1933 and reports a story that begins as a dead cat being stolen by thieves in an American store. Inside a store, yes. Then, in 1948, again, based in New York, we have from the book David Jacobson's,

The Affairs of Dame Rumour. So this is where it gets pretty interesting. Again, what I can't cope with is, it's about. a journalist. In 1948, there was a New York City newspaper man, a journalist, who decided to track down where this tale originated from. So it was the 1948 versions of what we're doing now, which is wild. In 1948, had they already kind of come to the conclusion that this was potentially an urban legend? No. This guy, he had first heard it from a friend, and claiming to believe the story himself, the friend told this newspaper man about a woman

who had placed her cat in a veterinary hospital where it later died. Because this woman loved her cat, she wanted to give her cat a decent burial, so she called the vets to get her pet's remains, and she received a neatly wrapped box with the dead cat inside. Oh my God. On the way home, the woman stopped off to do some shopping at Stern's department store on 42nd Street in New York. While browsing and selecting her purchases,

the woman placed the box on a nearby counter as she was checking some of the products out. And then she suddenly looked around for it and the box was gone. Stern's detectives, I don't know why her department store has got detectives, but it's already getting a little bit loose here, started searching the store for the packaged body of the cat,

and with a short time they found it. They opened the box, the deceased animal leering out of it, they found it on the floor of a telephone booth. Oh! Outside the store. This is where it gets really wild. Alongside the box,

the stolen box with the dead cat inside, lay the body of a woman. Immediately identified as a well-known shoplifter who had been under the scrutiny of this and other stores, for several months. The shoplifter had apparently taken her loot to the telephone booth, opened it, caught a glimpse of the dead cat,

and dropped to the floor, dead, from a heart attack. Oh, for fun. A heart attack. A heart attack. And note this, because this is the first one of very many coincidences and threads as this story evolves over the following decades, which gave me slight goosebumps, to be honest,

Every time I saw a thread, I was like, there's something in human psyche that's been passed on generation to generation of this urban myth. And there's little levels that you can root back to the 1904 and 1948 version of this story. It's pretty wild. I don't know what's more alarming, the schnapps or that there was an actual human death involved in this story. I mean, it's pretty extravagant. The original journalist's mate who told the story to him, heard this story from two actors who lived in a neighbouring apartment. I mean, the question is, do you believe everything the actors say?

They claimed to know the full truth of the story. So this newspaper guy went to interview those actors, and then he found out that those two actors had received the tale from a Christian science practitioner, a man whose word they did not doubt, as he had told them the rumor as gospel. So that was the original source, the Christian science practitioner.

And then he said, actually, no, it turned out that. The Christian science practitioner wasn't the original source. And it turned out that he had heard it from a woman who was the friend of the dead cat's owner. So already this poor bloke has been through the exact same thing as what we did, thinking that the chain was two handshakes away or the owner of the cat was two handshakes away. And it's actually multiple, multiple handshakes away. Sorry, but why was the thief taking the stolen, the loot to a phone box? I just don't know.

If you've stolen something from a store, I mean, let's pick holes through it right now, because there's a lot of holes to pick. If you've just got some swag, you're not going to call someone. And you're not going to go to a phone booth near to the store, right? You're absolutely not. You're going to go straight to where you were planning to go, which will be somewhere to hide the goods. Yeah.

Also, like, the sight of a dead cat is not going to kill you. You're not going to have a heart attack. Fucking hell. But this chief detective of Stern's department's tour swiftly assured him that nothing of the sort had happened, very much like our chat with the Louis Vuitton Insider. We've literally, we are repeating history. We are doing the same job from decades ago.

Neither had the local police station any record of a dead shoplifter or a dead cat having been reported. So, of course, the local. police station would know if there was a woman that was dead. So that bit is clearly not true. This is how they wrote it. While the newspaper man was playing Ring a Round of Rosie with the dead cat come to justice rumour, it was having a gay time of its own. The story was flying from table to table from office to office on its cross-country journey, readjusted to fit the local situation in Chicago. The rumor was an eye-opener months later when it became current talk.

In California the following year, so in 1949, people gassed. in amazement as they heard about the fate of a shoplifter in the local LA department store. At least one national magazine published the rumor as one of its truth is stranger than fiction features for the edification of the wonder lovers among its loyal subscribers. This story has kind of gone around, so it's already got proof that it's hopped from New York to California. And so it's a lie. The Califian version, we already know, wasn't true, but it's got a natural ability to just spread

people were saying it's happened to a friend of a friend. And then it gets amplified by these journalists who write about it. So like word of mouth is one thing, but the fact that journalists are involved in this, they're the ones obviously publishing stories for even more eyes to see, which proves how it's amplified and continued for this long. But you can't publish something making it seem like it happened if it clearly didn't.

So I guess we don't know if the 1904 version is accurate. if it originally came from an accurate story, right? All I'm saying is that it's too much of a coincidence that the 1904 version was a dead cat and it was stolen and then there was a 1948 version, which has become really exaggerated with the murder of the shoplifter involved now as well. But you can say that those two are linked. You can. I think you can. America.

America. So what I want to sort of say, and we're going to go on, but those are the first few records of this story. And then it kind of gets just a little bit more out of control from that point onwards. I couldn't find any records of anything after 1948 until we get to 1982. So again, weirdly, another leap of about 40 years.

Interesting that, isn't it? There seems to be a bit of a cycle here. When one generation becomes too old to remember the source of the story, A new generation seems to crop up with owning this is their new. Oh, this is their truth. This is their truth. So there's a book called The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends Second Edition in 1982. Again, America.

America have a lot to answer for with this story. The animal changes slightly. Do you want to guess what it is? Slightly, so... Well, it's quite an extreme. Oh, okay, okay. It's not like a member of the cat family. Well, it is.

Tiger. Close. Really? A wild bobcat. No, it doesn't. It does. It becomes a story about a wild bobcat in a suitcase. Then we get to South Africa.

And South Africa... So this is when it leaves the US. It leaves the US as a wild bobcat in a suitcase story. And then it travels across to South Africa. and this is where it gets a little bit more extreme in terms of the animal. Caminole, Arthur. Arthur is coming in. Arthur Gold struck.

Hi, Arthur. Hi. Good evening. Hello, Arthur. Hi. It's gold stuck, by the way. There's no R in there. Oh, well, I just thought we'd struck gold, so I added in an arm.

You make me nervous about your detective skills. As you probably guessed, we're a bit loose on the whole detective thing. We do what we want. I wondered about that. I wondered when they were going to take you away in the handcuffs. We're unarrestable. We can't be arrested. That's the beauty of us.

What drew you to this world of urban legends in the first place? I guess it was a result of being infinitely curious about the world and the way the world works. My emphasis as a journalist was to dig up unusual stories, mostly popular. culture-type stories because those were the ones that were getting the least attention from serious journalists. I guess storytelling is in my blood as a journalist as well, because that is my background. So my first books were on urban legends, and I've written a total of six books on urban legends, all published by Penguin. And number two was called the leopard in the luggage, which I suspect resonates very powerfully for you.

But it's the story of a farmer who was plagued by a leopard in the deep rural parts of South Africa where wild animals still roam, this farmer who had decided he wanted to capture this leopard that was killing his livestock. But because he loved animals, he didn't want to. to kill it. He decided that he would set a trap for it with some kind of sleeping potion in it. And then he would capture the leopard and take it off to a wildlife conservatory or a game reserve. And it could roam freely there. So this is exactly what happened. He managed to trap the leopard. It took the bait, ate the food, and fell sound asleep. But when the farmer realized that he couldn't easily just

put it on the back of his truck and take it off to the game reserve. He went looking for some way to package it, let's say, and he found a big old suitcase. And he crammed the leopard into the suitcase, put it on the back of his truck, and drove off to the game reserve. But his deep rural areas, the roads are long, very dusty and bumpy. And eventually, your bladder starts feeling the effect. And the farmer had to pull over to the side of the road to, visit nature, so to speak.

I think you know all about that. I could probably use the words, because I've actually heard you using some astonishingly bad language in your podcast, like shit, right? That's actually the past tense of shit. It's shat. Then he shat on the side of the road.

He wasn't actually shitting. He went to make a pee. We're not familiar with that part of bodily functions. We just focus on shat. Okay. While he was doing it because he had a lot to get rid of, he heard a vehicle pull up alongside the road, obviously next to his truck, so he quickly finished what he had to do and dashed out just in time to see a minibus driving off. And he ran to his truck, looked in the back, and sure enough, the suitcase was missing.

And he stood in the middle of the road looking at this vehicle, starting to disappear. into the distance thinking what is he going to do? And then suddenly the vehicle veered off the side of the road and almost crashed, but suddenly people spilled out of the vehicle and ran into the bush. And following them was this very sleepy looking leopard. What year do you think this was circulating? What kind of period of time was this prevalent? This was circulating through the 1980s.

and in fact one version of the leopard in the luggage was a verbat monkey in the luggage. So with the leopard story, that story and various others, definitely through the 80s and 90s they were circulating. And there's various other versions of that as well or extensions of it, which are very, very funny. But people tell them as true stories. The idea is they are trying to entertain their listeners or their readers. And by claiming it really happened, it makes it far more entertaining and far more immediate rather than this is here. So this is something someone told me.

When you say this really happened to me, then people really pay attention. What have we got ourselves into? I have been asking myself that for the last two weeks. I love how we were so just. naive at the beginning of Doggy Bag part one. I mean, I was pretty much 80% sure it was a urban legend, but I wasn't 100% sure. No, I mean, we trusted the person that told us,

and she was like, oh, it's a couple of, like, friend of a friend. Like, it really, you can understand the way that it was told so passionately and honestly. Like, of course we thought that. We thought Juel was an isolated case. He wasn't. He was just one. of millions of potentially fake animal victims. Which then becomes about a monkey in a suitcase.

Which then becomes about a snake in a suitcase. Oh, for fuck. This is ridiculous. It's outrageous. Who's putting a snake in a suitcase? Which then later becomes, there's a little sub-variant. Some people start spreading the wild bobcat story. And then a little porcupine in a suitcase variant crops up.

And that's around 1992 that there's a record of. the porcupine suitcase story. A porcupine? People are localising the details of this case, as we've seen from Dissoldorf. It only makes a good story when it's local and close and a couple of handshakes away. And it was down the street like 10 minutes down the road. Like that is what makes it an interesting story. What is it about this confidence and people to own the story and just lie and change the details of it?

And then the next point on my timeline is just a simple historic moment. 1993, the World Wide Web is made available to the public. And that is a really key moment for how this story escalates. There were six main variants of this story. The original, from 2004 to 1948, was a dead cat in a bag. Then we go on a bit of a wild escalation where it becomes a wild bobcat, and that's the zoo variant where someone was transporting a cat to the zoo. Then we go on a little tangent to South Africa with the leopard, snake or monkey in a bag story.

And now we enter a very, very fruitful post the World Wide Web being open to the public and their story spreading exponentially. The internet, one of the many perpetrators in this crime, an accomplice that didn't pull the trigger but allowed the damage to spread unchecked, reaching countless people at lightning speed. The next variant is from one of our fans and it was reported in from a Canadian called Charlie Cook. and he heard the story in 2003 in Vancouver, Canada. It was told to him by a classmate in year six when he's at school, and this is when it turns to a very large dog. Well, he says it happens to a friend of his mum's friend, and the story goes,

there's this college student, and she's dog sitting for her friend. It was a very old great day, and so a couple days into the visit, unfortunately this old dog passes away so the dog sitter calls the friend lets her know and the friend is of course sad but understands because the dog was quite old so she says no worries but would you be able to take the dog to the vet in order for it to be cremated this variant is echoing the 1948 dead cat story where the owner was taking the cat to the vet since this was a great Dane, it's this huge dog, and she's not sure how she's going to move it. And what she decides on is she gets a suitcase and puts the dog in it, but it's still this really big, heavy dog. And so

she's outside the house trying to put the suitcase into the back of the car. She's struggling with it, and this nice passerby sees her struggling, offers to help. And as he's helping with the suitcase, he's like, wow, this is really heavy, what's inside it? And she kind of panics and goes, oh, well, you know, I'm a college student, so it's textbooks and like a laptop and stuff. And I guess thinking that, well, those can be really valuable. This passerby runs off with the suitcase, not knowing what's actually inside it. And this, let's call it the dog in a suitcase variant,

a disturbing offshoote of the original. story. Once it surfaced, it exploded across the US and Canada, spreading relentlessly. We then hear another report of the same story from 2010. Again, it's a large dog, so this all tracks back to the Great Dane. It was based in New York City. From 2008, reports of a similar story begin to surface across the Atlantic. Funnly enough, this story crops up in London now. A girl is looking after a very elderly dog on behalf. half of her, you know, neighbours. Longs through short, she comes back on evening and stuck died.

She finds a suitcase in their house and she puts the dog, large dog, much larger than Shrao, and puts the dog in the suitcase. And then she gets off at one of the old stations on the district line. And this guy helps her onto the tube and says, God, what's in the bag? I'm a DJ, so this is like my equipment. And then at the next stop, the guy, gets the bag from her, wrestles it off her and jumps off the train, assuming that there's super expensive DJ equipment in the bag.

And then the story goes global. So it was when Tumblr was quite big, and there was this 15-year-old girl called Hela, who lives in New York, again, interesting, and she posts this very short 15-year-old style posts on Tumblr. She had quite a big following for some reason. And so she just went, so my friend's dog died and she lives in New York City. And so she had to take to the vet by the subway, no punctuation whatsoever in the story.

So she had to take it to the vet by the subway and she put the dead dog in the suitcase in the suitcase and some dude saw that she was struggling with the suitcase. So he asked if she needed to help with it. And he said, do you mind me asking what's in it? And she didn't want to say it was a dead dog. So she said it was a bunch of laptops. So he took the suitcase and ran and I just, and that was it. Wow. Okay.

So even children are spreading the line. Even children are spreading the lies. This Tumblr pose is now referenced quite a lot. This was like a juncture where loads of people started spreading it as their own story. Do you think this could be the first time it went viral, like digitally viral? Yes, 100%. It went viral at this point. Is this what we all get Guinness World Record for?

The most amount of historical research into an urban legend. the most work done on the most unnecessary story? The biggest waste of time by two podcasters. Correct. Okay, yes. In 1904, a dead cat was accidentally stolen in New York City. 109 years later, we have a similar story about a stolen dead dog in a bag. Same city.

Same unsettling premise. Is it coincidence or a pattern? Is New York the hub for thieves accidentally stealing dead animals Or is this dog variant truly linked to the original story? Now we get into a bit of a twist in this story And this is where if you didn't think it was already really meta, it's about to get even more meta Because we're involved now.

The podcast community has a massive, huge role to play in this. this. Oh no. Unfortunately. Have you heard of the podcast My Favorite Murder? Yeah. Okay, so in February 2017, they aired an episode. It was episode number 56 service poodle. And in that episode, they told a story from their listener's friend and they broadcast it as truth. And it was the exact same story about a dog that someone was pet sitting. And this is in L.A. This is in L.A. story and it was a golden retriever, elderly golden retriever that passed away on like day two, blah, blah, blah, la. The person tried to take it to the vet and then they put it in a wheeled suitcase. They went via bus and as she was waiting to board the bus, a stranger offered to help

carry the suitcase. When she asked what was inside, she just went, she was moving. And then this gets a really violent end to this story. The thief then punched her in the stomach, grabbed the suitcase and ran off stealing the dead dog. published as truth. So this podcast said that this was true. I know they had to retract it and they had to issue a statement saying this was not true. But oh boy, did people hear that?

The millions and millions of listeners that they had. So this is the point when podcasts has become kind of perpetrators of this crime, but also massive victims. And we're actually to blame as well. We can just take a lesson for the rest of the podcast community is like do some fact checking before you We never fact check.

Yeah. We don't fact check, but we're a comedy podcast. We don't have to. Is that true? Yeah, I think so. This is why it's good to have a comedy because you can just always say it's a joke. Yeah. So that wasn't the first time. We then go on to a very famous podcast, which has millions of listeners again.

And this is a bit of a jump again. So my favourite murder was February 2017. Then in September, 2024, there was. an episode called Pet Sitting from Armchair Experts, which is run by Dax Shepard. This guy, Alex R. Keating, guests on this podcast, and he tells the story as if it really happened to him in the most convincing psychopathic way. This is a clip from the podcast. My name is Alex Keating.

Alex grew up in Colorado. I went to a very wealthy high school. school, I was not wealthy at all. But I dated a girl who was very, very, very wealthy. He was introduced to her family's rich friends. And they ended up kind of hiring me throughout high school for odd jobs. In his senior year, an office surfaced that felt too good to refuse. This family was going on a one month long trip to Italy, a vacant house, one dog that needed care. And they have a black lab, which I had... I'll sit before in Colorado, and I knew him pretty well.

So anyway, the first night I get there and have some pizza, hang out, watch the movies, hanging out with the dog, go to bed, wake up the next morning, and the dog had died. They were in Italy, and I said, hey, your dog died. I'm really, really sorry. They told him that the dog was 13 years old and not to worry. Okay, I can't leave your dog here for a month. Like, what do you want me to do? And they were like, well, can you take him to the vet and get him cremated?

I played football in high school so I had one of those big duffel bags I put the dog in that He goes into extreme detail about the dodgy shoulder strap on the duffel bag I go to throw it over my shoulder and it's cheaply made It was given to me by my high school

That immediately broke So I was carrying it like this I go downstairs, Dorman I guess calls me a cab I put the dog in the trunk And he takes me to the vet Get out Olden it like this

And there's a sign on the door of the vet's office, it says, we have moved. But it was only like 10 blocks that way. I was like, all right, I'm just going to walk. It's summer. I'm dripping sweat. When this guy comes up to me, he goes, man, you look like you're struggling. Do you need some help?

He's a big guy, like, 6'3. He goes, you need some help? And I'm like, yes, please. We get like two blocks in and we're at a crosswalk. He goes, hey, this is heavy. What's in here? I wasn't about to tell him. So I was just like, oh, it's just bunch of my crap.

So light turns green, he drops the bag, grabs me, throws me into the street, he puts his feet in front of mine so I fall, picks up the bag, runs away. Similar to the my favourite murder situation, Arn Che Expert had to retract this, and later very apologetically admit the story was false, but not before it had reached the ears of millions of listeners, further sparking the spread of this story. The detail of his lies is like nothing I've ever heard before. I've tracked down Alex Keating. He's obviously gone a bit underground since he's appeared on this show. There's a whole Reddit threads trying to track him down. People were really angry about the lie that this was false, that he was so brazen to go on and tell the story in such detail.

There's a lot of angry people on Reddit. But I have tracked down where he works. who works for his brother's company and I do have an email address. Oh my God. So if we're trying to get a confession from someone that lied, he would be an obvious choice. So yeah, that's where I got to. Well, that escalated. Like really escalated.

The story that began for us as Doggy Bag, but for the world as Cat in a Bag has reached its tipping point. The evidence, the timelines, the research all point to the same conclusion. What we're dealing with now is no longer a misunderstanding. It has evolved into something far bigger, stranger, an iconic urban legend that has slipped beyond its origins and taken on a life of its own. And now we're left with the question every true crime story eventually asks, how does this end? Do we intervene and try to put an end to it?

at least the doggy bag version before it mutates any further and I'm worried that we're going to try and shut it down once and for all. Is that what we're going to do? We shouldn't, right? I'm actually worried that we're going to kill a tradition that is over

100 years old, or is there another solution? My dream for this is to perpetuate it in a way that we can track very clearly to benefit us. A new variant. So I think between us, we get to decide the future of

this story and I think we have to plant it. We pick a few people, maybe actors that we know, to start planting an even better version that we have written the very clear details of. We don't know any actors. I know of you. It's fine. Okay. Let's take that of fun. Okay, but I'll tell you what I want the solution to be for the shop.

I want it to be Armani because I've got the Armani bag. It needs to be Armani. Okay, that's fine. I'm happy with Armani. In yet. There's still the possibility that somewhere beneath the noise, a version of this story is true. We have two final leads.

And as long as those leads remain open, hope exists. The idea that one of them, either Luke's friend Anna or Tony's friend Joanna, will finally give us the closure that this case has denied us for so long. Oh my God, Lauren. Johanna just responded. she's willing to talk to us.

Coming up on the finale of Doggy Bag. It's become like this disease that is taking hold of Europe. And now you've just added in another infected country. I'm so sorry. I think you've become a little bit obsessed and it might be our fault. We need to get a rat expert because we need to find out if... No, we need to get a cat expert. We just need a vet.

Oh no, I feel bad about this. No, you've got to take the emotion out. I think he's projecting. I think it's guilt. Being really real with us, Andrea. Do you think this isn't going to... At this point, it doesn't have a good enough ending. Honestly, it was so embarrassing, so I'm happy to confess.

Listen, you're very good at manipulating. So I want to ask you this. What are we doing? What are we talking about? And is it actually real? To that journalist who wrote that article in 1904, this is for you.