00:00:00
This is exactly right. So whether you're grilling burgers, building a serious sandwich, or digging into pasta,
00:00:34
you're getting real flavor with a smarter protein-to-calorie balance. Hero makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles with 5 to 19 grams of protein per serving
00:00:44
that all go the distance. Shop now at Hero.co. Use code IHART for 10% off. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O.
00:00:52
All figures per serving. See nutrition info on Hero.co. 39% and 61% fewer calories than regular plain bagels and noodles, respectively.
00:00:58
Calorie content has been reduced from 270 to 130 and 200 to 80 calories per serving for plain bagels and noodles, respectively.
00:01:04
Data accurate as of 220-26. You're locked into a lot of things you can't change.
00:01:08
Weather, traffic. Hey, stay in your lane. Your wireless carrier's latest price hike.
00:01:13
But you can unlock a better way. Unlock the savings at Boost Mobile and save up to $600 a year.
00:01:18
Switch to the $25 a month unlimited wireless plan. No contracts, no price hikes, and you keep your phone.
00:01:24
Stop being locked into their games. Unlock the savings at boostmobile.com slash unlock.
00:01:28
Based on average annual single line of payment of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile customers,
00:01:31
compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited Wireless plan as of January 2026.
00:01:35
For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com. A burst pipe. A dead water heater.
00:01:40
The AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs.
00:01:47
With plans covering stuff, basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started.
00:01:55
Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50% less your first year.
00:02:02
That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price. Void in Florida.
00:02:23
Hello. and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hardstark. That's Karen Kilgariff.
00:02:31
Did you get the slurp? It was my sip of water right before your line. Was it loud enough or should I do it again with a louder slope of water?
00:02:40
You know, AMDR or what is it called? EMDR? No, that's electronic dance music. ASMR. ASMR.
00:02:47
You know, what if you just were changing the topic? You know, the Electric Daisy
00:02:51
festival where I love to do all my speakers, raving dancing. I went to that in like 1996.
00:02:58
Just give us a couple of the pictures that you've captured in your mind and tell us about it. I
00:03:03
don't remember which one it was because it's been so long, but I definitely had vinyl pants on.
00:03:08
I probably had crimped hair, tons of body glitter, but like everyone had body glitter on in the 90s.
00:03:14
So it wasn't like that big of a deal. Right. Just to go to Gelson's, you would do that. Totally. And
00:03:19
like, you know, Raver jewelry. That was little Georgia. I mean, what a time. What a time to be
00:03:27
alive. Did you, did you also wear white eyeliner? Yeah, that definitely happened. That was a thing
00:03:33
because, and I think this is the Gen X millennial distinction is we run a marketing meeting and
00:03:39
everyone was talking about when they used to wear white eyeliner. And I was like, God, I really hate
00:03:43
this feeling of not knowing what people are talking about. And then Erin actually showed a picture of
00:03:48
that era. Wow. And it was I was completely out of that. Like, you didn't even know it happened.
00:03:56
Yeah, that and then the like, bright pink, glittery, wet and wild lip gloss was my absolute
00:04:03
like, that's all I wore. Like, that was my thing. Always. Did they go together? Yeah. I mean,
00:04:09
yeah. I don't know. I was I'm not sure. Speaking of being high, let's get right into it.
00:04:18
have you heard that there is a cocaine shark and sharks going on? Well, I have. And the only reason I have is because our audience knows the news we want to
00:04:30
know. That's right. And immediately retweets and forwards us all of that kind of information.
00:04:36
That's fucking right. And we appreciate it. The Guardian says experts say cocaine sharks may be
00:04:40
feasting on drugs dumped off of Florida. Of course. Of course, Florida. Yeah. Do we maybe
00:04:47
should we put together a theory, a very fact-based theory right now that that's the only issue that
00:04:53
sharks actually have? And if it wasn't for the drugs, they'd be chill. What if that's the only
00:04:57
issue that Florida has? And if it weren't for the drugs, they would all go back to normal and stop
00:05:04
becoming a fascist state. That would be, I mean, yeah, it's actually just like, it's just like
00:05:10
Jaws. It's just the movie Jaws. But if you can catch a cocaine shark, it solves the country's
00:05:15
problems. Oh my God. We all come together hand in hand over rehabbing those sharks.
00:05:23
Being here for sharks instead of for ourselves for once. Can we please get those sharks some
00:05:30
fucking compassion? Our message we've always sent. This is what this podcast has always been about
00:05:35
and stop acting like we were never a marine biology slash drug rehab based podcast because
00:05:40
We have been since day one. Yeah. And you know that. And that's why you send us these stories.
00:05:46
Did you ever see, and this is a TikTok thing, because I don't know how recent it is, but
00:05:52
there is a video on TikTok of a woman who studies whales and she in the water swimming next to this blue whale and it really amazing And then they look over and here comes a great white shark Oh my God And she knows she
00:06:07
can't swim away. Yeah. Cause then it'll just chase her. And so she's kind of near the whale and the
00:06:13
whale's doing this thing where it is swimming, blocking the shark so she can get back to the boat.
00:06:19
But at one point she swims out and she just basically stands around and pushes the shark away by the nose.
00:06:27
Like it's a badly behaved dog. Like those things as they swim at you. It's all those teeth.
00:06:33
That's all you can see is those teeth. Oh, my God. It's pretty great. They have bad breath.
00:06:39
Sharks. You know what I mean? No, because it's like a constant saline solution rinse that they're doing across their teeth.
00:06:48
that's true every episode now i'm going to verbally describe a tiktok the worst way to
00:06:54
experience a tiktok which is someone retelling you but it's the only way i can experience i don't
00:07:00
have tiktok anymore i like i had it for like a month and then i just recently went back on and
00:07:05
it's like you don't have an account anymore like we deleted it fuck you so which is good i'm glad
00:07:09
i don't need it and i don't want it but they they're just like okay if you're not gonna be
00:07:14
you here with us every day, day and night, then you don't get it. Oh, you're not a team player,
00:07:19
then you don't get to fucking play on this team. Well, then you don't get to watch ring videos of
00:07:24
people falling down in their own icy driveway. Sorry. Oh, my God. There was one today. And the
00:07:32
funniest, look, I couldn't handle living in anywhere near ice. No, just absolutely not
00:07:37
prepared. It makes me laugh really hard, though, because, you know, these people have been living
00:07:41
like with icy driveways their whole lives, but they still, it's like a girl walking,
00:07:46
this is a ring video, walking out. And the second she steps, she starts the forward,
00:07:51
like her feet are going forward in front of her. She's like, is there like sound with them on, like on them? Can you hear them?
00:07:59
Normally no, but this one may not have been a ring because you could hear the noises she was
00:08:03
making before she hit the ground. And it was just absolute chef's kiss perfection. Really good.
00:08:10
It's like you're weaponizing your security camera. You know what I mean? I mean, also, and I think we've talked about this.
00:08:18
We're all always on camera now for real. I don't like it, but yes. Ring a doorbell.
00:08:23
They have you. I was actually thinking about that walking my dogs in the neighborhood because it makes
00:08:27
me so mad that people don't pick up their dog shit. And it happens a lot on my street.
00:08:33
And I just thought the next time anybody, there's a neighbor email, I'm going to be
00:08:38
like, by the way, can we start collecting up all the ring cam footage of people just letting their
00:08:43
dogs free range shit on the sidewalk? It's kind of a bummer. That's insane. It's even somehow more
00:08:50
insulting when they put it in a bag, a poop bag, and then leave the poop bag there. Do you ever see
00:08:57
that? People do that? Yes. And my neighbor, people fucking do that. Or it's like, there's one more
00:09:01
step, dude. No, I have not seen that. Have you been watching anything you like lately?
00:09:07
I have a podcast, if you can believe it. I'm watching a ton of stuff. The true crime one? I love that one.
00:09:12
Oh, I have a podcast. Did I tell you about my podcast? No, I found a podcast recently because I started following this guy on Instagram who makes these hilarious Midwestern mom videos.
00:09:26
And his name is Zachariah Porter. And he and his friend Jonathan Carson have a podcast called Camp Counselors.
00:09:34
it's basically them like just talking and telling you funny things like they did like a like recently
00:09:40
a beach day rundown of like must-haves and they're just hilarious you really feel like you're hanging
00:09:46
out with your camp counselors that are like way cooler and you want to be buds with them i love it
00:09:51
and are they is it like a long sketch like they're pretending like hey we're about to go to the
00:09:55
canteen but before we go yeah it'll be like canteen corner and then we'll just talk about
00:10:00
what snacks they're actually eating right now sort of thing i made that up but yes exactly
00:10:04
got it is it's camp themed it's camp themed like camp counselor themed yeah that's hilarious really
00:10:10
and they're just so both so funny and tell great stories and so yeah camp counselors highly
00:10:16
recommend between like true crime documentaries and podcasts get yourself a little humor get
00:10:23
yourself a little light and light and airy what have you got i tried to find remember that old
00:10:28
um guy from australia that had the interest like interesting mysteries podcast and we met him yes
00:10:36
it's not on anymore no and i couldn't remember the name yeah so i was like in the search thing
00:10:42
forever and i can't tell you how many things are named paranormal unexplained or mystery like
00:10:48
there's so many and then eventually i just found a reddit thread that said there was a lovely old
00:10:54
guy in Australia that used to read articles. And I was like, that's the one. And it was like,
00:11:00
mysteries abound. Mysteries abound. That's it. I can hear him saying it. In this world,
00:11:06
mysteries abound. Mysteries abound. They found a small statue in the desert. That's the one that
00:11:11
got me where I was like, oh, you're going to read us National Geographic articles? Like, hell yes.
00:11:15
You don't need to have like a fucking NPR podcast. You can just fucking read other people's articles
00:11:20
as long as you give the sources and give them credit. Just read a fucking mystery article.
00:11:25
Yes. Everyone needs a little, yeah, everyone needs a little like, let me disseminate this for you.
00:11:30
Let me shorten this for you just in this moment on this podcast. I mean, that concept built this podcast.
00:11:37
God bless. I survived. Are you watching, speaking of true crime, are you watching the HBO documentary Last Call?
00:11:46
And it's made by a friend of the podcast, Liz Garbus, who's so talented. No, I haven't heard of it.
00:11:52
It's Last Call, When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York And it is I didn know the story It from the early 90s And it talks a lot about homophobia in New York at the time and you know all over the fucking country
00:12:05
And there's a serial killer preying on gay men in New York city, like infiltrating this club scene
00:12:11
and the night, like the gay bar scene and serial killing and like dismembering and stuff. It's wild.
00:12:17
I read, I read that book because we were sent that book and I recommended that book,
00:12:22
but it was probably two years ago or so long ago. So as you were just describing it, I was like,
00:12:28
yes, that sounds familiar. That's called Last Call. Great. It's good. Oh, that's I'm in an
00:12:33
I'd love to watch that. And you don't have to read. Yeah. My family came to town. So I wasn't
00:12:39
really doing anything. But then one night, we watched a movie called polite society. That's
00:12:47
really it's a british movie and it's featuring like a british teenage girl whose family is oh
00:12:53
is it like the superhero kind of one yes oh my god is it the best yeah it's great it's like she
00:12:58
wants to be a stunt woman and it's made like a karate or a stunt movie or something like that
00:13:04
like she did so good it's such a great compelling way to make a movie about girls who are just like
00:13:10
going through it in high school yeah it's really good norah love it she did and then of course i
00:13:16
fell asleep. What I realized is when there's people at my house, I will fall asleep because
00:13:20
it's almost like I'm like a weird feral animal where it's like, oh, they're here now so I can
00:13:25
go to sleep. Yeah. Like you can, you can like, you're off the clock. You're off like duty of
00:13:30
like making sure nothing bad happens. Someone else has it. Yeah. They'll turn the lights out.
00:13:36
And so then I just like 30 minutes into anything, I'm like, so the next morning I was like,
00:13:41
hey how'd the end of that movie goes and she just like rolls her eyes at me it was so funny did you
00:13:46
go see barbie no i can't wait to see barbie but i didn't see i didn't do anything because it's
00:13:55
that thing of like having family at your house oh right i needed a recharge from just simply
00:14:00
talking to other people for several days in a row did you yeah it was good i liked it a lot it was fun it was fun watching in the theater
00:14:11
because everyone was laughing a lot. And I never do that, but I enjoyed it a lot.
00:14:15
Oh, that's right. You don't like movies. The way people got into it dressed up, there was, of course, a TikTok I saw
00:14:22
where women walking into the movie as people were walking out, they kept saying hi, Barbie, to anybody,
00:14:29
anybody that was wearing pink and leaving the theater. And it was like, women, dudes,
00:14:34
it was anybody that passed by. Hi, Barbie. And they'd go like, hi, Barbie. And it was the funniest, cutest,
00:14:39
just I think people need something positive to focus on and yes be together in and it has a
00:14:47
positive message so that's like we need that great it's not just like fucking mindless like
00:14:54
pretty drivel it's actually really well acted it's got really great storylines and I liked it a lot
00:14:59
yeah and the outfits are great I wore a pink dress to it of course with strawberries on it
00:15:04
did you do that of course I did you would those girls would have said hi Barbie to you if they
00:15:08
The Americana is full of a bunch of fucking fascists. So I guess it doesn't happen in Glendale, California.
00:15:18
Down here, people, everyone's pretending to be too cool to say hi, Barbie. You have to get that somewhere else in a different town.
00:15:24
All right. Fine. But I love that. Should we do Exactly Right Corner and then get into our stories?
00:15:30
Sure. All right. We have a podcast network called Exactly Right. And here are some updates from it.
00:15:35
OK, this is breaking news. Not only is the hilarious comedy podcast Adulting with Michelle Buteau and Jordan Carlos back from their summer break, but Adulting is now a weekly show.
00:15:46
You can listen every single Wednesday, which is great. And then on this week's episode of our newest show, Ghosted by Roz Hernandez, Roz is joined by none other than Lacey Mosley.
00:15:56
And she's the incredible host of the awesome podcast Scam Goddess. So like I feel like Roz Hernandez and Lacey Mosley together is like a power power team, you know.
00:16:06
That really is. And I'm sure everyone's listened to Scam Goddess. But if you haven't,
00:16:10
that is like one of the best scam podcasts there is out there. Definitely. Also in infectious disease news, on this podcast, I'll Kill You, Aaron and Aaron are going over
00:16:21
tularemia, which is also known as what? Rabbit fever, which typically infects humans through tick and deer fly bites.
00:16:32
Can we get rid of ticks? Let's save the sharks and let's fucking get rid of ticks.
00:16:36
They are the biggest dicks. Here come the emails. What you don't know is tics. Hey, and lastly, you're invited to head over to the My Favorite Murder store, which is at myfavoritemurder.com.
00:16:49
And you can check out a collection of enamel pins for this and other Exactly Right podcasts.
00:16:55
Everyone loves enamel pins. Get them for your leather jacket. You know, look cool.
00:16:59
Yeah. NYX, that's K-N-I-X, leak-proof underwear isn't just for one moment. It's for all the everyday moments you didn't realize leak-proof underwear could make easier.
00:17:12
Maybe it's day one of your period. Maybe it's a long travel day. Maybe it's hot outside.
00:17:17
You're on the move and you just want to feel fresh. Their leak-proof underwear comes in a range of absorbencies, from light to ultra,
00:17:24
and helps protect against periods, light leaks, sweat, and everyday surprises. And because they look and feel like real underwear,
00:17:33
they're soft, invisible underclothes, and machine washable. No extra hassle. No complicated routine.
00:17:41
Just dependable protection you can wash and re-wear. See why millions have made the switch to leak-proof underwear.
00:17:48
Visit Nix That K and use code FLOW15 for 15 off That K Code FLOW15 decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary
00:18:29
as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?
00:18:33
And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying
00:18:37
the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:18:43
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. And I left it on the
00:18:49
mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the
00:18:54
end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:19:05
Missatisfying breads and pastas and want to add protein without going overboard on calories?
00:19:10
Stacked sandwiches, fully loaded bagels, noodles built for serious sauce. Hero Bread delivers up
00:19:15
to 19 grams of protein. Think bagels and elbow noodles with nearly twice the protein of national
00:19:20
bestsellers, but less than half the calories. Plus, you can get up to 32 grams of fiber per
00:19:25
serving, a bonus when you're trying to stay full and fueled. So whether you're grilling burgers,
00:19:30
building a serious sandwich, or digging into pasta, you're getting real flavor with a smarter
00:19:34
protein-to-calorie balance. Hero makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles with 5 to
00:19:40
19 grams of protein per serving that all go the distance. Shop now at hero.co. Use code
00:19:46
iHeart for 10% off. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures per serving. See nutrition info on
00:19:52
hero.co. 39% and 61% fewer calories than regular plain bagels and noodles, respectively. Calorie
00:19:56
content has been reduced from 270 to 130 and 280 calories per serving for plain bagels and
00:20:01
noodles, respectively. Data accurate as of 2-20-26. Are you're first this week, right? Okay, yeah.
00:20:09
I mean, no. What? I mean, you are as a fact. Oh. Not like. You're not offering it.
00:20:16
not like you go that's not how we do it no all right well today i'm going to tell you
00:20:22
about a mysterious death of an actor it's tv's first superman george reeves you know about this well i do well i kind of knew about it a little bit because it's one of
00:20:37
those ones where if you ever look up like creepy hollywood blank it'll always come up but then
00:20:42
there was that there's a Ben Affleck movie. Hollywoodland. That's right. Yeah. It's Ben
00:20:48
Affleck who plays George Reeves. It's a good movie. 2006. Is it? Yeah. I liked it. I feel like it's
00:20:55
I've found it midway through on regular TV and you know. Oh yeah. For sure. I've never done the
00:21:01
comprehensive title to title viewing. Well I'm going to do it for you today. It's also in an
00:21:07
episode of Unsolved Mysteries from 1995. So you can check that out as well. You know, tour de force.
00:21:14
Ben Affleck's not in that one, though, unfortunately. They should have got him for it. Definitely.
00:21:18
That was a mistake. So my main source is that Unsolved Mysteries episode and a 2006 article
00:21:24
from the LA Times by Robert Welkos called Who Killed TV Superman? And the other sources are
00:21:29
in our show notes. All right. So let me tell you about George Reeves and his background.
00:21:33
Okay. He's born George Kiefer Brewer because actors don't have the real names as their acting names.
00:21:40
It's a chance to change and be new. Yeah. He's born in January of 1914 in Wollstock, Iowa,
00:21:48
and his parents separate shortly after he's born. And he and his mom moved to beautiful Pasadena,
00:21:55
California. What's up? Nice. His mother remarries a man named Frank Joseph Besolo,
00:22:01
and Frank adopts George. And I guess George is really little because he's brought up to believe
00:22:07
that this dude, this new stepdad dude is his actual biological father. So he takes his name,
00:22:12
George Kiefer Bessolo, and then the mom, Helen, and her husband, Frank, divorce when George is a
00:22:18
teenager. And it was while George was out of town visiting relatives. They just fucking divorced.
00:22:23
And when he gets back from visiting, instead of telling him the truth, George's mother tells him
00:22:28
that Frank, who he thinks is his father, died by suicide rather than telling him that they just
00:22:36
divorced. Like somehow that's better. Sorry. Is this what year is this like the 20s or the 30s?
00:22:42
Probably. It looks like the 20s. Yeah. I mean, people had bad ideas back then. They all went
00:22:48
unchecked. And the way anybody ever handled anything was the worst, it seems. Truly. And
00:22:55
it's like it says later that she did it because she was doting and overprotective like divorce is
00:23:01
somehow worse than he's just not alive anymore i mean it's one way to interpret it but i would say
00:23:08
that that's being incredibly self-centered to not care the effect right it would have to not only lie
00:23:15
that your adoptive father is your real father but then say now he's dead totally that seems like
00:23:21
Taking his own life. Yeah, it does. Yes. Yeah. It's a nightmare. Okay. So one time George is going through some pictures, finds a picture at his home of a good looking
00:23:31
guy, big dude, and asked his mom who that was. And she offhandedly said, oh, that's your father.
00:23:37
And then stopped dead because she realized what she had just fucking said. It was like, not the dad.
00:23:42
And he said, quote, I thought I was Italian. Little George Bessolo, who talked Italian and Spanish with the other Bessalos and ate
00:23:49
spaghetti and all of the rest of it. And then I found out that I was Irish, all Irish.
00:23:55
Sorry. Sorry. It's called 23andMe. Check it out. The old version of 23andMe where it's like someone comes and takes your plate of spaghetti away and then puts a just big bottle of whiskey in front of you and says, get to drinking, Junior.
00:24:08
Boiled cabbage is what you eat now. No food tastes good after this. So as a teenager, George likes to sing and act. He also likes boxing, but he gives that up because his mom is overprotective and is like, quit.
00:24:21
And so he focuses on acting and he performs at the Pasadena Playhouse for about five years and is discovered there by a casting director.
00:24:28
this leads to him signing a contract with Warner Brothers and this is when Hollywood is still
00:24:34
operating under those studio systems where like you get hired by a studio and you're contracted
00:24:39
to a specific amount of you know movies or whatever so his film career gets off to a great
00:24:44
start one of his very first roles is in 1939 when he is on a little picture called Gone with the Wind
00:24:52
what yeah was he can i guess yes was he one of the party goers at the very beginning opening
00:24:58
scene party i think so there's twin redheads trying to woo her i think i knew that sorry i
00:25:05
think i tried to get credit for knowing it i think i knew that already but i didn't know that and
00:25:10
does he play twins with another actor i think so they didn't have green no no well i don't know
00:25:18
here, here's what I need to learn to say. I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that they didn't
00:25:25
have that technology back then. And it was him and another guy. Yeah. Okay. That's my guess.
00:25:29
That's a pretty big fucking deal, right? Yes. At this point, George is 25 and the studio is like
00:25:35
betting on him and they want to change his name. So they change it from George Bessolo to George
00:25:42
Reeves. Classic. And there's some, Allie, my researcher said, other name changes of this era
00:25:49
include Cary Grant, who was born Archibald Leach. Classic. Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan
00:25:56
Persky, which is cute. That is cute. So in 1940, George marries a woman named Eleonora Needles,
00:26:02
which is the most punk name I've ever heard in my life. That is pretty badass. She's a fellow
00:26:08
actor from the Pasadena Playhouse. And after Gone with the Wind, he works steadily, but doesn't
00:26:13
really break through until 1943 when he's about 29 and he lands a starring role in the World War
00:26:19
II film So Proudly We Hail. The film is a success and it might have launched George's career,
00:26:26
but it also inspires him to enlist, which is like noble and shit. So around 30 years old,
00:26:32
George enlists under his real name instead of a stage name in order to avoid special treatment
00:26:38
but they find out that he's an actor and he winds up getting special duty assignments in the
00:26:42
entertainment corps where he performs for the troops so what if you're like i want to go fight
00:26:46
the good fight and they're like get on stage and tap dance you know that's kind of embarrassing
00:26:51
that's like especially because he's a big guy so i'm sure he was like yeah this is i'll yeah you
00:26:57
know i'll pull my weight i'll get in there and do my duty like everybody else in this country seems
00:27:02
to be doing. And then they're like, the Entertainment Corps. But then you can imagine
00:27:07
the amount of actual, like, just, you know, everyday soldiers who were like, I would kill
00:27:12
for that fucking position. Yeah. How dare you like shit on it? You know? Yeah, that's, and I wonder
00:27:18
if there was like pull from the studios where like, we've invested in this guy. So let's get
00:27:22
him in the Entertainment Corps, please. Right. Little envelope with some cash in it. That's,
00:27:27
that's a good point. So George gets back from the war and his career has lost momentum.
00:27:32
He's not booking as many roles. And the director of the movie he had been in the So Proudly We Hail had promised to make George a star,
00:27:39
but he dies while George is overseas. So like, that's your ticket and that sucks.
00:27:43
Yeah. He takes roles in a series of B movies and struggles to pay the bills, which I feel like is so many actors' actual stories
00:27:50
here in LA. Especially now that there's a horrible strike, which did you hear that, who was it?
00:27:56
The Rock? Like The Rock made this gigantic donation to the SAG strike fund. Oh my God.
00:28:03
So basically people don't have to worry about losing everything in the first six months type of thing.
00:28:09
It's wild. Like that now there's actual benefits set up for SAG actors who might need support
00:28:14
while they go through that. I mean, just like stuff like that that's happening. Amazing.
00:28:17
People are supporting each other is really beautiful. Support unions, everyone. Yeah.
00:28:22
So then because he's just doing B-movies, struggling to pay the bills, he finds a day job digging cesspools.
00:28:30
Oh. Do you want to know what a cesspool is exactly? Sure. It's an underground holding tank for sewage, a precursor to a modern septic tank.
00:28:39
Oh, man. So it's not glamorous. I mean, that's truly humbling. It's like, it's me, the star of So Proudly We Hail.
00:28:46
And they're like, pick up that shovel right over there. But the thing is, he's making $100 a hole, which in today's dollars would be, you want
00:28:57
to guess? $5,000 a hole? No. Oh, to $1,500 a hole. $1,1282. Nope. $1,282. Okay. That's a ton of money per hole.
00:29:11
That's a lot of money. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay. And I guess it's like a hole takes like two days.
00:29:17
So that's fucking legit. That's great. Yeah. Ain't no shame in a paycheck, as Marty likes to say.
00:29:22
In 1951, when George is 37, he's cast as Superman in the movie Superman and the Mole Men.
00:29:30
And then he's cast in the same role in the TV series, The Adventures of Superman, which
00:29:35
to us is like a huge fucking deal, right? Like you got cast as Superman, like the biggest hero in fucking comic book history.
00:29:44
And it's starring TV role, right? Right. But it wasn't as big of a deal back then because it's 1952 and TV has only just become common in American households.
00:29:55
So TV is not a big deal It like next to movies It kind of looked down upon So it actually not that big of a deal Right It less prestigious I guess it is Yeah And it doesn pay nearly as well either
00:30:07
The hours are long. The work is grueling and the pay isn't great. But George feels proud of the show as a quality product for children.
00:30:14
And he wants to be a good role model. So he even stops smoking in public because he doesn't want kids to think that Superman
00:30:19
smokes cigarettes. Oh, I know. which probably was real hard back then because everyone was like a pack a day.
00:30:26
Literally like you're in the doctor's office and the doctor's like, would you like a cigarette as I tell you your diagnosis? Like it never stopped.
00:30:34
No. So he did that. And he says in one interview, in Superman, we're all concerned with giving kids the right kind of show. We don't want to go for
00:30:42
too much violence. And then he adds, quote, we even try in our scripts to give gentle messages
00:30:46
of tolerance and distress that a man's color and race and religious beliefs should be respected.
00:30:52
Wow. But as time goes on, though, George becomes disillusioned with the role. In a 1956 interview, he says, quote,
00:31:00
The only rub in playing Superman is that I have a tough time finding other roles.
00:31:04
Most movie producers feel I'm too closely identified with Superman so they won't use me.
00:31:09
So typecast. Tale as old as time. Mm-hmm. So he's unable to get other work, but he needs to find ways to make more money when the show isn't shooting.
00:31:18
So he appears in advertisements as Superman. He books wrestling events as Superman.
00:31:24
Oh. Yeah. And he also does promotional appearances like early versions of conventions, essentially.
00:31:29
So George and his first punk rock wife, Eleonora Needles, they divorce in 1950, 10 years after
00:31:36
their marriage and right before George starts playing Superman. And George starts dating a woman named Toni Mannix, who is eight years older than him
00:31:45
and used to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies. The thing is, Tony's married. Her husband is MGM vice president Eddie Mannix. And you might remember him from the movie Hail Caesar.
00:31:56
Yes. The movie is a fictionalized version of his life and career as MGM's fixer.
00:32:03
Oh, Josh Brolin's part? Yes. I'm saying that. And I think so. Yeah. Got it. Yes. No, you're right. We're all right together. Yes. I love Hail Caesar. That's why I answered so fast.
00:32:13
I love that movie. And I love the concept of it where it's like, this is, of course, it's the
00:32:19
Coen brothers version. Yeah. Yeah. It's so like, those are the people that made Hollywood go.
00:32:24
Totally. The behind the scenes. George Clooney is that it's a good movie. Yeah. He's the guy that gets kidnapped by the Bolsheviks or whatever.
00:32:31
I got to watch that again. It's been so long. So this dude is the husband of his new girlfriend.
00:32:37
It's his job to do things like bail actors out of jail, pay off the victims of their drunk driving
00:32:42
accidents, cover up sexual assaults and arrange illegal abortions for actresses who are under
00:32:47
contract. So he's like in the underground scene. Right. And when Eddie needs to bring actors in
00:32:52
line and can't do it himself, he reportedly has mob contacts from his childhood in New Jersey
00:32:58
who act as his enforcers. Yeah. All of Hollywood is the mob, really. Definitely. I mean, not anymore.
00:33:05
Yes. But back then, that's really how it was. So hearing all this, you're like, George, why are you
00:33:10
sleeping with this man's wife. Don't fucking do that. It's dangerous. But actually, Eddie and Tony
00:33:15
have an open marriage and Eddie encourages the affair because he has a mistress of his own.
00:33:20
And he wants his wife to be, you know, happy and entertained. And the two couples actually go on
00:33:25
double dates together. Sexy. And then so Tony, she helps subsidize George's comparatively low
00:33:32
income. She buys him a car and a house in Benedict Canyon, which of course we know is a nice LA
00:33:38
neighborhood. Very fancy. And she also helps pay some of his bills. So she's fucking doing it.
00:33:44
She's a great girlfriend to him. Yeah. So in late 1958, George breaks up with Tony, though,
00:33:49
hold it, in order to pursue a relationship with another woman named Leonora Lemon.
00:33:55
So Leonora is the ex-wife of a penniless Vanderbilt relative, which is such a bummer,
00:34:00
and has a reputation for getting into fights in the New York club scene. Oh, Leonora is also much younger than Tony was.
00:34:08
And Tony is devastated by George breaking up with her. George and Leonora get engaged shortly after meeting, which causes Tony to spiral even
00:34:18
further. And she harasses the couple, sometimes calling them 20 times a day. OK, but she's still married, right?
00:34:25
Yeah, but that was her boyfriend, boyfriend. Yeah, but you can't. I don't think you get to lay that claim.
00:34:31
Yeah, it's complicated. It's definitely complicated. that's why the button up it's complicated wait is is this eleonora needles side maybe maybe yeah
00:34:44
yeah i'm on i'm on leonora lemon's side because it's uh that's liz lemon's grandmother oh amazing
00:34:50
um is that true that's her name no i'm joking goodbye it's just a name i thought you like
00:34:56
knew so much about 30 rock that you were like in the in the tv show 30 rock liz lemon's grandmother
00:35:02
is named Leonora. I was impressed. No. So she's harassing the couple and shit and like really
00:35:08
devastated and upset about all of this. And then her husband's upset because his wife's upset.
00:35:13
You know, they're both upset. And it's not okay. Also, just think about back then.
00:35:20
No answering machines. Yeah. No anything. The high pitched fucking rattle the telephone ring.
00:35:27
You call 20 times a day, that phone's ringing 50 times minimum. No, no. It's just ringing.
00:35:32
Take the phone off the hook, unplug it. No, thanks. You just have to leave your house.
00:35:37
So on the night of June 16th, 1959, George at this point is 45 years old. He and Leonore are entertaining a writer named Robert Condon, who's staying over in their downstairs bedroom.
00:35:48
Around midnight, George excuses himself and goes upstairs to bed. And while he up there two neighbors come over which is it like one o in the morning and two neighbors stop by which to me is fucking bananas And like especially like he 45 like what is he doing up so late and shit
00:36:05
Like, but that's crazy. I guess it's kind of a party atmosphere at his house. So that's kind of
00:36:09
pretty normal. I feel like in the 50s and 60s, it was like late night drink all night,
00:36:15
key party hangouts. Right. Yeah. So it's not odd for them to have drop by. Sounds like it. On this particular evening, though, George is not stoked about the late night visit.
00:36:26
And so he goes downstairs in his bathrobe and gets into an argument with the dude who stopped by,
00:36:31
William. And in the end, though, both men apologize. George goes back up to his room
00:36:36
and the guests stick around. Robert Condon, the house guest, later tells police that George seemed
00:36:42
despondent that evening, but didn't seem like he was about to kill himself. Dun, dun, dun.
00:36:47
Of course, we now know that people can outwardly appear fine and actually be suffering inside.
00:36:53
That's just life. Yeah. According to Leonore's own retelling of the events to police, when George goes upstairs,
00:36:59
she says to one of the guests, quote, in a moment, you will hear a gun. And then the group hears George open a drawer upstairs.
00:37:07
And then she says, quote, now you will hear a shot. And then the group hears a gunshot.
00:37:14
Yep. So Leonore herself tells police that she said this. But by the group's account, William, the neighbor, then goes upstairs and they find George's body on the bed dead.
00:37:25
Leonore tells police that she was kidding with her commentary and didn't really believe that George was going to take his own life.
00:37:31
And later she says that she didn't actually make those comments at all. So it's real weird.
00:37:35
I mean, the odds of the coincidence of narrating your boyfriend's suicide is just crazy.
00:37:44
I mean. Yeah, it is. But they were probably really shitfaced, too, at the time. I mean, they're drinking like straight fucking martinis and whiskey probably at that time.
00:37:52
Yeah. Right. And so it seems unlikely. They're all shitfaced. But then, like, why would you say that at all?
00:37:58
Totally. Well, they later denied ever saying that. Right. Which then makes me go, they definitely said it.
00:38:03
Yeah. So for decades, many of George's close friends and colleagues fiercely maintained that George did not and would not have killed himself.
00:38:11
They point to several details in George's death that don't line up with suicide.
00:38:16
First and foremost, 45 minutes elapsed between when the gun goes off and when Leonore calls the police.
00:38:22
Everyone is very drunk, but this is still a very long time. George is killed by a gunshot wound to the head.
00:38:29
That bullet creates a hole in the ceiling above George, but police find two additional bullet holes in the floor under the rug.
00:38:38
Leonore tells police that she made one of those holes days earlier when she was, quote, fooling around with the gun.
00:38:46
The other hole goes unexplained completely. Huh. What does that mean? Fooling around with a gun?
00:38:54
Like fooling around and then discharging a gun, which would be like a whole thing, because if they're living in an apartment, is there?
00:39:01
I think it's like a house. Oh, it's a house. Like the Benedict Canyon house. Oh, a house.
00:39:05
Right, right. Oh, sorry. For some reason, I'm for some reason, I pictured it in those real like 40s looking apartments.
00:39:13
Yeah. In that are like central Hollywood that have like almost a stucco, you know, fancy out outside where it's like, well, then they would shoot a downstairs neighbor.
00:39:22
Like I just built a whole thing that doesn't exist. But yeah, 45 minutes between imagine if a gun went off in your house, even if you knew a gun was there, people would freak the fuck out and pick up the phone immediately, even before you knew what was going on.
00:39:38
You call the police. Absolutely. I think. Why? Yeah. Why? Exactly. Someone runs up to see what happened.
00:39:43
Someone else calls the police and says, I heard gunshots upstairs. Please come immediately.
00:39:47
Immediately. That's a bad amount of lag time, in my opinion. In your doctoral position.
00:39:54
In my thesis speech that I'm going to be giving next week. That's right. So George is found lying on his bed on his back with his legs dangling off and his feet
00:40:02
close to the floor like he fell back when he allegedly shot himself. The gun is a Luger pistol and it's found between his feet on the floor, which would be an odd
00:40:12
place for the gun to have fallen if he had shot himself. But it's not impossible.
00:40:16
One bullet casing is found underneath George's body, which is weird. And there's some debate over whether or not a casing would wind up there if George had shot himself.
00:40:26
But no casings are found from the other two, you know, bullet holes. Which is weirder.
00:40:33
Yeah, totally. Here's what I think is very weird. The gun is clean. There's no fingerprints on it at all.
00:40:38
And they say that the gun had been recently oiled, so it might not hold fingerprints.
00:40:44
but like to have not a single person's fingerprint on it like hers from when she was allegedly
00:40:50
fooling around with it the other day right his on the gun like he's probably if you were going
00:40:55
to shoot yourself and imagine you're like sweaty and you know nervous and stuff i mean who knows
00:41:01
but i think there'd be fingerprints it wouldn't be clean that's for sure it wouldn't be without any
00:41:06
anything if the gun is clean it's because someone fucking wiped it off before yeah they run out of
00:41:12
the window, allegedly. There's also no powder burns or residue on George's hand or on his head,
00:41:19
which you would normally see with a shot at such close range. They're explained away and the
00:41:24
coroner only examines George after his body had been washed. And he also had several unexplained
00:41:31
bruises on his face and chest. What's up, red flag? Like, welcome to the party. You just read like five red flags in a row where it's like, I'm not going to stop you every single
00:41:41
time, but like, what, what, what, what, all of that, maybe singular instances wouldn't add up
00:41:49
to much but all of those together is very suspicious Totally Um some people say the fact that George was found naked and the fact that he didn also leave a note point away from suicide John Field a television historian who was part of a push in the 90s to get the case reopened says in a 1991 article that the scene did not look like a suicide
00:42:12
Field says, quote, the body of George Reeves was found naked in his upstairs bedroom.
00:42:16
The shower was running. Fresh clothes were laid out as if he were preparing to go out and party, which he was known to do.
00:42:23
end quote other accounts of the evening say george was not going back out and was getting in bed
00:42:27
so like convoluted the shower running was that a fact is that like a shower running and clothes
00:42:34
laid out on the bed is like i'm getting my clothes back on to go downstairs or yeah like whatever and
00:42:40
keep hanging out he was he was like at first mad like i have to get up early i'm going to bed and
00:42:44
then it's like oh it sounds like they're having so much fun i'm going back downstairs totally
00:42:48
Totally. Despite the strange crime scene and the fact that Leonor waited 45 fucking minutes to call the police, the police immediately ruled the death of suicide and don't investigate any alternative possibilities.
00:43:03
So let's get into theories. There are two main theories besides suicide. The first is that Leonor and George got into an argument and that Leonor, his fiancee, shot him.
00:43:13
And the second is that Eddie Mannix, the MGM studio boss from the Hail Caesar movie, was angry about George breaking up with his wife and had him killed.
00:43:24
Which he has resources to do so, you know? Right. So George and his fiancée Leonora's relationship with Stormy, by some accounts, they were supposed to get married just a few days after George's death.
00:43:35
Though some people say they were never going to actually get married. It's just like too complicated.
00:43:39
They were also struggling financially and without Tony Mannix subsidizing George, the bills were piling up.
00:43:46
They were known for getting into fights and she admitted she had played around with a gun.
00:43:51
And some believe that she may have shot him by accident drunkenly. So she had an accident a couple of days before into the floor and then, oh, no, another accident into a human head.
00:44:02
In 1999, when I was wearing white eyeliner and wet and wild lipstick, a Hollywood publicist named Edward Losey goes on the TV show Extra, fucking Extra, and claims that he was with Tony Mannix, the ex-girlfriend, when she was on her deathbed in 1983.
00:44:25
and they had become close towards the end of her life. And she was dying of Alzheimer's.
00:44:31
And Losey claims that Tony confessed to a priest that she and Eddie had had George killed.
00:44:37
Oh, wow. This is deathbed confession. Deathbed confession. Everybody loves one. Everybody.
00:44:44
He repeats his claim on Court TV. Oh, remember that one? In 2006, when the movie Hollywoodland comes out.
00:44:52
And on that appearance, he says that Tony had a shrine to George in her house and would routinely say prayers for him.
00:44:58
So she was kind of like obsessy, I'm guessing is the point. Sounds like it. These claims made by
00:45:03
a Hollywood publicist on Extra and Court TV about a woman with Alzheimer's are, of course,
00:45:09
taken with a grain of salt by everyone, you know? Right. Yeah. As for the theory that George took
00:45:14
his own life, people go back and forth talking about how the circumstances of his life could or
00:45:19
could not point to suicide, being typecast as Superman and feeling like he would never make it
00:45:24
in the way he wanted to as an actor was devastating to him. At the same time, he was beginning to
00:45:30
direct episodes of the show. And friends say he was looking forward to doing more of that in the
00:45:36
next season. So he did have, you know, stuff he was looking forward to doing. But again, of course,
00:45:41
we know that it can be so hard to tell like who's suffering and who's not. Right. John Field,
00:45:46
the television historian says quote with the death of george reeves a lot of children thought
00:45:50
that superman himself had died and a lot of their hopes and dreams died with him oh i know right how
00:45:58
about a follow-up message of that that's not what happened right like somehow can you somehow add
00:46:04
a little footnote there for the message so that's it parents tell your children it's like the same
00:46:10
message his mom gave him that his father had died when he was a teenager. I'm just like,
00:46:16
no, everyone has to go through it. Yeah, that's right. In 1960, a year after his death,
00:46:21
George is awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. A CGI version of him as Superman appears in the new,
00:46:28
the flash movie that I guess just came out. He became a big deal. And I don't think he realized what a big deal TV and Superman were going to
00:46:37
be in the future. No. Right. So George's Superman co-star Jack Larson said that George worried that his career wasn't meaningful because his work didn't resonate with adults.
00:46:48
And Jack says, quote, he didn't have the opportunity to see all the adult fans grow up and recognize that people of all ages, even in the 1950s, were watching The Adventures of Superman.
00:46:59
Yeah. And that is the tragic and mysterious death of George Reeves. Man. Man, here's only one theory that I thought of as you were explaining, like the end part, which is those 45 minutes before being before calling the police, maybe was someone else called?
00:47:22
Did they ever look into it to see if somebody else was called? Because if the current girlfriend knew that he went out with Eddie Mannix's wife.
00:47:33
Right. The fixer. They call a fixer before they call the police to get like to say, can someone come over here
00:47:39
and clean this up and make it so that I don't get in trouble or that whatever just happened.
00:47:44
Right. There's a big mess, like not mess, but like, yeah, something crazy has happened over
00:47:49
here. Can you come tame it somehow? Yeah, that's true. Tame it for his memory, for his, because this guy, like maybe it isn't as sinister as I've
00:48:00
was first thinking and maybe there was a piece of it that's like say if it was suicide there's
00:48:05
something involved that was nobody wanted anyone to hear about who knows they didn't want it to
00:48:11
come out so they're just trying to make it look more simple than that yeah yeah something that's
00:48:16
a good point this is this is why wow deathbed confessions are so necessary but i gotta tell you
00:48:22
not believing in a deathbed confession from someone who has alzheimer's and is dying of alzheimer's
00:48:27
Yeah. Because then your brain's like Swiss cheese and you're just kind of staring around. But I mean, not in a way where you can make a coherent, reliable confession. Right. Right. Wow. That's I'm going to be thinking about that a lot. So sad. It's so sad. And also it's just like back then when you were in the studio system, you were playing by totally different rules. It was like you were in the mafia, essentially, and you were covered in certain ways.
00:48:56
So there's just so many possibilities that it could be where people were like, if it was an accident and he got murdered and covering it up, like, what is the best optics for this situation?
00:49:07
Right, exactly. And we'll never know what the starting point was. Yeah. NYX, that's KNIX leak-proof underwear, isn't just for one moment.
00:49:20
It's for all the everyday moments you didn't realize leak-proof underwear could make easier.
00:49:26
Maybe it's day one of your period. Maybe it's a long travel day. Maybe it's hot outside.
00:49:30
You're on the move and you just want to feel fresh. Their leak-proof underwear comes in a range of absorbencies, from light to ultra,
00:49:39
and helps protect against periods, light leaks, sweat, and everyday surprises. And because they look and feel like real underwear,
00:49:47
they're soft, invisible underclothes, and machine washable. No extra hassle. No complicated routine.
00:49:54
Just dependable protection you can wash and re-wear. See why millions have made the switch to leak-proof underwear.
00:50:02
Visit Nix.com. That's K-N-I-X dot com and use code FLOW15 for 15% off. That's K-N-I-X dot com.
00:50:11
Code FLOW15. Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.
00:50:21
This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter. the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary,
00:50:29
massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth.
00:50:37
I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary
00:50:43
as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?
00:50:47
And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust
00:50:52
the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.
00:50:57
But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic.
00:51:03
That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end.
00:51:08
It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club
00:51:13
on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Miss satisfying breads and pastas and want to add protein without going overboard on calories?
00:51:24
Stacked sandwiches, fully loaded bagels, noodles built for serious sauce. Hero Bread delivers up to 19 grams of protein.
00:51:31
Think bagels and elbow noodles with nearly twice the protein of national bestsellers,
00:51:35
but less than half the calories. Plus, you can get up to 32 grams of fiber per serving,
00:51:39
a bonus when you're trying to stay full and fueled. So whether you're grilling burgers, building a serious sandwich, or digging into pasta,
00:51:46
you're getting real flavor with a smarter protein-to-calorie balance. Hero makes loaves, buns, tortillas, bagels, and noodles
00:51:53
with 5 to 19 grams of protein per serving that all go the distance. Shop now at Hero.co.
00:51:59
Use code IHART for 10% off. That's H-E-R-O dot C-O. All figures per serving. See nutrition info on Hero.co.
00:52:06
39% and 61% fewer calories than regular plain bagels and noodles, respectively. Calorie content has been reduced from 270 to 130
00:52:12
and 200 to 80 calories per serving for plain bagels and noodles, respectively. Data accurate as of 220-26.
00:52:20
Do you have a U-turn or a right-hand turn? Oh, yes, I do. A 180, right? I'm going to take us on a 145.
00:52:30
I love that freeway. It's not. To the 5, to the 4, 5, to the 210. To the 145, to the 210.
00:52:38
This story I'm going to do for you today was suggested by a listener. Bex Solidarity on Twitter now X.
00:52:48
They really that's today. They changed the name to X. They not only changed it, but I bookmarked this tweet.
00:52:55
And then when I went to find the bookmark, I didn't know where it was because I was looking
00:52:59
for the Twitter symbol and it's now an X. I this is news to me and I am horrified.
00:53:06
Truly so truly, truly dumb. Yeah. But all that aside, what's beautiful is that we have listeners that suggest great story ideas to us constantly.
00:53:15
Love it. And Beck's Solidarity is their account name. The handle is at Beck underscore ah underscore la.
00:53:25
And they wrote and said, Karen Kilgariff, have you ever heard of the Night of the Grizzlies?
00:53:31
Would be a great story for my favorite murder. I checked the wiki and don't think you all have covered it.
00:53:36
Hmm. So they did their research. I love it. Exactly. They were like, I'm not going to suggest a repeater.
00:53:42
And thank you for that, Bex or Beck Allah. And the other interesting thing is in planning this out,
00:53:49
Alejandra and Hannah saved it for this record because the anniversary of this event of the night of the Grizzlies happened August 13th which is just around the corner This episode goes wide August 3rd Oh my God So today I going to be telling you the story of Glacier
00:54:05
National Park's Night of the Grizzlies. And the sources used for the retelling of this story
00:54:12
is a 1969 book by an author named Jack Olson called Night of the Grizzlies. There's a PBS
00:54:19
documentary that Maren, our researcher, highly recommends people watch. She really enjoyed it
00:54:24
called Glacier Park's Night of the Grizzlies. And there's also a 2017 Outside Magazine article
00:54:30
by a journalist named Ben Goldfarb called The 50-Year Legacy of Glacier's Night of the Grizzlies.
00:54:37
And you can find the rest of the sources in our show notes. So to paint a gorgeous Bob Ross-style picture for you,
00:54:45
this story takes place in Glacier National Park in Montana. And it is apparently, I've never been there,
00:54:51
but it's apparently an absolutely stunning place. They have alpine lakes and beautiful meadows, mountains, and of course, glaciers that you have to go see now because they are vanishing, essentially.
00:55:05
So a biologist and conservationist named Douglas H. Chadwick told PBS in their documentary, Glacier Park's Night of the Grizzlies, quote, Glacier Park is heaven on earth.
00:55:16
I've heard Montana is super beautiful. Yeah, it's supposed to be incredible. Yeah. So, of course, that wilderness is teeming with all the wildlife you'd imagine. And the big ones, some of the big ones include mountain lions, bighorn sheep, elk, and the star of the top of that food chain, the grizzly bear. So when I say grizzly bear, you're just probably imagining like a bear in your head or pictures from the film Cocaine Bear that we all enjoyed.
00:55:44
But that cocaine bear, I actually looked it up. Cocaine bear was a brown bear. And the grizzly bear is only slightly different than a brown bear.
00:55:55
So I found a graph that looked like a police lineup where there's a man standing there and he's six feet tall.
00:56:02
A brown bear is also six feet tall. A grizzly bear is seven to eight feet tall. No.
00:56:10
And a polar bear is nine feet tall. Fuck. Fuck. Why do I think I could take a six footer, but not a fucking...
00:56:16
You want no part of any of these. I don't. That's why I stay very far away from the fucking forest.
00:56:23
Stay in LA, LA Central. Well, also when I was looking at these pictures, because you can go and look at the difference between a grizzly and a brown bear. And it's
00:56:33
just so scary to look at bears imagining the story I was about to tell and what the interactions were. Yeah. Another small difference. Brown bears, they have kind of
00:56:43
pointy ears that stick up. And grizzlies have round ears, like teddy bears. It's just funny.
00:56:49
But another difference is that brown bears have like roughly four centimeter long claws,
00:56:55
which is little short ones. And grizzly bears have five to 10 centimeter long claws,
00:57:02
which are on average the length of an adult human's fingers. Too big. No. No. Yeah.
00:57:11
Also, grizzlies can weigh up to 800 pounds. Fuck. Okay. And despite that size, they can sprint 35 miles an hour.
00:57:18
They can swim for hours. They eat everything, including other large mammals. So here's what's crazy, hearing all of that information and knowing what we know about bears.
00:57:29
Grizzly bears used to live all over North America, But by the beginning of the 20th century, their population plummets because of human beings, because of overhunting, because of land development.
00:57:40
They lose roughly 98 percent of their original habitat on this continent. But kind of in in opposition to that during the first half of the 1900s, due to the invention of the teddy bear, which was because of Teddy Roosevelt.
00:57:55
Really? the teddy bear was invented because of teddy roosevelt he was a big hunter and he oh my god
00:58:01
he loved the outdoors and they made those and they were incredibly popular still are to this day as we
00:58:06
well know and then there was this onslaught of like child-based bear entertainment or no i'm sorry
00:58:14
bear-based child entertainment no i want it the other way around so i'm talking about things like winnie the pear god damn it winnie the pear that's just rude
00:58:29
he is pear-shaped a little he is um and he's beautiful he is winnie the pooh yogi bear
00:58:35
paddington corduroy smoky the bear bears are just emerging in popular culture as friendly
00:58:42
cuddly animals they're staples in circus acts they become roadside attractions oh shit that's
00:58:49
Right. Yeah. Along with being prized hunting trophies where people stuff a bear or have a bear skin rug or whatever.
00:58:57
So basically, Glacier National Park starts to adopt this bear-fueled tourism. There's a ranger named Bert Gildart who remembers in the 60s that, quote, drivers would regularly pose their kids alongside bears.
00:59:13
One motorist even tried to coax a bear behind the steering wheel for a photo op.
00:59:18
I bet. And also Glacier National Park staffers would bait bears to come close to the lodges with food scraps, basically just to put on a show for the guests.
00:59:28
So if you had made a reservation at a lodge in Glacier National Park, you were essentially kind of guaranteed to see a bear come really close to you.
00:59:36
And that was like a plus for your vacation. It's on the amenities list and I want to fucking see it.
00:59:41
Right. So with a few exceptions, there is not a lot of fear around grizzly bears in this era.
00:59:49
The rangers aren't worried about them. Park staff isn't worried about them. And because of that,
00:59:53
the visitors are not worried about them And this is another kind of interesting like the way all this came together in this one night So I didn understand this but our national parks kind of went into decline during
01:00:05
World War II. And the people who worked like for the national parks in the government, they had to
01:00:13
fight to keep national parks from being stripped. Like loggers wanted to go in. They wanted resources
01:00:19
out of the national parks to help with the war effort. And they had to like fight to keep everybody
01:00:24
away from them. So basically, once the war was over and everything kind of got settled again,
01:00:30
the National Parks Director Conrad Wirth proposed an ambitious 10-year program to improve and staff
01:00:37
our national parks. And then kind of simultaneous to that, the same year, actually, that that program
01:00:43
was proposed, it was in June of 1956, Congress passes the Federal Aid Highway Act, which approves
01:00:51
the creation of a 41,000 mile highway system. So suddenly, by the time, you know, four years later,
01:00:58
by the time it's the 60s, there's these national parks all over the country that are fully staffed,
01:01:04
that are fully maintained, and there's all these highways to get you there. And now camping gear
01:01:10
is being made more lightweight and inexpensive. National parks are easy to get to. So suburban
01:01:16
Americans have every reason to start going to and exploring our nation's national parks.
01:01:23
Cute. So Glacier National Park gets exponentially busier in the 60s. And that same program that
01:01:30
I talked about enabled the park to build out its 700 mile trail system. So Glacier National Park
01:01:37
now welcomes an unprecedented 1 million visitors a year. Wow. Yeah. And that means that more people than ever are regularly hiking through glaciers, grisly territory. That's obviously risky, but these parks, they don't know to do anything to mitigate that risk. And the anti-litter campaign in America won't hit its peak until the 70s.
01:02:01
So many park visitors consider it totally normal to just throw their garbage along the trails or leave it at their campsites.
01:02:10
Like littering is celebrated. Yeah. That's one of my favorite scenes in Mad Men.
01:02:15
Remember that scene where they're having a picnic by the road and then just get up and they snap out their blanket, throw the litter everywhere and leave.
01:02:24
Yeah. Is that real? Like littering is so bad. I just can't imagine you were just like, well.
01:02:30
Yes. Well, I think it was someone else will do it. That's somebody else's job to pick up our litter.
01:02:35
Like you can't even be expected to just walk over to the garbage can and throw it away.
01:02:40
And they were doing it in National Park. So people are just walking along, just go wherever and throwing garbage.
01:02:47
And of course, the bears can smell that. That's food. That's something that they can come and eat.
01:02:53
So before long, these naturally timid animals lose their shyness and they start gravitating
01:02:58
toward the populated spaces where human garbage is being left behind. It's kind of an unholy
01:03:05
combination. Visiting national parks starts to rise in popularity, and we're basically drawing
01:03:11
the bears out of their natural environments to come and steal our picnic baskets.
01:03:17
So although the numbers are still tiny, there's an increasing number of visitors who start to
01:03:23
report encounters with aggressive bears. Some of these escalate to actual bites or slashes,
01:03:29
but none of the encounters are fatal. And they're kind of just written off as flukes.
01:03:34
As journalist Jack Olson points out in his book, Night of the Grizzlies, quote, the park's animal safety record was vastly better than any zoos in the country.
01:03:44
What? End quote. Yeah, it's safer to go to a national park and just witness a bear in the wild than it is to just like go see one in a cage.
01:03:52
That is crazy. Olson even quotes an unnamed ranger who in 1967 tells him, quote, if you set up a danger index ranging from zero to 10, where the butterfly is a zero and the rattlesnake is a 10, the grizzlies of Glacier Park would have to rate somewhere between a zero and a one.
01:04:11
OK, buddy. Right. The rattlesnake kills about 10 Americans a year. The grizzly kills about none.
01:04:18
So it just hadn't happened yet. Yeah. And they were basically saying, hey, we've got our toys.
01:04:26
We like these guys. Bears aren't going to hurt you. Right. Chill out. So it's interesting that he said that in 1967 because that's the year that people begin to notice that something is off with the bears at Glacier National Park.
01:04:39
In June of 1967, at a residential part of Glacier National Park called Kelly's Camp, where families own private seasonal residences, a woman named Joan Berry sees a bear rifling through her trash can in broad daylight.
01:04:54
Joan's taken aback by how weird this bear looks. It has an oddly shaped head. Its face looks all smashed in.
01:05:00
Its fur is raggedy. And it looks like it's starving. But the strangest thing about this scrawny bear is when Joan tries to shoo it away by screaming out her cabin's windows, the bear just stares back at her.
01:05:14
Grizzlies are typically very shy and skittish around people. Not this one. The bear eventually leaves, but only after it's had its fill of garbage.
01:05:23
And that's 1967 garbage. Shoot, Georgia, get away from that dip. 1967 garbage. So it's like leftover meatloaf.
01:05:34
Yeah. A lot of mashed potatoes. Lots. So a few days later, that same bear comes back for more trash.
01:05:42
And a few days after that, it comes back again. Within a week or so, the sickly bear gets bolder.
01:05:48
Instead of just hanging around garbage cans, it starts looking inside Joan's house.
01:05:54
It seems like the bear is increasingly interested in Joan and her family especially their yappy dog Before long the sickly bear behavior escalates into outright aggression
01:06:07
According to Jack Olson, quote, Whenever the grizzly was at the garbage cans, Joan would counsel everyone not to move between the light and the window.
01:06:15
And if someone would forget and commit this error, the bear would crash into the side of the house with all its weight,
01:06:22
smashing against the walls with its heavy paws one night sending a saw flying halfway across the room
01:06:28
from the intensity of the impact end quote someone's exaggerating well the weird thing is normally the food was enough but now this bear is kind of like
01:06:40
there's more and i want it so it turns out this bear is a female bear and it was being reported
01:06:48
by several other people staying in Kelly's camp throughout the months of June and July.
01:06:52
And in all of these incidents, the bear seems completely unafraid of humans. In fact, she seems
01:06:58
drawn to them. One afternoon, the bear arrives during a dinner party on one homeowner's raised
01:07:04
deck. And this scrawny bear starts climbing the steps up the deck. And it only goes away when the
01:07:11
panicked party members start just throwing a bunch of stuff at her. Oh my God. And this is like,
01:07:17
No one's seen stuff like this before. So more complaints about the bear come in saying that it's swatted at cabin windows,
01:07:23
that it's slashed screen doors. It was even stalking children. Oh, dear. So the weeks pass.
01:07:30
Nothing's done about the grizzly bear. And Joan Berry gets pissed off. She gives park rangers a piece of her mind saying, quote,
01:07:36
we've got a sick bear, a crazy acting bear around. I wish you'd do something about it.
01:07:41
I'm sure that he's dangerous and somebody's going to get hurt. End quote. So this executive ranger reportedly tells Joan, oh, Joan, is it really that bad?
01:07:52
Kind of a baffling reaction for several reasons, especially because park policy at the time explicitly stated that aggressive bears should be killed, period.
01:08:02
Wow. But nothing's done about this bear. In August, Kelly's camp residents are informed by a ranger, quote, you shouldn't be having any more trouble.
01:08:11
Your bear's at Trout Lake tearing up camps. So it's basically like, don't worry about that bear.
01:08:17
It's somebody else's problem now. Uh-huh. Okay. So aside from the park rangers, there are about 850 on average college age people who seasonally
01:08:27
staff the kitchens, the laundry rooms, and the gift shops of Glacier National Park.
01:08:32
It's a great summer job for young people who actually like enjoy camping. Not you, not me.
01:08:38
Weirdos. So this summer, there's a group of young people working at the park and they all become friends.
01:08:44
At the East Glacier Lodge, there's Roy Ducat, 18 years old from Ohio. He's working as a busboy.
01:08:51
Julie Helgeson is 19. She's from Minnesota. She's working in the laundry room. Paul Dunn is from Minnesota also, but he's only 16 years old, and he's working as a busboy alongside Roy.
01:09:03
And Paul had actually been on vacation at Glacier National Park with his parents, but when it came time for them to go home, he loved it there so much, he wanted to stay, so he applied to get a job there.
01:09:13
Damn. which is precious. So along with those guys, there's 19-year-old Michelle Coons of San Diego.
01:09:20
She works in the park gift shop. Brothers Ray and Ron Nosek from Arizona, they are both in their
01:09:25
early 20s. Ray works as a service station manager. Ron's a waiter at the lodge. And rounding out the
01:09:32
group is Denise Huckle from Arizona. She's 20 and she works as a room clerk. So this group of friends,
01:09:39
like most of the other people working in the park that summer, they like to plan weekend excursions
01:09:44
together. So Michelle, Denise, Ray, and Ron, they all decide they're going to be camping at Trout
01:09:50
Lake this weekend. And they invite Roy, Julie, and Paul to go with them. But Roy and Julie had just
01:09:56
been to Trout Lake the weekend before, so they tell those guys they're going to go to somewhere
01:10:00
new. They want to go up to the Granite Chalet, which is a lodge at the end of Glacier's Highline
01:10:06
Trail. After weighing those two options, Paul decides to go with the larger Trout Lake crew
01:10:12
instead of with Roy and Julie. So on the morning of Saturday, August 12th, Roy and Julie load up their hiking gear,
01:10:19
they put on their backpacks, and they head out from the employee bunkhouse. They get a ride in the back of a pickup truck
01:10:25
to the trailhead, and then they set out on a hike for Granite Park Chalet. This hike takes several hours.
01:10:32
And when they get there, there's bad news. It's overbooked. No. It's so packed, some guests have to sleep on the floor.
01:10:42
So Roy and Julie decide they're not going to sleep on the floor inside the crowded chalet.
01:10:47
But since it's already sunset, it'll take them hours to get back home to the bunkhouse.
01:10:52
So they settle on a happy medium. They walk about 400 yards away to the nearest campground and decide to stay there for the night.
01:11:00
So Roy and Julie knew that bears regularly rummage through the dumpsters at the chalet.
01:11:07
They've heard the chalet employees actually bait the bears with food so that in the evening guests can see bears.
01:11:14
Yeah. So the two of them knew it was not ideal to have any animal poking around their campsite at night.
01:11:21
So they think it over and they decide the campground is far enough in the opposite direction of the chalet that they would be out of a bear's footpath.
01:11:29
But the problem is Roy and Julie thought they'd be sleeping at the chalet. So they didn't pack tents.
01:11:35
They just have sleeping bags. So the two start a fire. They heat up some food from their packs.
01:11:41
And once they're done eating, Roy takes the leftovers far into the woods, you know, to keep animals away.
01:11:47
Yeah. And just hucks them into nature. Because that was the time that we got to live in. So it's like, I'll take care of this garbage.
01:11:55
And then you just go and throw it into a lake or something. Yeah. He comes back. They put out their campfire. They go to sleep. Roy says, quote, being out in the
01:12:04
wilderness was, I don't know, it felt great. I had no qualms with sleeping. Neither did she.
01:12:09
As far as camping in the middle of nowhere with a sleeping bag, no tent under the stars,
01:12:13
I always felt fairly safe. I never had any fear of wild animals or anything. Typically, wild animals stay away from people, and that's pretty much the way we felt.
01:12:22
There was just nothing to be afraid of in our minds at the time, end quote. So meanwhile, the group that went to Trout Lake spent their afternoon about eight miles away, also in a grizzly bear hotspot.
01:12:34
Trout Lake had it all, access to water, fishing, waist-high foliage, including lots of berry patches where grizzlies can hide out and fill their stomachs with strawberries, huckleberries, raspberries.
01:12:47
And by August of 1967, the trail up to Trout Lake is accommodating as many as 700 daily visitors.
01:12:55
Holy shit. Those people are leaving their garbage along that trail and around the lake, which is, again, another draw for hungry bears.
01:13:03
So the Trout Lake group knows what they're walking into here. It's well established that bears are all over this area.
01:13:11
So on the trail up, they actually run into two hikers who are heading back down the trail.
01:13:16
And they tell the kids that they had been treed by a strangely aggressive grizzly while camping at the lake.
01:13:23
What's treed? They had to climb trees to get away from this bear. Yeah, treed. That's what camping people, that's a verb camping people use.
01:13:32
Got it. I am not. And I was pretending to use it, but I learned it when I was putting this together.
01:13:38
The bear is described as skinny, scrawny, female grizzly with an oddly shaped head who's now been involved in a handful of incidents at Trout Lake.
01:13:47
She's ripped up campsites. She's chased fishermen halfway around the lake shore, and she's sent multiple hikers rushing up trees for safety.
01:13:56
But this story does not deter the group, and they decide to keep going. They find a place to set up camp.
01:14:02
Paul goes out to the lake with his fishing rod and catches a few rainbow trout. Then the group sits around a campfire.
01:14:08
They cook fish and hot dogs for dinner. And as the sun is setting, Michelle points to the brush and says, here comes a bear.
01:14:15
so before the grizzly can get too close the group decides to ditch that campsite and basically move
01:14:22
to a different spot on the lake and they leave most of their supplies behind and as they're
01:14:26
leaving they see a large grizzly bear barreling into their camp and start gobbling down all their
01:14:32
food and paul says quote there was a discussion about whether we should leave but it was getting
01:14:37
late in the day and we had to go back through that berry patch in order to get up to the trail ridge
01:14:42
So there was a decision that we would stay and tough it out. End quote. So for added protection, the campers put up a log barrier around their new campsite and they leave their remaining food, which at this point, because they left so much behind.
01:14:56
Now all they have is a box of cookies and some crackers, but they leave that far away from their sleeping area.
01:15:02
And then they all do their best to fall asleep. But it's difficult because throughout the night they can hear bear noises in the bushes nearby.
01:15:09
every can't even imagine this night night go to sleep yeah do your best um every so often a
01:15:18
grizzly walks near the campsite one grabs a box of cookies before going back into the woods and
01:15:23
then for the next several hours it's just an ebb and flow of bare grunts and total silence
01:15:28
then woofing sounds more silence then splashing in the nearby lake then silence but eventually
01:15:35
everyone manages to fall asleep. So back at the camp near the chalet, it's after midnight,
01:15:43
and Roy wakes up to Julie whispering to him, play dead. Cool. Yeah. As Roy begins to process this,
01:15:53
a bear picks Roy up inside his sleeping bag and tosses him six feet away and then attacks.
01:16:00
Oh, my God. The bear basically bites him all over on his shoulder, in his back, on his legs.
01:16:06
Roy will later say, quote, I remember that his breath was very bad. It was the most horrible stench I've ever smelled.
01:16:13
End quote. After a few very long moments, Roy feels the bear pull away, but it doesn't leave.
01:16:21
Instead, Roy listens in horror as the bear begins to attack Julie. No. Mm-hmm. Roy remembers, quote, she started screaming, yelling, and then he picked her up. I heard her screams going down the mountainside. He carried her off. End quote.
01:16:37
Oh my fucking God. It's so horrible. So Roy is totally injured himself, but now he's like, I have to get up and get help for
01:16:46
Julie. So he gets up and somehow is able to start going back up the trail toward the chalet
01:16:54
because he knows if he tries to chase the bear, he could find the bear. That's not going to help anybody.
01:17:00
So as he heads back up the trail toward the chalet, luckily he runs into a solo camper
01:17:06
named Don Gullet. And when Don sees Roy's wounds, he knows the boy is losing a ton of blood.
01:17:11
So he stops, he wraps Roy in his own sleeping bag. He grabs his flashlight and signals SOS
01:17:17
up to the chalet. So at this point, some of the chalet's guests have been awakened by the screaming.
01:17:24
They see Don's signals. Several of them come down the mountainside to help. But by the time they get to Don and Roy, Roy has gone into shock.
01:17:34
So here's the most incredible twist of fate. Among the guests at the chalet that night are a nurse, three doctors, including a surgeon, and a priest named Father Connolly.
01:17:45
So when the guests bring Roy back up to the chalet he is put on the dining room table and immediately operated on using the first aid supplies that are kept on site at the chalet And as the doctors try to stabilize Roy in these imperfect conditions a parks official signals for help on the radio So now a helicopter is on the way
01:18:06
Meanwhile, some very brave guests form a search party and are combing the woods looking for Julie.
01:18:13
But when they find her, the situation is very bad. She has been mauled. She has horrible injuries all over her body,
01:18:21
including large puncture wounds on her chest and this is awful. Much of her right arm has been chewed off.
01:18:29
Oh my God. Incredibly, she's still alive though. So one of the men runs to a nearby crew cabin,
01:18:36
grabs a camping mattress and they very delicately put Julie on it and carry her back up to the chalet.
01:18:43
When this group arrives, the triage team gets to work, but they realize it's too late for Julie.
01:18:50
She's lost almost all of her blood. her puncture wounds are too large to seal shut in any way jack olson author of night of the grizzlies
01:18:58
says quote the surgeon doubted that the problem could have even been solved in the operating room
01:19:03
of a major hospital yeah so she just had mortal wounds from the attack as julie struggles to make
01:19:11
shallow breaths father connelly holds her hand he tells her quote you know that god will watch over
01:19:16
you and take care of you. And Julie manages to whisper back, yes, I know he will. When it's clear
01:19:22
that Julie's slipping away, Father Connolly baptizes her with a cup of water from the chalet sink
01:19:26
and recites the Lord's Prayer, which Julie seems to be mouthing along with him until her grip on
01:19:32
his hand weakens and she passes away. The death of 19-year-old Julie Helgeson at 4.12 a.m. on
01:19:39
Sunday, August 13th, 1967 marks the very first bear related fatality in the 57 years of Glacier
01:19:47
National Park's existence. Holy shit. So now there's this helicopter on the way and it's being
01:19:55
piloted. This is another like unbelievable twist. It's being piloted by a man named John Westover,
01:20:02
who was a combat pilot in Vietnam. And he's not only having to navigate the peaks and valleys of
01:20:08
Glacier National Park in complete darkness, but there have been recent wildfires. So there's also
01:20:14
smoke and haze. And basically Westover manages to fly land and then take off again, completely blind.
01:20:24
Wow. Like he just gets it done. And because of him, 18-year-old Roy Ducott is transported
01:20:31
to the nearest hospital and saved. Wow. But this horrible night isn't over yet because now at the Trout Lake campsite, it's 4.30 in the morning and 16-year-old Paul Dunn is startled awake by the sound of a large animal coming toward him.
01:20:48
And when it stops, it's standing directly over him. He later remembers, quote, I could hear the bear breathing.
01:20:55
And that was probably one of the most frightening moments of my life, having this gigantic creature directly over my sleeping bag while I'm laying down.
01:21:03
And at the advice of everyone in the campsite, I was playing dead. End quote. So Paul hears a noise and then he feels a pull on his shirt and he realizes the bear's biting down on him.
01:21:14
So instinctually, Paul shoots out of his sleeping bag, dashes across the campsite and basically climbs up a tree as fast as he can, a.k.a. being treed.
01:21:24
This sudden movement actually seems to startle the bear and it heads back into the woods, but not for long.
01:21:31
When the bear comes back, it comes toward Ron and Denise. But like Paul, both of them jump up, run down toward the beach, and each climb a separate tree.
01:21:42
Again, the bear heads back into the woods. So now Paul, Ron, and Denise, from their separate trees, start yelling down to Michelle and Ray to ditch their campsite and climb up into trees before the bear comes back.
01:21:56
So Ray hears them. He darts out of his sleeping bag. He runs up a tree in no time.
01:22:01
But just like in a horror movie, Michelle tries to get out of her sleeping bag and the zipper is stuck.
01:22:09
Yes. So she's panicking. She can't get free. She has no choice but to play dead as this bear comes back into the campsite.
01:22:18
Can you imagine being one of the friends like watching this fucking happen? I don't have to imagine because it's on this piece of paper.
01:22:25
Listen to this shit. No. From his position up in the tree, Paul, the 16-year, the youngest one of all, he can see Michelle dimly lit by the campfire, stuck in her sleeping bag, playing dead.
01:22:41
He watches as it all happens. Oh, my God. He watches as the bear comes back out of the woods and heads straight for her.
01:22:49
Michelle is laying entirely still. And then they all hear screaming. Michelle is screaming.
01:22:55
He's got my arm. my arm is gone. So Paul is watching as the bear drags Michelle inside her sleeping bag back into
01:23:03
the woods. And he then just starts screaming, she's dead. She's dead. So, so horrifying to
01:23:09
imagine these young people in the dark, paralyzed with fear and shock and grief, just trying to like
01:23:15
hold on to the branch of a tree. They end up staying up in these trees for more than an hour,
01:23:21
basically until dawn breaks and they can finally actually see what's going on around them.
01:23:27
So when they can finally see, they climb down and they run to the ranger station to get help.
01:23:31
When they enter the ranger station, all four of them are visibly shaking as they tell the rangers
01:23:37
Leonard Landa and Bert Gildart, who was the ranger who had given that quote of that bears
01:23:45
were zero to one percent danger. They basically start telling those two rangers this story that
01:23:51
their friend has been mauled by a bear and is still somewhere out in the woods with this bear So Ranger Landa knows this group of kids He sold them a fire permit the day before and he cannot believe what they saying because both of these rangers have already been alerted
01:24:07
that there have been these attacks up at the chalet. So in one evening, they have to go from
01:24:13
thinking bears are a zero to one danger to, oh, there's been a bear attack up at the chalet,
01:24:19
and now these kids come in, there's been a second bear attack. What are the chances that they would know each other, the two groups? That's so wild.
01:24:27
Right. Well, they're all it's all employees. Yeah, that's wild. So it's yeah, exactly. It's not random people, too. It's like it's crazy.
01:24:34
Yeah. So these two rangers grab their guns and a medical supply bag and they head out toward the campsite.
01:24:41
How horrifying is that? It's like, yeah, now you're like, oh, this is actually a monster.
01:24:46
Yeah. And we have to go solve this problem. So it's even worse than that, because as they're walking toward the campsite, they come upon a detached human ear.
01:24:54
And then they come upon a ripped up sleeping bag. And when they finally find Michelle's body, it's mutilated beyond recognition.
01:25:02
They have to call an emergency crew to come in and retrieve her remains. Michelle Koons is only 19 years old.
01:25:10
The remaining four campers are told about the bear attack at the chalet involving Roy and Julie.
01:25:15
So now they have to learn that their same friends that they went to two separate places from also were attacked by bears.
01:25:23
Roy will later say, quote, when I finally pieced it together, the Granite Park Chalet's incident involved two other friends of mine that I had intended to go camping with.
01:25:32
There was a shudder through my being that still remains to this day. Somewhere, somehow, I was meant to be in an experience that night with a grizzly bear, and I was just lucky to be a survivor.
01:25:44
Wow. Yeah. Like he's saying, no matter what choice he made, the same thing would happen.
01:25:49
And there's a chance he made the better choice because he was able to live through his.
01:25:55
Wow. So now Glacier National Park officials, of course, snap into action. Trails are closed.
01:26:02
Guests are escorted out of the backcountry by gun-toting rangers. And any grizzly bear that feeds near the attack sites is ordered to be killed.
01:26:11
This includes the bears that have been habituated to come and take food near the chalet.
01:26:17
Come on. Right? So rangers end up killing three adult bears near the chalet. One is a female with dried blood on her paws.
01:26:25
Park officials believe that this bear, who might have been particularly aggressive because she did have cubs, is the one who killed Julie.
01:26:33
But it's impossible to prove that. And meanwhile, over at Trout Lake, rangers Landa and Gildart do the same. They bait the lakeside campground and then they lay in wait. And when they see a weird looking skinny bear approaching from about 40 feet away, they realize it's the Kelly's camp bear. This bear walks straight toward them. Landa and Gildart take aim, fire and shoot her dead.
01:26:59
Later that day, when an FBI agent and a park biologist examine this bear's body,
01:27:04
they find that she has broken glass embedded in her molars, which is almost certainly a result of her feeding on garbage from dumpsters and trash cans.
01:27:14
This glass would have left her in constant pain, making her agitated and unable to eat normally.
01:27:21
Inside her stomach, the biologist also finds a clump of blonde hair, which was the color of Michelle's hair.
01:27:27
so they conclude that the kelly's camp bear that had been reported countless times that summer
01:27:33
is the bear that killed michelle so yeah that but the like the irony of the idea that that bear
01:27:41
and what was wrong with that bear was human related once again is that kind of thing of like
01:27:47
it's a starving bear with glass in its right teeth right and so much pain and horrifying yeah
01:27:54
News of the fatal bear attacks at Glacier National Park sweep the nation and cause widespread panic and a newfound fear of grizzly bears.
01:28:02
The story is featured on Walter Cronkite's CBS Evening News. The tragic deaths of Michelle Coons and Julie Helgeson shock the nation.
01:28:10
People demand answers. They want to know why after decades with no attacks, these grizzlies would suddenly kill two humans on the same night.
01:28:19
I mean, how wild mind blowing. Yeah. Some theorize that recent lightning storms, wildfires, or even the late summer heat could have caused the bears to become particularly agitated that weekend. But as Jack Potter, chief of science and resources management at Glacier National Park says, quote, I think it's just sheer coincidence.
01:28:38
Yeah. Conservationists and biologists are immediately concerned that there will be a devastating backlash against grizzlies.
01:28:45
In his book, Night of the Grizzlies, Jack Olson warns that, quote, the grizzly will almost certainly be banished into Canada and then perhaps into Alaska to live out his last years as a species.
01:28:56
And all the goodwill and understanding in the world will not alter his eventual fate.
01:29:00
so that seemed to be so possible because it after jaws came out and then they were just killing great
01:29:07
white sharks all over the place that that kind of fear and people deciding that this is a fear
01:29:13
this is a concern and a danger that we need to do something about right is very threatening
01:29:18
so by the 1970s a mix of all of those factors lead to this critical situation and it does look like
01:29:25
grizzly bears might go extinct and then something amazing happens, human beings in positions of
01:29:31
authority actually make a series of excellent decisions. Huh. In 1973, the Endangered Species
01:29:37
Act is passed, which outlaws unauthorized hunting of grizzly bears. Then new policies are passed at
01:29:45
the state level, which aim to preserve wildlife habitats and keep humans and grizzly bears as far
01:29:51
So basically saying hey let not just go where they live and then blame them for what happens Right At the same time many national parks rethink their policies around human interaction with bears Journalist Ben Goldfarb writes that quote
01:30:06
altogether, Glacier's bear management plan expanded virtually overnight from three pages long to around 50.
01:30:14
Wow. End quote. Many parts of this plan are now considered common sense measures.
01:30:19
So they didn't even have the most basic stuff in place about these dangers. Like don't make an extra sandwich for a bear.
01:30:26
No, don't talk to a bear. Don't try to put like a little fake collar and a green tie on a bear.
01:30:33
Just describing Yogi Bear. So now, of course, we bear proof garbage cans. Cooking areas are kept away from tents and cabins.
01:30:42
And of course, that tradition of baiting bears with food so you could be entertained by them.
01:30:47
Yeah. Of course, it's now not done. Also, the advice to just play dead in a grizzly bear encounter has been updated.
01:30:55
The recommendation now is avoid eye contact. Be calm. Speak in a low, steady voice.
01:31:01
Don't make any sudden movements. If the bear is stationary, just very slowly move sideways, ideally to higher ground, because being taller will make you seem bigger to the bear.
01:31:12
You always try to seem bigger than the bear. And now the National Park Service actually warns against climbing trees because bears can climb trees, too.
01:31:21
That's what I thought. But I was like, don't say that because maybe they don't. Oh, no, they do.
01:31:27
And actually, grizzlies with their long, crazy claws can climb them pretty easily.
01:31:33
So those guys just got fucking lucky. They got super lucky. They just didn't bother to.
01:31:39
They were just going for kind of the easy food on the ground. Oh, they also say that if a bear doesn't go away, if it's like worst case scenario, either lie flat on your stomach or curl up at a ball and lay on your side and be as quiet as possible until it leaves. And if you're already standing up and a bear charges you, they say stand your ground because you can't outrun a bear.
01:32:04
Sure. That makes me think of there is an amazing video that was going around. I think it was like in quarantine. And it's a little kid walking down a trail downhill down a trail toward I think it was in Italy somewhere because the father is saying be quiet and be calm on video.
01:32:25
and the little kid is walking and going, be calm. Like, mom, it's fine. Be calm.
01:32:31
And there is a huge bear walking behind this kid. And the mother is like, can barely control herself.
01:32:37
Cause you're like, you have to be quiet. You have to be quiet. It's one of the scariest videos I've ever seen.
01:32:44
And the amazing part is that little kid was clearly educated about this kind of stuff because the kid was like,
01:32:51
don't do mom, be quiet. Don't do anything. I mean like the calm one. Yeah. And just like walking normally, which is like, how?
01:32:58
I think that's like, if you have a certain type of personality, you're not going to be able to do that.
01:33:03
Yeah, totally. And by that, I mean my personality. Okay. There is a silver lining in the horrifying story of the Night of the Grizzlies.
01:33:13
It basically put an end to our illusion that a wild animal is harmless. That idea, it's so funny to hear it now.
01:33:23
but that was a thing that people really kind of believed and didn't care about and the national
01:33:29
parks immediate policy changes saved the lives of countless human beings and countless bears
01:33:33
over the years but as many viral videos do show us people still have a lot more to learn you see
01:33:41
those videos constantly of people trying to mess around with like bison at yellowstone seriously
01:33:48
And I think a guy got killed recently. Yeah. Trying to take a picture near a bison.
01:33:53
And it's like, they don't do that. Don't. Just don't. Like, please. Have some respect.
01:33:59
As conservationist Douglas H. Chadwick told PBS, quote, a bear is what it's born to be, and it's what it learns to be.
01:34:08
The most distant place in the lower 48 states from the nearest road is 23 miles,
01:34:14
which would take a bear a morning to walk out of. Whoa. There is no big wild left out there. And these guys are going to have to learn to live
01:34:22
with us, which I think they're doing. And we're going to have to learn to live with them. End
01:34:27
quote. And that's the story of Glacier National Park's Night of the Grizzlies. Holy fucking shit.
01:34:33
I've never heard of that before. That is bananas. Same. I never heard it until Beck suggested it.
01:34:39
That's a mind blowing story. Wow. Good job. That was great. Thank you. That was great. I'm terrified.
01:34:45
uh yeah that's great i'm terrified that's why we all came here today i stay in hotels
01:34:52
i saw true beverly hills recently on a uh at vidiots you know in town yeah yes and they they're
01:35:03
supposed to be camping it starts raining they go to the beverly hills hotel to do their like
01:35:07
kumbaya camping and i'm like that's where i learned it yes that just go to a hotel
01:35:13
So you can still have a lot of similar fun. Totally. You know, just while we're here, I really can't wait to go to Vidiots.
01:35:22
I haven't been there yet, although I have bought tickets multiple times and just not
01:35:25
shown up for certain things that I wanted to go to and forgot about or whatever.
01:35:29
But there's a lot of people who ask what can be done during a strike when writers and actors
01:35:35
are striking because nobody wants to like break a rule. People are very careful to be like, oh, if we mention this, does that mean that we're
01:35:42
promoting it. We don't want to do that. All that kind of concern. I think one of the best things
01:35:48
you can do is support places like Vidiot's, places where you can see the brilliance of
01:35:54
filmmakers and writers and actors and appreciate it and support like local businesses.
01:36:00
around your town or wherever you live and understand that like that's not something
01:36:05
some computer program can replace. You can kind of go sit and absorb it and understand how
01:36:12
cynical and kind of ugly and disrespectful that attitude is that these studios are taking that
01:36:20
like all of that talent is replaceable when the truth is they're the ones that are replaceable.
01:36:26
So replaceable. Well, how's two hours for you guys? Is that long enough? Jesus. Almost.
01:36:36
Yeah. Is there anything else you want to discuss real quick so we can round it out to a solid two hours?
01:36:41
I have to pee so bad. So no. Then let's just say stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
01:36:49
Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production.
01:37:02
Our producer is Alejandra Keck. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton. This episode was edited and mixed by Liana Spolacci.
01:37:10
Our researchers are Maren McClashen and Allie Elkin. Email your hometowns and fucking hoorays to myfavoritemurder at gmail.com.
01:37:17
Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and Twitter at My Fave Murder.
01:37:23
Goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you One unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash iHeartRadio.
01:38:07
That's O-D-O-O-O dot com slash iHeartRadio. This episode is brought to you in part by Vital Farms.
01:38:14
Have you noticed that the egg section at the grocery store has gotten very complicated lately?
01:38:18
But Vital Farms makes it simple. Pasture-raised eggs traceable to the farm. Their hens have outdoor access year-round with fresh air and sunshine and forage on rotated pastures with local grasses.
01:38:28
Every carton can be traced back to the farm it came from so you can see the pasture where the hens live by visiting vitalfarms.com slash farm.
01:38:36
Look for the black carton in the egg aisle and visit vitalfarms.com to learn more.
01:38:40
Vitalfarms. Good eggs, no shortcuts. Goodbye. The Colonels cooked up a new $10 bucket of the day just for you.
01:38:48
Monday, 24 nuggets for $10. Tuesday, 8-piece fried chicken for $10. Wednesday, 10 wings for $10.
01:38:55
Thursday, 8 tenders for $10. Friday 24 nuggets for ooh you guessed it didn't you
01:39:01
$10 the $10 bucket of the day deal every weekday only at KFC it's finger licking good
01:39:10
prices and participation variable supplies last not available on third party ordering platforms tax extra