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316 - Circle of Malice

March 03, 2022 /

This episode of My Favorite Murder covers the story of the Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher, and her attempted murder of Mary Jo Buttafuoco. Hosts Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff discuss the events leading up to the shooting, the media frenzy surrounding the case, and the aftermath for both women. Key topics include the relationship between Fisher and Buttafuoco's husband, Joey, and the societal implications of the case.

Georgia and Karen recount how Amy Fisher, a 16-year-old, became involved with Joey Buttafuoco, a 36-year-old married man. They discuss the manipulative dynamics of their relationship, including how Joey encouraged Amy's obsession and ultimately her violent actions. The hosts highlight the tragic consequences of this affair, particularly for Mary Jo, who was shot in the head by Fisher.

The episode also touches on the media's portrayal of the case, with Fisher being labeled the "Long Island Lolita" and how this affected public perception. Georgia and Karen express their frustration with the way women are often treated in the media, especially in cases of violence and crime.

As they delve into the details of the investigation, they discuss the challenges law enforcement faced in identifying the victim and the eventual legal outcomes for both Fisher and Buttafuoco. The hosts reflect on the societal issues raised by the case, including the exploitation of women and the consequences of toxic relationships.

Overall, this episode provides a comprehensive overview of a notorious case that captivated the public and raises important questions about gender, power, and accountability.

TLDR

Amy Fisher's attempted murder of Mary Jo Buttafuoco highlights toxic relationships and media exploitation.

Episode

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Own the dream. Hello. Hello. And welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hardstark. Thanks. That's Karen
00:02:03
Kilgariff. And we're here to podcast at you. Are you ready? At you, on you, around you. Can you do
00:02:10
it with us? Yeah. Your aura is made of podcasts now. Yeah. And we're here for that. Hi. What's
00:02:16
going on, Karen? How's your week been? I mean, you know, nothing stressful, nothing, like,
00:02:22
nothing brain breaking at all or anything that just makes me stare at my phone all day long.
00:02:30
Yeah. How about yourself? Same. Yeah. I definitely did a deep dive while Vince was sleeping next to me and I was insomniac-ing
00:02:40
and then went online to buy disaster preparedness kits. Did you know you could buy a bucket of fucking food?
00:02:48
Fruit dried food. Yeah, essentially. But it comes in a bucket for some reason. Yeah. The great Jim Baker, Tammy Faye's ex.
00:02:56
Oh, yeah. He's been selling Apocalypse Soup on those religious channels for years now.
00:03:04
Apocalypse Soup is the best term I've ever. It's like a prepper concept, I think.
00:03:11
And yeah, I don't. It's the bucket aspect. Like, yeah, we can just let's put everything else aside because, you know, it's upset.
00:03:22
and it's whatever. Yeah. Here's how I imagined it. Okay. That soup goes into that bucket in soup form, hot, liquid.
00:03:32
And then it's slopped in there. And then it gets shipped out to the people that watch Jim Baker's TV show over the hours,
00:03:40
days, weeks after it gets slopped in. Or are you telling me this soup is freeze dried?
00:03:46
Okay. Yeah. It's not loose soup. It's not loose soup. These words we're using. It's not a hot bisque.
00:03:54
It's not a hot loose soup. It's like, it's like little, it's like little, it's, this doesn't make sense though.
00:03:59
Cause it's like packages, individual packages of meals and soup and stuff. But then they put it in a, like, there's no reason it needs to be all then put in a bucket
00:04:06
unless, oh, I know what it is. What? You use the bucket as your toilet. Pee that soup right back out.
00:04:12
Shit. It's all dark and horrifying. It is. And I'm I don't want to be one of the many who are like trying to glorify or almost like social media of this invasion.
00:04:32
I do have to say the very first moment that basically kind of set the tone was an old lady walking up to the invading army and a soldier, which we all know this at this point.
00:04:47
Now this is legend. Yeah. Yeah. And she said, you better put some sunflower seeds in your pocket. So something grows when your dead body is left behind in our land. Did you know I missed that? Because I was off everything over the weekend just for my own mental health and to keep buying buckets of smart food.
00:05:09
Yeah, for your mental health, you weren't checking Instagram, but you were buying.
00:05:14
Yeah. But you know what I did? I go, Vince, figure it out. Because, you know, Vince will be like, I looked into every single one and here's the best one
00:05:20
and here's why and this and that. And so I'm like, you do it. Sure. But he's also like chiller than me.
00:05:25
So he's like, got it. I'm on it. And then like, and then he buys a packet of Lipton onion soup and is like, yeah, I did
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what I technically did what you said. This will last us 72 hours. But I just want I do want to celebrate that badass woman.
00:05:42
And apparently this is what you Ukrainian people are like. Yeah, because she didn't give a fuck.
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And then when I first read it I thought she was being nice to him because I didn understand what she was saying And then of course then you learned Ukrainian when and then I studied it but no that message of a
00:06:04
of just a woman walking up to a fully armed soldier and being like, well, this is pointless.
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You're going down. And at the very least, you might as well stick some sunflower seeds in your brother.
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It's just like, this is pretty fucking unbelievable. Wow. Yeah. I mean, if that's what the old ladies are like in Ukraine, then well, yeah, then my sister sends me a TikTok this morning of a young lady with she had gray fingernails and very hip clothing.
00:06:35
And she was showing you how to drive a Russian tank that's been abandoned on the side of the road.
00:06:41
No joke. OK, she's inside it and she's explaining to you what you flip this, you flip this, you do this, you put it into gear.
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and she goes ahead and drives the tank away. Can I tell you how proud of myself up until this point I've been that like,
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I know how to drive stick. And then suddenly this chick comes along and she's like, I know how to drive tank.
00:07:03
There's always another level. This is some genius man said to me early days of working in television.
00:07:10
He was a designer and he was so genius. And I was like, whoa, I didn't even know stuff like that existed.
00:07:16
And he looked at me and goes, oh, there's always another level. I was just like, fuck, yes.
00:07:21
Yes. There's always another level. That's matrix shit. Yeah. It's like the goal of life is leveling up.
00:07:30
So, yeah. Level up. Yeah. Learn how to drive a tank. That's the point. That's the point.
00:07:35
What letter is that on your driver's license? That's a D? Class T. Class T. Class T is when you can drive tanks around.
00:07:42
Yeah. No, it's very scary. Let's do some escapism. The reason that, you know, I'm the one that fucking told Georgia we shouldn't talk about this.
00:07:51
And then I'm the one that's talking about it in my classic manner. But it's because we don't want to pretend like it's not happening and it's not scaring the shit out of everybody.
00:08:01
But you you get onto these podcasts so that you can escape from escape into true crime, which is like you're everyone who knows you is like, what is wrong with her?
00:08:11
That that's her escape. But like, we're here with you. That's our escape, too. Yes, it is. Also, can I ask you, did you get a chance to enter into my favorite latest escape?
00:08:24
Now I want to sing. Love is Blind? Stefani. No. What? The Tinder Swindler. Oh, fuck. I'm not interested for some reason.
00:08:35
And we were watching Inventing Anna for the past week with the fucking. I gave you very clear homework.
00:08:43
And you, of course, in your punk rock style said F you teacher and refused. Fuck you, man.
00:08:49
I think you're going to enjoy. I know I will. It's beyond. Okay. I'm there. I'm going to make Vince.
00:08:56
We do this thing where we're like, I'm not going to like that. And then 10 minutes in and we're like, either fuck this forever or we love this.
00:09:03
But isn't that what all of TV watching is like now? because you're you're trying to control the I'm not going to say vibe because I'm 51 but you're
00:09:12
right it's like that though you're trying to continue on what you're already feeling yeah or
00:09:18
or level it up a little and like a little better yep but unless you're depressed and yeah those
00:09:24
true crime docs in these in these dark days are difficult because you're like oh is anyone gonna
00:09:29
do anything about this yeah but this one has a kind of a there's kind of a jaunty sociopathy
00:09:38
going on in this thing that that is feels next level in the kooky um like brand name you know
00:09:47
those people that just love brand name items versace and gucci and they're just like i have my
00:09:55
Kate, my Versace purse that everyone knows is Versace. It's not subtle at all. No, no, no, no, no. It has like the letter of the brand all over it. It's the goofiest shit.
00:10:06
I've always thought it was goofy. It's just style wise. If you like stuff like that,
00:10:10
fucking God bless. And I don't care. Yeah. But when, but honestly, when you see it's driving
00:10:16
this person entirely and there's all these like selfies where like he's wearing the latest quote
00:10:22
unquote sunglasses, but it's, it looks like someone doing a bad sketch. Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:28
Like, uh, who would it be? Like, uh, what's his name? It has everything. Bill Hader.
00:10:34
Bill Hader. I don't know. It's, it's kooky. Let's not spend too much time on it.
00:10:38
Cause I don't think it deserves it, but I liked it. Can I, can I actually say another one I liked?
00:10:44
Please. I have to get, I have to look it up because the name is ridiculous. So the Kristen Bell show, the woman in the house across the street from something, something, something reminded me of Naked Gun.
00:10:58
And that was really it was really fun to watch. Oh, really? Yeah. It wasn't like laugh out loud, but it was like giggle inducing.
00:11:06
And also the story itself like carried it through. So it worked. I mean, it's a it's high time that people start making fun of that very specific genre of like troubled lady.
00:11:19
The first time I think you and I talked about this because the first time I read the I think it was the girl in the window or the woman at which there was one of those books.
00:11:27
And they talk about this girl drinking like it's the craziest shit. Remember where it's like she gets on the train, but she already had a little vodka.
00:11:36
Oh, yeah. She's like vodka in her like sports drink bottle. And they're talking about it like she's shooting up where I'm just like, hey, sorry, this is what I used to do every fucking day.
00:11:46
Like this is she barely putting in the time of being like a meaningful drunk And you writing about her Also like who drinks vodka straight Like that to me is No you got to mix some Gatorade in there so it goes into your bloodstream faster Oh God
00:12:01
That's what we got in high school. There's two friends of the podcast family in it.
00:12:07
Mary Holland, the hilarious comedian who we love. The best. The best. And then also Cameron Britton.
00:12:15
None other than... Yes! Ed Kemper. Ed Kemper on Mindhunter. He's in it too, playing essentially the same character.
00:12:23
Yeah. So Cameron Britton was in it. It's a fun little show to watch. I really did like it.
00:12:29
Oh, great. Yeah. It was very naked gun, like airplane style. Who doesn't need that shit right now?
00:12:37
Like, yes, please. Yes, please. Yeah. It's comfy. I'd watch it for sure. Well, I did.
00:12:43
I would tell you to watch it for sure. Yes, you did. And you have. And I will. And everybody's hearing it and doing it.
00:12:52
I can't I keep trying to watch like shows on PBS that are from other countries that I'm like, yes, I'm going to really dig in.
00:13:04
And I truly can't keep my eyes off my phone to read the subtitles. I just keep doing that over and over again.
00:13:11
It's very frustrating. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I said it recently, two fat ladies on YouTube, the cooking show is so highly enjoyable.
00:13:21
And so like at the end of every episode, they're out sipping martinis and one of them is fucking chain smoking.
00:13:27
Like they're just the best women. I love it so much. It's like a palate cleanser at the end of the night if you've been watching true crime all day.
00:13:34
Oh, yeah. That's I we watched that show real time when it was on in the 80s because it was on PBS.
00:13:41
And my dad, those guys and there were some local chefs. We watched. That just reminds me so much of like that early 80s, like cuisine.
00:13:51
Yes, cuisine. Cuisine and quiches and the trend of cuisine. And it wasn't like a beautiful kitchen.
00:13:58
It was like back in the cook station at a restaurant. Yeah. With like tons of stainless steel.
00:14:03
It wasn't like, here's a beautifully manicured kitchen. No. It was like, here's how you make it.
00:14:09
You get to have this. You're going to be the French chef now. Yeah. You should plate it like this.
00:14:14
And that's the end of it. It is. Yeah, I can't think of anything else. Me neither.
00:14:24
Just doing a lot of staring. A lot of staring. It's that kind of time in our lives where it's just like a lot of staring, a lot of eating.
00:14:33
Eating, staring. Also, the weather changed. And this is so truly boring to talk about weather.
00:14:40
But in Los Angeles, it has been like all over the map of what we're doing, what season we're in.
00:14:46
And suddenly today was spring, the end, 82. It was fucking 90. Well, over here, it was fucking 90.
00:14:52
Yeah. Sorry, everyone. Yeah. Cold. But, you know, you should just move, probably.
00:14:59
You know, Vince has told me that, like, I was like, maybe we'll move to Ann Arbor one day or something.
00:15:03
And he's just like, Georgia, you will not be able to handle six months. out of like he yeah there's no way i could handle six months out of the year in michigan
00:15:13
what you know how you could do that you start in alaska and you get you just go miserable yeah the
00:15:21
worst the highest level of it and then you bring it down to oh this is smile compared to fucking
00:15:28
alaska no white knights in ann arbor great perfect there probably are what's a white knight
00:15:35
White nights are that it's some time of year where the sun never goes down. Well, I, you know, I went to Alaska once to Homer and it was daytime until 10 p.m.
00:15:47
Yeah. It was the trippiest thing. Yep. Because you're way up there by the sun. You're right next to the sun.
00:15:56
Anyway. All right. Quick Exactly Right highlights Alex and Elizabeth of the True Beauty Brooklyn podcast.
00:16:04
they're continuing their discussion. So it's part two of all you'll ever need to know, Karen,
00:16:09
about eyebrows. Yes, literally two parts to that, which like, I want to know what there is to know.
00:16:17
Well, these days, there's so much more than usual, because there's I mean, I'm a little bit obsessed
00:16:23
with it, like people getting the is it microblading? Yeah, they're getting those big old
00:16:31
eyebrows tattooed. I feel like as a person who's really gone through almost every phase of eyebrow
00:16:38
style, and I know that those tattoos do fade, but not as much as they should, I feel like,
00:16:45
especially for the style. It's like this style won't last. Right. The style was very large and
00:16:50
also like very close together in the middle, which I remember I asked you backstage once,
00:16:58
Should I get eyebrow blading? And you were like, absolutely not. Don't do that. Thank you.
00:17:03
Thank you, by the way. You're welcome. Yeah, I want to know about eyebrows. Only because, but here's why I say that.
00:17:09
Because when I was 12 years old, I noticed that I had basically this starting of a unibrow.
00:17:16
And that by myself in the bathroom at Jerry Batanti's house, because I was being babysit
00:17:21
after school, I started plucking my eyebrows. And that's how I plucked this one all the way back to the middle of my eye.
00:17:28
Like I just kept going because I was like, oh no, there's too much. One more, one more.
00:17:33
And it was like, my sister and I said to Nora every day from when she was eight years old on, never touch your own eyebrows.
00:17:39
We will take you to get them whenever you want to get them done. We will take. And she would always be like, what are you talking about?
00:17:45
Because I was so afraid once you fuck your eyebrows up once you fuck them like that they come back in weird So like maybe that just me my old self talking but if you mess with them in any other direction
00:18:01
whatever. Yeah. But I guess I just mean making big swings in the eyebrow department,
00:18:06
it gives me pause and I want other people to also have pause because you're not always going to be
00:18:12
wearing mom jeans and a half sweatshirt. No, we shaved ours in the nineties. Can you imagine us
00:18:18
walking around now? Look at, look up Drew Barrymore photos from the nineties, who was the
00:18:22
only person who looked good with that style. Yeah. Shaved, drawn back on. The Clara Bow look was
00:18:29
rough. And for those of us on speed, it made perfect sense for what you did all morning longs,
00:18:35
pluck your eyebrows. Yeah. But man, yeah, it, it was, it didn't hold up later. So that's our, that's our message to you is to listen to true beauty Brooklyn podcast.
00:18:47
They might have, you know what? Are we estheticians? No. Are we professionals? No.
00:18:53
I went to three months of beauty school. That's not enough. You didn't get that license. You're so close and you could go back with your credits.
00:19:00
I'm just saying. Don't think so. Okay. Is 20 years the limit? I don't know. What's the statute of limitations?
00:19:07
Okay. This week on That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast, the guest is none other than Jacqueline Smith.
00:19:16
If you are anywhere near my age, you know she was one of the OG Charlie's Angels.
00:19:22
She was a guest star on SVU Season 11, Episode 18, and she is on Kara and Lisa's podcast talking to them to their face about her career and her time.
00:19:34
on Law & Order. She's amazing. There's no way she wasn't on an episode of Love Boat, right?
00:19:40
Oh, every one of those. Also, every shampoo commercial. Like, she sold me shampoo in my deepest,
00:19:48
in the deepest part of my subconscious. She's there. Was that Tresemme? Was that it?
00:19:54
I don't know. Sounds right. Tresemme? Yeah, something fake French. She was involved in it.
00:20:02
Jeannette, Tresemme. Okay. Whatever. Whatever. And then on Lady to Lady, the ladies are joined by actor and the very popular food
00:20:10
TikToker, which I freaking love, Katie Molinaro. She's at Eat It, Katie. And I, you know, I'm
00:20:17
obsessed with food bloggers and people. How are you a food TikToker? How is one a food TikToker?
00:20:25
You make food on TikToker. correct i'm saying tiktok before very recently was all about real short clips right so like if
00:20:37
you were gonna do a recipe in 30 seconds is that just a ton of editing as you cook i'm 41
00:20:43
steven steven how does tiktok work steven you're 12 yeah i'm too old for this too
00:20:50
I'm turning 35 this year oh yeah you're done everyone let us know how the fuck TikTok works
00:20:58
I mean I know first of all go listen to Lady to Lady and I bet you'll find out through Katie Molinaro
00:21:05
but I also want to know because I do know my sister sent me recipes where it really is like
00:21:11
super sped up chopping and shit yeah well I follow the Reddit page Stupid Food which is just joyful and
00:21:20
they just show a lot of bad TikTok. Like this, there's this trend right now where they,
00:21:25
the kitchen Island, you know, it's beautiful marble. Everyone lives in beautiful fucking
00:21:28
houses, all these influencers and they make countertop nachos. So they spread everything
00:21:35
all over the fucking countertop where nobody wants to fucking eat it. I heard that was fake. I heard that was invented to get clicks and to get people upset.
00:21:47
Yes, there's another one of those where they make cotton candy in the dryer. And it is so disgusting.
00:21:55
It is heinous, heinous. And I think a lot of those where they'll be like the biggest fucking grilled cheese in the world.
00:22:03
Like a lot of those are like to piss people off. But that one specifically, it works.
00:22:07
It's on stupid food on Reddit, the subreddit. It's true. Man, you know who else is on it a lot is Salt Bay.
00:22:14
because people buy these like tomahawk steaks and they get it covered in that gold paper edible gold
00:22:23
and so it's like a three thousand dollar fucking tomahawk steak because it has gold which doesn't
00:22:28
taste like anything and you're just gonna shit it out excuse me you're gonna shit it out anyways
00:22:32
but it's like but salt bay delivers it to your table it's like so obnoxious it's a conspicuous
00:22:38
consumption it's like they're like look how rich we are that we're just being insanely
00:22:41
insanely rich and wasteful. Yeah. Look, long-time listeners, we've got some classic MFM logo merch for you
00:22:54
in the merch store. So go check out all of that. The old stuff from back in the day.
00:23:00
I feel like we do so much cool new stuff now that we just need the actual logo and the cool fucking
00:23:05
classic. We need to give everybody everything all the time. Any want. should be absolutely met immediately.
00:23:14
But how insane is it that we're old enough, we've been around long enough to actually have classic merch?
00:23:20
It's like we could put out a best of album where you're like, you've only been around for fucking Britney.
00:23:26
It's like however long and you're putting out a best of? Hell yeah, we are. Pretty cool.
00:23:31
I mean, that's just about commerce. That's just about demand, supply and demand.
00:23:36
If people demand the old merch, who are we to say now? Who are we? Who there but for the grace of God go we.
00:23:46
That's right. And our merch. And stuff like that. Should we start this thing off?
00:23:51
And also my favorite murder dot com. But yes, yes, let's do it. Go. Let's give people the true crime relief they need from the reality of the world.
00:24:01
Everyone take a deep breath. Let's get into the distraction time. Hello, beautiful.
00:24:13
I'm Amy Erick, founder of Madison Reed, a hair color company I named after my daughter.
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00:24:48
Today we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP.
00:24:56
Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari. I'm still working on rolling my R's.
00:25:04
But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi,
00:25:09
the Ferrari superfans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something,
00:25:16
want to belong to something. So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team.
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You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space.
00:25:32
I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement,
00:25:37
I mean, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans.
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To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.
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Code FLOW15. Let's escape into the 90s. Okay. This is a story that came up. I referenced it a couple weeks ago, and then I said to you right to your face,
00:27:05
I'm going to do this one. Now I'm doing it. Love it. I warned you. And now it came back for vengeance.
00:27:13
This is, and to have just read through it, I am shocked. I lived through this. I watched it go down in real time.
00:27:21
And then reading through it, I was just like, what? This is the story of the Long Island Lolita, the attempted murder of Mary Jo Buttafuoco by the coward Amy Fisher.
00:27:35
And so 37-year-old housewife and mother of two, Mary Jo Botafuco of Long Island, New York, answers a knock on the door and finds a 17-year-old girl that she doesn't know standing in front of her.
00:27:48
This girl tells Mary Jo that her name is Anne Marie and that her sister, who's a 16-year-old, is having an affair with Mary Jo's husband, Joey.
00:27:58
so Mary Jo looks and sees that there's a car idling out front and that there's a boy inside
00:28:05
so she asks quote-unquote Anne Marie who he is Anne Marie says that that's her boyfriend
00:28:11
and quickly changes the subject back to this supposed affair to prove this is the truth she
00:28:19
holds up a t-shirt from Joey's auto body shop complete auto body and fender ink and then she
00:28:26
says Joey gave it to her sister. So she's basically holding that up like, here's your proof right here.
00:28:32
Weird. Right? Mary Jo not only does not believe her, but she gets pissed, of course. And all told,
00:28:40
the two women talk on this front porch for about 15 minutes. So she clearly listened to her,
00:28:47
heard her out, you know, kind of indulged this a little bit. Finally, Mary Jo tells Anne-Marie,
00:28:53
get off my property. I'm going to go call my husband about this. And, you know, if they're
00:28:58
knowing that they're on Long Island and based on some of the interviews that I've seen,
00:29:03
it's a good chance they told each other to fuck off. I would hope. I would hope Mary Jo told her
00:29:10
to fuck off. But before Mary Jo can turn and go back inside her house, Anne Marie pulls out a 25
00:29:18
caliber semi-automatic pistol and whacks Mary Jo on the back of the head with it, stunning her.
00:29:24
She hits Mary Jo with the gun a second time and knocks her to the ground. Then she aims the gun at Mary Jo's head and fires.
00:29:33
My God. This is so crazy. I have not read about this since it happened in the 90s because I was then too.
00:29:40
And I figured, I know the whole story, blah, blah, blah. I mean it was a huge tabloid story It was gigantic You couldn get away from it It was the only story around You heard about it every single day everywhere And it became after a while it became breaking news
00:29:58
because then additional things happened. But this first initial attack, which from almost the
00:30:07
beginning of this story, and there's a lot of, I don't, you know, there's a lot of very interesting
00:30:12
things that I'm sure much smarter people than me can break down about, uh, you know, basically the,
00:30:20
the, the journalism piece of this, the media frenzy piece of this and the way it took both
00:30:27
of these women just, you know, took them for all they had basically. And just, it was, uh,
00:30:34
while he kind of, well, the husband just kind of walked around and was like, Hey, what's the
00:30:39
problem. Um, it's amazing. The 17 year old factor of it, I think would be treated very differently
00:30:47
today. One would hope. Oh my God. I mean, like even just reading this and reading it and reading
00:30:55
Jay's research, he did an amazing job. Um, but I was, it was like, just like this couldn't,
00:31:01
like the way this was treated and the way this was discussed and the way it all went down
00:31:08
is so disgusting yeah and so um so not okay and i mean like yeah it's it's pretty amazing but
00:31:16
but the idea that this woman was shot point blank mary joe but if you go shot point blank
00:31:22
at her on her doorstep in an attempted murder essentially is fucking beyond that alone is
00:31:29
beyond okay so okay so then we'll call her ann marie for the time being but we all know this is
00:31:38
Amy Fisher, Anne Marie drops the gun and the T-shirt that she was holding up and runs back
00:31:44
to her boyfriend's car. The kid yells at her going, you left all that stuff behind.
00:31:49
So then she has to run back up, grab the gun and the T-shirt and then get back into the
00:31:56
car, speed off, leaving Mary Jo Buttafuoco bleeding out and as far as she knows, dead
00:32:03
on the front porch. So thank God, three of Mary Jo's neighbors heard this gunshot and they came running over to find that she is still alive.
00:32:13
Actually, they call 911. The ambulance arrives minutes later. She gets rushed to the ER at Nassau Community Medical Center.
00:32:21
The doctors immediately take her into surgery. They work through the night. She's in surgery for eight hours.
00:32:27
They cannot remove the bullet from her skull. that's actually gone through and down and is lodged in her spine.
00:32:36
Oh, my God. But they are able to stabilize her. When she wakes up, the doctors, and I'll discover half of her face is paralyzed,
00:32:47
and she is partially deaf in one ear. So in the meantime, the police find her husband, Joey Botafuco.
00:32:56
They bring him in for questioning. There's no evidence tying him to this shooting.
00:33:00
but police want to know who might have done it and why and Joey point it points them to two people
00:33:06
that he thinks might be involved one is a man named Paul Makeley and then Paul's girlfriend
00:33:11
Amy Fisher okay Joey tells the police that Paul is in drugs he owes dangerous people money and that
00:33:20
Paul borrowed money from his girlfriend Amy and because Joey claims to be a friend of Amy's
00:33:28
He's 36 and she's 16 years old. He advised her not to lend it to him. So he believes that when Paul heard that he, Joey, told Amy not to lend Paul the money, that Paul got mad about that and decided to retaliate against Joey's family.
00:33:48
So let's take that from the top. Okay. Paul? Oh, no, just kidding. But can you imagine the investigator that's sitting in that room with him? Like, okay, that's your story? That's your story. So when Mary Jo regains consciousness, the next day, it's May 20th, 1992, investigators ask her if she can remember what happened. And she describes what this teenage girl, Anne Marie, look like and what her boyfriend with the car, she remembers everything.
00:34:20
Oh, my God. That's crazy that she still has her complete memory. Yeah. In that moment. Yeah. She tells them all about it. And then when they show her a photo of Amy Fisher, she immediately identifies her as her shooter. Amazing. So now that they know that the whole Anne-Marie, Anne-Marie doesn't exist, that that because Joey Botafogo admitted to being quote unquote friends with Amy Fisher, they now know he's involved in this somehow.
00:34:45
Now it's starting to look like he is basically knows a lot more than he's letting on to the police.
00:34:52
So let's do a little bit of history here about the people that we're talking about.
00:34:58
So Amy Fisher, she was born August 21st, 1974. She was an only child. She was raised, born and raised on Long Island, very close with her mother, but has a strained relationship with her father.
00:35:12
According to Amy, he's a very angry man who scares her. she tries her best to stay out of his way. And she also would later go on to say that her
00:35:22
upbringing was traumatic. She was sexually abused by an unnamed family member throughout her
00:35:27
childhood. And then this is very triggering. 1987, she was only 13 years old when a contractor
00:35:34
who'd been hired to work on the Fisher's home rapes Amy in her bedroom. So a lot of trauma
00:35:40
in her childhood But despite all of this she is a very social person She has tons of friends several close friends she hangs out with regularly and by all intents and purposes
00:35:55
is having a good time in school. Then one day in May of 1991, she's 16 years old. She's pulling her
00:36:04
car out of the garage. She accidentally scrapes her rearview mirror against the garage wall
00:36:11
and knocks it off. And she's so scared about how mad her dad's going to be, she decides she needs
00:36:18
to take it to an auto body shop herself and try to get it fixed and try to see if she can not have
00:36:24
to tell her dad about it. So she ends up going to complete auto body and fender ink in the Long
00:36:31
Island town of Baldwin. And that's where she meets the shop owner, Joey Botafuco. Wow. So she's
00:36:37
convinced that she can get her car fixed. And basically, that her dad will never know about it
00:36:43
if she can get just get it done quickly. But when Joey quotes her the price, she cannot afford it.
00:36:50
And she breaks down. She explains that she can't go to her parents for the money because her dad
00:36:57
It'll lose his mind. Joey calms her down and tells her to just say that someone else sideswiped the car.
00:37:04
And then it won't be her fault. It'll take the blame off of her. And then her parents will pay for the repairs.
00:37:10
Yeah. So that's exactly what she does. She goes home and tells her parents that lie.
00:37:15
Her dad buys it. He agrees to go back with Amy to the shop to pay for the repairs.
00:37:20
And while they're there, Amy starts to notice how smooth and charming Joey is dealing with her very uptight, angry father.
00:37:30
So she takes an interest in him. So over the course of the next couple of weeks, Amy dings her car several times on purpose.
00:37:41
Oh, I mean, if they had been a great couple, that would have been cute. Right. But doesn't this remind you of the sociopath test?
00:37:49
Which part? Isn't it the thing where it's like, I'm going to see this person again if someone else dies?
00:37:55
She's wrecking her own car just so she can... Maybe she's just scratching it or whatever.
00:38:00
It points to the unbelievability of this story in the first place. If she's so fucking scared that her dad's going to lose his shit on her, which is her story,
00:38:13
then why would she keep dinging and taking it back? Why wouldn't she just go back and figure out some other non-risky reason?
00:38:22
Here's why. She's 16. Yeah, but I think that she's... I think it's a lie. I think that there's a bit of...
00:38:32
I mean, who knows? But what I'm saying is, it's the storyline. You're setting it up that she's so scared to death.
00:38:40
And then suddenly she's now doing the thing that she was, quote unquote, so scared to do.
00:38:45
Because she's actually not scared at all. That's my pure editorialism. But anyway, the point being, Joey doesn't mind the attention.
00:38:55
They start flirting and basically beginning an incredibly appropriate borderline pedophilic relationship because she's 16 and he's 36.
00:39:06
He's 36? Yeah. So then on July 2nd, Amy goes to the auto body shop once again to have a new stereo system installed in her car.
00:39:18
I guess she has money now. Okay. After the appointment, Joey ends up driving her home.
00:39:25
He goes inside with her. And this is the first time they sleep together. She's 16 years old.
00:39:32
So this qualifies as statutory rape because New York's age of consent is 17. so for the next few weeks Amy and Joey
00:39:40
are meeting up at motels to have this affair and of course no one knows but them
00:39:46
so about two weeks after this first encounter Amy gets a rash she goes to the doctor
00:39:54
finds out she has contracted an STD from her new lover Joey but because it's this medical issue
00:40:02
she tells her parents about it and so at this point She doesn't say where she got it, though.
00:40:09
She just she just tells her parents about it. She's not like, hey, remember that mechanic?
00:40:15
So at this point, she is completely under his spell and she's very afraid. She doesn't she knows that he could get arrested by having this affair with her.
00:40:24
And she's trying to protect him. OK, so the next month, August, Amy is going to turn 17.
00:40:32
So now this illicit and illegal affair is now at least legal, although exploitative and gross.
00:40:40
So Amy gets a job at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa. She's fired after a month. So she goes to Joey to confide in him about how she needs money to finish off paying her car.
00:40:53
And according to her, he convinces her to look into starting sex work. Oh, wow. He hooks her up with an escort agency called ABBA Escorts.
00:41:03
She didn't particularly want to do it, but she is desperate enough for money that she ends up joining this escort service in September of 1991.
00:41:12
So basically, as you would expect this kind of lifestyle change to do, she's basically consumed with this affair she's having with Joey.
00:41:25
She's consumed with like her sex work. So her grades are dropping. She's not talking to her friends.
00:41:32
Like her life is changing. She also starts fantasizing that she going to end up with Joey Right But she knows he still married to his wife And he often complains about Mary Jo to Amy and tells her that he unhappy in his marriage and that he loves being with her
00:41:53
being with Amy. So by November of that year, she's sick of waiting for him to come around.
00:42:01
Literally, it's been like three months, but she's already like enough. Yeah. She gives him an
00:42:07
ultimatum and says, it's either your wife or me. And Joey chooses Mary Jo. Right. So Amy has a
00:42:14
breakdown. She attempts suicide. And basically, she tells her mother that it's about a boy her
00:42:21
own age. And that's, that's what happened. Her mom helps her pick up the pieces. And she basically,
00:42:27
you know, decides to, to continue on. During the winter of 1991, she starts a new relationship with
00:42:36
a man named Paul Makeley. He's a co-owner of a gym in Massapequa called Future Physique. And even
00:42:43
though she's dating Paul, she's still obsessed with Joey. So she starts reaching out to him again.
00:42:48
And even though she went through a really horrible thing over him, she basically gets
00:42:57
back together with him. So by January of 1992, they're back together. She tells Joey that she's
00:43:05
dating Paul and Joey gets jealous. But since, you know, Joey's still with Mary Jo, then Amy feels
00:43:12
like that's her counter to that. Right. But whenever the subject of Paul comes up, Amy assures Joey
00:43:18
that he means nothing to her. Yeah. That she really only wants to be with her 36 year old
00:43:25
boyfriend who got her into sex work. God. Yeah, it's dark. So, so basically, Amy becomes obsessed
00:43:33
with the fact that Joey will not leave his wife and chooses his wife over her. So on May 13th,
00:43:40
1992, Amy and her friend Jane are at a salon and they start talking about, um, Jane is talking about
00:43:49
her boyfriend troubles and saying how, um, she knows her boyfriend's cheating on her with this
00:43:55
girl and that she wishes she could just quote, get a gun and go blow that girl's head off.
00:44:00
and that's uh with that amy tells jane that's what she's going to do to marry joe so that's
00:44:07
like the they can pinpoint it to the day that she first started thinking about this
00:44:12
amy asks her friend jane if she knows where she can get a gun and and jane suggests their
00:44:19
a friend and mutual acquaintance an auto parts salesman pdg his name is peter good genti good
00:44:27
genti. Okay. But we'll call him PDG. PDG. So according to Amy's later account, she goes
00:44:35
to Joey and tells him about her plan to kill Mary Jo. Oh. And Amy says that he encourages this plan.
00:44:46
Oh. He would later deny that that conversation ever took place. But according to Amy,
00:44:51
she went to him with this plan and he agreed and liked the plan what do you think happened
00:44:58
I mean it's really hard to say because I feel like the story I feel like Amy Fisher was a pariah
00:45:06
from the second like this started so nothing on her side of things will ever look like genuine or
00:45:14
like she was trying or she there's she's never gonna seem like the innocent victim ever right
00:45:20
So if he tells some story about how she was obsessed with him and she told him she was going to do this and all this stuff, you know, or other people do, if other of her friend Jane made money by going and being interviewed by, you know, some someplace and tell that story.
00:45:41
I mean, like, who knows? Because it's it's hearsay, right? They're both unreliable narrators.
00:45:47
So it's like, yeah, but neither are believable, which makes it really hard. And it's kind of like it reminds me of the second season of Dirty John, which was about the woman, the 80s woman whose husband left her.
00:46:04
Her name is like synonymous with like Betty Broderick. Thank you, Betty Broderick.
00:46:08
You know that one? Oh, it's so good. But it makes me think of that where like when we first heard about Betty Broderick.
00:46:14
Yeah. She was just a lunatic woman who murdered her ex and his new wife. Right. His new wife, yeah.
00:46:20
And then when you watch like season two of Dirty John, you're just like, oh my God, she was driven.
00:46:25
She was driven insane. She was, you know, there are steps before someone does that.
00:46:31
So like there are steps before Amy Fisher as a 16 year old was standing on that porch shooting Mary Jo Buttafuoco.
00:46:40
But does that right? It doesn't always mean that that means they're innocent or that they were driven to that.
00:46:49
Like, it's just I would never know. I would. I don't know. It doesn't mean they're not culpable for their actions.
00:46:55
And I feel like living through a news event like this, you judged this story like on day three and never looked back.
00:47:05
I did. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I was I was 22, so I wasn't paying a ton of attention to anyone besides myself.
00:47:12
And I was 12, so I didn't understand a lot of it. But yeah, it's pretty mind blowing, too, because it it's a level of obsession where you're just like, oh, you just went as a teenager.
00:47:25
Murdered attempted to murder someone in cold blood to their like on their front porch with who has children.
00:47:33
Yeah. A mother of two. And like other than as far as that woman knew, just an average.
00:47:41
Medicine. Wife and mother, like so innocent. Yeah. Yeah. It's really awful. Yeah.
00:47:47
So two days after that discussion, Joey pages Amy. And according to Amy, they get on the phone and he asks her whether or not she got the gun yet or not.
00:47:59
Oh. So she says she hasn't. But then two days later, she hears from PDG and he says he's got a gun for her.
00:48:08
He tells her to steal license plates from a random car. And then she and PDG put those stolen license plates on his Thunderbird.
00:48:18
And then she and PDG are the ones who drive over. I love that they change the license plate, but they bring the most obvious car.
00:48:27
Like, get a fucking Oldsmobile. Yeah, no. Thunderbird. A Thunderbird. Come on. But I bet they're a dime a dozen in Long Island.
00:48:35
Yeah, maybe. That was just what was there. But also it's this is not a well thought out plan.
00:48:41
Oh, yeah. By any stretch. I'm giving them too much credit. Yeah. Because if it wasn't the Thunderbird, it would be every other thing they did.
00:48:51
Right. Including her dropping the gun and the T-shirt. Yeah. Like nothing about this.
00:48:57
All the things. Is it is a good smart plan or anything. And you can like we can keep flipping that card where it's like, so either she was obsessed with this man who got her into sex work and basically said, yeah, you should you should go kill my wife, go get a gun and like pressure into it as according to her.
00:49:17
Or the flip side of that, which is that she was obsessed and was basically wouldn't let it go and wasn't going to let anything stop her from, quote unquote, having her man.
00:49:32
Even though she was at this point, I believe 17. Her man because she was. She was 18.
00:49:40
A child. 18. She was a teen. It's correct. A teen. Yeah. But I mean, all of this is like, it is that, it just is like, we're talking about statutory stuff or whatever, where it's like, don't mess with teenagers.
00:49:55
They're not, they don't know how to be in the world. This is a girl who has, if nothing else we know, has been through serious trauma and can't handle shit.
00:50:05
Yeah. Can't handle this. It reminds me of the podcast Teacher's Pet that first season.
00:50:11
That was so incredible. That was just like, oh, this guy is manipulating every situation he's in.
00:50:18
Yeah. I mean, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Horrifying. Okay. So then they do their license plate thing.
00:50:27
And then the morning of May 19th at around 1130, they drive to the Botafugos. So that's basically what kind of got us there.
00:50:37
What led it up. Yeah. What led up. So now we're back in the hospital with Mary Jo. It's May 20th. And Mary Jo has identified Amy Fisher as her shooter. So the police stake out her house and to go arrest her. But they surveil it for a full day. They see no sign of Amy. They get impatient. So they ask Joey to call her and to see where she's at.
00:51:01
He's hesitant at first, but then he does it. She tells him she's actually at home and that then basically police know that they can go in and they basically go and arrest her at her home on May 21st, 1992.
00:51:13
So during her interrogation, Amy finds out that Joey's the one who told the police where she was.
00:51:19
She's, of course, devastated by this betrayal. So then she tells police Joey's the one who gave her the gun and that she didn't want to shoot Mary Jo and that the gun just went off by accident.
00:51:32
She reveals that she and Joey have been having an affair and she claims that Joey wanted Amy to get rid of his wife for him.
00:51:40
So after she names Joey as the one who gave her the gun, the police bring him in again for questioning. He swears up and down that Amy is lying about his involvement. Investigators have no evidence that tied Joey to the shooting, but they are digging around into his history with Amy.
00:51:59
And of course, he fears that it's only a matter of time before they find out the proof that this was statutory rape because he was sleeping with her before her 17th birthday.
00:52:11
He denies any illegal romantic involvement with her. And at this point, Mary Jo believes him and is solidly in his corner.
00:52:23
Oh, yes. Sweet baby angel. Because what else is she supposed to do? How easy is it for her to believe this crazy girl just walked up and shot me in the head at my door?
00:52:35
Yeah. So and if my husband's looking me in the eye and going, I have no idea. I never slept with this woman.
00:52:42
Then she is there in the hospital, like with a bullet in her neck going, either you believe him or your whole world is a lie.
00:52:51
And the only evidence she showed was a shirt that anyone could get probably from his mechanic's office.
00:53:00
I don't know. Yes, totally. Yeah, for sure. Anyway. Yeah. Because a lot of people get upset.
00:53:06
Of course, of course, as this story unfolds, people judge Mary Jo Buttafuoco and like, you know, have all kinds of shit to say about her when she's the fucking one who got shot in the head.
00:53:19
And had no idea about her husband's character or had if she did, like, who the fuck knows?
00:53:27
But none of it. She's the fucking innocent goddamn victim. She the innocent victim on top of which you know this is a teenage girl So it not just your husband having an affair Right It your husband is like having an affair breaking the law and is exploitive creep A predator He a predator
00:53:46
Yeah. And you have to admit that about that's tough. And she has two daughters. Like you don't
00:53:51
want to think that your husband is a predator. I mean, Jesus. Okay. So, so on May 29th, Amy Fisher
00:53:59
is indicted by a grand jury for more on multiple charges, including attempted murder in the second
00:54:04
degree, criminal use of a firearm in the first degree, armed felony and assault. She pleads not
00:54:10
guilty to all charges. And her bail hearing is scheduled for June 2nd of that year. So of course,
00:54:18
to say there was a media frenzy is an understatement of the century. Local, national news,
00:54:24
they call, everybody's calling Amy the Long Island Lolita, right? It's just like known and
00:54:31
friends and acquaintances of Amy's, they're all interviewed by local and national news over and over again.
00:54:38
No one paints Amy in a good light. They highlight her history of poor grades, reckless behavior,
00:54:44
sex work, etc. But who among us? Who among us? Truly! For real, it's just like, I
00:54:51
will never hold up in a looking back on her life report, ever. My God! Can you imagine?
00:55:00
I mean, it's Yeah, it's just ridiculous and it really sucks. And it's what happens to women every single time.
00:55:06
Yeah. Meanwhile, they're not talking about the guy that had the affair with the 17.
00:55:11
She has a fucking nickname. Why doesn't this motherfucker have a fucking nickname?
00:55:16
Yeah. And like, I mean, unless she was like the underage person's name wouldn't be put in the in the news today unless it was they were being tried in this adult.
00:55:28
I mean, in a in a perfect world. Obviously, that doesn't happen. But right. yeah you know yeah no no it's uh mishandled is one way to say it yeah and then can i just say
00:55:37
also calling her lolita like lolita was a fucking victim of a fucking pedophile you know that
00:55:43
character in the book right so but you're here's a catchy name and you're calling her that without
00:55:49
even realizing that she's a fucking victim of a predator it's all dirty gross and salacious and
00:55:58
And absolutely what sells all newspapers. Okay, so then on June 1st, the night before Amy's bail hearing, an old John of Amy's releases a sex tape that he recorded during one of their nights together.
00:56:15
Do you remember this part of it? No, I don't remember. I think my mom was like, probably realized what was happening.
00:56:21
And I was 11 or 12 and it was like shutting off the TV. Yes. This story is so it's so salacious and so crazy.
00:56:31
And again, we're talking about a teenager that this this sex tape got released. Child pornography.
00:56:37
It's yeah. So then when Amy's bail hearing comes around the next day, the prosecuting attorney tries to convince the judge to deny Amy's bail altogether.
00:56:47
altogether. They end up setting it at a whopping $2 million for at the time that was like crazy
00:56:56
high. Amy's defense attorney tries to get the bail amount lowered, managing to get a second bail
00:57:02
hearing a couple days later, but the judge will not budge on it. Amy Fisher is unable to afford
00:57:09
the record-breaking amount of bail that has been set. So she is now behind bars until a trial date
00:57:15
set. So as she sits in jail, her reputation completely ruined. Joey Botafuco walks around
00:57:21
a free man. In June of that year, he even goes on the Howard Stern show. Oh, yeah. Yeah. After
00:57:29
Amy's bail hearing to talk about how he had never had any type of affair with her whatsoever.
00:57:36
Oh, shit. Yeah. He also claims to be a completely innocent man. And at this point, no one has any evidence to prove otherwise.
00:57:49
But a little over two months into her imprisonment, Amy gets a lucky break. A company called KLM Productions teams up with International Fidelity Insurance Company, and they raise Amy's $2 million bail.
00:58:02
Wow. Right. What? Well, they offer to bail her out in exchange for exclusive rights to her story.
00:58:09
She agrees her bail's paid and she's free to live at home until while her legal process continues.
00:58:16
And at the same time, the police investigation is continuing. Authorities now setting their sights on Paul Makeley.
00:58:24
They believe that Paul may have been the getaway driver. But when eyewitness accounts rule Paul out, further interviews lead police to
00:58:33
PDG, our boy PDG. PDG admits having supplied Amy the gun, and they later find that gun in a gutter
00:58:43
near Amy's house. So Amy's defense attorney works with the prosecution to come up with a plea
00:58:49
bargain. They are confident that Joey Botofuco, despite his claims of innocence, committed
00:58:54
statutory rape with having that relationship with Amy. So they agree that if Amy cooperates with
00:58:59
the investigation into Joey, she can plead to a lesser charge of first degree assault and face
00:59:05
five to 15 years in jail. So on September 23rd, Amy takes that deal. And of course,
00:59:14
the Buttafucas are furious, especially Mary Jo Buttafucco. Yeah. So now PDG is in legal jeopardy
00:59:25
because now he's pulled into everything and he sees that Amy cut a deal for herself. So he
00:59:31
releases yet another newer sex tape with Amy What Yeah He releases it to the show hard copy And in that tape Amy makes statements that further damage her character
00:59:45
Yeah. Basically, the video was taken exactly in the time between her being released on bail and her accepting the plea bargain.
00:59:56
And in it, she's heard saying that she wants to marry Peter so they can have conjugal visits.
01:00:01
and that she wants her quote name in the press. She says, I want my name in the press.
01:00:08
Why? Because I can make a lot of money. I figure if I'm going through all this pain and suffering,
01:00:12
I'm getting a Ferrari is the quote. Hey, what's up? I'm 17 and the things I want are Ferraris.
01:00:20
And yeah. And all of this is like a weird made up fake thing that I'm just kind of trying to get through.
01:00:27
Right. Right. Or you're a sociopath, but who the fuck isn't at 17? I mean, or yeah, or just this is worst case scenario for a person like that.
01:00:39
It's so crazy, but a person is marred by trauma. Yes. So, of course, this is yet another betrayal.
01:00:47
Amy's traumatized by she attempts suicide again. This time she takes an overdose of tranquilizers, but she's found in time she gets her stomach pumped and she survives.
01:01:00
So her sentencing hearing takes place on December 1st, 1992, and she's sentenced to 15 years.
01:01:06
But she winds up serving seven and was released in 1999. PDG is tried and sentenced to six months for getting the gun for Amy.
01:01:16
And as for Joey Buttafuoco, the DA makes an announcement in October of 1992 saying they're not pursuing charges against him in relation to the shooting.
01:01:27
So Joey goes basically flaunting his freedom in the press and on TV every chance he gets.
01:01:35
But his victory is short lived because in February of 1993, the DA reopens the statutory rape case against him.
01:01:43
Amy testifies before a grand jury that spring, and her words coupled with hotel receipts dated before Amy's 17th birthday, they basically all point toward Joey's guilt.
01:01:57
But even in the face of this damning and hard evidence, Mary Jo Botafugo defends her husband.
01:02:04
She believes that Amy's lying. She claims that she's lying. And she believes Joey never, ever cheated on her with Amy.
01:02:11
The grand jury disagrees. Joey's indicted for statutory rape, sodomy and endangering the welfare of a minor. At first, he pleads not guilty, but then reality sets in. And by the time his trial starts in October of 1993, he pleads guilty to the statutory rape charge and is sentenced to six months in prison.
01:02:32
so and this is where this story i think for a lot of people it was like it was all in like everything
01:02:41
you would read about everyday long island lolita and then these twists and these turns and then
01:02:46
finally when it got to this part it was just like oh no like i can't i don't want to hear about these
01:02:51
people anymore yeah so after joey's release from prison in 1994 um and at this point he and mary
01:02:58
Joe are still together. She stood by him through him serving time for statutory rape. They moved
01:03:06
to Los Angeles because Joey wants to parlay this fame and infamy into a TV or acting career.
01:03:15
He gets some work on cable television, but a year later, 1995, he gets caught trying to solicit sex
01:03:24
from an undercover cop. So this arrest and then, and also this consistent cheating,
01:03:31
it points to, basically opens Mary Jo's eyes to the fact that her husband is, as she will later say,
01:03:42
a sociopath. And she divorces him in 2003. And a year later in March 2004, Joey Botofuku is arrested again
01:03:51
for committing insurance fraud. He spends a year in jail and is sentenced to five years parole after his release.
01:04:01
In 2019, there were rumors that he was working on a movie about his life. And according to his daughter, he is, quote, in therapy and he's healing.
01:04:13
But she says hopefully he's, quote, not using it to justify why he made so many poor decisions.
01:04:19
so after her prison release in 1999 amy fisher um works as a columnist for the long island press
01:04:28
she also goes on to publish a memoir in 2004 called if i only knew then um the although there's a the writing credit is given to a writer named robbie walliver
01:04:41
In 2003, her parole officially ends. She marries a man who's 24 years older than her and is also a New York police officer. They have three kids before they are divorced in 2015. So they make it for about 12 years.
01:05:02
Mm hmm. Since her release from prison, Amy has given conflicting statements about her shooting Mary Jo Botafuco.
01:05:11
She's written articles in which she expresses remorse for what she did and acknowledgement that she's paid her debt to society and a desire to move on and grow from that experience.
01:05:21
But then in other instances, she's also said that she feels, quote, no sympathy for Mary Jo.
01:05:27
she also made a number of her own TV appearances and even she reunited with Joey Buttefugo in May of 2007 because there was an idea that they might start a reality show together
01:05:41
No one wants to see that. It never materialized. Thank God. Instead, Amy goes into the adult film business for a while,
01:05:51
but she got out of it in 2011, and she has since reportedly changed her name and her appearance.
01:05:56
So she's trying to put all of that life behind her now. Okay. So after the Buttafuoco's 2003 divorce, Mary Jo did the rounds on all the TV talk shows herself. She was on Larry King Live. She did Oprah. She did all of them. And in 2009, she wrote and released a book called Getting It Through My Thick Skull.
01:06:20
Yeah, that's clever. It's amazing. It is. But here's the full title of this book.
01:06:27
Getting it through my thick skull. Why I stayed, what I learned, and what millions of people involved with sociopaths need to know.
01:06:36
Girl. Yes. And I know comics who have met Mary Jo Botafuco because she likes to go to comedy shows.
01:06:45
And they say she's super cool, really funny, really nice, like a really normal, regular, cool person.
01:06:52
Amazing. um so she she had a facial paralysis for a while after uh in her recovery she had um and she had
01:07:05
surgeries all along to like slowly repair that but in 2017 um she had a what what's called a
01:07:13
reanimation surgery um after all the reconstructive surgeries that basically repaired the nerve damage
01:07:19
in her face and it reversed a lot of the facial paralysis. Um, and she basically can smile fully
01:07:27
again because of that surgery. I mean, imagine having a, every time you look in the mirror,
01:07:33
it's like a reminder of this horrible time in your life. And so is not looking in the mirror,
01:07:39
but just the fact knowing you have a bullet lodged in your spine, which is still there to this day.
01:07:44
they can't remove it. I forgot. Oh, shit. Okay. And just as a little kind of disgusting cherry to top off this very upsetting story.
01:07:55
Okay. Because Mary Jo Botafuco referred to Joey Botafuco as a sociopath in her memoir, he sued her on
01:08:04
grounds that she had, quote, made Mr. Botafuco a pariah in the community, causing him not
01:08:09
just public embarrassment, but the loss of business. No. yeah yeah the woman who stood by him all the way through she should have used that as proof
01:08:21
your honor he's suing me he's for this clearly he's actually a sociopath i mean yes like that's
01:08:30
the evidence all the evidence you need oh my god insane then that basically it's such a
01:08:37
skimmed out version. Yeah. But in terms of chronology and in terms of remember when this crazy shit
01:08:44
happened in America, that is the story of the shooting and the survival of Mary Jo Buttafuoco.
01:08:50
It feels like a Shakespearean tale. Yes. Doesn't it? Yes. So, so much drama. So it's such a nightmare.
01:09:01
Also, it's just like somebody walking up to your door in the middle of the day. Like there was some,
01:09:05
So many things triggered in this story. And it just like the more you talk about it, the worse it gets.
01:09:12
And it was handled. I mean, just even slightly thinking about how awful everything was handled around it in the media.
01:09:22
It was just disgusting. Well, that's what the fucking 90s were like, man. Yes, they were.
01:09:28
No privacy and everything was up for grabs. well and exploited exploited and these takes these angles right on women always yeah like
01:09:43
that it just was there was so little not even equality but just even like care it was just like
01:09:51
right yeah amazing sorry i never read my sources go ahead go ahead if you want to say something
01:09:57
i was just gonna say if you're watching pam and tommy right now which is hard because
01:10:03
I feel for her so much, but they're really showing what, how horribly she was treated.
01:10:09
Yeah. And that, you know, this reckoning of like what the public and, you know, lawyers and
01:10:18
tablets did to fucking Pamela Anderson. It's like heartbreaking. Yeah. And it's, it reminds me so much of this story of like, you're, you are game and you are fodder
01:10:29
and that is all you fucking are. That's right. You're a woman. you know yep and god forbid that you're like a really gorgeous sexy woman like cam anderson or
01:10:40
well i mean like the quote-unquote long island lolita which is like you mean a minor a minor
01:10:49
right even when it was like even when it was statutorily okay she was still under 18 yeah
01:10:57
Yeah. And he was 30 fucking six. Like, oh, gross. Nightmare. The sources for my story today, an article from the True TV Crime Library by a journalist named Rachel Bell.
01:11:13
There's an article from Good Housekeeping by Kayla Keegan. There's a New York Times article by Diana Jean Shamo.
01:11:22
There's a Time Magazine article by William A. Henry III. There's three Wikipedia's.
01:11:33
pages, Mary Jo Buttefucos, Joey Buttefucos, and Amy Fisher's. And there was a Time article by Jennifer Latson and an Associated Press article.
01:11:48
And sorry, I just read this. The title of the Associated Press article is Amy Fisher taped saying she deserves a Ferrari
01:11:57
for pain. Yeah. And an article from the Associated Press. Hello beautiful. I'm Amy Eric, founder of Madison Reed, a hair color company I named after my daughter.
01:12:11
Forget everything you know about hair color. The mess, the smell, the hassle, the damage.
01:12:17
We're female founded and female led. We've transformed the hair color experience with ingredients that care for your hair and
01:12:24
award winning color on your terms at home or at our hair color bars. The future of hair color is here at Madison Reed.
01:12:37
Hello, hello. This is Malcolm Glaibble from Smart Talks with IBM. Today we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard,
01:12:46
head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari.
01:12:55
I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the Tifosi, the Ferrari superfans in the digital age.
01:13:05
Ferrari fans and superfans want to be part of something, want to belong to something.
01:13:11
So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team.
01:13:16
You've got Ferrari, which has a long history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space.
01:13:25
I'm curious how you balance those two traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are being able to create a deeper connection with our fans.
01:13:38
To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari.
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01:14:46
Code FLOW15. All right. So my story today is a little short, partly because it's a cold case without a ton of
01:14:54
evidence, but I'd never heard of it until I was scrolling on Reddit late at night.
01:14:58
And it's so bizarre that I just really wanted to cover it. Cool. So today I'm going to cover the case of what's known as the Box Lady of Benton County.
01:15:09
My sources are multiple journal and courier articles written by Sherry Brown and then one by
01:15:15
Dave Bangert, a UPI staff article, a blog post from this really cool website called The Dead
01:15:23
History, and then the DNA Doe Project. So October 8th, we're in 1976. A man named Norman Skoog is in his combine.
01:15:36
Do you know what that is? Yes, I do. Would you like me to tell you? I really would.
01:15:41
Combines are those big, gigantic, and this is going to be farm. It's farm. Yeah.
01:15:48
Terms. No, I was going to say like farm, farm arenas. Let us know. Let me know how wrong I get this.
01:15:55
But from what I know, you know, a tractor is like grinding up just like the thing here.
01:16:00
The combines are those big, wide ones that like do, you know, like a bunch of stuff at the same time.
01:16:08
Maybe sometimes they're like hay balers. Sometimes they're like to turn up everything at once.
01:16:13
But it's like a big, old piece of farm equipment. OK, big, heavy, rusty thing. Yes.
01:16:19
So Norman is harvesting corn in one of his cornfields in his combine. In the combine.
01:16:25
Say it with me. Combine. Combine. It's out in rural Benton County, Indiana Which is less than 100 miles
01:16:32
Outside of Indianapolis But I'm guessing back in 1976 It was probably really rural
01:16:36
And like a farming area There's no 7-Elevens for miles You just like You couldn't get a Domino's pizza
01:16:47
To save your life out there God, a fucking $5 fast and easy from Caesars Would save your life
01:16:53
You wish Dream on Dream on Maybe if your mom drove you into town No crazy bread for you.
01:17:00
No crazy bread for you, baby. So he's out there. He's driving to the ninth row of his corn area.
01:17:08
I'm from suburbia, by the way. The ninth row? The ninth row of his corn field. Okay.
01:17:15
I don't know. Got it. Okay. It's around 15 yards from the main road, and he stumbles upon a white box.
01:17:22
Always bad. And it in the middle of nowhere You know what I mean and it not like off the side of the road or whatever So it around three feet long two feet wide one foot deep It the kind of box that commonly used by moving and storage companies you know just like a basic moving box One end is stamped with wardrobe bottom And the other part of the box says Hull Closet written on it So like not an easily traceable kind of packing box
01:17:50
it's sealed with gray furnace tape and tied with a clothesline and it must have been dumped there
01:17:57
within the last 12 hours because it had rained before then and the box isn't wet
01:18:01
this is a real uh very disturbing opening to a story because out in the middle of nowhere
01:18:11
and then out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere so like you're in the ninth
01:18:16
throw of the cornfields. Yeah. The only person going out there is the farmer that works that
01:18:24
land and whoever else works on that land, except for the person who put this box out there.
01:18:30
Which, and it gets weirder. Oh. So Norman, he rolls the box aside thinking someone dropped it.
01:18:37
Maybe it was some kids playing, but it's still there later on in the day. So he asks his father
01:18:42
in law to help him load it in the truck because it's too heavy for him to carry on his own.
01:18:47
So when they pull up to Norman's house with the box in the back, his 16 year old son notices
01:18:53
that the box is, quote, drenched with a cheap, heavy perfume. So Norman starts opening it up and finds a, quote, massive object wrapped in heavy sheets
01:19:05
of plastic. It's similar to clear plastic runners used to put over carpets. so you know they wouldn't get dirty and it's also bound by rope and tape and norman gets a weird
01:19:16
feeling about the box and this is how you're supposed to fucking function in life so he stops
01:19:20
and calls the cops yep that's right like even in 1976 norman was like you know what fingerprints
01:19:27
not dealing with it when also i think norman probably being a very uh level-headed farming
01:19:34
type of person. Right. Just like what, what could this come to in the end? Right. Opening it up and
01:19:41
seeing something I'll never be able to deal with. Right. You know, like some shocking, awful thing,
01:19:46
like get the authorities in. Yeah. Something's wrapped in carpet runner. You know how thick
01:19:52
that rubber is on carpet runners? No. It's hardcore. And also it's like Indiana. So he's
01:19:58
probably like, Hey, our, our state motto is mind your business. So this is not my business.
01:20:04
It's not my business. This is someone else's business. Look, Indiana, if that's not your saying, then just let me know.
01:20:11
Mind your business. Mind your business. State motto. We should do some state motto updates that are more helpful to people.
01:20:19
Mind your business. Put that on a fucking license plate right now. All right. So the sheriff named Donald Steely shows up and cuts open the five layers of the plastic sheeting.
01:20:31
Of course, immediately the smell of death permeates out of those sheets, which they hadn't been able to smell because of that crazy strong perfume that had clearly been like dumped all over to cover the smell.
01:20:45
So Sheriff Steely automatically recognizes what the smell is, that it's a dead body.
01:20:50
So he also fucking minds your business. And he calls the state police before going deeper.
01:20:57
He's just like, also not my business. Let's go higher. Which is like so rare, I feel like, for back in the day then.
01:21:04
It was just like, let's touch everything and put cigarettes on, lit cigarettes on everything, you know?
01:21:09
Right. No, that's great. It's all great. Everybody's doing a great job so far. That's right.
01:21:16
The state police arrive. They transport the box to the coroner's office. The rope and tape are undone.
01:21:21
And there, of course, they find the body of a woman in the fetal position with her hands tied behind her knees.
01:21:29
Mm hmm. Her head is wrapped in, quote, smaller than average white cloth towel and two, quote, light colored plastic bags similar to the type used to line small trash cans.
01:21:44
And she'd been shot in the back of the head at close range with a small caliber bullet.
01:21:49
And then the plastic had pressed against her face, leaving kind of her face distorted.
01:21:55
So it was kind of hard to tell exactly what she looked like. Um, the autopsy shows that the woman had been left for dead around seven to 10 days.
01:22:06
However, the body shows little sign of decomposition and it appears that her killer or killers knew what they were doing because the woman had been shot at the base of her brain in such a way that the bullet, um, didn't enter and get lodged in the, in her brain or in her spinal cord, like, like, uh, your victim.
01:22:27
But it actually exited the soft tissue, meaning there was no bullet left behind to help authorities identify, you know, the killer.
01:22:37
So it's basically a professional job, like someone who knows. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a hit, you know, to me.
01:22:43
And it seems like that's possible. So the woman, her description is that she's white.
01:22:48
She's around 55 to 65 years old, 5'2", 160 pounds. she's wearing light green slacks and a green white checkered blouse which just sounds like the
01:23:01
1970s grandma like a uniform yes right like the elastic way slacks yeah like a jc penny yes special for sure yeah totally which is like who like and and her clothes
01:23:18
besides being covered in blood of course were like clean So why who is this woman Why would she you know what on earth happened that she would be murdered You know the outfit is quote indistinguishable from that of any other woman her size and age So it like a fucking typical outfit Yeah According to the Journal and Courier her clothes are quote unfrayed and relatively clean Besides all the blood and she not wearing any pantyhose shoes or jewelry which I feel like pantyhose were pretty standard back then So that is interesting
01:23:52
Yeah. The woman's face is, quote, plain, unblemished with makeup. And she has, quote, an upturned nose with a bump beneath the bridge portion and abnormally large ears for her small face.
01:24:06
Her nails are trimmed short and, quote, ragged. Her hands are calloused, leading investigators to theorize that she may have been a cleaning lady.
01:24:14
She has faded and graying red brown hair, heavy bags under her eyes and few wrinkles.
01:24:20
Her eye color can't be determined, but the coroner believes them to be brown. Oh, the woman had undergone many surgeries, including a, quote, radical mastectomy on her right side.
01:24:32
She'd also undergone dental work, but, quote, still needed much more, which is like insulting.
01:24:39
For days, police keep the county roads surrounding the field cordoned off while they scour the fields for evidence.
01:24:45
They don't find anything. investigators tried to figure out how the box got in the field a few tipsters reported that they saw
01:24:52
strangers in the area around the time of the box being dumped but according to all the farmers
01:24:57
living in the area they would have noticed a vehicle driving on the gravel like i feel like
01:25:02
it's the kind of town where you notice what's you don't mind your business you keep an eye out for
01:25:07
your neighbors you know what's going on right like any unidentified cars would have been noticed
01:25:12
Well, that's the thing about like where I grew up because we were five miles out of town.
01:25:18
Yeah. You you noticed every car that went by because they only went by once every four hours.
01:25:23
You could hear them coming. You could like I always knew when my dad was coming when he was really far away because you could hear a Volkswagen engine.
01:25:32
Like when you're that far out in the country, it's quiet. Yeah. And cars are rare.
01:25:36
So people do pay attention, like especially if a car drive by twice, that's when like everyone's paying attention.
01:25:44
So there is a it's very easy to pay attention to cars because they're like a rare thing.
01:25:50
If that's how it was, if if it was comparable to where I grew up. And you also probably know, like when you kind of have it and, you know, in your in the back of your mind, an idea of when cars come and go like this person gets home then this is three o'clock.
01:26:04
So kids are coming home from school. So if there's a random one during the day, you'd probably notice.
01:26:09
I think people, they look out their window a little bit, see what's going on. Yeah.
01:26:14
Yeah. So, but the area is very secluded. It's miles from the main roads and is only reachable through a series of twists and turns.
01:26:23
And then also there aren't any broken stalks of corn leading up to the body, which means a vehicle didn't drive the nine rows into the field to dump the box.
01:26:32
Yeah. It was walked in. It was maybe, but it was very heavy. So because Norman hadn't even been able to carry it himself.
01:26:40
So it'd be weird if it was just one person. Right. Yeah. So none of the farmers saw a vehicle before the box was found.
01:26:50
But what they had seen, Karen, was a helicopter. No. Which was, quote, highly unusual for the area.
01:27:01
And the time, I would think, too. According to the Journal and Courier, three farmers, three different farmers watched a helicopter fly in from the northeast, swing to the southwest, lower to hover near the ground where the box was found, then swing back to the west and then disappear into the northeast.
01:27:20
I don't know why I'm telling you these directions because I don't even fucking know.
01:27:23
No, but I like it because it basically they came in and did a big loop and they basically they they came and dropped something off.
01:27:33
and took off. They hovered, man. In a helicopter. That's nuts. Helicopter. It's also very obvious.
01:27:40
Yeah. It's like, it is. Yeah. It's not subtle. No, it is not. Okay. Anyway. So one of the farmers
01:27:48
happens to know a lot about helicopters. So he's able to tell the investigators about it, which is it's a golden white bell jet ranger. And it's typically owned by corporations
01:27:59
or rich people. So the plot thickens. The helicopter tip seems crazy to the investigators.
01:28:08
They're like, that's not possible, but they look into the lead anyways. And when they review aerial
01:28:14
photos taken of a crime scene, they see an irregular circle of exposed black dirt surrounding
01:28:21
the dump site. And according to the Journal of Courier, again, quote, just before corn is harvested
01:28:27
And after it's picked, brittle and dried stalks litter the ground and cover most of the soil.
01:28:33
But it turns out the powerful updraft created by a helicopter could have caused the stalks to scatter.
01:28:39
Got it. And leave the ground exposed. Amazing. Yeah. Ew. There are no other irregular circles of exposed dirt anywhere else in the photos.
01:28:49
So the investigators aren't sure if the body had been dumped there via a helicopter or car.
01:28:55
They're like us. us like this is weird and curious yes they put together a sketch of the woman and take her
01:29:02
fingerprints and they send them to nearby states this i mean this people don't come forward saying
01:29:08
they knew who she was nobody but the sketch is so rudimentary of her it's like there's no there's
01:29:16
no defining characteristics it a side profile of her i mean it be hard based on that to identify anyone Right So no leads come up And it also shows that the woman had never been arrested because her fingerprints aren in the system
01:29:31
She'd never been in the military. She'd never immigrated to the U.S. or worked in the civil service based on her prints not being found anywhere.
01:29:38
Sorry, this just hit me. And I know this is very JV of me, but it just kind of hit me how because they know that the percentage wise,
01:29:48
the odds of someone of you being killed by someone that, you know, a family member or
01:29:52
whatever, the highest, right. The Venn diagram of people who would report you and who would kill you are entirely one
01:30:00
big overlapping circle of malice. And yeah, I just sorry that it's so obvious. It's what everyone already knows.
01:30:08
And but it just hit me or just like that's how things like this happen. The people who would report are the people who may have been involved.
01:30:18
And I feel like back then it's like, well, the friends would have believed the husband.
01:30:23
He's like, she moved to be with her sister in, you know, wherever. And no, and they wouldn't have meddled and said she's missing.
01:30:31
They would have just believed the husband or, you know, the son or whoever. Yeah.
01:30:36
Back then. and then wouldn't i mean it's so rare to see it to like actually look at the newspaper and see that
01:30:43
photo and be like oh my god that's my friend because in your mind yeah she's away and fucking
01:30:47
right yeah you wouldn't be suspicious or you wouldn't be looking right so yeah yeah um so
01:30:55
they published a sketch no one comes forward and two weeks after her body is found the box lady
01:31:01
as she's known, is buried in an unmarked grave in the Fowler Cemetery. Investigators continue
01:31:07
trying to solve the case. They are unsuccessful. All they have is theories. And Sheriff Steely's
01:31:14
theory is that she was killed in the Chicago area. He has many reasons for believing this.
01:31:20
People are killed more often in the big city, of course, but, and it would be a really kind
01:31:25
a quick drive from Chicago to Benton County or a very fast helicopter ride. Very fast helicopter ride.
01:31:32
Yeah. We know like, you know, some people theorize that maybe she had witnessed something that
01:31:38
the mob was doing and was set to testify. Like, who the fuck knows? And like, I feel like the mob would have access to a nice helicopter pretty easily.
01:31:47
Probably. Yeah. But I mean, you know, my opinion of involving the mob in these things.
01:31:53
How dare it's how dare you? How dare you? How dare you approach my people with this? No, it's an easy patsy and you don't appreciate it.
01:32:00
Well, but I think the mob is smart enough to know you can't you like going out to me, the move of if it were the helicopter.
01:32:11
Yeah. The move of going and dumping a body in a helicopter and racing away is a city person move thinking, oh, out there, that's just a bunch of cornfields.
01:32:21
no one's going to see. Right. When it's like, no, no, you don't, you, what you don't understand is
01:32:26
there's people all around that you're just, they're just low key. That's why I don't totally
01:32:31
believe the helicopter theory is like, well, why didn't they just fucking, they would have just
01:32:36
dropped it in a body of water, not in a place that people farm and like regularly fucking drive their
01:32:43
combines. True. Although what body of water would be near there big enough? Like you mean like
01:32:51
Lake Michigan the one right by Chicago why are you asking there's some great why are you asking
01:32:57
us this I know I wish you wouldn't why do I think questions up uh well I just I mean yeah yeah
01:33:07
but what's driving me crazy is you're there's going to be no answers to these things that
01:33:13
we're here I know yeah I know and that's why I don't love cold cases but that's why I'm so
01:33:17
fascinated with cold cases. And it's just like, the answer is right freaking there. And like,
01:33:22
we just need a few more details, but we can't grasp them. And I just, like, it drives me crazy. So the other thing is that the box she was found in was manufactured in
01:33:33
Melrose Park, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago, and was distributed to moving and
01:33:39
storage companies in Indiana, Chicago, Southern Michigan, and Wisconsin. So in January of 2019,
01:33:46
So that was back in, what did I say? 76? That was back in 76. So finally, in 2019, Benton County investigators reopened the case.
01:33:57
Whoa. Yeah. They're hoping to identify the woman at least. Luckily, they still have the evidence from the investigation.
01:34:02
Like, when does that happen? Yeah, that's amazing. There was a flood. There was a fire.
01:34:07
We threw it away. But if there's anybody that you can rely on in this scenario, it's these Benton County
01:34:14
investigators from 1978. They're like, we got this. We're going to put it. That's right. We're
01:34:19
going to put it somewhere safe and we're going to respect evidence and we're going to try to make
01:34:23
sure that this gets solved. That's right. They dot their T's and they cross their eyes.
01:34:28
Okay. Luckily they have the evidence. They have the rope, the plastic and the box still.
01:34:32
The coroner, Matt Rosenbarger tells the journal and courier, who's like so involved in this
01:34:38
story, obviously. First on the scene. First on the scene. That it really bothered the initial investigators
01:34:45
that they couldn't solve the case. He says the quote, previous investigation deserved the extra effort now that science
01:34:51
has caught up. They worked so hard and I wanted to carry that torch for them, I guess.
01:34:56
So I know. Coroner Rosenberger tells our friends at the Journal and Courier that there's currently a wide variety
01:35:04
of theories. It could have been a mob hit as Karen refuses to admit, could have been that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
01:35:14
And then he says, who knows for sure? And obviously finding out who she is is the first step.
01:35:20
Yeah. He just says that he knows that there was no missing people cases around around the time, and that someone went out of their way to go to the middle of Benton County
01:35:29
to leave her, which is so curious. Like, why there? So in the summer of 2019, authorities
01:35:37
exhumed the box lady's remains from her pauper's grave and sent them to the labs at the University
01:35:42
of Indianapolis. And according to the DNA Doe Project, the remains are still undergoing testing
01:35:49
as of February 6th, 2022. Wow. And that is the cold case story of the box lady of Benton County.
01:35:58
So this is something that could potentially in the next couple months come back up.
01:36:04
Absolutely. And I feel like these cases are, these cold cases of mostly like a lot of identifying missing
01:36:12
people has been happening a lot lately. You know, of course, we have these incredible new DNA investigation techniques.
01:36:20
And, you know, that's obviously the first step to finding out who did it is to identify who the person is and then look into the people in their lives.
01:36:26
And right. Wow. Fascinating. I hope we hear about something that would be. also i just like thinking about the clothes thinking about the description thinking about
01:36:37
the like the possibility of who it could be is oh i really really hope that they are able to try
01:36:44
to track uh and trace her yeah it just also seems like an an unusual victim you know what i mean like
01:36:52
it sounds like a grandma right she had no makeup on she had her nails weren't like it's just very
01:36:57
a very simple seeming woman yes so you wonder what on earth could have happened right yeah
01:37:03
yeah oh yeah say it well also just the the wrap her being wrapped up and all the stuff wrapped
01:37:14
around her and then the smell and everything like that then it like how long how long since had she been where she kept somewhere Right Like was this yeah I just want to know the story now real bad too sorry no that a good one that a but also what an intensely bizarre
01:37:37
a helicopter dropped a box with a body in it I mean what if that turns out to be true
01:37:43
well but because you're right like if we're nine rows in in the corn and away from the road right
01:37:50
There's no way someone's going to go be able to get away with it. Because I was like, what if it's a neighbor walked it in there?
01:37:57
But that's 160 pounds that someone has to carry. And if they had like wheeled it in on a thing, then there would have been broken stocks around it.
01:38:08
The other thing, too, is that if it was a helicopter that dropped it, then two people were involved because someone had to fly the helicopter and hover and someone else would have had to push it out.
01:38:17
So like that to me is a little more mobby too, where it's like multiple people are in on this and no one's ever ratted those people out, you know?
01:38:25
Yeah. But, you know, if it's rich, if it's just plain old rich people, like a privately owned helicopter, then that's someone that's got their valet slash manservant that's just working for them and like being paid off.
01:38:39
I mean, who knows? God damn. Yeah. Bananas. Amazing. Good one. Thank you. So we wanted to end real quick. We talked about how just awful the Russian invasion of Ukraine is. And we are absolutely horrified by it. And so we're going to donate 10 grand to the Ukrainian crisis relief fund, which is part of global giving. And so basically, they provide long term support for survivors of conflicts like this Ukrainian conflict.
01:39:13
And if you want to give to that or any fund to help Ukrainian refugees just make sure that the place you giving to is legit There lots of things going on on social media right now There lots of it you know obviously everyone paying attention to it and everyone involved So just take a
01:39:33
moment to, to verify where you're sending. And there's lots of great, like, I've seen tons of
01:39:39
tweets of like, here's the verifiable places where your money actually goes somewhere. So just be
01:39:45
careful. And, you know, thank you for thinking of also helping because I think, you know, this is,
01:39:50
there's a lot of women and children caught up in the middle of this and a lot of now a lot a lot
01:39:57
of refugees just trying to find somewhere just trying to find you know a place to go yeah so
01:40:04
art this is globalgiving.org is where we're donating yeah all right stay strong uh focus on
01:40:12
the positive allow yourself to escape into true crime because that's what you like and that's what
01:40:19
we like. Right. Don't blame the mob. Obviously. They're just not involved as much as people want
01:40:24
them to be. It's just like, don't blame the mob. Look into the human psyche and what is wrong
01:40:31
with, uh, with so many of us. That's right. And the way we treat each other, it's, uh,
01:40:37
we, we want everything. It's the mob's fault. Yeah. Scapegoat. Karen is calling scapegoat
01:40:42
right here right now. Look to yourselves. Judge thyself, lest thee be judged by... No, not judge
01:40:50
the mob. By mobs. They're just the mobsters. There's just not that many of them.
01:40:56
And other than that, stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye! Elvis, do you want a cookie?
01:41:10
This has been an Exactly Right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton.
01:41:15
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01:41:20
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Badges

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  • 85
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  • 80
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  • 80
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  • 75
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Episode Highlights

  • A Badass Woman in Ukraine
    An old lady confronts soldiers with a powerful message about life and death.
    “You better put some sunflower seeds in your pocket.”
    @ 04m 32s
    March 03, 2022
  • Driving a Tank
    A TikTok shows a young woman driving an abandoned Russian tank, showcasing unexpected skills.
    “I know how to drive a tank.”
    @ 06m 41s
    March 03, 2022
  • Classic MFM Merch
    Check out the classic MFM logo merch now available in the store.
    “We've been around long enough to actually have classic merch.”
    @ 22m 54s
    March 03, 2022
  • A Dangerous Encounter
    Mary Jo Buttafuoco answers the door to a stranger with a deadly agenda.
    “She asks quote-unquote Anne Marie who he is.”
    @ 28m 11s
    March 03, 2022
  • The Illicit Affair
    Amy Fisher's relationship with Joey Botafuoco leads to devastating consequences.
    “This qualifies as statutory rape because New York's age of consent is 17.”
    @ 39m 30s
    March 03, 2022
  • Amy Fisher's Betrayal
    During her interrogation, Amy reveals Joey's betrayal and claims he wanted her to kill his wife.
    “She's, of course, devastated by this betrayal.”
    @ 51m 13s
    March 03, 2022
  • Media Frenzy
    Amy Fisher becomes known as the 'Long Island Lolita' as the media frenzy escalates.
    “To say there was a media frenzy is an understatement of the century.”
    @ 54m 19s
    March 03, 2022
  • Amy's Life After Prison
    After her release, Amy Fisher navigates a tumultuous life, including a brief stint in adult films.
    “She's trying to put all of that life behind her now.”
    @ 01h 05m 56s
    March 03, 2022
  • The Box Lady of Benton County
    A man discovers a mysterious box in his cornfield, leading to a chilling investigation.
    “It's so bizarre that I just really wanted to cover it.”
    @ 01h 14m 58s
    March 03, 2022
  • Discovery of the Body
    Authorities uncover a woman's body wrapped in plastic, raising more questions than answers.
    “The smell of death permeates out of those sheets.”
    @ 01h 20m 31s
    March 03, 2022
  • Theories Emerge
    Investigators speculate about the woman's identity and the circumstances of her death.
    “It could have been a mob hit.”
    @ 01h 35m 06s
    March 03, 2022
  • Supporting Ukrainian Refugees
    The hosts express their horror over the Russian invasion and announce a donation to help refugees.
    “We're going to donate 10 grand to the Ukrainian cause.”
    @ 01h 38m 46s
    March 03, 2022

Episode Quotes

  • There's always another level.
    316 - Circle of Malice
  • Who are we to say now?
    316 - Circle of Malice
  • This is a girl who has been through serious trauma and can't handle shit.
    316 - Circle of Malice
  • I figure if I'm going through all this pain and suffering, I'm getting a Ferrari.
    316 - Circle of Malice
  • This is how you're supposed to fucking function in life.
    316 - Circle of Malice
  • A helicopter dropped a box with a body in it.
    316 - Circle of Malice

Key Moments

  • Redfin Advantage01:10
  • Attempted Murder27:25
  • Media Sensation54:19
  • Amy's New Life1:05:56
  • Cold Case Introduction1:14:48
  • Discovery of the Box1:17:08
  • Helicopter Sightings1:26:50
  • Case Reopened1:33:57

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown