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427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky

May 09, 2024 /

This episode features a discussion about the case of Russell Williams, a Canadian military officer who led a double life as a serial rapist and murderer. The hosts recount the chilling details of his crimes, including the murders of Jessica Lloyd and Corporal Marie France Camot, and the psychological aspects of his behavior.

They detail how Williams was initially respected in his military career, flying dignitaries and holding high-ranking positions. However, his criminal activities escalated from breaking and entering to violent sexual assaults and murder.

The episode highlights the investigation that led to his capture, including how police used tire tracks and DNA evidence to connect him to the crimes. Williams' eventual confession and the disturbing details he provided about his actions are discussed.

Additionally, the hosts reflect on the impact of his crimes on the victims' families and the broader community, emphasizing the horror of his actions and the complexities of his psychological profile.

This episode serves as a stark reminder of the hidden darkness that can exist beneath a seemingly normal exterior.

TLDR

Russell Williams, a respected military officer, became a serial rapist and murderer, shocking his community and revealing a hidden darkness.

Episode

1:24:24
00:00:00
This is Exactly Right. of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:00:36
I'm Anna Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Anna Navarro, I'm talking to the people
00:00:41
closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world. Because I know
00:00:46
deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on. Every week,
00:00:53
I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world. I'm
00:00:58
talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
00:01:04
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
00:01:10
Listen to Bleep with Anna Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:17
You think you're in control until you realize you're not. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air,
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many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then.
00:01:31
The Knife is a podcast about the moment ordinary lives take an unexpected turn. Real people, real stories, and the split second that changes everything.
00:01:41
New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network.
00:01:46
Listen to The Knife on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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My savior Do a fast run. Fast. Hello. And welcome. To my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hartstark.
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That's Karen Kilgariff. And we have to go. Thank you so much for hitting play. We have to leave that in.
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You sing fast, fast. We just have to run real quick. Guys, we're out. Goodbye. Goodbye. This is the new era of podcasting. Didn't you hear?
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Wouldn't that be so fucking irritating if you're like just trying to listen to the thing that gets
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you from like your front door to the subway station or whatever. And they're like, oh,
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sorry, we have to go. And they hang up like a phone call, but it's a podcast. Just hang up on you. Oh, sorry. The connection's not great. I can't hear you.
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What's that? I'm going through a tunnel. I'll call you back later. Click, click, click, click, click.
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Wait a second. This is a podcast. ass. I'm going through a tunnel. What? You're in Kansas. You're not going through a tunnel.
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Have you ever done that? Pretended the connection was bad just to get off the phone with someone
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because you like accidentally answered the phone? Well, no, Brad. But actually, my thing was I would
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just hang up while people were still talking. That was one of my favorite things to do was to truly
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like honor my own feelings and be like, right as I would get bored, I would just hang up.
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That hurts. As a people pleaser who needs everyone to be entertained and like her at all times,
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that would be a hard, hello, hello. You might be interested to know it makes people like you.
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There are many ways to make people like you. That way is a way as well. Okay. Well, listen, I'm on medication for it.
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Listen, goodbye. Oh, it'd be real easy right now because I'm doing one of those things where I'm like,
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why am I feeling so down and kind of depressed lately? And then I was like, oh, you're in the
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middle of a true crime book, an awful one, career, a true crime career, a career, a book. And then I
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just finished a post apocalyptic book that I have to recommend as well. I'm listening to tell me if
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this would depress you. The book we've talked about before called Say Nothing, a true story of
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The Troubles in Ireland. Wow, that is not an uplifting book. But here's what will uplift you.
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The Troubles are the reason I get to live here. That's why my people came over. It's by Patrick Raiden Keith. It's amazing. But it's like, and it's so fascinating. It's shit that
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I didn't learn about this in high school. I mean, about East Berlin and everything like that,
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but not this. Right. Because the kind of the storyline is like, oh, everything's great there.
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and they like that the British are there and it's fine. Right. Which is how all colonizing kind of propaganda works.
00:04:47
Yeah. Yeah. I actually had say nothing on my nightstand. I think we both talked about this for so long
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and I would pick it up and read a couple of pages and be like, I can't, I can't do this.
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But it was during COVID. Oh yeah, me too. So I need something new because I can't, I can't.
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Yeah. It's great. I can't. The book I just finished is To Paradise. It's to paradise.
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it's hard to say to paradise. Like we're on our way to paradise by Hanya Yanagihara. And it's like
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three different stories kind of that are all interconnected at different points in time. And
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one of them takes place in like 2090 when everything's falling apart and you can kind
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of see the connections to now. And that's really hard. Yeah. And when they refer back to like the
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pandemic of, you know, 2030. And you're like, uh-oh. Uh-oh. It starts to feel like you're just
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reading prophecy where you're just like, uh-oh. Yep. Yeah. It's funny. We went to dinner because
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I'm up at my dad's house. So I went to dinner with my sister's friend, Adrian, my sister,
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Janet the whole crew Janet sister Sally Very fun Ladies night It was ladies night We were sitting there talking about just sharing weird COVID quarantine experiences
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Because Adrienne was the first person any of us knew to get COVID. Oh, shit. Her son went on a camping trip.
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And they thought because they were camping, they were away from other people that they would be fine.
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And he then walked in the door, shut the door. And then he was like, hey, mom, what's up?
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He gets a phone call. He hangs up the phone. He's like, we have COVID. Oh, no. Essentially.
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Yeah. And this was back when they had to quarantine for 21 days. Oh, my God. I forgot.
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I think we've all kind of wiped our memories. Entirely. Until the time we can really think about it, like a 10-year anniversary, I feel like, is a good, whoa, that was fucked up moment.
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You know? Well, we were all talking about how we thought Adrian was dead for sure.
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And we all did. We didn't ever say that to each other, but we said it at the table that night.
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And she is, of course, the saltiest old dog. So she was like, man, well, I did too, whatever.
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But we're just like, it was such a weird, like, we all just held our breath for those 21 days.
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Yeah. Crazy. The fear, the fear. So much fear. The like changing in the garage after having to go to the grocery store and putting our
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like Vince and I putting our clothes directly into the washing machine. Yeah. And just the like, oh my God.
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My sister mailing me N95 masks because her friend Kelly, Kelly's father is a doctor saying, get these now while you still can.
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And then you couldn't. Yeah. And so I had four of them because my sister is the way my sister, the vigilance paid off.
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How dare you hoard those? Yeah, really. Yeah. And but the first time I wore one, we walked into smart and final to just see if I could grab things at the last second. And I had a panic attack. Yeah. It's not that I couldn't breathe. It scared me to have it on, which I think a lot of the anti mask people were trying to politicize it when deep down they were just scared and they didn't like being scared. So they were like, I don't need this.
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This is the cause of my panic, not that I'm panicking. Not reality. Well, that's like when you get a panic attack and you're like,
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a panic attack makes your panic attack works. You know what's happening. It's so annoying to be like, this is a panic attack.
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Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, it's really happening. Oh, wait, it's not stopping.
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Oh, that's what's happening now? It's getting worse. Oh, so fun. But did you read recently or have we talked about the fact that the candy warheads,
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the super sour candy warheads have been proven to stop panic attacks? No. Oh, that's just,
00:08:37
that makes me happy. Right? Because it's like, it's, you shock your senses, I guess. Yeah. Well,
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you know what else they, they do is if you put a frozen lemon, nope, you put a lemon in the freezer
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and you hold onto that as it like kind of melts and it just like shocks your body because you
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have this frozen thing in your hand. Yeah. Something like that. It's something to do with
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lemons near you. You have to get a bunch of lemons near you. Did you hear if you tase yourself,
00:09:06
you'll get right out of that panic attack. Allegedly. I heard that if someone hangs up
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the phone on you, you're done. You're no longer panicking. It's fine. What else? There was
00:09:18
something else I wanted to. Oh, I have a recommendation. My dad and I last night watched
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because you know that the challenge of watching TV with Jim that doesn't involve Winston Churchill.
00:09:27
And so last night I was looking on like TikTok to see recommendations of things on Netflix or things wherever.
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It recommended the movie Sing Street. Did you ever see Sing Street? Okay. It came out pre-pandemic.
00:09:43
And it's about this Irish boy who in Dublin in the 80s, early 80s, and he's trying to start a band because everything's kind of shitty in his life.
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So he wants to start a band. Like, yeah, you have to see it. It's so perfectly good and charming.
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And the songs they write are so, you know, sometimes when they try to write songs for movies where it's like.
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Movie songs. Yeah. These movie songs are great. And like, but also realistic to a freshman or a sophomore in high school writing songs.
00:10:15
Yeah. It's such a delightful movie. Like my dad loved it and he loves to hate movies and he loves to go, this is phony.
00:10:22
Turn it off. And he loved it. It was so good. Sing Street. Sing Street Have you and your dad been watching the new season of The Jinx?
00:10:31
What? I'm sorry, what? No I'm gonna double back on you Alejandra, turn all of this off
00:10:37
What? I'm gonna what you I'm gonna double what you I'm gonna hang up the fucking podcast on you
00:10:44
Cause you don't know that there's a new season of The Jinx out I fucking didn't know that
00:10:48
When? It wasn't a huge to-do, as they say It's episode three, just came out last night
00:10:55
or this weekend on a trio yeah yeah yeah it's the jinx all over again and this time oh my god
00:11:03
okay this time it's about like the trial that happened because he got caught after the first
00:11:09
season yeah and so the characters are introducing this time around are his old buddies so that's a
00:11:16
fucking cast of characters that are troubling i'm gonna say the same thing to you i said to vince
00:11:22
which is just, you're going to, there's two words you need to look out for in episode two.
00:11:27
Country porn. That's it. And then that's the character of the day. Okay. Writing it down.
00:11:34
I can't believe I'm so excited for you. You're going to go watch three fucking episodes right
00:11:37
now. This is like you actually wrapped a surprise birthday present for me and gave it to me in
00:11:43
through words because what a fucking, what a gift. Oh yeah. Your birthday's in four days.
00:11:49
Shit. Happy birthday. Oh yeah I wasn trying to say that Actually it be like two when this comes out But I only meant that metaphorically Well it must have been on your mind because it fits Well I guess you have to send me at two dozen roses now
00:12:06
Shit. Shit. Edible arrangement. Pineapple stack to the sky. Edible arrangement. Have you been going to get the chocolate covered strawberries?
00:12:15
That's how much I like you. Oh my God, you're splurging on me. Thank you. It's been eight years.
00:12:22
We haven't done a theme song in a while. We haven't done a jingle for Edible A arrangements.
00:12:27
And then there's the, clearly. Is it because they all sound the same? It's gotta be because we're so good at it.
00:12:33
I think. And like you have to, we save them for the ads. I feel like this is the saddest thing about what that skippers don't know they're missing.
00:12:39
Oh, for sure. The beautiful music that we make in the top, in the first, in the first 15 of this show.
00:12:47
Oh my God. Should we do Exactly Right Corner? Oh, can I just say one more thing?
00:12:53
I want to say hi to Emma. She listens and she works at a bar that I met Adrian and Laura and
00:13:00
Amy G at. Yes. They were all there for like a long time before I got there and I rolled in
00:13:05
and then she came over to ask if we wanted anything. And then she had like a little bit of a,
00:13:11
wait, are you? And I was like, I am. Yes. And cause we were like three inches away from each
00:13:16
other. And then she kind of like, she went to say something and then she kind of like,
00:13:21
didn't know what to do. And I go, I go, it's okay. You can come back and talk to me. I go,
00:13:26
come back, come back. And she just walked away and then came back a little bit later. It was
00:13:30
the sweetest, cutest. And it definitely means more to me when it's my hometown people.
00:13:37
Absolutely. I shouldn't say it means more, but it is very touching to me when my own,
00:13:42
it's my own town. It can. When I'm in LA and people do it, not Orange County. I don't give
00:13:47
a, nobody fucking, and I can't even, and we won't, and they won't, and we won't talk about it. And
00:13:51
they know why and i know why click uh however i will say so i'll give a shout out to kaylee who
00:14:00
works for the dodgers i've been to the dodger stadium for dodger games shockingly twice in
00:14:07
the past like month every time the loveliest gals say hello like for some reason dodger fans
00:14:13
are murderinos hey and does did kaylee work there like she used to work she worked there
00:14:19
And then we're, and she was like, where are you guys sitting? And Vince told her and she goes, oh no, you should do better than that.
00:14:24
I could do better than that for you. She was like, let me give you my card. And like, was just like, let me know next time you come.
00:14:33
Sweet. It was pretty sweet. That's what it's all about right there. Yeah. Nice. It was really fun.
00:14:39
Ate a churro. I ate a hot dog. I think the hot dog was accidentally vegetarian, but.
00:14:43
How was it? Not good. Tasted vegetarian. Sorry, Erin Brown of our marketing department.
00:14:49
sent me, did she send you the hot dog that's now in Times Square that is 65 feet long and shoots
00:14:56
confetti up in the air? I think like once an hour. I could be wrong about once an hour,
00:15:03
but there's, for some reason, somebody put a gigantic mechanical hot dog in Times Square.
00:15:08
Get off our gimmick. I'm just kidding. It's a hot dog summer. It is a hot dog confetti summer. Yeah. I love confetti. That's fun.
00:15:18
It's a fun combination. Little bit phallic, little bit dirty. It's got innuendos.
00:15:24
I think that's just where we are right now. It's like no one has time for wordplay.
00:15:29
Just show it. Yeah. Just be direct. Just shoot the confetti out of the hot dog. In Times Square.
00:15:36
I'm sorry, I get it over with. Yeah. And enjoy it and celebrate it. We all do. All right.
00:15:43
Business time. Cool? Yeah. Business time. We have a podcast network. It's called Exactly Right.
00:15:49
And we think you'll like all the shows on it. But here are some highlights. Well, over on this podcast, we'll kill you.
00:15:55
Erin and Erin are back with brand new episodes. This week, they cover everything you'll ever want to know about supplements.
00:16:03
And that's supplements with a capital S. I want to know every... This is like my obsession currently.
00:16:09
Yeah. Even though I refuse to take them every day. I buy them and don't take them.
00:16:14
Oh, my God. I mean... I have great supplements that I don't take. And also every time I find out about a new and different one, I'm like, this is the one
00:16:22
I have to write it down. I have to go get it. This is going to solve everything.
00:16:26
Yep. Maybe if I get it in gummy form, I'll start taking it. Nope. You won't, Georgia.
00:16:30
You won't even take candy supplements. And on That's Messed Up and SVU podcast, Kara and Lisa discuss Honor, the second episode
00:16:41
of SVU's second season. Their guest is actor and comedian Asif Manvi, who you likely know from The Daily Show.
00:16:48
Yeah, that guy's great. And also every other funny thing you've kind of ever seen.
00:16:53
Asif Manvi has been in it. Also, actor Bridie Elliott joins Bridger on this week's episode of I Said No Gifts.
00:17:00
And comedian Ashley's story is over with the girls on Lady to Lady. And now a little bit of business.
00:17:06
We now have a recommendations corner page on MyFavoriteMurder.com. that means every freaking stupid ass thing we've ever recommended in 2024 will be there and then
00:17:18
we'll continue to add to that if you're ever searching for an honor recommendation that whole
00:17:22
thing of like what was that show that you said don't watch because it's depressing you know
00:17:26
yeah exactly there that you say you love but then it's a book you love that you then put down
00:17:31
because yeah you don't have loved it the attention span oh also on the my favorite murder store
00:17:37
There's new items in the last chance clearance section. So sale items, good prices, get over there and see what you want to buy before they're gone.
00:17:47
Yeah. Yeah. Do it. Do your thing. Every story has a point where it balanced on a knife edge That where we begin For some it a confrontation no parent ever expects They finally admit we here to take your children The department has taken custody
00:18:05
and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation. For others, it's surviving the unthinkable.
00:18:14
As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft.
00:18:21
I thought we were gonna die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
00:18:29
We talk to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next.
00:18:35
And on our off-record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about.
00:18:42
New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network.
00:18:47
Listen to The Knife on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:18:51
Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was.
00:18:56
Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
00:19:07
Just then, we felt the plane turn in the air. So much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.
00:19:16
Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy. how it shapes our identities and relationships
00:19:23
and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know
00:19:30
but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything
00:19:33
and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.
00:19:39
And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off and that was the last time I saw him.
00:19:44
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:54
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers
00:20:01
behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating
00:20:06
and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face,
00:20:13
and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says, She's gone. She's gone.
00:20:19
These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever.
00:20:27
Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do.
00:20:34
You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.
00:20:38
Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network.
00:20:44
Listen to Wicked Words on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:20:54
You're first? Yeah. All right. I'm going to do for you today a classic true crime podcast story.
00:21:03
You probably have heard of it. Maybe. It's incredibly disturbing. it's also one of kind of my areas of interest which is people that live double lives
00:21:15
it all starts on the morning of january 29th 2010 when 27 year old jessica lloyd of belleville
00:21:23
ontario canada does not show up for work and when her brother andy hears about this he goes to her
00:21:30
house to check on her he finds her purse he finds her wallet and her cell phone but he does not find
00:21:36
his sister. So Jessica's reported missing, which triggers an extensive search by her family and
00:21:43
friends and neighbors and, of course, the Ontario Provincial Police. A couple days into that search,
00:21:50
a local man sees all these police cars parked outside of Jessica's house, and he immediately
00:21:56
goes in with information. He tells the police he saw a mysterious SUV parked in the field next to
00:22:04
Jessica's house the night she went missing. And that small lead would be the beginning of one of
00:22:09
the most astounding falls from grace that Canada has ever seen. This is the story of sex offender,
00:22:17
serial rapist and murderer, Russell Williams. And yeah, does that sound familiar to you?
00:22:23
Not yet. Okay. I believe and I'm this is one of the many facts that I like to share off the top
00:22:30
of my head that probably could be wrong, but I'm remembering watching a made-for-TV movie starring
00:22:35
Gary Cole playing this part, and he was so creepy in it. Alejandra, do you mind checking that to
00:22:42
make sure that's right? Yes, Karen, that's right. An officer and a murderer, it's called. Oh, good.
00:22:47
It feels good to be right. Thank you. So the main sources for today's story are an episode of the
00:22:53
Canadian investigative docuseries from the CBC called The Fifth Estate, which is an incredible
00:22:59
series. Like it's on, I believe it's on YouTube for us. You should go, if you're interested,
00:23:06
go in there. This episode is called the confession that's, that covers this case,
00:23:10
but the fifth estate is pretty great. There's also an article from a website called Vancouver
00:23:17
is awesome, which is like, it's so cute. That article was written by a writer named Jeremy
00:23:24
Hainsworth and the rest of the sources are in our show notes. So we'll just talk about him first.
00:23:30
David Russell Williams is born in England on March 7th, 1963. He's raised in and around Ontario,
00:23:37
Canada. His father, Cedric, is an engineer for a nuclear research lab called Chalk River
00:23:43
Laboratories. And his mother, Christine, is a stay-at-home mom. His parents were divorced in
00:23:48
1969 when Russell's six years old and his mother remarries a family friend named Dr.
00:23:54
Jerry Sovka, who I guess was in the same business as his father in 1979. nine work takes his mother and his stepdad overseas to South Korea. Russell stays in Canada.
00:24:06
He goes to boarding school. So he graduates from a high school called Upper Canada College in
00:24:12
Toronto in 1982. And then four years later, he graduates from the University of Toronto with a
00:24:18
degree in economics and political science. 1987, he joins the Royal Canadian Air Force
00:24:24
and earns his pilot's wings in 1990. On January 1st, 1991, a year later, he's promoted to captain
00:24:32
and he starts flying some very high profile passengers like Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip
00:24:38
among other dignitaries and government officials. Yeah, so he's way up there in the military.
00:24:44
That's huge. And I think you have to have like crazy security clearance like they did background checks and shit, right?
00:24:49
He had such high security clearance that we don't know what his security clearance was.
00:24:55
Wow. It was a secret. Yeah. Okay. So six months after that, he marries his wife, Mary Harriman,
00:25:01
who is the associate director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. And then in November of 1999,
00:25:08
Williams is promoted to the rank of major. He goes back to school to the Royal Military College of Canada
00:25:14
and he earns a Master of Defense Studies in 2004. He's then promoted to Lieutenant Colonel
00:25:20
and he's given his first commanding officer position of the 437 transport squadron.
00:25:27
I think that's how you say it. A Canadian Forces Base Trenton. It's called CFB Trenton.
00:25:32
And while he's there, he rises through the ranks. And within five years, he becomes the overall commanding officer of the entire Air Force Base.
00:25:44
And it is the largest and busiest air base in Canada. So he is, yeah, he's very powerful and prestigious career military man.
00:25:55
His career advances, he and his wife move from their home in a suburb of Orléans, which is outside of Ottawa, into a new townhouse in Ottawa in the West End neighborhood.
00:26:08
But since Ottawa is a three hour commute from CFB Trenton, Russell stays at his family's lakefront cottage in the town of Tweed. So Tweed is a tiny, like, it's basically a little lakeside community. It currently has, I think this number, this population is from current times, 1600 people.
00:26:31
people. Oh, wow. Really tiny. So, of course, it's the kind of place everyone knows each other. It's
00:26:37
thought of as a very safe place to live. And it's a country getaway away from, you know, the big city
00:26:43
of Ottawa. But all of that changes in September of 2007, when a series of strange robberies begin
00:26:50
to be reported. Someone's breaking into homes at night and stealing women's underwear. And almost
00:26:56
all of these break-ins are happening on Cozy Cove Lane. And this is the kind of thing where
00:27:02
I just stopped to point this out, which is something all people who follow true crime know,
00:27:08
which is we used to laugh at stuff like this, peeping Toms, people who steal underwear,
00:27:15
stuff like that. But now we kind of know, right? Or the experts know that that usually is the
00:27:22
beginning of a very bad and usually escalating series of crimes. Absolutely. I mean, it was like
00:27:29
a punchline when we were young. It was Porky's where they're all like in a tree trying to watch
00:27:35
girls in the shower. And it's like, sure, let's normalize that when actually the people who do it
00:27:40
and are serious about it usually go on to be stalkers and, you know, have escalating crimes.
00:27:47
The crazy thing too to think about is like, you know, I don't know why it's such a different thing
00:27:51
for someone to break into someone's house during the day when everyone's gone and to do it at night
00:27:56
when people are at home sleeping. I just feel like there has to be a different mentality there. I
00:28:00
wonder if there's any studies about that. Yeah, because, well, the risk is obviously higher.
00:28:04
So it's like, you like that, right? You like that the risk is higher. Yeah, right. It becomes about
00:28:10
the risk. Right. Yeah. So, so of course things escalate on September 17th, 2009. And that's when
00:28:19
in the middle of the night, a single mother living along the lakes wakes up to an intruder
00:28:24
in a ski mask standing over her. He hits her in the head with a flashlight. He blindfolds her with
00:28:29
a pillowcase. He then binds her to a chair, assaults her, and then photographs her. And
00:28:37
before he leaves, he steals some of her underwear. A little less than two weeks later on September 30th,
00:28:42
2009, that happens again. Another woman is physically and sexually assaulted in her home
00:28:48
at night. And then she's photographed the assailant leaves with several pieces of the
00:28:54
victim's underwear. And this time that takes place in a home that's three doors down from
00:28:59
Russell Williams cottage because he also lives on cozy Cove lane. So after these assaults,
00:29:08
the Ontario provincial police or the OPP as they call themselves. Yeah. You know me. They go door
00:29:14
a door asking everyone in the neighborhood for any information that they might have.
00:29:19
And of course, among those, the police talk to Colonel Russell Williams, who claims to
00:29:25
have no useful information to offer. The police move on. There's gossip in town.
00:29:30
People suspect another man who lives in the neighborhood. Rumors start to swirl around him.
00:29:35
And that man is ostracized in the town. Of course, Wing Commander Russell Williams evades suspicion entirely because this is a
00:29:43
man who is respected, obviously the military. There's tons of credit, and rightfully so,
00:29:50
that you get by rising up to truly the tops of the ranks in the military So about a month later on November 25th 2009 the body of a 38 woman Corporal Marie France Camot is found in her home in Brighton Ontario
00:30:08
She's been beaten over the head, raped, and then suffocated with duct tape. And her boyfriend is the one who found her in her bed.
00:30:19
Terrible. So Marie France was stationed at CFB Trenton. She worked on various flight crews. She was said to have an adventurous spirit and her work in the Canadian forces enabled her to live her dream of traveling the world.
00:30:34
So when the news of her murder circulates around CFB Trenton, Russell Williams sends Marie France's father, who himself is a military veteran, a letter expressing his condolences.
00:30:47
Russell and Marie France had worked together once before. So it's just a couple months later.
00:30:54
It's the evening of January 28th, 2010. And Jessica Lloyd, who's 27 years old, is out at a bar with her friends.
00:31:02
She is known as a kind and selfless person. She's very popular, has tons of friends.
00:31:07
So it's not unusual for her to be out socializing on a work night, but she is responsible enough to get home at a decent hour.
00:31:14
And when she does around 1030 p.m. that night, she texts a friend at 1036 and says night night and then goes to bed.
00:31:24
Around 3 a.m., two locals are driving along Highway 37 past Jessica's house when they see a suspicious looking SUV parked in the field next to her house.
00:31:36
They don't know Jessica. They don't know, you know, who lives in the house. They just look at it and they see that that car parked there, being parked there is odd.
00:31:45
They don't see an immediate threat, so they keep driving, but they remember it. Good.
00:31:50
The next day, January 29th, 2010, is when Jessica's mother gets word that she hasn't shown up for work, which is totally unlike her.
00:31:59
So Jessica's mother calls her son Andy and asks him to go check on his sister. And that's when Andy drives over to Jessica's house, finds all of her personal and very important like personal items, but not her. He has a bad feeling. And that's when the missing person's report is made.
00:32:19
So in the days following her disappearance, Andy hangs missing flyers around town, the Tweed community bands together to help in the search, and even complete strangers volunteer to help in this search along Highway 37 to try to find her.
00:32:34
And this is when one of those two men who saw the SUV parked in the field sees the emergency vehicles parked around the same house that they drove by.
00:32:45
When he learns what's going on, he immediately contacts police and tells them everything he saw that night.
00:32:51
So police go back to search that field. And when they do, they find tire tracks in the snow and they find boot prints leading from the field up to Jessica's house.
00:33:03
Whoa. So armed with the images of these tire tracks, the police set up roadblocks on Highway 37, and they begin checking people's car tires, hoping to find a match.
00:33:15
No way. That's so smart. It's so smart. There's a two-piece thing that happens here that procedurally is so smart.
00:33:22
They immediately set this roadblock up. It starts at 7 o'clock on Thursday, February 4th, and it goes through the night to 6 a.m. on February 5th.
00:33:33
And one of the cars that stopped in that roadblock is Colonel Russell Williams. They check his tires.
00:33:40
He cooperates fully and they let him go. But what they don't tell him is that his tires are a match.
00:33:47
They let him think that he's flown under their radar. But from that point forward, the OPP have Russell Williams under surveillance.
00:33:56
Wow. So two days later, in the early afternoon of Sunday, February 7th, Williams gets a call from the police department asking him to come in and answer some questions.
00:34:06
He agrees, and he heads over, telling his wife on his way out that he'll be back in time for dinner.
00:34:11
So Colonel Williams arrives at the police station just before 3 p.m., and he's led into an interrogation room.
00:34:18
And he's joined by Detective Sergeant Jim Smith, who reads him his rights and tells him he's not under arrest.
00:34:24
He's free to go if he chooses. so detective smith starts asking russell williams questions about the sexual assaults that took place
00:34:32
in tweed but as he does that and as he begins asking his questions he does not refer to williams
00:34:40
as colonel he does not refer to him as sir smith is basically tacitly suggesting unlike
00:34:46
down at the air force base where he has control over everyone and everything all the time
00:34:52
in this room he has no status and he has no power so at first Williams denies knowing the sexual
00:35:00
assault victims he does admit that he had once met Marie France and he tells the detective that
00:35:07
he recalls getting a knock at the door after one of the neighborhood assaults and says he already
00:35:12
spoke with the police about it of course detective Smith knows this so then he tells Williams well
00:35:19
sure, but you have to admit that the geographical positioning is that can't really be, you know,
00:35:26
it's, we can't assume it's a coincidence. It makes you a person of interest. And he gets
00:35:31
Williams to basically agree with him that that's a reasonable assumption. And then he asks Russell
00:35:36
to provide both a DNA sample and to let them take an impression of the soles of the boots that he's
00:35:42
wearing to rule him out and surprisingly Williams agrees to do both investigators collect those
00:35:50
samples immediately begin analysis on that while detective Smith continues his line of questioning he questioned for 10 hours finally the boot impression comes back and Williams boot impression matches the boot impression from the field next to Jessica house
00:36:07
Wow. So that's when Detective Smith breaks the news to Williams. It's just a matter of time until the
00:36:14
DNA comes back as a match that they've already obtained a warrant and are searching his home
00:36:21
right now. Is it true? Are they really? Yes. Holy shit. And that idea puts Williams over the edge for good reason.
00:36:31
He has a lot to be scared about with cops looking through his house. He tells investigators he is ready to come clean solely to, quote, minimize the impact on my wife.
00:36:41
Oh, now he's fucking thinking about his wife? Oh, my God. I mean, yeah, that's such a good point.
00:36:47
It's so fascinating. And I wish there was a podcast we could listen to about how this psychology actually works.
00:36:54
And maybe there is, and maybe people will recommend it. But that idea of like, I think because he was living this double life, he truly just
00:37:01
thought the two lives would never meet. They're separate. I also want to know the psychology around saying yes to the DNA, especially, of course,
00:37:10
and the Boone impression when you know they're going to come back as a match. Like what, who says, who are the people who say, no, I want a lawyer.
00:37:20
Like you, you have to have a, you know, a warrant. and who are the people who say yes and why, like who's guilty and who's innocent. It's just such a
00:37:29
weird phenomenon of me to be like, yes, and then still not respond or say I did it until
00:37:35
the results come back. Well, it's almost like, did he realize that there was no way
00:37:40
he wasn't painting himself into a corner the entire time that it had escalated to the point
00:37:46
where he was no longer in control, where he knew it was inevitable. I mean, it would be very
00:37:53
interesting to know. Essentially, Russell Williams confesses to all four of the crimes that have been
00:38:00
laid out before him, two home invasion, sexual assaults in Tweed, and the rapes and the murders
00:38:05
of both Corporal Marie France Camo and of Jessica Lloyd. He then goes on to describe each crime in
00:38:13
disturbing detail. Detective Smith is shocked to hear Russell admit between just those two murder
00:38:19
victims that he's talking about, he stole over 60 pieces of underwear. And that bizarre fact
00:38:28
would actually turn out to be just the tip of the iceberg. So with Williams in custody, OPP
00:38:34
searched both his lakefront cottage in Tweed and his Ottawa townhouse where his wife lives.
00:38:41
And in a townhouse garage, they find a pillowcase stuffed with stolen women's underwear.
00:38:48
Several boxes hidden in the basement hold hundreds more pieces. And according to that article by Jeremy Hainsworth, quote, all of it was cataloged in minute detail.
00:39:00
What? So he kept it, like kept it in boxes. He knew where all of it was from. Oh, that's so creepy.
00:39:07
under his and his wife's bed the police find a bag that contains the black ski mask that he wore
00:39:14
for the attacks oh my god can you imagine the wife like oh my god you're sleeping over that thing
00:39:20
and it's around you it's like all around you yeah at the tweed cottage police find another duffel
00:39:26
bag and this one is filled with hundreds more pieces of women's underwear they also find computer
00:39:32
hard drives that are filled with thousands of photos of the victims bedrooms of their underwear
00:39:38
neatly laid out on their beds of russell wearing that underwear and masturbating on their beds
00:39:44
and most horrifyingly they find photos and videos of the actual assaults holy shit yeah and maybe
00:39:54
that was part of it. It was like he, with his kind of, I don't know, mental illness,
00:40:01
had to keep that. He had to keep the trophies. He wanted to rewatch that. So he knew if that's
00:40:08
what he was going to do, at some point, someone was going to find out. Or maybe he thought,
00:40:12
if I cooperate, I'll be able to go home and destroy all this stuff that day. Like, I don't
00:40:19
know why he kept talking for 10 hours, but maybe go along with it, go home, destroy everything.
00:40:25
And also maybe that's why in that, you know, in the many articles, like somebody took the time to
00:40:30
say that he was told that he could leave because someone is in there going, we have to protect the
00:40:35
Ottawa Police Department, which is something that very often happens where it's like, hey,
00:40:40
you know, we're certainly not doing anything for 10 hours that it would go against his rights. And
00:40:45
It's like, do we know that for sure? Who knows? So with nothing left to hide, Russell Williams points to a location on a map where he left Jessica Lloyd's body, which was 40 feet off the road at a remote local intersection.
00:40:59
And when police search that area, Jessica Lloyd's body is recovered on February 8th, 2010.
00:41:05
So now Russell Williams is formally charged with two counts of first degree murder, two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of breaking and entering and sexual assault, which are folded into the same charge.
00:41:18
So he gets the charge twice and then 82 counts of breaking and entering related to his underwear fetish.
00:41:26
82. Wow. So Williams made a full confession. he doesn't deny any of these charges against him, but the details of his crimes are actually
00:41:36
revealed in open court to inform the Canadian public and to determine his sentencing.
00:41:42
So a selection of just some of the thousands of photos discovered in both his Ottawa and his
00:41:48
Tweed homes are shown to illustrate the depravity of his crimes. They also show some of the
00:41:54
undergarments that he stole and kept as trophies And an additionally disturbing fact He didn just target adult women He broke into young girls bedrooms as well
00:42:05
He stole the underwear of girls as young as nine years old. Oh my God. And he also, in a one 12-year-old girl's bedroom,
00:42:13
he wrote on her computer, thank you. Ew. Like before he left. The amount of stolen underwear had grown so rapidly
00:42:21
that on two different occasions, Williams will admit to burning hundreds of pieces of underwear because he didn't have the room to keep them anymore.
00:42:30
What the fuck? How long have they been doing it for? That's like a lifetime. Yeah. He then gives the details of Marie-France Camot's murder.
00:42:39
She had suspected that someone had been going through her underwear drawer, but it was not her ex-boyfriend as who she thought it was.
00:42:48
unbeknownst to her after she worked on a flight crew that Russell Williams was on he had taken an
00:42:55
interest in her and then on November 16th 2009 days before her murder while she was away Williams
00:43:02
breaks into her home in Brighton goes into her bedroom and puts on her underwear photographs
00:43:09
himself but then he returns a week later on the night of November 24th 2009 while she is there
00:43:16
alone. He actually breaks into her basement wearing the ski mask and he plans to wait there
00:43:23
until she goes to sleep so that he can like surprise her the way he did to that young mother.
00:43:28
Except that all changes when Marie France comes down into the basement looking for her cat.
00:43:35
Oh no. And when she does that, she sees a masked intruder hiding behind her furnace,
00:43:41
which is just the scariest. Yeah. so basically then the plan changes he rushes her hits her over the head with his flashlight he
00:43:50
drags her upstairs spends the next several hours brutally assaulting her and records it all on his
00:43:56
video camera oh my god at one point she begs for her life saying have a heart please i want to live
00:44:03
instead he covers her nose and mouth with duct tape and she suffocates to death and afterwards
00:44:09
He bleaches her bedsheets. He places her body in her bed, covers it with a duvet, and then leaves it there for her boyfriend to discover the next day.
00:44:18
What the fuck? He then explains how he selected Jessica Lloyd to be his next victim.
00:44:25
So on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, Williams was driving home on his usual route from work along Highway 37.
00:44:35
And as he does, he sees Jessica through the window of her home, working out like walking on a treadmill.
00:44:43
So the next day he sees that she's not home. So he parks in that field next to her house and he breaks into her house and he looks around.
00:44:53
But then when he gets in his car to leave, she comes home. So he waits until he sees the lights go out in her house, assumes that she's gone to bed.
00:45:03
and he breaks in again through the back patio door. He then attacks and rapes her.
00:45:09
He forces her into his SUV and he drives her to his home in Tweed. And then he continues to assault her there.
00:45:18
At one point, she actually has a seizure. So when she comes out of it, she begs him to spare her life.
00:45:25
And so he promises that he won't kill her if she'll just cooperate with him. And cooperating with him,
00:45:31
And I'm not going to go too far into it because it's already so upsetting and so depraved.
00:45:36
Yeah. But he would make his victims like put on their underwear and like so he could take pictures of them and do stuff.
00:45:43
It's so insane. So she then believes if she does it, she'll at least make it out alive.
00:45:50
Yeah. And he actually supports that belief because he walks her out of the house towards his car.
00:45:58
So she thinks he's going to drive her back. Fuck. But instead on that walk, he hits her in the back of the head with his flashlight again.
00:46:04
And then he strangles her to death with a length of rope. Oh my God. So after he kills Jessica Lloyd, he leaves her body in his garage in Tweed.
00:46:13
And then he goes to work for the day at CFB Trenton. What the fuck? Yeah. I think that counts as being a psychopath, right?
00:46:22
Yeah. When you can just be that cut off. Absolutely. Then when he's done with work, he drives back home to Ottawa and spends the weekend with his wife.
00:46:30
And it isn't until the following Tuesday, February 2nd, that he finally goes, retrieves her body from his garage,
00:46:40
drives it out to that remote location, and dumps the body on the side of the road.
00:46:45
Jesus. So ultimately, Russell Williams pleads guilty to all 88 charges on October 18th, 2010.
00:46:53
And three days later, he is given two life sentences for the first degree murders of Jessica Lloyd and Marie France Camot, two 10-year sentences for the
00:47:02
sexual assaults, two 10-year sentences for the forcible confinement charges, and 82 one-year
00:47:08
sentences for the breaking and entering charges, all to be served concurrently. Although technically
00:47:15
Russell Williams is eligible for parole in 2035, the details of this case all but guarantee that
00:47:23
he will not get it. Russell Williams was stripped of his military rank and honors immediately after
00:47:29
his arrest. And in what is believed to be a first, his military uniform was burned,
00:47:36
his medals were destroyed, and the SUV he used to transport Jessica Lloyd's body
00:47:41
is crushed and scrapped. Wow. His wife files for divorce in December of 2010. There are surviving victims who file civil suits against Russell Williams, but his wife is also accused of having known about his criminal acts all along.
00:48:00
No. Yeah. And the suit alleges that she kept quiet because she stood to gain financially because after he was arrested, they switched ownership of the houses that they had. So I think what it is, is the more valuable house was switched into her name. But basically they were just saying, well, I'll read you. This is a quote, an article from McLean's that doesn't have a byline. There's no journalist attached to it.
00:48:27
And it says, quote, although Williams is the key defendant, all three lawsuits also accused Harriman of acquiring his half of their $700,000 house in a fraudulent post-arrest deal designed to shield his assets from potential litigation.
00:48:42
Harriman has denied any wrongdoing, insisting she paid good and due consideration for his portion of the property.
00:48:49
So basically, this kind of business deal doesn't look good. It makes it look like they're somehow trying to benefit from it.
00:48:59
Shield him. And they also just, it's very natural for them to be suspicious of how she couldn't have known when it went on for so long.
00:49:09
And he was out breaking into houses all around the area night after night. And the excuse he gave was that he was taking late night walks to stretch out his sore back.
00:49:21
So I think there was just a lot of like, you know, how could this be? It makes me think of the Golden State Killer.
00:49:28
Yeah. And by Salia Rapist, it's like, like how? How the fuck? But then also. It happens.
00:49:35
I mean, look, look at him. He was he fooled everyone. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So here's a more of a quote from McLean's.
00:49:44
They say, quote, still, the province's highest court was clearly sympathetic, describing Harriman
00:49:49
as indeed yet another victim of Williams' depravity. She was shocked and devastated by the charges laid against her husband.
00:49:57
And through the revelations that followed the laying of the charges, Harriman learned that her husband, to whom she'd been married for many years
00:50:05
and who she believed to be a highly respected, successful, and loving man, was in reality a sexual predator and cold-blooded serial murderer.
00:50:14
Jesus. So in October of 2016, that case is settled out of court, details are never uncovered. And then in an interview given 10 years after her death,
00:50:25
Jessica Lloyd's brother, Andy, tries to stay positive by saying, quote, every year seems to
00:50:31
get a little bit easier, I guess. Every year it seems to be maybe not easier. Maybe it's just more
00:50:37
routine. Maybe we're getting used to it. End quote. And that's the story of the double life
00:50:44
of the serial rapist and murderer Russell Williams. I had never heard of that. Yeah.
00:50:51
Man, being a woman isn't safe. The treadmill piece is gonna stick with me. It's so awful.
00:51:00
It's gonna stick with me. Yeah. It's like, oh, and then Georgia never opened her shades
00:51:05
in her house ever again. But there is this thing. I mean, we've talked about this a lot.
00:51:11
And it's like, we all know you can take any precautions you want. But if we have these violent serial rapists, if we have people that the crimes aren't ever taken care of when they should be, or if they're such high level predators that they're, you know, that kind of thing is, it's not on you.
00:51:32
It's not on you. It wasn't on her. Of course not. He was going to, no, no, I'm not saying you're saying that, but it's like he was going to find the next person.
00:51:40
Just the chances that he would drive by at that moment. It's just so fucked up. Yeah.
00:51:48
That's really sad. That's awful. Thank you for telling that story. I mean, I can't believe I haven't heard of that.
00:51:55
Yeah. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin.
00:52:04
For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children.
00:52:11
The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation.
00:52:17
For others, it's surviving the unthinkable. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air,
00:52:25
many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then.
00:52:30
The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
00:52:35
We talk to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it,
00:52:40
and what came next. And on our off-record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting
00:52:45
and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about. New episodes drop every Thursday
00:52:50
on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network. Listen to The Knife on the iHeart Radio app,
00:52:55
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is.
00:53:01
Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history.
00:53:06
I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
00:53:14
And just then, we felt the plane turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.
00:53:23
Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships,
00:53:29
and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know,
00:53:36
but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything.
00:53:40
And me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.
00:53:46
And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.
00:53:50
Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts When a group of women discover they all dated the same prolific con artist they take matters into their own hands
00:54:07
I vowed I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.
00:54:14
We always say that, trust your girlfriends. Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe,
00:54:20
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, it's not a U-turn.
00:54:34
It's like a sharp left. Great. That we're taking now. That's how we do it. Yeah, that's how we do it.
00:54:40
We're still doing a fucking double life story. Oh, great. Imposter story. Okay. Chameleon.
00:54:48
The rapper? Chameleonare? The chameleon air. Today, I'm going to tell you about a French conman who compulsively
00:54:56
impersonated unhoused teenagers through the 90s and early 2000s. He's best known for claiming to
00:55:02
be a missing Texas teen in the 90s. Reunited with that missing teen's family, lived with them for
00:55:10
months before his true identity was revealed. This is the story of serial imposter, Frédéric
00:55:16
Pierre Bourdain. Amazing. A.K.A. The Impostor from that incredible documentary. I literally
00:55:23
can remember the seat I was sitting in at Man's Chinese when I saw that documentary.
00:55:29
You saw it there? Wow. Yeah. And I just like the whole time was like, you have got to be
00:55:35
like, it was such a good documentary. It's so good. It's so hard to watch you like rack your
00:55:41
brain because you're like, what would I do? Like, would I believe this person? Right. And I think
00:55:47
the answer is yes, for a lot more of us than we want to believe. Sure. So here I'm gonna tell you
00:55:51
that story. The main source they used besides the documentary, The Impostor is a 2008 New Yorker
00:55:57
article by David Gran and the rest of the sources can be found in the show notes. So Frédéric Pierre
00:56:02
Bourdain is born to Ghislaine Bourdain in 1974 in the suburbs of Paris. Like, come on, take me there.
00:56:10
His mother, she's only 18 years old when she has her son. She doesn't have money.
00:56:17
His father isn't around. It ended up being someone she worked with. And when she got pregnant, she found out that he had a wife already.
00:56:24
So she didn't even tell him that she was pregnant. I mean, she was a child. Frederic has a tough childhood.
00:56:30
When he's two years old, a judge takes custody away from his mother. And he goes to live with his grandparents.
00:56:36
his mother claims that she was a responsible and fit parent and her parents just took him away
00:56:44
but it's said that she likes to party and go out all night so you know who knows later frederique
00:56:50
will say that she is manipulative though when he's five frederique's grandparents moved to the
00:56:56
city of nantes i'm not saying that right probably how's it spelled it's spelled n-a-n-t-e-s and then
00:57:02
And the translation that Allie put in there is N-O-N-T. Nont. Yeah, that's good.
00:57:07
And you gave it a little nont. Nont. Yeah, that's good. So he has a hard time in school.
00:57:12
He's known there as the fatherless kid. He is dressed in secondhand clothing from the charity shop.
00:57:18
So he's teased. He starts inventing wild stories, like saying his dad is a British secret service agent.
00:57:25
And that's why he's not in his life. No one believes him. But he is precocious and he draws people in.
00:57:31
You can kind of understand this kid who wants so badly to fit in and have a seemingly, you know, quote, normal life.
00:57:41
Yeah. And he starts making up stories to try to fit in. Also that age, when you have it hard in school, whatever you're trying to do to cope with that situation is what you're trying to do.
00:57:52
No one can help you. Like, no, what can you do? You're making up ways to fix it.
00:57:57
They usually get you into worse, like, situations. It's just the worst. And when sometimes they don't get you into worse situations and therefore you keep doing them,
00:58:08
or sometimes the worst situations just gives you more attention. Yeah. So you keep doing it because that's all you're really craving.
00:58:14
I mean, it's so sad. Yeah. One of his teachers about him says, quote, he had this way of making you connect to him,
00:58:21
end quote. But he's also in distress. And this becomes clear as he approaches his teenage years.
00:58:27
he tells his grandmother that a neighbor has sexually abused him, but it's never investigated.
00:58:34
I think it's a small town and it's what the 80s, early 90s, everyone just fucking ignores it,
00:58:41
which is so tragic. Yeah. That's a real betrayal. That's horrible. Yes. And so he starts acting out
00:58:47
as you do. He starts stealing. He's ultimately sent to a juvenile facility when he's only 12
00:58:53
years old. So while he's at this facility, Frederic starts to experiment with creating
00:58:58
characters. He often goes into town and pretends to have amnesia and like interact with people to
00:59:05
be like, help me. I don't know what's going on. I have amnesia. Like, you know. Yes. Can I just say really quick that that sound, it's like the kind of thing where I would guess
00:59:12
he saw it in a TV show or in a movie. Right. Because that is, it is that kind of thing of
00:59:18
like, oh, this exists in the world. What would it be like if that happened to me? And then you just
00:59:22
kind of want to try it out. Yeah. Yeah. One of his teachers refers to these things he does as
00:59:29
quote his little dramas. So it's just like he's testing the waters of getting attention,
00:59:35
not in a nefarious way, I don't personally think, but in a, you know, in a bid for attention.
00:59:42
And in a way that I think maybe makes people dismiss him instead of embrace him, which is
00:59:48
what he wants. And instead, it's like you and your little dramas. Then it like oh then does nothing I say matter Like nothing I tell anybody matter Yeah So when he 16 which is in around 1990 he runs away to Paris And this is when he first tries to fully adopt the character of an actual
01:00:07
missing child. He tells people that he's a boy named Jimmy Sale and that he's from England.
01:00:13
And I looked this kid up and I can't find any information about him other than he was just a
01:00:17
missing child. Of course, he doesn't really speak English and he does have a very heavy French
01:00:24
accent. So no one believes he's this missing English kid. But his intentions, he says to
01:00:30
David Graham from The New Yorker, he says, quote, I dreamed they would send me to England where I
01:00:34
always imagined life was more beautiful, end quote. So I don't think he thought the end game
01:00:39
through of like, if people believe you're this missing child, like you have a lot more work to
01:00:44
do. I think he just hoped that he would just, you know, suddenly have a new life. Yeah. So Frederico
01:00:51
has returned to the facility where he lives, but he keeps escaping maybe about a dozen times
01:00:55
and embodies the characters of fictional unhoused children. He almost always claims to have been
01:01:02
abused. And that's part of his story is I was an abused child and I ran away. And I think that that
01:01:07
has some truth to it. He's trying to get someone to pay attention to the fact that he was abused.
01:01:13
It's like, if I was a different child, would you care? If I was from England, would you care?
01:01:18
And he later says when he's interviewed that like, you know, he realizes the best thing to do is to tell as few lies as possible. So be, you know, the details should be true, because then you have to remember as much stuff people believe you. And so I think this abused part is, is definitely part of that.
01:01:36
he goes all over the place. He goes to way more places than I've ever been. Spain, Germany,
01:01:43
Belgium, Bosnia, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, Denmark. Like it's because they're close. It's
01:01:50
close. You've been to a bunch of states. It's the same thing. If you're talking distance.
01:01:56
It doesn't sound as fun though. And also he's like a teenager, just like going all around Europe and
01:02:01
on a train. That's true. You could take a train everywhere. So it's not like he's
01:02:06
jet setting. Okay, fine. Fine. Don't be jealous. He keeps getting caught. And ultimately he confesses
01:02:14
every time he's not, he's not like trying too hard to embody this persona. And he appears to
01:02:19
relish the confession part. The moment when he tells people his secret, like he's kind of excited
01:02:25
about the fact that he's like, yeah, I did this. Isn't this amazing? Which I think says a lot too.
01:02:29
right yeah he continues this until he's 18 years old and then he's pretty much as you know as you
01:02:37
are here too in the foster system when you're 18 they're just like goodbye you know go fend for
01:02:41
yourself it's so sad it's like when we start fixing this country and I feel like it's going
01:02:46
to happen really soon I really hope at some point just imagine the timeline where things start going
01:02:53
well again, because we have to imagine it. It's important to think about it. Fixing, well,
01:02:59
obviously funding education and fixing the foster care system has to happen. Like that has to start
01:03:06
getting prioritized. We have to, it matters so much. Hey, let's give some money away right now.
01:03:11
Okay. Let's take a second. We can look up the one that Kara Clank works for. Yeah. Let's look that up. Okay. So we're going to donate $10,000 to National CASA GAL Association
01:03:22
for children. It's where court appointed special advocates or guardians ad litem supports and
01:03:28
promotes court appointed volunteer advocacy. So every child who has experienced abuse or neglect
01:03:33
can be safe, have a permanent home and the opportunity to thrive. And we know about it
01:03:39
because our own Kara Klink from That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast is a CASA appointee. So check out
01:03:45
nationalcasagal.org. It's a great organization. Yeah, that's such a good cause. Thank you,
01:03:52
Kara for working for them. Hey, that feels good. That feels good. So he's 18 now, right? And that
01:04:00
suddenly means you know what you're doing and you can move on with your life, right? As we all did.
01:04:05
Right. Yeah. Your brain is not done cooking. You guys, if you're freaking out right now,
01:04:10
you're 19. You're like, how come I don't have my shit together? Your brain is not done. You have
01:04:14
a soft boiled egg in your head. And I feel like at that age, that's when the bad ideas really start
01:04:22
to gestate and really start to come to the fore. That's when I was like, oh, I know I'm going to
01:04:27
drive like two hours away and get drunk. That'll be good. Like shit like that. Yeah. The quote
01:04:34
unquote independence and all those ideas. We were like, I'm going to do the thing my mom told me not
01:04:39
to do. And that's how you learn why she told you not to do them. We're going to drink Zima in my
01:04:45
car before we go into the club because we can't buy alcohol in the club. So we're going to sit in
01:04:51
the car and get drunk first. Like, what the fuck? And that doorman will never know this 18-year-old
01:04:57
is drunk. Of course not. No, of course not. Jesus Christ. So not knowing what else to do with
01:05:03
himself at 18, Frederic continues these ruses early into adulthood. He does still look young,
01:05:09
you know. He goes to various European cities and pretends to be an unhoused youth. On some
01:05:15
occasions, he just gets rid of the accent problem and pretends to be mute. And in order to look
01:05:21
younger, he shaves his face. He does eyebrow work. I don't know. He wears clothes that are too big to
01:05:27
make him look small. And as I said, he tells as few lies as possible. All of his characters at
01:05:34
their core are the same and basically the truth of who he is as best as we can tell, because who
01:05:39
the fuck knows? A young person who has suffered abuse and is looking for a home. It's only the
01:05:44
superficial details that change each time. This is really smart. When someone says he looks older
01:05:49
than he claiming to be he acts pleased He like I do Thank you Because every teen wants to look older It a great one I just keep thinking thinking my nephew micah at 14 wanting to be an adult so bad and you like quit it yeah dude i mean that
01:06:06
the great irony of life is that the kids don't know how great they have it i don't they're not
01:06:11
supposed to at the same time you couldn't fucking pay me to be a kid again no way it sucks no it
01:06:16
sucks so bad what what was i even saying i don't know literally 10 seconds ago the thought i mean
01:06:23
it's hard it's hard to be a kid okay every time he shows up in a new city he places a call to
01:06:29
authorities this is actually genius he pretends to be an anonymous concerned adult so he says
01:06:36
i was in the train station or whatever i saw this kid who doesn't look well like he obviously needs
01:06:43
help you should come check out this kid the authorities come down thinking an adult called
01:06:48
and are like, oh yeah, this kid needs help. Yeah, that's smart. It's pretty smart. That's kind of
01:06:53
like when my sister and I called the cops on our own party because all these people showed up from
01:06:58
other schools. We're like, what the fuck is this? We're going to get in so much trouble.
01:07:02
Exactly. Yeah. That's very smart. After a few years of this, so Frederic is known to local
01:07:09
authorities and to Interpol. Here's the weird thing about him. He, not weird, I guess, but he
01:07:14
loves the attention so much that he'll tell his story of what he's doing publicly for the praise.
01:07:23
Yeah. In a way. So he goes on a TV show, a French TV show called Everything is Possible
01:07:28
and basically says what he does and tells people that, you know? I would love to be able to make a French friend who can tell me what they're saying on Everything
01:07:39
is Possible and watch Everything is Possible. I think that is possible. Do you think it's possible?
01:07:44
I do. I have a French friend, Melissa. Do you know why? She could totally do it for you.
01:07:48
Because everything is possible. Tout le monde, c'est possible. Yeah. But here's the thing. On the show, he tells everything, but then he says he does it.
01:07:57
He tells everyone it's not for money. He's not making money off of this. It's not, you know,
01:08:02
whatever it is, he says he wants a loving home and a family. Yeah. And it really just seems like every time he does this, he wants to be placed somewhere
01:08:09
where he can feel like he's at home. Oh. I know. And like just fit in and have a normal, like a kid's normal life. The producers of the
01:08:19
show feel so bad for him. And I guess like him so much that they give him an entry level job at the
01:08:26
TV station. But he fucking later days and he runs away from that job. Well, yeah, I guess because
01:08:33
he's never really had structure or any kind of like example of here's how you would do this or
01:08:38
you should want to do this. This is not, yeah, it's not what he wants. Yeah. Right. I mean,
01:08:44
I'm sure there's a huge element of the excitement in it for him too, that like not knowing day to
01:08:51
day, like what the next day will bring. That's gotta be fun. And I bet working at a TV station
01:08:56
doesn't give you that excitement. No, it kind of sucks. It's hard in that you, they're like, take this pallet of water and run down there. And he's like, oh,
01:09:04
This is actually work. This is not glamorous at all. Gotta go. So now we're in October of 1997.
01:09:12
Frederic is 23 years old. He's at a youth home in Spain, but the local authorities in Interpol are closing in.
01:09:19
He's been told by a local judge that he has one day to prove that he's a teenager.
01:09:22
They're kind of like, you're not giving us enough information. We're on to you. Like prove you're a teenager.
01:09:28
How do you do that? Well, I'm about to write a movie about it. That's the fucking funniest premise of all time.
01:09:35
Poor man's copyright. Do not steal this idea. You have one day to prove you're a teenager.
01:09:41
And you're actually like. Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen. Oh, prove you're a teenager, Ashley and Mary-Kate.
01:09:49
Somebody, I think it was on TikTok, showed this thing. They were holding up an ashtray.
01:09:53
And there's a picture of Mary-Kate and Ashley. And it says Mary-Kate and ashtray.
01:10:00
They love smoking. It writes itself. It really does. It's so. You have one day to prove you're a teenager.
01:10:06
What do you do first? In Europe. You're in Europe. What do you do first? Smoke? What would I do?
01:10:12
I'd go roller skating like I wasn't worried about my back. Oh, nice. Nice one. That's what a teenager would do.
01:10:18
That's what Georgia as a teenager did. Free skate. Free skate. What would you do?
01:10:22
Drink wine coolers. And roller skate? Under the Lach de Triomphe. Yeah. Okay. So he's like, oh, fuck.
01:10:32
I might go to prison for this. I need to come up with a new plan. So instead of impersonating a
01:10:37
fictional lost child, he comes up with this idea to find a real missing kid and impersonate that kid.
01:10:44
He clearly has not thought this through. And every step of the way, he's like, oh, shit,
01:10:48
I haven't thought this through. But for some reason, this fucking thing works. And I think
01:10:53
this is the crux of the story is like, what it brought out is, is dark. Yes. And I don't think
01:11:00
He intended to do it, but he did. And it's also horrible and awful to impersonate actual missing children.
01:11:05
Like, I don't want to make him seem all fun and games. Like, what he did is terrible.
01:11:09
Yeah. But he was selfish. And at this point, how old is he? He's 23. He's not thinking two steps ahead.
01:11:17
You know, he's thinking one. He's not a teenager, but he's certainly not. He hasn't had the kind of life where he can be like a responsible 23-year-old.
01:11:25
Right, right, right. So in this youth home, he calls the U.S. He calls the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, basically explains to
01:11:36
them in English. He could speak pretty good English now that he's just a concerned adult over in Spain.
01:11:43
And he's met with a teenage boy who speaks English with an American accent. The boy seems scared.
01:11:48
So he gives the operator a physical description of the quote boy and some little details and
01:11:54
asked if it sounds like any missing American children. And this poor representative is probably
01:12:00
He was just like so excited to try to help and gives Frederic a name. And that name is a missing boy named Nicholas Barclay.
01:12:09
Nicholas had been reported missing three years earlier, a little more than three years,
01:12:12
when he was just 13 years old out of San Antonio, Texas. He'd been playing baseball with friends.
01:12:19
He had called for a ride home, but his older brother told him to walk. And he was never heard from after that.
01:12:26
And there's so much more to this story because I think this was a troubled home that this kid came from.
01:12:32
This kid also, Nicholas was troubled, like, and kind of ironically in the same way Frederick was, where his home life was unstable.
01:12:42
He was starting to get into trouble because of that. He didn't really have stability that he needed.
01:12:48
His mom was using heroin. His brother had moved back home to kind of try to tame this rebellious kid.
01:12:55
and he went missing. And it's really sad. He's this cute, like skater looking blonde,
01:13:01
little 13 year old boy. He had some homemade tattoos, which I had at the same time I had when
01:13:06
I was 13 too. It's like, when you're, when you're in it, you're in it, you know? So Frederick is able
01:13:13
to get the representative to send him a fax and then a package from the National Center for Missing
01:13:18
and Exploited Children with pictures of Nicholas and a bunch of details about him going missing,
01:13:23
like what he was wearing at the time. When Frederick sees this photo, he's like, oh shit,
01:13:29
this isn't going to work. Frederick has brown hair and brown eyes and Nicholas, the missing boy,
01:13:34
has blonde hair and blue eyes. So basically Frederick dyes his hair. He concocts a story
01:13:41
about why his eye color has changed. And he gets someone at the youth center to give him a stick
01:13:47
and poke tattoo that matches the one that Nicholas had when he disappeared. And finally,
01:13:55
the Nicholas Barclays family are informed that their missing child has been found. Nicholas's
01:14:01
half sister, 31 year old Carrie flies her first time out of the US flies to Spain to see if it's
01:14:09
actually her brother, her little missing brother. Yeah. So sad. So sad. So Frederick puts on a hat
01:14:17
and wraps a scarf around his face. He's like, sure, he's going to get caught immediately.
01:14:21
But she sees him and she wraps her arms around him and is like so happy to see her missing brother.
01:14:30
Yeah. It seems like she wants it to be him. She does believe it's him. I do believe that she really did think it was him.
01:14:38
Yeah. For whatever reason, I do think she believed it. So he immediately violates his own rule
01:14:44
to keep his lies as simple as possible. Frederick says that he was abducted by a pedophile ring and that the reason his eye
01:14:51
color has changed is because they injected chemicals in his eyes to turn them from
01:14:55
brown to blue. Like that's the extent of the lie. And this family still wanted to believe it.
01:15:02
Yeah. I think, sorry about watching that documentary. Yeah. I feel like the idea that he is there saying he was abducted by a pedophile ring when that
01:15:12
was part of it. it's like, that's such a, at the time, bizarre, mysterious possibility that if they say this,
01:15:20
they changed us so that you couldn't find us. It makes sense. It's like, well, then sure. Then
01:15:26
that's why we couldn't find you. Of course you have a French-ish accent. You've been held hostage
01:15:31
for this long and they've like, it's like mind control. Like these little things can be explained
01:15:35
away easily by the trauma that you've been through and people are not going to push to get you to
01:15:41
tell them more about the trauma to prove it. Yeah. You know, that's exactly right. So posing as
01:15:47
Nicholas, Frederick is brought back to Texas and he has like a panic attack on the plane where he's
01:15:51
like, I'm about to go meet this family. They're all going to know it's not me. Like how, how is
01:15:57
this even, how has this even worked thus far? Like he had not planned the rest of it. Yeah.
01:16:02
And actually in the documentary, Nicholas's mother, the real Nicholas's mother, Beverly
01:16:07
looks trepidatious and kind of fearful and holds back a little in the documentary when she first
01:16:13
sees Frederick, aka fake Nicholas, getting off the plane. But she ends up holding him and accepting
01:16:21
him as her son, as her missing son. So Frederick has learned small details about Nicholas's life
01:16:26
from some family members. He then like, he'll get a little info from one family member and then
01:16:31
parrot it back to another. And they'll, so they'll think he just remembered it. And they all seem to
01:16:35
want to believe it's Nicholas except for Jason, the older brother. He's a recovering addict who
01:16:42
now works at a treatment facility and he doesn't meet them at the airport, even though he lives in
01:16:47
the area. He takes a while to come home to see his brother, who's this guy claiming to be his
01:16:53
brother. When he does see him, he's standoffish, but ultimately he gives Frederick a hug. But also
01:17:00
on the way out, Frederick claims that Jason said to him, good luck, man. Like, yeah. And he,
01:17:06
and he never sees him again. You know what I mean? He knows. He knows something's up. We'll get there.
01:17:12
So then this TV crew is skeptical about this story And so they hire a private investigator and the crew tries to get everyone to interview on camera And the family like no no leave us alone We want to just like have this have our boy back Except for Frederick
01:17:28
who's like, yes, I love the spotlight. Let's do this. This is the part I love. Yeah. I don't know
01:17:34
why he did that. During the interview, the private investigator, whose name is Charlie Parker, by the
01:17:39
way, like the jazz legend, he sees this photo of Nicholas before he disappeared, sitting right
01:17:46
behind frederick who's he's interviewing and he can tell it's not like there's little things that
01:17:52
he's like and in the documentary it doesn't look like him but you could kind of you could kind of
01:17:59
get there you know what i mean sure it's not impossible that it could be him maybe well
01:18:05
the story itself is a victory because we almost never hear stories yes of years later a missing
01:18:12
child being recovered in that way where it's like, you know, the tragedy of any family just
01:18:20
losing a son and that's it. And then out of the blue, however many years later, 10, 15 years later.
01:18:28
No, it was only three and a half. It was only three and a half years later. Yeah.
01:18:32
So he's like, I'm a 16 year old now. Oh, I'm so sorry. But the trauma of losing that child
01:18:37
and then you have this gift of them coming back. You probably don't, if everything's on the level,
01:18:43
you don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, right? Like you don't want to look too hard.
01:18:48
And then it's also like, why the fuck would someone do that? Why would someone do that?
01:18:51
Right. It doesn't make sense. Like the problem, the solve of the problem of like, this couldn't be him.
01:18:58
Well, that means someone's pretending to be him. There's no way someone would pretend to be him.
01:19:03
That is a very logical kind of, therefore it's him. It must be him. The hard part of it is there are people who would do this for reasons that aren't familiar to us.
01:19:15
Because we wouldn't do it doesn't mean someone else wouldn't do it. Right, right.
01:19:20
And it's the late 90s. So the internet isn't really a thing in most homes. Such a different time.
01:19:27
Yeah. And like all the scams we know about don't happen yet. Oh, all the information of like, these are, here's what's actually going on. This is,
01:19:38
it used to be an urban myth. No, actually that's real, but it's worse than you think. And it's
01:19:43
like those days started when I was like 21. Yeah. Where it's like, Oh, I guess I'm a compulsive
01:19:51
liar. And it's like, no, we all were everywhere. It's like my aunts would tell me urban legends
01:19:56
like that. It happened to their neighbor or whatever. That's, we all did that. And then Snopes came along and ruined it for everyone.
01:20:04
Yes. We all got to be smarter. Yeah. So they weren't as onto it as we are, I feel like now.
01:20:10
Okay. So this guy, Charlie Parker, the thing that he focuses in on are the earlobes.
01:20:16
Because he knows that earlobes don't change throughout one's life. Yeah. If you are born with the earlobes attached to your head, they're going to stay that way.
01:20:25
And he sees that Nicholas in his photo has earlobes attached to his head and the kid sitting in front of him.
01:20:33
Yeah. Touch your fucking earlobes. Yours are. Yours are attached. Are they? Yeah.
01:20:37
What about mine? Mine are a little, little knot. I can't, you can't see. They're far away.
01:20:42
I bet it's like a belly button too. Right. That's stupid. Okay. So yeah. So his earlobes aren't attached.
01:20:55
So the private investigator, Charlie Parker, he is pretty open about the fact that he doesn't
01:21:00
think Frederick is who he says he is. He basically like calls the family. He's like, that's not your boy.
01:21:05
And the mom is like, what are you talking about? Yes, it is. Charlie Parker made sure that Frederick knew that he was sure that Frederick was not Nicholas.
01:21:15
So he was on to his shit. And an FBI agent was also skeptical, like being able to tell that he obviously had bleached
01:21:23
his hair, you know, and had dark roots. It's like that simple. And this FBI agent asks both
01:21:29
Frederick and Beverly, the mother to give DNA samples, and they both refuse, which is suspish.
01:21:36
Yes. Basically, he's there for like two months and then starts to lose steam. He's living with
01:21:42
the sister in a trailer home on the floor of her son's bedroom. He's like, this kind of sucks. He's
01:21:51
going to high school. He's not having what he thought would be a great time in the US. Yeah.
01:21:57
And so after a few months of living as Nicholas, he confesses to both Beverly and to Charlie Parker,
01:22:03
the private investigator, that he is not who he says he is. Jason, Nicholas's older brother,
01:22:09
dies of an overdose not long after Frederick has revealed himself. Mm-hmm. And so several investigators and Frederic will imply that the whole time,
01:22:21
Jason and Beverly, the brother and mother of Nicholas, somehow had known what really happened
01:22:27
to Nicholas. And they knew from the very beginning that Frederic could not have been Nicholas because
01:22:32
they knew for whatever reason that Nicholas was dead. They had to pretend to believe this imposter
01:22:38
so they could cover for themselves. Yeah. That is a very creepy turn in that documentary That happened in the documentary I didn even put that together until they said it in the documentary I was like holy shit
01:22:52
Yeah. That makes so much more sense of why they would believe this fucking adult man with, you know, French accent is their kid.
01:23:00
It's that they didn't believe it. They didn't and they needed it. It was like, oh, this is a perfect cover.
01:23:06
It's a perfect cover. And if we say, no, it's not, then it's going to get reopened too.
01:23:10
Yeah. the case. Wild. So fucking wild. But no one's ever charged with a crime. The case doesn't seem to
01:23:19
have gone anywhere, which is so sad. And Frederick says he thinks several family members actually knew
01:23:24
that he was faking the whole time and knows what really happened to Nicholas Barclay.
01:23:30
And he admits that what he did to them was cruel, obviously. Frederick is ultimately sentenced to
01:23:36
six years in prison, which is a pretty harsh sentence for his crimes, which are perjury and
01:23:41
obtaining false documents. Because every time this happens, authorities don't know what to charge him
01:23:45
with because he hasn't stolen from anyone. He's not, he's just faking being who he is.
01:23:52
Yeah. Six years feels like they're trying to prove a point or that it got, like the case
01:23:56
itself got famous. So they had to do it. Or everyone got duped. And so they're like, yeah.
01:24:02
While most of Nicholas's family is angry and heartbroken, Beverly, Nicholas's mother, isn't.
01:24:08
She tells David Grand, quote, I feel sorry for him. You know, we got to know him.
01:24:14
And this kid has been through hell. He has a lot of nervous habits. He did a lot of things that took a lot of guts, if you think about it, end quote.
01:24:22
So after his release from prison in 2003, Frederick returns to Europe, goes right back
01:24:27
to impersonating various missing children. But he's caught quickly each time. in 2005 in France, now 31 year old Frederick, once again, winds up in a shelter for children.
01:24:39
Like again, he's doing it. Yeah. And he's 31. He says he had been in a horrible car accident
01:24:44
that killed the rest of his family, that he had then been sent to live with an uncle who had
01:24:48
abused him and then he escaped. And so he says that he's covered in scars and burns from the
01:24:54
accident. So he's given a private room. He's allowed to wear a hat at the school he ends up
01:24:58
going to, which they don't let anyone else wear hats. They had like uniforms. And it seems like
01:25:02
everyone loved him there. He got popular with the kids. I think the teachers and the administrators
01:25:07
like felt sad for him and kind of, you know, took them under his wing. He was charming and
01:25:14
charismatic and people were drawn to him and he kind of got what he wanted, which was like a home.
01:25:22
Well, then good, right? Yeah, but not for long. Oh, so he settles into this home. But then one night, a school administrator is watching TV and sees a special about an infamous serial imposter named Frederick Bourdain, who looks just like this new student that everyone loves. So she freaks out. She tells the leadership, they call the police. She also you're thinking, I'm thinking to myself, like, if they all loved him, what if they had been like, oh, well, and like, let him stay there. He's not hurting anyone.
01:25:50
Right. Is he just he's using up services that a kid might actually need? Definitely. Definitely. So they realize it's Frederick. You know, they take his hat off. He
01:26:01
doesn't have scars under his hat, but he is balding. And that's why he wanted to keep the hat on.
01:26:06
Oh, because he's like, I don't look like a kid. I don't look like a 16 year old anymore. I'm
01:26:10
fucking 31. Yeah. And the jig is up. The local prosecutor tells David Graham, the journalist,
01:26:15
quote, in my 22 years on the job, I've never seen a case like it. Usually people con for money.
01:26:21
His profit seems to have been purely emotional, end quote. So after this last con, Frederick seems
01:26:27
to settle down, at least for a while. In 2007, he gets married. He and his wife have five children,
01:26:33
and it seems like he wants to set a good example for his kids. And so he stops, you know, pulling these pranks. He also now looks like an adult, so it's kind of impossible to...
01:26:43
wait that's so beautiful i know i know he he made his own home he made his own home and family
01:26:51
that's all it took still in 2008 when david gran asked if he's a changed man he says quote no
01:26:58
this is who i am end quote yes thank you honesty yeah and it does seem like he's like this is this
01:27:06
is the way he just accepts it you know and he's like i'm not i don't want to be a monster i've
01:27:10
never wanted to be a monster, but this is how I am. Yeah. There's never been any answers in the
01:27:14
Nicholas Barclay case. And that is the story of the chameleon, Frederick Bourdain. Wow. That was
01:27:21
great. I mean, it's so frustrating that the Nicholas Barclay case just disappears. Like,
01:27:27
there's just no solution. And even with this, because of course there's also like in the movie
01:27:34
version and the Hollywood version, this kid who has this obsession with like impersonating younger
01:27:40
people and trying to get the love he wants would help solve the Nicholas Barclay case.
01:27:45
Yeah. Like we need answers in this one. It's one of those cold cases that you hate.
01:27:49
And now I'm mad about it too. Right. And it's also, it should have been investigated better.
01:27:56
Definitely. It shouldn't have been exploitable. I feel like San Antonio has got to be such a like where where would his body be you know Well in the documentary the guy becomes convinced that that kid is buried in the backyard fuck okay yeah which is like and but then they dig and
01:28:18
they don't find anything and so they have to like not talk about it anymore but it was like one of
01:28:22
those things where it almost is satisfying and then it's like no it's so sad just this like
01:28:29
rebellious kid for obvious reasons. Like when they're like 12 year olds are bad and they have
01:28:35
to go to juvie. And it's like, that's not true. No, no, they're not. They're a circumstance
01:28:41
of their home life, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, good one. Thank you. You too. Should we do some of their, what are you even doing right now? So we can just kind of
01:28:51
end on a high note. Yes. We ask you now a days, what are you even doing right now when you listen
01:28:57
to my favorite murder and now we're going to tell you what you're even doing right now.
01:29:01
You're going to tell us and we're going to tell you what people have told us. That's right. Okay. You want to go first? You want me to go first?
01:29:07
Go ahead. Okay. This is emailed to us. It says, I live in Maui, Hawaii and work for an ecotours
01:29:13
whale watching at snorkel company. My job is to find and train marine biologists to narrate
01:29:18
whale watches and teach people how to save the ocean. I like to listen to my favorite murder
01:29:23
while watching humpback whales. That's amazing. I know. More than once, I've heard your voices at the same time
01:29:30
with a live broadcast of whale singing over our hydrophone, an underwater microphone,
01:29:36
that it says, you sound great together. Yeah, we duetted a fucking humpback whale.
01:29:43
Okay, as a child whose family had a National Geographic subscription and one of those magazines came
01:29:50
with a little vinyl 45 of whale songs that I listen to all the time. May I tell you,
01:29:57
that is the most exciting news of all time. Oh my God. You did a TikTok duet with a humpback whale.
01:30:04
The whales. Oh my God. That's so good. Okay. Should I do mine? Yeah. Okay. Let's see. This
01:30:08
is from S.Christophorakis. And they say, what am I doing? Cutting olives, hand cutting so many
01:30:17
olives. How many hand cut olives? 1.5 hours of hand cut Kalamata fucking olives.
01:30:26
Why? Yeah. Whales and olives. Whales and olives. That's it? Well, I gotta know why. Making a big Greek salad for a fucking buffet?
01:30:34
Do they work at Roundtable Pizza? It could be a thousand reasons. Tell us, what are you even doing right now? Wherever you can think to get a hold of us.
01:30:45
please thanks so much for listening you guys yes we appreciate you we're glad we didn't hang up on
01:30:51
you at the beginning of this episode it's so nice that you stayed on the phone this entire time
01:30:56
because this was a great call it was a conference call with you and me and everybody listening
01:31:02
yep and everyone and we appreciate you guys and we really want you to stay sexy and don't get
01:31:08
murdered. Give it. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Ah! Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at MyFavoriteMurder and Twitter at MyFaveMurder.
01:31:43
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01:31:53
Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Dani Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.
01:32:04
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Episode Highlights

  • Bleep with Anna Navarro
    Anna Navarro tackles the biggest issues affecting communities and the world today.
    “Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.”
    @ 00m 46s
    May 09, 2024
  • The Knife Podcast
    A podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
    “The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.”
    @ 18m 23s
    May 09, 2024
  • Family Secrets Season 14
    Dani Shapiro explores stunning stories of identity and secrecy.
    “Your identity is formed by a secret history.”
    @ 18m 59s
    May 09, 2024
  • Escalation of Crimes
    Innocuous thefts of women's underwear escalate to violent assaults, revealing a dark pattern.
    “This usually is the beginning of a very bad and usually escalating series of crimes.”
    @ 27m 22s
    May 09, 2024
  • The Shocking Confession
    Russell Williams confesses to multiple murders and assaults, detailing his horrific actions.
    “Essentially, Russell Williams confesses to all four of the crimes that have been laid out before him.”
    @ 38m 00s
    May 09, 2024
  • Russell Williams' Guilty Plea
    Russell Williams pleads guilty to all charges, including two first-degree murders.
    “Russell Williams pleads guilty to all 88 charges on October 18th, 2010.”
    @ 46m 47s
    May 09, 2024
  • Wife Accused of Complicity
    Williams' wife faces accusations of knowing about his crimes and benefiting financially.
    “The suit alleges that she kept quiet because she stood to gain financially.”
    @ 48m 00s
    May 09, 2024
  • Frederic's Troubled Childhood
    Frederic Bourdain's early life is marked by neglect and abuse, leading to his later impersonations.
    “He had this way of making you connect to him.”
    @ 58m 21s
    May 09, 2024
  • Frederic's Desperate Plan
    Frederic decides to impersonate a real missing child, Nicholas Barclay.
    “I might go to prison for this. I need to come up with a new plan.”
    @ 01h 10m 32s
    May 09, 2024
  • The Family's Hope
    Nicholas's family believes Frederic is their missing son, despite the oddities.
    “She wraps her arms around him and is so happy to see her missing brother.”
    @ 01h 14m 26s
    May 09, 2024
  • Frederic's Confession
    After months of living as Nicholas, Frederic confesses the truth.
    “He confesses to both Beverly and to Charlie Parker.”
    @ 01h 22m 03s
    May 09, 2024
  • TikTok Duet with a Whale
    An exciting moment where a TikTok duet with a humpback whale is revealed.
    “Oh my God. You did a TikTok duet with a humpback whale.”
    @ 01h 29m 57s
    May 09, 2024

Episode Quotes

  • Oh my God.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky
  • An officer and a murderer, it's called.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky
  • He has a lot to be scared about with cops looking through his house.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky
  • That's really sad. That's awful.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky
  • You have one day to prove you're a teenager.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky
  • No, this is who I am.
    427 - Pineapples Stacked To The Sky

Key Moments

  • Unexpected Turns18:23
  • Mysterious SUV21:56
  • Police Interrogation34:17
  • Confession38:00
  • Wife's Divorce47:41
  • Desire for Home1:08:05
  • Prove You're a Teenager1:09:38
  • Frederic's Confession1:22:03

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown