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Bye. Hello. And welcome. To Rewind with Karen and Georgia. That's right. Every Wednesday, we're here recapping our old shows with all new commentary and insights and updates.
00:02:33
Today, we're recapping episode 76, which we named My Own Sinkhole. Oh, this episode came out on July 6, 2017.
00:02:43
All right, let's listen to the intro of episode 76. Happy 4th of July. Hello. Wait, let's start over. It's not 4th of July anymore.
00:02:54
Oh, oh. Happy 5th of July. It's not the 5th. It's the 6th. hello and welcome to my favorite murderer hi welcome thanks for coming that's karen kill
00:03:06
garrett why do we always start it with like it's super uncomfortable we've gone over this a million
00:03:12
times we're staring at each other maybe that's part of it we just stare at each other to see
00:03:18
who's gonna go first and then the fakest voices that we have to offer come out of our heads and
00:03:24
then we asked to start over um but we don't and we never plan anything i mean what what are you
00:03:32
gonna plan what are you gonna plan i mean we have an ending what more do you want who cares anyway
00:03:37
yeah of all the things have you seen that picture the newest pictures that have come back from the
00:03:43
hubble telescope that show the galaxies they're purple they did it basically it's like black
00:03:48
background um they did purple were the galaxies in the picture and orange was the gas the different
00:03:55
things of gas that make stars and it like there's a countless number of galaxies in this photo
00:04:01
you're giving me an anxiety attack i'm just saying who cares what we how we start this podcast
00:04:06
did we're stardust did or made of stars i we really i can't even start to think about it
00:04:13
Wait, that is it the the vastness of space gives you anxiety? The vastness of space, the reality of life.
00:04:21
What is it? What are we? Are we aliens? Clearly. I mean, everyone is. I'm not. I'm not.
00:04:29
I'm actually Irish. Which is worse and harder. There's, you know, that podcast we love, Mysteries Abound.
00:04:38
Yes. We go to sleep to the last episode is like, are humans actually aliens? And it's like, yes.
00:04:45
I got so into that episode that when I landed, when I went to Petaluma for Father's Day, when I landed and Lauren Adrian came and picked me up, I got into the car and was like, so the thing is that there's a really good chance we're all aliens.
00:04:59
I said that to Vince too. And he was, and I explained it very poorly. He was like, I don't know.
00:05:04
Yeah. I don't. And then, then I turned to him and one night when Elvis was sitting on me and I said, do you think cats are aliens?
00:05:11
And he was just like, no. I am the weird one in the relationship. He is the like, what's it called?
00:05:19
He's the voice of reason? Yes. Oh, speaking of which, there's a reason we can never think of the word trophy.
00:05:27
And I would like to say, I would like to take responsibility for it. Because I think every time it's happened, it's been in my story where we can't.
00:05:34
So like a serial killer takes trophies. Yeah. They take a thing, they keep it so they can look at it and remember the bad thing they did.
00:05:40
That's called a trophy. Okay, but the word memento, which is what we use, this is the fucking same word.
00:05:46
Yeah but I guess the most often used term and the ones that people tweet to us in all caps with 17 exclamation points after is trophy Yeah So maybe here in the podcasting loft which we finally moved into and everyone are you going to ever tweet picture or uh
00:06:07
put pictures on Instagram? Yeah. I just like, didn't feel like it was done yet, but I should just post it. It's so good. You guys, all of the awesome, um, art you sent us
00:06:16
and dolls you've made us and pictures and everything Georgia has arranged in her loft
00:06:23
obsessively and it it looks so cool it's super fun uh to report it on social media but there's
00:06:30
like things i want to frame still and things i need to put up here and there but i'll post it
00:06:34
for now and there's also a drawing of a let's sit crooked and talk straight yes drawing and i thought
00:06:41
it was so funny when i hung it crooked yes well i saw it immediately and it made me laugh it's
00:06:47
driving me crazy like as a as a fucking ocd person but it's got a point there's a reason it's that way
00:06:54
reason i don't need to download the um app that is a measure a leveler oh they have that i can
00:07:00
have that dude dude you can have an app for anything i know man when the grid goes down
00:07:05
we're gonna we're screwed beyond belief nothing will be straightened no frames will be straight
00:07:10
and that you won't know even if there are like land lines if they can get a hard line in some way
00:07:16
Could you, do you know even your own phone number anymore? Yeah. Do you know mine?
00:07:22
No. Vince and I purposely memorized each other, so I'm going to give it out right now.
00:07:27
Okay, great. Please call us day or night. Do you know what I, like, I'm super prepared, trying to prepare for earthquakes, you know?
00:07:34
And so I got like, this is boring. This is so boring. Nobody cares. Right as I take a huge sip of Diet Coke thinking you're going to cover for at least 30 seconds.
00:07:42
No. Yeah. Preparing for earthquakes is necessary and a reality in California. But what'd you do? Buy some flashlights? Come on, zhuzh it up a little bit.
00:07:52
I have a flashlight. I have a external batteries in my car and in my house. The hand crank kind?
00:07:58
No, no, no. For the phone. Like, like that have a charge on them. Oh, right. Listen, everyone be prepared.
00:08:05
Yeah. That's, it's very important. Yeah. I have a, like a, and I have an earthquake kit in my front closet.
00:08:11
I have one too. But all I think of is, what if that's the part of the house that goes down?
00:08:16
Dude, I have one in the loft and I'm like, clearly the loft is going to collapse.
00:08:20
What is it doing here? I stick flashlights under everything in my whole house. And I've actually, when I bought my house, I had to sign a piece of paper declaring that
00:08:30
I understood that my house is on land, that if there's a strong enough earthquake, it turns
00:08:35
to liquid and sinks into the earth. What? I will get my own sinkhole, which is, as many people know, one of my great passions of life is sinkholes.
00:08:44
Well, I have a question. What kind of liquid are we talking about? Because it's something fun like Kool-Aid.
00:08:49
Yes, I have. There's a Kool-Aid spring underneath my house. No, it's because I'm near the quote unquote L.A. River.
00:08:59
You mean the one that's feet from my door? Yes. Well, that goes right up kind of near my house if you go north.
00:09:06
and um that creates the water table is right i guess close to under my house so basically if the
00:09:15
ground shakes the the kind of silt or whatever ground is under my house will just mix with the
00:09:22
water become like sand quick sand goodbye and goodbye and goodbye and good night so just things
00:09:31
two skippers come back skippers this is what you need to know the most skippers in places where
00:09:38
there isn't and won't be earthquakes ever hi you never know though do you think there's a geologist
00:09:44
who listens is that an earthquake doctor yes definitely okay he's gonna email so you're
00:09:49
completely incorrect about all of this information i signed paperwork listen um speaking of i'm not
00:09:56
Oh, experts. That's right. I have a letter, an email from a girl who, so I did the mainline murders, the fucking insane mainline murders last week.
00:10:06
Yes. And the girl who was, whose dad was involved in the case emailed us. Whoa. Okay. I'm so excited when you covered the mainline murders in your last episode, as my dad was very closely involved in the case.
00:10:18
He prosecuted Karen Reinhart's lover, William Bradford, Patches. Patches the professor.
00:10:23
Yeah. For stealing from her estate. So the one thing he got in the beginning, he described Bradfield as a master manipulator and a truly evil man, despite being a prosecutor for over 30 years and putting hundreds of murders behind bars, including billionaire murderer John DuPont.
00:10:39
Oh, wait, wait. Is that the fox catcher guy? Hell yes. My dad says no case has ever affected him quite like this one.
00:10:47
And he's a father of four daughters. And he still tears up when he talks about the kids, the innocent children and the discovery of Karen's art museum pin on the floor of the car.
00:10:56
And by the way, I accidentally called her Carol at the very end of it. And that's just.
00:11:01
You were off the page, though. You were just trying to talk. Yes. That's always a mistake.
00:11:06
It's the mistake that we're dedicated to making on this podcast. Yes. Never apologize for like I just apologized.
00:11:13
So Patches and Principal Smith were co-conspirators, he thinks. and that Patches had agreed, I'm just calling them this,
00:11:20
agreed to split Karen's life insurance money with the principal in exchange for killing Karen and her children.
00:11:26
To this day, he's still heartbroken over the police, mishandling the evidence that led to Jay Smith's conviction
00:11:30
and being thrown out. Thank you guys so much, et cetera, et cetera. John Bonet, JFK.
00:11:36
Thanks again. Stay sexy. Don't get murdered. Brianna. P.S. And Stephen said he asked, can I read this, Stephen?
00:11:41
Oh, no, you're going to be embarrassed. It's fine. I don't want to embarrass you.
00:11:45
Say it and then we'll decide after. Okay, we can cut it out, Stephen. P.S. is Stephen Stingle?
00:11:50
Nope, I said that wrong. Is Stephen Stinky? Yes totally Is Stephen Single Oh sorry Stephen I going to take this one Wait can we say that you can cut this out obviously you in charge of this whole show look at everything well there got so many so many listeners like this yeah inquiring minds
00:12:13
he's a cat guy which lots of girls like but don't mistake that for innocence or or any kind of uh
00:12:21
Don't mistake his kindness for gentleness. What is the saying? Don't mistake my weakness for kindness.
00:12:28
I like that. I saw that one time on Tumblr. I dig it. Right, Stephen? This is going to be on my dating profile.
00:12:34
That whole clip of this podcast. The whole thing can fit on a Tinder bio. Where are you going?
00:12:40
Are you going to Tinder? Let everyone know. Oh, I haven't decided yet. Okay. I think you should take it over to what's it called?
00:12:49
Too Many Fish? the christian dating site too many fish is that it is plenty of fish plenty of fish there are too
00:12:55
many fish i don't like fish so i feel like there's too many that's true uh yeah steven religion
00:13:00
that's really important to you i mean i am a satanist so so bring that act over to too many
00:13:06
fish and then you know for a change of pace speaking of traveling can i just say one thing
00:13:13
really quick please at the end of that email did she start calling the woman karen because karen
00:13:17
was the daughter yeah i now i know only because oh shit somebody that has my name no no she said
00:13:24
the discovery of karen's art museum pin at the floor of the car so the kids the kid
00:13:28
but then later on um yeah you're right she may have no you're right she did fuck yeah
00:13:35
not just me right i just want to make sure so the i know i feel awful the mother's
00:13:41
no this isn't right okay anyways here we go well just so just so they know we didn't do it yeah
00:13:47
should we start that was just a run through uh i'm gonna say this the cl the cleveland murderinos
00:13:56
had a meetup they sent us pictures they sent us a video there's a bunch of them uh they're a good
00:14:03
looking group they were all in a bar enthusiastic and a lot of people were tweeting just saying
00:14:09
what a great group it was, how happy it made them to be a part of it. Other people were writing
00:14:15
saying, Hey, I didn't know. I wish I was there. And they, they ended up collecting $500 for in
00:14:21
the backlog, which is so cool. So thank you guys so much and congratulations and way to go. Cause
00:14:27
that really makes a difference. That's lovely. Yeah. That's nice. Des Moines. Sorry. Des Moines.
00:14:33
Sorry, guys. Sorry for talking shit. I actually have no idea what it's like there, but apparently
00:14:38
it's lovely uh yeah i think i was like a great place and i think there was an iowa meetup too
00:14:44
where they went and saw despicable me together and so does a photo and i'm like what that's cool
00:14:49
you don't have to make a bunch of cocktails with any like funny names you just go watch a movie
00:14:53
that's so good i there was a somebody sent i can't tell if he it was the person that sent it
00:14:59
was wearing the sweatshirt because he kind of looked like a model or if it was just showing
00:15:03
the picture of a sweatshirt, but you can get a sweatshirt that says Des Moines D-U-H.
00:15:09
Like it's basically spelled phonetically, but also Des Moines, which made me laugh really
00:15:14
hard. Yeah. Well, so we're, you know, we're on each other's radar. We might. Yeah.
00:15:21
Can I say one more thing about Murderina? So on Instagram, they're having, I guess, a thing called the lettering challenge, which
00:15:26
I didn't know was a thing. It's all these people who are like written to calligraphy and like write and like lettering,
00:15:31
I guess is a thing. And so they're having a My Favorite Murder lettering challenge.
00:15:35
I guess there's like a whole, it's a whole community. They have challenges for like the month.
00:15:39
And so it's hashtag letter MFM. And I think I found the girl who was going to design my tattoo, my My Favorite Murder
00:15:47
tattoo. Oh, that's great. So do you want to get one with me or should I surprise you?
00:15:52
That is so fucking weird. Why? I had a dream the other night that everyone in my family was getting a tattoo together.
00:15:59
and I was in the dream I was like really Aunt Mary in your mid-70s like I was just looking around at
00:16:06
my family like and you know what we were getting a tattoo of some toes what does that mean I don't
00:16:14
know I'll look it up but uh yes I'll get a tattoo with you together yes okay can I want to get mine
00:16:20
all across my one haunch just just my whole hip front to back I think I'm gonna get mine like
00:16:26
what's this called under my armpit side of my body ribs i love it and then i'm gonna get an ssdgm
00:16:35
and this chick who does calligraphy really well who i'll shout out when i get the tattoo i'm gonna
00:16:40
have i'm having her design something maybe i'll get it on my neck are you serious no
00:16:45
my um i used to know a guy that used to call neck tattoos job stoppers yeah they have hand tattoos
00:16:52
but i don't think that's true anymore because how many chefs do you see with neck tattoos or like
00:16:59
podcasters i mean people who are tatted up are like yeah fuck you i run my entire company i have
00:17:05
a face tattoo deal with it get an and i make more money than you and your dad i'm my own boss too
00:17:10
bad your dad needs okay oh do you know my dad is driving lyft now and he said i keep wondering if
00:17:17
Well, these young girls who get in my car are murderinos. It sounded like he was going to kill them at first.
00:17:24
Yeah. He has to be careful with how he brings that up. Yeah. So if you see Marty picking up on Lyft.
00:17:29
Marty. Marty. I think that's all. It's all for you. Let me see. I think it's Steven has.
00:17:35
I was going to say. There's a little fun thing for us based on last week's story on your story, Karen.
00:17:43
I know it's July right now, but I think it's never too early for us. All right. What is it?
00:17:48
The Andy Williams Christmas Special. Holy shit. Oh my. Claudine Lange's first husband.
00:17:54
God And this was the one that like was it that it was this is the highest ranking television show before he got knocked out by some Super Bowls Yes Yeah This is the classics
00:18:06
This is when we spend a weekend watching this. Yeah. That is amazing. Do we save it for Christmas?
00:18:15
No. Okay. A July Christmas special event. Yeah. Thank you so much. Wait, someone sent it to us or did you get it?
00:18:22
No, I got it. Yeah. Steven. Really good gift giving. You're now invited to watch it with us.
00:18:28
Okay, it's me this week, right? Yeah. Yes. I knew. Now you know. Stephen's not fucking paying attention.
00:18:34
I was trying to look up who went first this week. I definitely went first. Yeah. Because now we're all back.
00:18:40
We're all on it again. What's a bummer, though, and I think that we have this often,
00:18:45
is that mine is a real bummer. And I hate closing with a real bummer. Yeah, but...
00:18:51
Then we have something positive. That's why we have a positive. That's why we turn it hard.
00:18:54
We take a hard left into positive land. Yeah, people don't like when murder podcasts are a real bummer.
00:18:59
They don't? No, they do. Yeah, that's the whole point. And we're back. I want to go ahead and say right at the top that because of this podcast and the murderinos who listen, I was able to help my dad retire.
00:19:17
He doesn't drive Lyft anymore. He has a nice apartment and a van that he loves. So I just wanted to let everyone know that and thank them for listening.
00:19:28
Yeah, that's right. Every moment that you spend with us has affected our lives and in ways that are so crazy. So crazy. And I mean, like, it was a really exciting time back then when you got that new, that split level apartment, that high class, high ceiling split level apartment. Just so funny. And now I own a home that is built on granite. I'm no longer in a liquefaction zone. I got to move on up.
00:19:58
Yeah, we're doing a location update. My dad is not driving Lyft and lives in a great apartment.
00:20:06
Karen's house is standing and not a potential sinkhole. There's no secret rivers under me anymore.
00:20:13
It's great. So grateful. I can't believe that the big one hasn't happened, though, since then.
00:20:19
I'm sorry. That's so stupid of me to say, but I've been waiting for it this whole time.
00:20:24
For a little while on social media or online or whatever, the thing was that the caldera in Yellowstone was going to blow.
00:20:32
And they were like, any second. But I think it's the kind of thing of a little perspective of the thing.
00:20:38
We get told what to worry about. Yeah. And we don't realize it. So suddenly. Here comes COVID.
00:20:43
Yes. COVID's on the way, but I'm literally all eyes on Yellowstone every day. I'm like, how's the caldera?
00:20:48
Is it bubbling or not? It's like, how crazy is it that we just had no clue what was going to hit us in a couple of years?
00:20:55
Like we had no clue. Unprecedented in our lifetimes. Yeah. Or sorry. Yes. In our lifetimes.
00:21:02
I was like, wait, the Spanish flu. But we weren't there for that. In the 21st century.
00:21:07
Unprecedented. Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yes. That's what I remember when COVID first started and they were kind of like talking about quarantine where I was like, how are we going to do this?
00:21:17
We've never done it before. Right. And the answer is we're going to wipe down our cereal boxes and freak the fuck out.
00:21:24
Speaking of MFM tattoos, I still haven't gotten one. Will I ever? But I did recently have a great idea for Vince and I.
00:21:33
What if we got each other's MFM animated characters tattooed on ourselves? How cute would that be?
00:21:42
If I got the little MFM animated Vince and he got the little MFM animated. No, let me explain this to you.
00:21:49
I was just thinking of like, would Vince agree? No, never. Would Vince agree that that?
00:21:54
No, no, no, no. I already said that. He got excited and he reacted like you reacted.
00:21:58
Let's rephrase it. You're going to get a tattoo of We Watch Wrestling. The logo of We Watch Wrestling across your back.
00:22:07
Okay. And he's going to get MFM. But I mean, I love those characters. I love the way those characters look.
00:22:13
It would be cute. If we had to get a couple's tattoo, that would be like the fucking cutest thing.
00:22:18
Don't you think? How big? It would be Georgia as the Mothman on the back of Vince's calf.
00:22:22
Oh, my God. That would be even cooler if I was the Mothman. Double bird's whole leg.
00:22:27
That would be so cute. No, he already does enough by wearing our merch, which is above and beyond.
00:22:33
The fucking funniest. It is the funniest. He's number one. What I really love is when in the live shows, just forgetting this part and Vince walking on to tell everybody, here's the mic and then I'm going to stand over here.
00:22:46
The way that audience loves Vince is the cutest thing in the world. It's so sweet.
00:22:50
I love it. They start screaming for him. He loves it. Also, I just love that we're really laying down the groundwork, the canon of sinkhole,
00:22:58
where it's like, if anybody thought I was a fake lover of sinkholes, if I was some sort
00:23:03
of bandwagoner of sinkholes, you can just go right back to this fucking episode.
00:23:08
But Karen goes way back. She was into sinkholes before they were cool. I liked them first.
00:23:12
All right. Let's get into Karen's story about Mark Hoffman. When you're young, you don't really buy furniture.
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Don't we all kind of need that? Like the eye of an expert? Yeah. Where should I put this?
00:24:09
And also what should I move here and there? And what should I even get? But Article has it all, so you can get whatever there.
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00:26:32
Terms and conditions apply. See pandora.net for more details. Goodbye. Okay. Mine is...
00:26:40
it's hard sometimes as we've talked about to get for me to get my homework done.
00:26:48
No, it's yeah. And especially when I will work on something for a while. And then if I have a
00:26:54
friend who goes, have you ever heard of this one? I will switch immediately and go do my friend.
00:26:59
I switch, I switch, you know, you're halfway done. It's not like you're just reading about it.
00:27:03
No, I switch all the time. Yeah. And, and so many of these stories, because, you know,
00:27:08
You guys are just as into true crime, if not more, than either of us. So oftentimes you feel like I'm only telling a third of this story.
00:27:17
I know there's so much more. I should have read an entire book about this, whatever.
00:27:21
That's what other people do. So sometimes I'll bail just because I know a story has much more to it,
00:27:27
and I should invest more time. You're not going to do it justice. Right, exactly.
00:27:30
Someone else already has. But this one was so juicy, and I loved it so much. Um, uh, my friend Bridger is the one who told me about it. He's a hilarious, uh, he's, he's very
00:27:42
famous on Twitter and he's a great, uh, writer and he, uh, grew up in Utah. Um, so he was like,
00:27:49
have you ever heard of this one? And I had never heard anything about it. Turns out there's a
00:27:54
forensic files. There's lots of stuff. There's, um, an amazing book. Um, but anyway, I'll just
00:28:02
give you, I'll give you what I know. So we're at salt, we're in Salt Lake city. Okay. What's this?
00:28:07
Is there a call? Is it called anything? I'm not going to call it anything because I usually do
00:28:11
that and then I end up giving it away. I totally understand. Okay. So we're in Salt Lake city,
00:28:15
the morning of October 15th, 1985. Um, a man named Steve Christensen, who is a businessman,
00:28:21
a husband, a father of four and a Bishop of the Mormon church. He arrives at his office on the
00:28:26
sixth floor of the judge building in downtown Salt Lake City. One time I did a story and it was
00:28:33
that horrible one about the woman throwing her kids off the top of the hotel. In Utah. In Salt
00:28:39
Lake City even. Right. And in that I threw out the random idea that it was a very, because,
00:28:48
you know, all of Utah, I assume is very Mormon, that Salt Lake City would be a conservative town.
00:28:54
Well, I was couldn't have been more wrong about that. I would like to say now I now know because of making that mistake that actually Salt Lake City is the like liberal part of Utah and it's a college town and it's the hip place.
00:29:07
And it's probably best case scenario. And if you're looking for, I don't know, a great shirt or really cool flats, I'm not I don't know.
00:29:18
So Steve Christensen gets to his office. He sees a brown wrapped box shaped package in front of his office door and his name's written on top of it.
00:29:28
He picks it up and it immediately explodes. Oh, fuck. Here, I thought it was something else.
00:29:34
And this is fucking, let's do this. Yeah. So it was a pipe bomb. Steve is killed.
00:29:42
The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire. Yeah. It was a pipe bomb that was made with concrete nails were inside.
00:29:50
And concrete nails are the nails you use to pound in. They not made of concrete They the really strong industrial sized nails that you pound into concrete So the person that made this pipe bomb wanted the person who picked it up to be killed Wow what a bummer
00:30:05
Yeah. So the ATF officers arrive, they begin to piece the bomb back together to figure out that
00:30:15
it's a pipe bomb. And that was activated by a mercury switch that would go off when the package
00:30:22
was picked up and tilted one way or the other. So the minute the mercury like shifts.
00:30:27
Exactly. It's in a little glass circuit. And if it is laying on one side of this little glass thing,
00:30:34
and then when you pick it up, if you put it in, chip it one way or the other, the circuit connects and that's when the bomb explodes.
00:30:41
Wow. So they know from a bomb like that, that the person, that the bomber dropped that box off
00:30:48
because they would have to make sure it stays exactly the way it is. And they couldn't mail it.
00:30:53
Yeah, you can't just give it to somebody else. Okay. So, also inside the bomb were Tandy brand batteries, which is, as many RC enthusiasts
00:31:06
know, Tandy is the Radio Shack brand of batteries. Really? Uh-huh. So, they start going around to the local Radio Shacks trying to find out who has bought
00:31:18
batteries there, you know, the past week or whatever. Mm-hmm. They also find out that Steve Christensen had recently worked at a financial company called CFS,
00:31:29
which after doing huge business in the 70s and the early 80s had started losing money and was in serious trouble.
00:31:37
So this is the part that I actually found really interesting because so the 80s were like a time of big money.
00:31:43
That's when everybody pretended to be rich and preppies. And, you know, it was a very eyes odd Coke time.
00:31:49
Yeah. and apparently Salt Lake City in that time was a hotbed for financial fraud.
00:31:56
Really? Yeah. So what people would do, con men would go to Salt Lake City and they would kind of like get into the Mormon church.
00:32:04
They would either pretend they were Mormons or they would befriend higher-ups in the Mormon church.
00:32:10
And then when they would do business, they would like say they were in securities or whatever stocks bought.
00:32:17
They're like, I got a ground floor fucking thing to get in on. Exactly. And then the elders or whoever in the church would be like, oh, this guy is trustworthy.
00:32:25
And so then all the parishioners or Mormons, I'm not sure what you call the general word for it, but all the people in that church would then trust that person and buy into whatever thing that that person was bringing to the table, whether it was high finance or also very popular pyramid scheme.
00:32:45
vitamin sales got to be very popular back then. Yeah. So it was kind of an, there was lots of
00:32:52
Amway, low grade Amway, um, kind of bullshit going on. Did they get the vitamins? Did they ever get
00:32:59
the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins they needed? I don't know, but it was a, it was a kind
00:33:05
of thing. They call it, um, affinity fraud and it happens in lots of different, different kinds
00:33:11
of religions. This is why my money is under my bed. Right. And trust no one. Yeah. Um, it's the
00:33:18
same. It's the, the assumption that quote unquote, one of your own is going to look out for your best
00:33:23
interest as opposed to an outsider. I don't trust anyone. Do you? No, I'm, I'm scared of my fucking
00:33:30
cousin is a financial, whatever the fuck. And I like scared. Well, because it's, it's so, um,
00:33:37
Anyone can tell you anything. And if you don't know exactly what's going on, you, you, it's a hundred percent pure trust.
00:33:44
Yeah. And if people are that into money, like they're into money and they want it.
00:33:48
Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, um, so it's the same thing Bernie Madoff did, uh, to, uh, he got $20 billion, as you
00:33:55
well know, watching that documentary, um, from wealthy Jewish people, a guy named Alan
00:34:00
Stanford did it to Southern Baptists. He had a $7 billion empire that fell. There was even a con man named Monroe L. Beachy who became trusted within the Amish community.
00:34:15
And he went to prison for orchestrating a scheme that defrauded 2,700 investors, many of them his friends and neighbors.
00:34:22
What a dick. So it's just a very common practice of like this idea that your religion would would stand for your good morals and that that therefore the business is trustworthy.
00:34:35
It's almost worse con than just, you know, clients, because, yeah, these people are trusting because they because if you're in their religion, it's because you believe the same things they do.
00:34:46
You have the same morals. They're they're they're going right on the inside. You know, they're not just standing out and like rolling the dice that maybe you'll believe them and maybe not.
00:34:55
They're they're asking you they're playing on your ultimate faith. Yeah. Which is very ugly.
00:35:01
And and in the Mormon religion, it was the kind of thing where there I believe a lot.
00:35:09
I know lots of Mormons. I've grown up. I grew up with Mormons. One of my good friends that I used to work with, Betsy, is a Mormon.
00:35:16
And, you know, it's, it's a very, um, moralistic, they, the life they live is really the whole
00:35:25
idea of it is that you live this life based on your faith. So it's like, my friend just said it the other day, he's like, Mormons really walk the walk.
00:35:33
Yeah. So it's not just, and I may, maybe I'm only saying this because of all those like design
00:35:38
websites that you see these days. And when you trace them back, it's like a young Mormon family, but it's like the most
00:35:44
beautiful, you know, table setting and the cutest design. And it's like, here's a great thing for your baby.
00:35:51
I heard so many bloggers like famous bloggers or like the big ones that have beautiful websites are Mormon for some reason Yeah Cause it kind of like it the whole idea of like home building and like putting the best into your home Right And being ambitious and always
00:36:05
having something anyways. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are insane generalizations, obviously we're not
00:36:11
speaking for every single person that's in the religion, but there is just, there's something to
00:36:14
that. There's something to that. Um, where there's a, there is a, there seems to be an innocence that,
00:36:22
that in the 70s and 80s, con men were like, oh, we can exploit this, this community, this
00:36:27
sense of community that they have. Okay. Two hours after Steve Christensen's attack, there's another bombing at the home of Gary
00:36:38
and Kathy Sheets. Gary Sheets was Steve Christensen's boss at CFS. And his wife, Kathy, was the one who picked up the package.
00:36:46
It exploded in her hands and she was killed. Oh my God. I never heard of this. I know.
00:36:52
So now the police are thinking that these bombings are related to the failed CFS business dealings.
00:36:59
And so it could be retaliation from an old employee or even the mafia. Police talked to the Sheets 13 year old next door neighbor who saw a tan minivan pull into the Sheets driveway the night before around midnight and thought it was suspicious.
00:37:16
But all he saw was the car. He didn't see anybody, anybody get in or out. but then they also talked to a jeweler who worked on the fifth floor of the judge building,
00:37:26
one floor below Steve Christensen's office. Um, his name is Bruce Passy. And he tells the police
00:37:31
that the morning, the morning of the bombing, um, he got into the elevator with his father
00:37:37
and there was a man standing in the elevator wearing a letterman jacket, but with no letter
00:37:41
on it. And he was holding a Brown, like paper wrapped box that said to Steve Christensen on
00:37:49
the top of it oh shit and so he um bruce passy describes this man to the police um saying he's a
00:37:58
white male five foot eight medium brown hair um the next day there's a third bombing um this time
00:38:05
it's inside a car and the victim is seriously injured but he's not killed it's 30 year old
00:38:10
mark hoffman um he is rushed to the hospital um where he's in critical condition but he ends up
00:38:19
being able to tell the police that he'd opened his car door and the package was sitting on the
00:38:23
driver's seat with the action of opening the door. It fell off and exploded. Oh, good. So he didn't
00:38:29
get the full impact. Right. But he had a fingertip blown off. He had a huge wound in his knee where
00:38:37
parts of the explosives went into his kneecap, like his knee area. So he was, he was pretty badly
00:38:45
injured. But this, but immediately the police are suspicious because if he had his fingers blown off,
00:38:51
that doesn't, that means that the box was in his hands, not on the seat and then tumbling to the
00:38:57
ground. Um, also with the direction, the guy in forensic files explains it really well, but it's
00:39:03
basically the way they know bombs explode and the directions they go. If the thing was in his knee,
00:39:10
then he could not have been standing outside of the car. He must've been inside of the car,
00:39:14
leaning over. And so they basically reconstruct it. I want to watch that. I'm like trying to
00:39:19
picture it in my head. Basically they, with the trajectory of the stuff that flew out of the bomb,
00:39:25
which hit him, they realize he must've been leaning over the center console, holding the box and basically inside the car. So his story, why would you lie about that? Why
00:39:37
wouldn't you just tell him exactly? I love when cops figure that out. Like this person killed
00:39:41
themselves and it's like no the trajectory like yours last week the trajectory shows yes that that
00:39:46
person couldn't have killed themselves and and that's the relatively new forensic part that's
00:39:53
like what forensic files is all celebrating because it's like we you would never have known that
00:39:57
until forensics comes in and and is like hold up so the police search um mark hoffman's house
00:40:04
and they find a letterman jacket just like the one that bruce passy said the guy in the elevator was
00:40:10
wearing and they also find they also see that he has a tan minivan oh shit and there's gunpowder
00:40:17
that they find traces of around his house that match the brand used in all three bombings well
00:40:23
there you go so mark hoffman maintains his innocence says he's the victim um and he demands
00:40:29
to take a lie detector test and he does they give him a lie detector test and he passes with flying
00:40:36
colors. Oh shit. Yeah. So the police start looking into who this guy really is. So Mark
00:40:42
Hoffman was born in Salt Lake city on December 7th, 1954, raised in a strict Mormon household.
00:40:48
He was a mediocre student. Um, but later he was tested to have an IQ of 169. Wow. Which is
00:40:54
insanely high. That's one point over mine. Um, I feel like in stories I've read people who are
00:41:04
like mad geniuses are usually in like the mid 130s to 140s. I was gonna say that like I feel like
00:41:10
very very very fucking smart is like 130. I think so. But like then genius is like 160 something.
00:41:17
And maybe. I like us trying to guess what genius IQ levels are in the dumbest way. Well I know when
00:41:25
my brother was a kid with fucking attention issues they tested him and he had like one
00:41:32
very high up there because it's like, well, he's just fucking bored. Yes. That's why. So yeah. And
00:41:37
I never, I was not that smart and I was never bored. No, I was always bored. You're like,
00:41:42
this is fascinating. I was just bored. Not smart and bored. Um, okay. So he collected coins as a
00:41:51
teenager and um when he was when he was young uh that a weird cut and paste He collected He was a teenager And at some point he forged a rare mint mark on a dime that was verified by an organization of coin collectors to be genuine
00:42:10
And when he was a kid, he tricked the shit out of fucking professional coin people.
00:42:13
Exactly. He got he got the taste early of like, you know, it's impressive. I think so, too.
00:42:20
This don't kill people next. I mean, so in 1973, he volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary.
00:42:29
When he came back from his mission, which was in England, he enrolled as a pre-med major at Utah State University.
00:42:36
He married Dora Lee Old in 1979. They eventually have four children together. And she filed for divorce in 1987.
00:42:46
So in 1980, Hoffman claims to have found a 17th century King James Bible with a document inside that he claimed to be the transcript that Joseph Smith, who was the founder of the Latter-day Saints church.
00:43:05
He had a scribe named Martin Harris and was supposed to be a transcript that Martin Harris brought to a Columbia classics professor in 1828 that was originally copied by Joseph Smith from the Golden Plates, which he from which he translated the Book of Mormon.
00:43:27
So I'm going to say this probably incorrectly, but the general idea of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Joseph Smith found golden tablets that he dug up.
00:43:39
And from those tablets, he wrote down the tenets of the religion. And an angel appeared to him as he dug up those tablets to help him.
00:43:52
Um, so basically he presents this document. They freak out cause they're like, they'd never, it's a historical document from their
00:44:02
church. They'd never seen before. And the, um, the church ends up buying it from Hoffman for $20,000.
00:44:10
So this not only sets him financially, but it also sets his reputation as a historical
00:44:16
documents dealer. So, um, I wonder where he said he found it. Oh, is that inside a King James Bible?
00:44:23
So he, okay. So he was already, um, trying to become like a, uh, a historical book.
00:44:30
Okay. Dealer. So one of the book. Okay. One of that makes sense. It was a really old, it was a 17th century King James Bible.
00:44:37
So then it was like inside that. Got it. Got it. Okay. Um, so, uh, basically he then starts, um, for the next several years selling forged quote
00:44:49
unquote, lost LDS documents to the church. The most notorious of which was the Salamander letter
00:44:58
in 1984. So he basically starts forging pieces of historical text and bringing them to the church.
00:45:07
And as a church member himself going, I found this, I found this. Now the church is,
00:45:14
part of it is like a little bit like, oh yeah, we need to be owning these papers. And sometimes
00:45:19
he would donate them and sometimes they would buy them from him. But essentially it was, it was text
00:45:25
that they, um, that was relevant to them knowing about their own religion and the founder of their
00:45:32
own religion. So the one that is the most infamous is the salamander letter, which basically said
00:45:39
that when Joseph Smith dug up those tablets, it wasn't an angel that appeared to him, but a white
00:45:46
salamander. Um, that, uh, uh, so, so that was such a change of the historical record.
00:45:56
And they had never heard that before. They'd never heard it before. It was super freaky.
00:45:59
And it was kind of like, they didn't know if they should announce it. It put them in a really weird
00:46:03
position because suddenly it's, it's, it's a very non-religious sounding and almost like a magical
00:46:09
witchy sounding version of the story of how their church is founded. Right. Um, that's a salamander is kind of like not as cool as a snake is it a snake no uh well but snakes are
00:46:23
in the in like christian religion are evil right so there's but there's just something weird about
00:46:29
it's an albino salamander like as opposed to an angel man i think he could have done better
00:46:34
well a bear an albino bear a blue bear a blue um well it turned out he was actually
00:46:44
forging all of these documents and he had lost his faith and when he was a teenager
00:46:50
like he went on his mission basically he felt a lot of pressure from his family because he was
00:46:55
raised in such a strict mormon household but he um he was trying to embarrass uh the church
00:47:02
So he was writing these documents and changing these stories and basically adding in little inconsistencies and mistakes so that the church would kind of be scrambling and not knowing what their official approach should be.
00:47:19
And he was like a master forger because he had already sold. Let's see this. Here's the list.
00:47:29
He'd forged unpublished poems by Emily Dickinson. signatures signatures of mark twain a full handwritten letter uh supposedly written by
00:47:40
betsy ross no um he tricked the library of congress he tricked sotheby's he sold signatures
00:47:47
by george washington john adams john quincy adams daniel boone john brown andrew jackson
00:47:53
wow nathan hale john hancocks francis scott key abraham lincoln john milton like wow this
00:48:00
So lucky. He just finds all this shit. Yeah. And makes a shit ton of money off of it.
00:48:06
There was somebody named Button Gwinnett. No, the signature was the rarest and therefore the most valuable of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.
00:48:16
A guy named Button signed the Declaration of Independence. Or girl. Oh, sure. No way.
00:48:22
But little Button Gwinnett got up there. he also said he he claimed to have discovered a famous document called the oath of the free man
00:48:31
which um is believed to be or you know some say the precursor to the declaration of independence
00:48:38
um it's from the 1600s and it was worth over a million dollars oh my god but this they never
00:48:45
knew it existed until he came they knew it existed but they didn't there were no copies of it in
00:48:50
in America. Um, uh, so he had claimed he found one and he was trying to sell that,
00:48:58
but it was the sale of that was kind of held up because, um, they were questioning its authenticity.
00:49:05
Finally, someone's like, you know what we should do? Well, in this, it's funny. Cause I think in
00:49:10
the forensic files, they start talking about how they, because it's within the church and the way
00:49:15
he did it. He was a master manipulator. He was super smart. Um, so he knew how to do it where
00:49:21
they would not, they didn't question the documents because of who he was and what he had already
00:49:28
sold. So it was like, well, if he sold something to the library of Congress and Sotheby's and all
00:49:32
these places, what are we going to, we're going to question him. Yeah. This guy's an expert and
00:49:36
he's a Mormon. So get him all the way in on the inside. Um, but he also would buy really expensive
00:49:42
of things. So he was always broke, even though he would make big money on selling these forgeries,
00:49:47
he would then buy like rare books and he was buying things so that he could then forge other
00:49:53
things later. I mean, it's very complicated. And there's a, there's a book called, um,
00:49:59
the poet and the murderer by Simon Worrell. And that is, it tells the story of Mark Hoffman,
00:50:07
but specifically from the view of him pretending to have discovered poems by Emily Dickinson.
00:50:14
And the public library in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is where she was from, collects money to buy these heretofore unpublished lost Emily Dickinson poems that were fake.
00:50:29
Yeah. What a bummer. He was like one of the greatest forgers or the most infamous forgers anyone had ever seen.
00:50:40
Working it. He's doing it. So essentially what happened was he was trying to sell some new set of documents to the church.
00:50:49
Steve Christensen knew a little bit about antiquities and old documents. And so he was questioning.
00:50:58
he was like i heard this guy is being questioned about the oath of the freeman they're they're not
00:51:04
even sure like he's under investigation we need to look closer at these papers calling him out
00:51:09
yeah so what he did was he plants a bomb at steve christensen's office to kill him then he planted
00:51:15
the other one at gary sheet's house to make it look like it had something to do with cfs instead
00:51:20
of anything to do with him shit that's fucking tricky yeah i mean this guy is you know yeah
00:51:27
Tricky. He's a trickster. He was eventually arrested in January of 1986, charged with a total of 27 counts, including murder, forgery, possession of an unregistered machine gun.
00:51:41
And Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's literally Jesus Christ. And a salamander. So he albino salamander.
00:51:51
I know you can't forget the albino part. I mean, all of their beliefs for hundreds of years are one thing.
00:51:57
And then he gives them paper that's like, it turns out an albino salamander had a say.
00:52:01
They're like, you know, an angel sounds cooler, so we're just going to stick with that.
00:52:04
They're like, now we need to have a really big meeting. And what if we have to start fucking praying to an albino salamander?
00:52:10
I mean, would that ever even have been a choice? No. They say also, so he had like 600 forgeries that got sold and are in the market where they're still finding them today.
00:52:22
I was going to ask. Yeah. So they're apparently and he wrote a letter from jail explaining which things that he did were forgeries, because some things obviously started out, he kind of there were valid ones.
00:52:33
So but they're saying that they're like there's some Daniel Boone signatures out there that are fake that like there's there's because there were hardly any in the first place.
00:52:48
But then Mark Hoffman comes along and suddenly there's four that are in the marketplace, which brings the value down.
00:52:54
Right. And it turns out, you know, three of them aren't real. Do you think that his forgeries are now worth money?
00:53:00
A lot of money? Mm. To Murderino types? Or like, is there a forger's museum? Yeah.
00:53:08
I'd go to that. I would too. I mean, I think overall the historical signatures are going to be worth the most.
00:53:15
Of course. Because they're like the, you know. But I feel like there's got to be like Smithsonian or some kind of thing that's just like, you know, it's history.
00:53:24
Look at this rat bastard in that department. Look what happened. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's funny that he did it so much.
00:53:32
And when you see the paper, like he would bake the paper in the oven. Yeah, I was going to ask.
00:53:36
Like a lighter. Yeah, exactly. Like, come on. Like an old Western. Yeah. All that.
00:53:42
They found all this, you know, they found ink that he specifically mixed to match.
00:53:48
But then the when the the guy who finally started investigating it forensically he was like the new ones all glow blue underneath a microscope because they new Yeah and so he was just really easily able to once they knew yeah start investigating all of them and just be like
00:54:06
none of this is real yeah sorry this letter from betsy ross that's crazy i bet he'd be good at the
00:54:11
lettering challenge he might be he's got to have good handwriting he would add in he'd be like i
00:54:18
I believe that this is a real. I don't know where I was going, but anyhow, he initially maintained his innocence.
00:54:28
But at a preliminary hearing, the prosecutors showed so much evidence of his forgeries and his debts and all of the evidence linking him to the bombs that instead of risking the death penalty, he pled guilty to two counts of second degree murder.
00:54:45
account of theft by deception for the salamander letter, and account of fraud for the sale of the McClellan collection,
00:54:54
which was that last collection he was trying to sell when Steve Christensen stepped in.
00:54:59
He confessed all of his forgeries in open court. He was, in January 1988, he was sentenced to five years to life in prison.
00:55:08
He's spending life in prison. Five years? Wow. Wow. And he's still there. We can...
00:55:14
Still there. wow yeah that's mark hoffman everybody first i thought you were going like towards the ted
00:55:21
kaczynski route when i heard about a bomb but that's fucking crazy i've never heard about that
00:55:26
oh to be killed by a bomb do you ever open envelopes and you're like i don't know what
00:55:30
this is going to be yes well that's my moths thing i never think it's a mom though um a bomb though
00:55:36
well or a mom just a mom coming to tell me to sweep up the kitchen honey do those dishes oh
00:55:43
what is that fear? They're just sitting there. You let them soak for too long. Yeah. You can't
00:55:48
just let things soak in cold water, Karen. It's true. But also this was the eighties when like,
00:55:53
this was back when you could walk into an office building with a plain package. I feel like,
00:55:58
you know, as worrisome as it all sounds, we don't live in that world anymore. It's like,
00:56:02
that was definitely a very pre nine 11 era. Yeah. Except I, yeah. Yeah. But maybe not.
00:56:12
You know what I mean? Well, I'm scared. I know, I know. You can be. Wow, that's fucked up.
00:56:19
Good job. Thank you. Thanks and good job. Thank you. I don't know. Thank you. Okay.
00:56:29
Okay, we're back. Karen, do you have any updates? I have a couple. Mark Hoffman is still in prison.
00:56:35
He's never given an interview to the press. He's only corresponded with his family from prison.
00:56:40
Netflix had a three-part docuseries that covered this case called Murder Among the Mormons.
00:56:46
And victim Kathy Sheets' daughter, Gretchen Sheets McNeese, grew up to actually be a detective with the Salt Lake City Police Department.
00:56:54
Because she wants to ensure that Hoffman is remembered for what he is, which is a cold-blooded murderer.
00:56:59
And she told the Deseret Times, I think they've kind of idolized him and given him a unique status I don't think he deserves.
00:57:07
Yes, he did those forgeries, but he also killed two people and didn't care who he killed.
00:57:13
End quote. That's so important when we cover these cases that we're not like idolizing these people and thinking like, especially we do live shows and we're like, okay, what if the victim's cousin or brother or sister were in the audience?
00:57:27
Right. How would they feel if we were saying this thing and making them seem like a hero when they're not?
00:57:34
Yes. Right. Or like, you know, some kind of anti-hero. Like, we don't want to do that. We try really hard not to do that.
00:57:39
Right. But it's the kind of awareness that we definitely had to develop over time.
00:57:44
Yeah. And it is the kind of thing it's like hearing from people and knowing and basically thinking that it made the job a little bit harder because it was that thing of like, what if someone is there?
00:57:55
And then it's like, then if someone is there, write to that. Yeah. Like, represent them while you're putting everything else together and don't be cheap about it, which is what we thought when we started this podcast, we were in this, like, third-person away commentator kind of thing.
00:58:10
But no one is that in true crime. Right. Totally. And knowing that, like, you know, history is written by the victors, like, don't take the reporting and the, you know, what's been written and documented about it as face value, because there's so many sides to the story, you know.
00:58:29
And weirdly, the victim side, it's new for the victim side to be considered first, to have that part of it.
00:58:37
Or like I think even just in the beginning when we would just call serial killers pieces of shit.
00:58:42
Yeah. Felt very revolutionary because it's like, oh my God, can you believe they're saying that?
00:58:46
And it's like, it's a serial killer. I remember getting into an argument with a guy who was really mad about toxic masculinity ruins the party again.
00:58:56
And he was like all pissy about it because he was a men's rights activist. essentially. And I remember saying to him, I was like, you do know I'm talking about John Wayne
00:59:06
Gacy's father. Right. Like there's a context to this conversation and it's about serial killers
00:59:12
and how that comes to be. Totally. Like that's what you're defending. You're defending us being
00:59:18
mean to serial killers. Why? Right. What do you mean? And you were saying specifically toxic
00:59:23
masculinity. So he's defending toxic masculinity, not masculinity. Yes. Toxic. Right.
00:59:29
Okay, dude. Yeah. The game is you're not allowed to talk about us. And what we were saying without realizing it is we can talk about whatever the fuck we want to talk about.
00:59:38
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into Georgia's story now. And man, what a timely fucking story it is, too.
00:59:48
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01:02:49
I'm glad we were talking about the 80s and you explained kind of like the money stuff because mine takes place in the 80s too and has a lot to do with class wars and all this stuff.
01:03:00
Maybe, should I not tell you the name of it? Whatever you think. Because I think you'll know immediately about it.
01:03:04
Okay. All right. I'm going to yeah I'm not going to tell you Okay all right so New York
01:03:09
Late 80s it's insane Jim Dwyer of the New York Times Calls it completely schizophrenic
01:03:16
They've got one side where there's Just insane wealth from Wall Street Everyone's getting fucking rich and doing coke
01:03:22
And having eyes odds and such Like we said The financial industry is booming After a long period of stagnation
01:03:30
And it got so bad like in the 70s And I think early 80s that the city of New York was going to file for bankruptcy.
01:03:38
Wow. Do you remember that? I didn't know that about New York City. The city was going to file for bankruptcy.
01:03:44
But I mean, it really was so bad in the 70s and like the late 70s, the Carter administration, where it was just like a recession.
01:03:54
Huge recession. Like we've talked about before, gas lines, you couldn't get gas on certain days.
01:03:59
I mean, the whole country was going through this, But New York City, because they had so much violence and that sort of thing, I feel like it was a lot worse.
01:04:10
And in fact, so during the financial crisis of the 70s, a ton of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the homeowners and the landlords were lighting the apartment buildings on fire and burning them to the ground just to collect insurance money.
01:04:25
So all these people had nowhere to live and they left them like that. So there are these, you know, looks like how you see how you saw Detroit for a little while.
01:04:33
Just, you know, it's insane. There's sorry. There's a movie now. I can't remember what it's called.
01:04:41
And Albert Finney is in it. And they have it's basically like it's basically a kind of a werewolf in the in New York City movie.
01:04:49
But there's parts of it where I think it's the Bronx where it's just people, maybe like kids, whatever, playing in like their vacant lots.
01:04:57
They have filled with just burned out debris. Wolfen? Wolfen. Wolfen. That's exactly right.
01:05:02
Good job. It's kind of a kooky, supposed to be scary, goofy movie, but you can see all that where
01:05:07
it's like now New York City is pristine and amazing. And of course, like the real estate is like-
01:05:13
Once Giuliani took over and made it fucking Disneyland. But there's also photo, not that I think that it's better when it was dangerous, but there's
01:05:19
photographs you can go. There's a couple of great photo, one of the slideshows of New York in the seventies and
01:05:25
eighties. And I mean, just the subways alone are terrifying. And yeah, and they had kids playing on like mattresses and vacant burned out.
01:05:33
It's just it's crazy, crazy. And especially I think younger people who never saw that should go and look those photos because you'd be you'd be very surprised.
01:05:41
Yeah. That's where that punk rock came from. Yeah. So it was mostly in black and Latino neighborhoods that this burning down was doing.
01:05:49
Let see So both unemployment rates and crime rates were at an all time high And because of the bankruptcy coming up police and firefighters have been laid off municipal services were cut including sanitation and after programs were totally cut
01:06:05
So these kids who had working parents had nowhere to go after school. So they were, you know, on their own in this insane city.
01:06:12
And during this time, Son of Sam was on the loose. So people were fucking terrified of that as well.
01:06:19
And then there was the blackout of 79, and there's a fucking great American experience
01:06:24
It's called The Blackout. And I fucking, everyone should watch it. It's so good.
01:06:29
And it shows what it was like at that time. And after that, there were these crazy fires and looting and it never really got cleaned up.
01:06:35
So you have abandoned buildings, you have all this stuff. So then in the early 80s, Wall Street suddenly boomed, created crazy wealth for people.
01:06:45
I mean, the wealth they had compared to what normal people had even was insane. And then the other side of the city is experiencing crazy poverty.
01:06:54
The crack epidemic starts crazy violence that's fed by an understaffed a lot of times racist and corrupt police department.
01:07:01
That is, you know, horrible. And there's class tensions and racial unrest. In about 84, crack came to New York and that just increased the crime.
01:07:11
The crack wars came. So also giving really young kids access to a lot of money and weapons.
01:07:17
So you just have these young kids and teenagers, you know, with, yeah, all hell rakes loose.
01:07:24
That was like the way to get a job and to get out of the hood. Totally. Basically.
01:07:30
And for some of them, it was the only way. Yeah. There's an amazing movie called Fresh.
01:07:36
It's one of my favorite movies of all time. I've never seen it. It's really good.
01:07:40
We'll do a double feature with this other movie. With the Andy Williams Christmas special.
01:07:44
it's such it's about a black kid who's trying to figure out a way to get out of the bad neighborhood
01:07:52
and the bad situation he's in and it is so brilliantly written and brilliantly shot and it's
01:07:58
one of my favorite movies I definitely want to watch that I need and I'm sure other people want
01:08:04
it's just a lineup of movies you suggest because it's never me I think I suggest documentaries
01:08:10
like Ken Burns and you're like here's this movie that'll change your life And I'm like, I've never seen it.
01:08:15
So we're going to need someone to make a list of those movies. We're going to need someone with a mustache to write that down.
01:08:22
If only we had. Oh, shit. I owe you money. I owe you a paycheck. I forgot. I didn't forget.
01:08:29
Oh, Stephen. I'm sorry. So crack came. Hell breaks loose. All right. On a typical day in 1989, which is where the story takes place, New Yorkers reported not
01:08:39
One day, nine rapes, five murders, 255 robberies, and 194 aggravated assaults. Shit.
01:08:48
And that's later in the 80s. 89. God. Yeah. Okay. So the people who are experiencing this, of course, are the poor working class families.
01:09:01
They're falling through the cracks. brown and latino black and latino communities in mostly bedford stye in brooklyn harlem brownsville
01:09:10
east new york these neighborhoods are experiencing all of this and then you have the upper east side
01:09:15
of fucking rich as shit people all right for example and then i'll get on to the story in 1984
01:09:20
bernard gets he was a 37 year old queens native white dude nerdy white dude he's on the subway
01:09:28
and he starts getting accosted by four young black men. They tried to mug him and he takes out a gun and shoots all four of them.
01:09:38
They all survived. But he became known as a fucking subway vigilante. People celebrated him.
01:09:45
Right. And he was ultimately found not guilty on all charges except for possession of an illegal firearm
01:09:52
and sentenced to one year in prison for shooting four people. Yes. So, all right.
01:09:58
So that's also sorry, but that's also the time that they started doing Guardian Angels where they were.
01:10:03
It was almost like people didn't believe anyone was going to help them with crime.
01:10:09
And like the Bernard Goetz thing was such a racially kind of motivated situation.
01:10:16
But also is just the these everybody is the irony of like what you just said was the people that were in the worst neighborhoods,
01:10:24
which were demographically minorities and people of color, were actually getting the worst of this crime.
01:10:32
But then it's like the white vigilante that starts shooting everybody. Right. It's not like, yeah, you don't go to these neighborhoods and every, you know, there's work.
01:10:39
These are working class people. I mean, they're working their asses off and they're not going to be able to move into other neighborhoods.
01:10:44
There's so much racism. There's kind of this race war between white people and people of color.
01:10:49
But it's, you know, it's not everyone who's there being affected. more so right by this so okay so we'll get into this let's get into the central park five and the
01:11:01
east side right oh shit dude yeah all right i'm going there you sound all right like you're not
01:11:06
no i mean this is just one of the heaviest the thing that i remember most about this case is how
01:11:12
go you know what go tell me no no it's just it was such a big deal and this was like when i was
01:11:19
in high school. Yeah, I didn't know. I was maybe 10. So I didn't. My mom kept that away from me.
01:11:24
So you'll have to jump in at any time. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me stuff. Yeah. All right. The night of
01:11:30
Wednesday, April 19th, 1989, around 9pm, approximately 30, 30, God, I'm burping. Sorry.
01:11:37
30 teenagers who lived in East Harlem went into the northmost part of Central Park and they
01:11:42
proceeded to commit several attacks, assaults and robberies. Can you imagine 30 teenagers?
01:11:47
I don't care what what fucking nationality or color they are I would run no teenagers are bad
01:11:54
teenagers are bad people teenagers are horrible also two teenagers are fine Yeah. 30 teenagers. 30. The volume alone. Yeah. I don't care if they're women, girls. I fucking run.
01:12:06
I think girls are worse. Yeah. Here's the thing, though. Were the do we know for a fact that they were committing those crimes or was that that was that like a fact?
01:12:15
Well, I can. Yeah, I have a list of great, great crimes they were actually committing.
01:12:20
So I don't. Yeah, it's hard because you want to see every everyone is innocent, but they, you know, and it was 30.
01:12:25
So who knows how many of them are actually doing it. Right. So they attacked several bicyclists, threw rocks at a cab and attacked a man who was who they assaulted, robbed and left unconscious.
01:12:34
A school teacher out for a run was severely beaten. They attacked another jogger, hitting him in the back of the head with a pipe and a stick.
01:12:41
And they beat two men unconscious, hitting them with a metal pipe, stones and punches and kicking them in the head.
01:12:46
Wow. So they definitely there was a group of these 30 kids. And they were basically kind of wilding throughout the park.
01:12:52
Well, that's the word that was created later. OK. Yes. So a chase ensued by the police and at 1015, a handful of the kids are taken into custody, including Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana.
01:13:03
And they're both 14 years old. So these are young kids and they're charged with, quote, mischief.
01:13:09
So cut to 130 in the morning, passersby has discovered the unconscious body of Trisha Miley in a shallow ravine in a wooded area of the park, wearing only her bra.
01:13:20
Trisha had gone for a run on her usual path in Central Park before 9 a.m. I mean, sorry, 9 p.m. that evening when her and then when her almost lifeless body was found about four hours later, she had been knocked down, dragged or chased 300 feet and violently assaulted.
01:13:38
She was stabbed five times, raped, sodomized and beaten almost to death. The first policeman who saw her said she was beaten as badly as anybody I've ever seen.
01:13:48
Meanwhile, back at the police station, the kids were about to be released from custody when a police officer was told about Trisha being found.
01:13:59
And then what followed was hours of intense interrogation using tactics to get them to wear them down.
01:14:05
As now we know, that's how you get a confession, whether it's legitimate or not.
01:14:11
Exhaust them. They get no food, no drink, no sleep for almost two days. it takes. And they're repeatedly told that they could go home once they confessed.
01:14:22
And then eventually after like two days, the boys turn against each other. They tell them,
01:14:26
they admit just to, you know, go home. And these are 14, 15 year old children that aren't bad kids. So there's this documentary by Ken Burns and his daughter. And it's this
01:14:41
incredible documentary that I definitely think everyone should watch called the Central
01:14:46
Park Five and they talk about the kids' backgrounds and they're all good kids from good homes. None of
01:14:52
them had ever, ever been arrested or taken in before. You know, they were Little League baseball
01:14:59
players. These were not bad children. Yeah. Also, when there's a group of 30, how do they know who
01:15:06
threw what rock? Basically, it's the slowest kids get arrested. Yeah. Go ahead. The thing is,
01:15:13
Later, none of the people who had been attacked that night, aside from Tricia, were able to identify any of the boys who got who were brought in for this attack.
01:15:23
So they probably didn't have anything to do with it. Otherwise, they would have been identified.
01:15:28
Yeah. So they implicate each other in the assault. The boys begin to confess after two days.
01:15:36
I already said that. So in the written statements and videotaped confessions, each confessed to being an accomplice to the rape, although not participating in the rape itself.
01:15:44
And they start telling details of what happened and how. And then they implicate three other boys in the attack.
01:15:52
And they're picked up for questioning. And Anton McRae, who's 15, Yusuf Salam, who's 15, and Corey Wise, who's 16.
01:16:00
And they they ultimately all confess, except for Yusuf Salam, along with and then along with the other two boys, the five of them are arrested and charged with the attack.
01:16:11
The media fucking loses its shit, which is such a big part of the story. Right. And probably how you heard about all of this is it was huge news.
01:16:20
And the story kind of confirmed, you know, the white New Yorkers image of what's wrong with the city and confirms their racial racial prejudices.
01:16:30
The boys, when they confessed, were calling it that they were wilding, which is a phrase that became huge and everyone used it.
01:16:38
And it was kind of this reference to them all being these untamed, you know, children running amok.
01:16:45
They formed, quote, a wolf pack, which is also was what they made up. So sorry, those were the boys words?
01:16:52
Yeah. Like that's what they were telling the police. Wilding. Yes, they called it wilding, which they made up.
01:16:57
um and then the underage suspects names were printed despite the fact that the names of
01:17:04
criminal suspects under the age of 16 are supposed to be withheld from the media and the public
01:17:08
they also print the so the names photos and addresses no fucking way of the juvenile suspects
01:17:15
before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted wow yeah who did it what was it that
01:17:22
I just think that at that point it was so many of them. But it's basically the tabloid.
01:17:28
Yeah, the tabloid. Yeah. Seeds. Seeds? Seedy. None of them were arrested. And they retracted their statement within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions.
01:17:43
And the confessions themselves were videotaped after they had been interrogated and confessed and written statements.
01:17:49
That part wasn't taped at all. So they had no way to show that they were being fed information and coerced So they only taped the part where they said I did it or someone else did it They only taped the part after all this when they had their stories down Okay
01:18:05
And they knew the details they were supposed to be talking about. Didn't tape any of the part where they make them tell the story 500 times.
01:18:10
Right. Or, you know, you've seen these things where they say, is that what happened?
01:18:13
That's not what happened. Right. Tell me the truth. And they kind of feed it in this really creepy way.
01:18:18
They lead them into the correct story. Right. And who knows if they even do it. Do the cops do it on purpose?
01:18:23
Do you think the detectives, I just don't think they even know. I mean, it seems like for a long time, it was just the way things were done until people, lawyers and whoever, you know, rights activists came back and were just like, you can't tell them how it went.
01:18:40
And then when they repeat that back to you because they want a sip of water or they want to go home, use it against them.
01:18:47
Well, it's the whole thing, too, of like that shouldn't be in the confession videotape should not be admissible in court because there's no background.
01:18:55
Right. OK. It's like apropos of nothing. Right. Essentially. Yeah. OK. So meanwhile, Trisha's injuries are so bad that she's given last rights like they think she's going to die.
01:19:05
But after being comatose for 12 days, she survives and was eventually able to talk, read and walk.
01:19:12
But she had no memory of the night of the assault whatsoever. So now the trial. So usually the homicide detective, usually they look in. OK, instead of the homicide unit getting put on the case because they thought she was going to die.
01:19:30
Linda Fairstein of the sex head of the sex crimes unit and her prosecutor, Elizabeth Letterer, were put on the case.
01:19:38
And for some fucking reason, they're part of the police investigation from day one.
01:19:42
So they're helping investigate this case, thinking that these five kids did it and building the case around that.
01:19:49
So they get to analyze the crime scene. They get to do all of these things that that clearly are going to lead the case for the prosecutors, you know.
01:19:59
And they were supposed to be the defense. No, they're the prosecutors. Right. They're the sex crimes unit and they're prosecutors.
01:20:07
And they are investigating case from the minute it happened. Okay. And that's not normal?
01:20:13
No, because this way they can skew the results in the direction they want, which is immediately for these five boys.
01:20:19
Okay. So they're, you know, usually the prosecutors and the defense team and the attorneys wouldn't get the information until after the whole investigation has been completed by the detectives.
01:20:27
Okay, got it. Or the sex crimes unit, which is this woman who allowed her prosecutor to be in on.
01:20:33
Oh, oh, I see. Okay. Got it. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay. So the boys are brought to trial. 16 year old Corey Wise is being tried as an adult for some reason because he's 16. And the newspapers are going nuts. The case of a white woman being attacked by a rowdy group of black teens stirring up the racism in the city, which kind of was this underlying thing that no one was talking about. But finally, they had something to point at.
01:20:58
It was the equal opposite of the Bernie Getz situation. It was basically, yeah, that's kind of retribution.
01:21:08
Right. The idea of retribution. Yeah. And piling it all very conveniently on these five boys.
01:21:15
Yeah. So, for example, the night of the Central Park rake, a woman in Bedford, Stuy, was raped and thrown off a building.
01:21:24
Never fucking talked about in the media. And that same week that this happened, 28 rapes were reported.
01:21:29
But those were not being reported by the media. But the black community even turned against the boys as well, some of them, because they were having their own run-ins with the black youths who insulted and intimidated those people in their own neighborhood.
01:21:45
And they felt that they were giving the whole community a reputation as, you know, drug dealers and felons.
01:21:50
Right. So even the black community was fucking pissed about them. Oh, and good old Trump puts out a full page ad in four newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York.
01:22:03
Even though the death penalty wasn't even on the table for this. He just. And at the time he was he was a slumlord.
01:22:10
A very wealthy one. A very wealthy slumlord. A very wealthy businessman. Yeah. Who made money off of basically being a slumlord.
01:22:19
Yeah. Oh, and casinos. Yes. Maybe. OK, and then the City Sun newspaper and the Amsterdam News used a victim's name in their paper, despite the media policy of not publicly identifying victims of sex crimes.
01:22:35
Yeah. So they gave out her name, even though they weren't supposed to. And they said it's because, well, if other people are willing to put out the boys' names, then she should have her name out, too, which is like so fucked up.
01:22:45
Well, that doesn't. No. That's not a one to one thing at all. It is not. But it sounds like this was the Wild West, essentially.
01:22:53
Yeah. This sounds like the worst. 89, man. 80s. Just this like, yeah, Wild West.
01:23:01
So the analysis was done on the DNA that was collected at the crime scene, and it didn't match a single one of the suspects.
01:23:07
They also didn't have any hair, any evidence. And the crime scene looked like, it didn't look like five people could have been attacking someone.
01:23:16
It looked like a single person was attacking someone. And there was like this small little path that was walked up and taken Trisha away from the main road.
01:23:27
But there wasn't, you know, beat up dirt or anything like that. So it was like she was down in a ravine and there was like one track down to her body and back up.
01:23:35
Yes. Not like five people walked down. Right. And when the boys got in there, they didn't have any mud or dirt on them.
01:23:41
And the other thing is, if she were fighting back, which they said the cops said that she put up a hell of a fight,
01:23:47
They would all have scratches and crazy things on them. One kid had, one of them had a scratch on his eye, but that's it.
01:23:53
Right. So the DNA collected And so when the DNA was collected and didn match the prosecutors just said that they must have been there must have been a sixth one of them then that the DNA matches and still brought them to trial
01:24:10
With a case that was almost entirely based on the confession circumstantial. So, okay.
01:24:18
So the four boys, Kevin, Yusuf, Anton, and Raymond are convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot in the attacks.
01:24:29
They were 15 years old and 14. So they got maximum sentence for juveniles, which is five to 10.
01:24:35
But Corey Wise is 16 and tried to lose adult. So he gets five to 15 in fucking Rikers.
01:24:40
Rikers, which is like a hardcore prison and going in as a rapist, especially against a
01:24:46
white woman where there's a lot of Aryan people in the prison is ugly. All right.
01:24:52
Well, the summer that the attack on Tricia occurred, there's a serial rapist terrorizing
01:24:57
the Upper East Side called the East Side Rapist. Okay. I just got a weird chill.
01:25:03
Did you remember this? No, I've never heard of this before. Yeah. So you know that story, but you don't know the end of it.
01:25:09
story very well all i know is that the mentality at the time was they caught some this was the
01:25:17
mentality they caught some of them and they're going to jail like like good and everyone yeah
01:25:22
everyone rejoiced everyone was was abs was absolutely and i feel like in general unquestionably
01:25:29
swallowing the story that was being fed yeah um everyone i mean they wanted it to be solved and
01:25:36
And it was a perfect backdrop and proof of what was going on and what they'd been saying was going on and what they were mad about.
01:25:43
And something to say, this is why I feel this way. Yes. You know, this is why my racism is justified.
01:25:50
Exactly right. And and to say as if this is the only these are the only people that are breaking the law in New York City.
01:26:00
Yeah. That this, and that to me is the, that's the thing I feel like all the way up to, and obviously
01:26:06
passed until very recently, but like around the OJ trial where it's this idea of you don't
01:26:12
just get to say who is, who is innocent and who's guilty, but like, you don't just get
01:26:17
to pull people through the legal system and just be like, they're the problem is solved.
01:26:22
Because if you have, if it's a setup, which many of them have been, you still have somebody
01:26:28
that's guilty out there doing it. Totally. And who knows what color that person is. But you've now not solved the problem, ruined people's lives, supported racial stereotypes, not told an accurate story.
01:26:42
So, but this is how the story ended in 2002. Okay. So the summer that the attack happened, a serial rapist named the Eastside Rapist is fucking terrorizing everyone.
01:26:54
August 5th, 1989, 17-year-old Matias Reyes is caught after raping another victim.
01:27:01
He's the Eastside Rapist. east up the east side rapist um he so the the woman who was raped noted to detectives that she
01:27:11
saw fresh fresh stitches on his chin and it was right after the attack on trisha so he ultimately
01:27:17
confessed to one murder five rapes two attempted rapes and the rape and murder the murder was uh
01:27:25
lord lordis gonzalez and she was pregnant and her three children heard through the bedroom
01:27:32
Oh, no. So August 5th, you've got this guy getting caught for rape and saying that he murdered people.
01:27:43
And then in April, a couple of months before that, this rape of Trisha happened, this attack.
01:27:53
Let's see. So after being in prison, he's in prison for more than a decade for the murder.
01:27:58
in 2002 he finds god reyes finds god comes forward and says that he is the attacker of
01:28:06
trisha he did it so he then goes on to detail uh how he followed raped brutally beat her with
01:28:16
and then details that the five that the central park five never got right they never even had
01:28:21
similar stories of what happened they were all different and he just tells exactly how it really
01:28:26
went from where he threw the socks to where he threw the keys and why because he was mad that
01:28:32
she wouldn't give him her address so he could break into her house so he threw the keys and
01:28:36
they had always wondered what the deal with the keys were what exactly what she was wearing that
01:28:41
she had a walkman that was stolen and they never they weren't sure if there was a walkman involved
01:28:46
but she he all her friends said she always ran with a walkman and he said it too yeah which it
01:28:52
wasn't even at the scene so the fact that he knew about it meant you know he was there he definitely
01:28:59
did it yeah and the dna is then tested and uh it's his dna oh man yeah um so let's see the detective
01:29:11
who his who gave him who gave the statement who he took the statement said matias reyes is one of
01:29:16
the top five lunatics he's interviewed in more than 20 years investigating homicides.
01:29:21
The five boys had already been released from prison. They're adults now. But they were struggling because they were now sex offenders on the sex offenders registry.
01:29:32
And Raymond Santana was still in jail because he had a drug charge he took to selling drugs
01:29:37
because he couldn't get a job with a sex offender on his as a sex offender. Yeah. But his sentencing because of that drug charge, because of his prior convictions was longer.
01:29:48
So he was still in prison based on his prior conviction. So he released And then in 2002 Manhattan Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau threw out the convictions in the Central Park Jogger case The five are exonerated And in 2014 New York City paid them million as a settlement
01:30:09
Really? Yeah. Are you crying? Yeah. Yeah. 41 million. That's like, we fucked up so hard.
01:30:16
Yeah. So the prosecutors, the woman who was the prosecutor, the sex offender unit head, refuses to admit that they were wrong.
01:30:30
She's now a teacher at some big college and they're like starting a petition to get her kicked out because she uses this case as one of the highlights of her career.
01:30:41
Oh, no. Yeah. So she can't say it's true. She says maybe there were six of them.
01:30:45
still sticks to that story. And doesn't acknowledge the hard evidence of the lunatic
01:30:52
rapist who admitted he did it. Why would you admit you did something? And did it alone.
01:30:59
And then actually have the hard evidence and know the details. I mean, that's very difficult to
01:31:05
deny. Right. Yes. And then, so the police detectives, a lot of them won't admit that
01:31:12
they were wrong. And of course, Trump refuses to admit he says, look at the confession. So he's
01:31:18
still stuck on this confession, which as we know now, so many confessions are coerced easily.
01:31:24
Right. Especially out of children. Totally. As for the victim. So Trisha had five months of rehabilitation. She returned.
01:31:38
and then she returned to running in Central Park. In 95, she ran the New York City Marathon.
01:31:45
And in 2003, so she had been anonymous up until then. And in 2003, she comes out and with a published,
01:31:55
publishes a memoir called I Am the Central Park Jogger. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.
01:32:01
I don't know. I want to know what she thinks about, you know, thinking that these five boys were her attackers for so long
01:32:08
and then having to switch your brain completely. It's just so scary. And I feel so much for her just based on that.
01:32:16
And then she began a career as an inspirational speaker. She works with victims of sexual assault and brain injury
01:32:22
in the Mount Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Group. So that's the Central Park Five and the East Side Rapist.
01:32:30
Wow. Huge. I know. That's such a huge story. Did I tackle that okay? Did I give it justice?
01:32:38
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I mean, this is, I feel like, especially in this day and age, it's so difficult to talk.
01:32:48
The first thing I thought of while we were talking about this is, I remember one time, a long time ago, we were talking about something.
01:32:54
And the way we intimated it, it made it sound like what we were saying is all people of color live in the ghetto.
01:33:01
Right. And we got a lot of people who wanted to talk to us about that, where that is in no way what we meant.
01:33:07
but it was like the wording of how it sounded. And so I would just point that out that, you know,
01:33:12
like this isn't the assumption that because you are of color, you live in the worst part of the
01:33:17
Bronx. And it doesn't mean that because you're of color, you go wilding. Like none of, none of
01:33:23
what we're talking about is to say every single person was living only this one way in New York
01:33:30
in that time. I'm sure there was tons of, you know, upwardly mobile black people and people,
01:33:35
Hispanic people and people of color that lived on the Upper West Side. So it's not that.
01:33:41
But I think that the lines were absolutely drawn because back then, it was basically white men ran most media and white men were the cops usually
01:33:53
for the majority, I would say. And so that was the story that we were always given.
01:33:59
And that was the story people were reacting to. And that's what we're talking about.
01:34:03
Well, it's just so hard because for this with this podcast, like, you know, I don't want to do the thing that so many people talk about is that like blonde white women.
01:34:12
That's all the stories we cover, which I don't think we do. But, you know, I want to give I want to tell them the stories because I want to represent as many people as we can and as many victims as we can, which I totally think these boys are victims in this story.
01:34:29
but you know, it's hard as a white woman. I want, I try to empathize, but I'll never,
01:34:35
I know I'll never understand completely what's going on. So, you know, like the Mike Therese
01:34:40
Richardson case, I just really wanted to, to, yeah, I just want to make sure that we're covering
01:34:45
them, but I know it's never going to be perfect. Definitely. So it's a bit of a risk to even talk
01:34:51
about them because everything is very loaded these days. And I think people, it makes people feel
01:34:57
better if you make, if you misspeak about something, it makes people feel better to tell
01:35:03
you how wrong you are. It makes, it makes it feel like that's, that's making a difference,
01:35:08
which it definitely is. I mean, in, in some ways, but, but I guess our hesitation is when you put
01:35:16
stuff like that out there, it's easy to say something incorrectly or sound insensitive or
01:35:21
make it sound like you're making a generalization. Right. I don't want to do that. I tried very hard
01:35:26
not to. But please email us. We're always open to, you know, hear your story or have your
01:35:35
corrections. And they know that. I know. I mean, Jesus, that's the one thing we do get, I think.
01:35:41
But I think what's better than not covering it because it's too loaded is just not talking about
01:35:46
it at all. And so I think that's important as well. To talk about it. Yes. Yes. Especially
01:35:53
for people who have a podcast, you know, who are talking specifically about murder and podcasts
01:35:58
in a podcast. It's like. we can't just cover the easy ones. Well, and also the ones that have been covered
01:36:05
because you're exactly right. That's the thing of it's the blonde cheerleader. When the blonde cheerleader goes missing,
01:36:11
everybody freaks out because the society that's built up around us is basically said,
01:36:17
well, that's what makes the money. That's what sells the newspapers. There's a lot of like very convenient rationale
01:36:23
that goes into why we talk about some murders and crimes and why we don't talk about others.
01:36:29
I think that example of like a woman who was raped and then thrown off a building on the very same night and no one has heard of that story.
01:36:36
That's I think that's very kind of symbolic. And I think it's that thing of like, it's just good.
01:36:42
It's good to start trying to open your eyes. I think it's a hard thing for some people to do.
01:36:48
There's some people that will never be able to do it. But if you can try, I think it's important.
01:36:53
I think it is going to help. Our society needs this kind of help very badly. Definitely to come together and to be like, I get it.
01:37:02
Nobody's nobody's, you know, horror is worse than another person's horror. And then for you and I to to kind of.
01:37:14
To kind of open the conversation up because we're two white women and then it's not, you know, that we're trying to understand what's going on in other people's worlds.
01:37:27
And I'll take that out. That sucked. No, I had it and then it was gone. Okay, we're back. Are there any updates on this case, Georgia?
01:37:40
Yes, there are. So here's where the exonerated five are today. Yusuf Salam became a board member
01:37:46
of the Innocence Project and has advocated for criminal justice reform, particularly for juveniles.
01:37:52
In 2016, he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Barack Obama. He won the Democratic nomination
01:37:58
and seat for New York City Council's 9th District in 2023. Incredible Raymond Santana started a clothing company called Park Madison NYC and donates a portion of its proceeds to the Innocence Project I didn know that
01:38:13
Park Madison NYC. People should know that so they can buy that stuff just to support him.
01:38:19
Absolutely. Corey Wise remained in New York where he works with the Innocence Project to advocate for the rights of the wrongly convicted as well as criminal justice reform.
01:38:28
Antron McCray is married with six children and lives in Georgia. Kevin Richardson served as an advocate with Santana and Salam to reform New York State's criminal justice practices, advocating methods to prevent false confessions and eyewitness misidentifications.
01:38:43
In 2019, Netflix released a four-part miniseries on the case, which is so incredible, called When They See Us.
01:38:50
The series was highly praised and won a Peabody Award in recognition of its powerful storytelling around racial justice and state violence.
01:38:57
and in December 2022, a Central Park entrance was renamed Gate of the Exonerated to honor the five
01:39:04
men. Wow. On October 21st, 2024, the Exonerated Five sued Trump for defamation in federal court
01:39:12
in Philadelphia after Trump once again claimed they were guilty during a 2024 presidential debate,
01:39:19
which is, oh wow, facts. Let's not just, let's not even pay attention to them. Trump tried to have the case thrown out, but Judge Wendy,
01:39:26
Beatlestone rejected Trump's motion to dismiss the case. And the case is still going through the courts.
01:39:32
All right. So let's head back now to wrap this show up. OK. All right. So something positive.
01:39:41
Yes. That's how we end this so everyone doesn't get bummed. Do you want to go first?
01:39:46
No, you go first. OK. The good thing that happened to me, you know, I said I went last week to a new psychiatrist.
01:39:52
the fucking change in medication's already working. Oh, really? It just makes me so hopeful when I wake up in the morning
01:39:59
and I'm not exhausted all day, you know, and I'm sleeping at night without any pills.
01:40:05
It's just like, it makes me really hopeful. Oh, good. I really you know I had two days of not exhaustion and I was just so happy about it That great Yeah What yours My friend I have a friend my friend Kevin Farzad has a band called Sure Sure
01:40:22
And they have new music coming out. They're truly one of my favorite bands. It's like the
01:40:28
kind of music you can put on. Like, I just feel so stressed out lately. And I think a lot of
01:40:34
people have been. It's the kind of music that's like super catchy and great, but it's not like
01:40:40
invasive. I can't explain it. It's just very good. I totally recommend it. I think they're coming out
01:40:45
with a new album soon, but I will be retweeting their music. I'm just a big believer in Sure Sure,
01:40:52
the band. And so I think everyone should listen to them. That's a good one. Yeah.
01:40:56
Music is such an important part of, you know. The human existence. The human experience and life and happiness.
01:41:08
Okay, we are back. So this episode was originally titled My Own Sinkhole. If we were naming it today, maybe we would call it, oh my God, I love this one so much.
01:41:19
Too Many Fish, which never sounded wrong to me. Still to this day doesn't sound wrong to me.
01:41:24
I'm like, as I read plenty of fish, I'm like, oh, got it. That makes sense. I think that is so like, that is such a, what's it called?
01:41:32
Freudian slip. Freudian slip. Yeah. Too many fish. Like it says just something about you.
01:41:39
Can't get involved with those fish. There's too many of them. And there aren't plenty.
01:41:43
There's no fucking way there's plenty. No. Okay. The other one could be called really Aunt Mary, where we talk about tattoos.
01:41:51
we all make our whole family get tattoos that's also some toes is one of the weirder
01:41:58
yeah like that's the tattoo i want everyone to get also one point over mine which is
01:42:03
george's amazing joke about her iq 168 baby i forgot about that great well that's the episode
01:42:11
that's this week's episode of rewind let's let elvis say goodbye from 2017 thank you guys for
01:42:16
listening thank you All right Stay sexy And don get murdered Bye Elvis Elvis. You want a cookie?
01:42:30
Elvis. Want a cookie? Come here. He's coming. Elvis. Want a cookie? Come here. There he goes.
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01:43:57
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