00:00:00
This is exactly right. Isn't some far off concept? It's already here. Next starts now.
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Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. If audiobooks are your thing, or if you've been meaning to listen to more of them,
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00:01:36
because the food you love is better with Marikon. Hello. And welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hardstar. That's Karen Kilgariff.
00:02:03
We're here to do true crime comedy podcasting for you. Hopefully exactly in the way you like.
00:02:08
Exactly the way you like it. Nothing at all that upsets you or kind of irritates you.
00:02:14
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nothing that's like, I don't know if I, but I'm going to go ahead. No, none of that.
00:02:19
None of it. It's going to be executed in a Simone Biles perfection style. Landing it.
00:02:27
We're going to stick the landing. Yes. And the middle and then not this beginning, but later.
00:02:33
Yeah. And you're going to go, wow, they've been practicing. Like what kind of stretching? What kind of uneven bars have they been working out on?
00:02:41
The muscles that they must have to target. Is that a word? Yeah. It's out of this world.
00:02:48
It's imagine the amounts of Tiger Balm those two are using on these podcasting muscles.
00:02:55
Going through every Monday. They must go through jars and jars. Jars and jars. How's your week since we haven't seen each other been?
00:03:05
We saw each other last night. But for the pretend podcast. Oh, right, right, right, right, right.
00:03:11
Week's been fine. Had the laziest weekend. Went to a two-year-old's birthday party, which is always hectic.
00:03:17
Raging. Did you do so many lines of coke? I did all the cocaine. Two lines to celebrate my nephew's second birthday.
00:03:25
Don't say it. Why? It's cute. It's precious. That's right. That's an L.A. baby birthday.
00:03:34
What about you? What do you do? What are you doing? I was also at that baby birthday.
00:03:38
You just couldn't see me because I was wearing my camouflage sweatsuit. Just leaning against the bushes, watching your family.
00:03:46
God, that'd be great if you did that. I have let's well, the big story that you got pulled into is that now it was like about 48 hours ago.
00:03:58
My Internet went out entirely. My Wi-Fi, whatever it's called, cable modems. There's a bunch of words people started throwing at me where I was like, I don't know.
00:04:07
All the things you suddenly don't realize use Internet. Yes. Like, oh, that doesn't work either.
00:04:12
Yes. Where I was like, I guess I could make a couple old fashioned phone calls and I can read a book. And other than that, Netflix won't have me. Nothing, nothing that I, no way I normally watch TV was available. I ended up that night having to watch regular TV.
00:04:30
Ew, your microwave is digital too, so you can hook up to the internet. Say goodbye to that popcorn dream.
00:04:38
Yeah, I was on straight up regular TV. How was it? I'm a fan. Like, I like the idea of being like, here's what's on, pick one.
00:04:48
Yes. I think it's good for, I think it creates that feeling that you have stumbled upon something
00:04:54
that's your personal favorite thing. Or like, hey, I forgot what kind of person I was 15 years ago.
00:04:59
Yes. where yes and i used to do this all the time like i've told you the story of when i lived in that
00:05:05
horrible studio apartment with the cat so it was like we just lived in a cat box together me and
00:05:11
the cat um and i used to watch local news and the jamie fox show oh nice because that was basically
00:05:18
what i could find because i couldn't afford one other thing to help me watch tv the only time i
00:05:23
ever watched like cable like real paid for cable was when i had to always move back in with my
00:05:28
grandma because I was broke. I couldn't afford $300 a month rent on my thrift store employee
00:05:35
salary. God, the magic of like the 90s, 2000s. We didn't know how very much we were living off the
00:05:42
fat of the land. Yeah. You could get a $5 an hour job and have an apartment. Yes, you could. And
00:05:49
your job you could kind of get a job based on how cool you want it to seem Totally I going to work at this record store Yes Yes I barely make any money but I be at the record store
00:06:00
I'm the girl who works at the record store. And then yes. And then somehow find money to go to the bar later.
00:06:05
Yeah. Everything sucked and everything was dirty. You couldn't afford laundry, you know.
00:06:12
No. And the laundromat was gross. Right. And you would that would have to be like one big day where you were going to go down and
00:06:19
do it all at once so you had to get this was pre-febreze so you had to get creative about how
00:06:26
you're gonna not smell but then for me personally in the mid 90s like this was back when people still
00:06:32
smoked in bars and i would smoke when i drank so it's all covered up anyways just like pig pen
00:06:39
with the little dirty lines all around me follow this little cloud following here the 90s the cloud
00:06:45
of the 90s stink following you around. Yeah, bad attitude, real sarcastic for no reason,
00:06:51
aggressively, aggressively unfriendly, and you smell like camel lights. And also like your Mary
00:06:58
Jane docks didn't look cute with socks. So your fucking shoes smelled so bad. So you get to
00:07:03
someone's house, you're like, we're in a shoes house. And you're like, well, you fucking hate
00:07:06
my guts. And you want everyone to know how bad my feet smell. Dude, that's... Oh no! Karen got so
00:07:11
excited she knocks multiple drinks over thank god this is indoor outdoor carpeting thank god this is
00:07:17
your house and so you don't have to go i'm so sorry i'm sorry um that was my in the 80s when ballet
00:07:24
flats came in big right right um that's when i discovered i can't wear shoes without socks
00:07:31
because because of my foot smell and it was the first discovery of it was so embarrassing it was
00:07:38
just like, oh, my God, I'm going to die. I remember mine. Yeah. Like it was. And the first time I went
00:07:43
to a place that I didn't understand was going to be a no shoes thing was a dance at a different high
00:07:48
school. Oh, no. And we at least there's enough people there that they don't they're not going to
00:07:53
point at you. No, no, no. But it was just the kind of thing of now I have to kick off my silver
00:07:57
ballet flats filled with talcum powder. I've told you that story, right? It was just like, well,
00:08:06
Well, there she is. She's not making out with anyone from this school tonight. No way.
00:08:11
She's not going to say I'm dating a guy from a different school. No, the Cardinal Newman boys would not have me.
00:08:16
They just wouldn't pick me. Mine was because I was a raver. So I would just dance in these cute, like, you know, tennis shoes all night, Adidas or whatever, without socks on because it didn't look cute.
00:08:26
And they didn't have like peds or like shoes, like little socks back then. No. Guys, you don't understand.
00:08:31
You fucking 20 year olds don't know what you had to live without. Yeah, the niches that have been filled since this time by the people who suffered because they didn't have them.
00:08:40
Yeah. What do you need? Well, we created it for you. You're welcome. You want a sock that doesn't show so you don't look like a weird nerd?
00:08:46
You can wear your flats and still not have stinky feet. We got this. That's right.
00:08:49
You want a perfect podcast that's a fucking 10 that we just landed the intro to?
00:08:55
You got it now. Here we go. We couldn't have done it then. Oh, I have a correction.
00:09:01
Speaking of perfect landings. Yes. I fucked up last week. Hey, that's how we do it.
00:09:06
So it's perfect for us. That's right. That's how we do it. That's right. Corrections Corner for Hillsborough.
00:09:12
Hiya, Huns. Oh, cute. I began listening to MFM in April 2020, just as the world had absolutely fallen apart.
00:09:18
And it has helped me through that time so much. Since then, I finished my undergraduate law degree, finished my master's in law and have
00:09:26
just started as a trainee solicitor. It's lawyer in British. Correct. And you guys have been with me supporting me every step of the way.
00:09:34
So thank you. You're welcome. So starting with a nice compliment and we're proud of softening us up for the bad news.
00:09:41
Brooke, we're proud of you. And here we go. I was listening to today's episode in which Georgia covered the Hillsborough disaster.
00:09:48
Listening to this was the hardest episode I've ever experienced because it hit so close to home for me.
00:09:53
My dad, Mark, is a Hillsborough survivor having escaped one of the pens onto the pitch.
00:09:59
Oh, God. He wanted people to climb the fence. He was 18 years old at the time and was attending the match with his 16-year-old brother, my uncle Paul.
00:10:08
He ended up becoming separated from Paul and had to get a coach back to Liverpool, not knowing whether Paul was alive or dead.
00:10:15
Luckily, he was okay and had come home on a separate coach, but we can never forget the families that were not so lucky.
00:10:21
He is still unable to talk about his experiences to this day. I'm sure. I do have a slight corrections corner to do with the story.
00:10:28
You stated that 96 people lost their lives on that day. However, this is not accurate.
00:10:34
Ninety-four victims lost their lives on the day, one two days later, and Anthony Bland passed three years after the disaster.
00:10:42
This was following his family's legal battle for him to be the first person in the UK to be allowed to die from withdrawing treatment.
00:10:50
Recently, Andrew Devine was deemed by the coroner to be the 97th victim of the disaster following his death on the 27th of July 2021.
00:11:00
This was past summer. Due to the irreversible brain damage he suffered in the crush.
00:11:04
I realize that this email is long, so even if you choose not to read it out, please recognize Andrew Devine and honor his memory as the 97th victim.
00:11:13
Thank you for sharing the family's fight for justice. Despite the outcome of the trials, they have done our city proud.
00:11:18
than hashtag JFT97, which is justice for the 97, not 96. SSDGM, Brooke from Liverpool.
00:11:26
Thank you, Brooke from Liverpool. That's a crucial correction. Absolutely. And I appreciate you letting me know.
00:11:33
What's up with you? What do you have going on in your lifetime? Well, I was going to ask you, have you watched any more Game of Thrones?
00:11:40
I've watched a couple more episodes. So I'm on episode eight now. there a lot of people and names and I can follow all of those things Do you see why I sent you that thing Okay I get it now You truly it like you need the family trees
00:11:57
But I was going to ask you, have you gotten to the part where Peter Dinklage has to go to Mrs.
00:12:06
Stark's sister? Yes. With that kid who's like trying to go. Oh my God. If you can,
00:12:13
if you can, yeah oh my god the first time i saw that i was like they cannot be doing this on television like
00:12:20
this is insanity it's the king boy it's the fucking shithead king boy king who's like a
00:12:28
total little shit i love it it's he's a nursing 11 year old it is intensely disturbing but also
00:12:36
So, you know, first of all, love a castle that's got a we will get rid of you forever hole in the middle of the throne room.
00:12:45
How do I remodel my house to have one of those? Because epic. So epic. Do you remember what the boy said?
00:12:52
It was like, we're going to make him go away or something. I don't remember. But he got so excited when they were going to kill someone.
00:12:58
Yes. Like so thrown down that pit. It was just like everything. And what I love about that show is like, so then you're in that scenario.
00:13:06
It's nuts. You're freaking out. And then Peter Dinklage is like, yep, here's how we're going to handle this.
00:13:11
Yeah, he's boss. It just shows how that character is so smart and so political. Gets away and survives.
00:13:20
He's such a survivor. Is this a spoiler that I need to make clear? So the little Leng.
00:13:27
What's the king's wife's family? You mean Ned Stark's wife? No, no, no. The king.
00:13:36
Robert. Oh, yeah. His wife. Baratheon? No. Cersei? Her family? No, no, no. Yes. Cersei's family.
00:13:43
Steven, take all of this out. I'm really just trying to... No, you leave, Steven. You leave
00:13:46
every word of it in. The little fucking, the little page boy, blonde king who becomes the king.
00:13:54
Joffrey. Yes. So he's actually the inbred son of them. Yes, that's correct. Okay. That's what I
00:14:02
thought and he's very mad he should be mad i'd be mad at my fucking mom and dad if they were brother
00:14:07
and sister it's pretty intense it is it's like uh yeah there's a there's a lot of and i mean
00:14:15
yeah we i don't think we have to worry about spoilers because people everyone's seen it come
00:14:20
on oh and me right uh and um and also it's just this kind of like uncomfortable reality where
00:14:28
you're like, oh, this isn't this is this weird world where you have to kind of adapt to these
00:14:33
creepy cultures. Because that's not what I noticed when I started rewatching is that's not the only family that
00:14:40
has incest things going on. Absolutely not. So, yeah, it's just what a what a show.
00:14:47
You know, what it's taught me is that I don't give a fuck about sword fights. Like, I truly mute it and look away, scroll Instagram until the sword fight is over.
00:14:58
It is the most boring kind of fight to me. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
00:15:04
Oh, duck and cover. Clang. Clang. Coming back. Have you gotten to the part with, um, shit, I'm not going to be able to remember her name
00:15:12
offhand, the tall woman who is the sword, who's the knight that's protecting Mrs. Stark?
00:15:19
No. Oh, that, that, it. It actually changes that aspect of the show, where if you are not medieval times oriented, you suddenly love it because there's a reveal.
00:15:31
And I'd like to make something clear. The Princess Bride is one of my all time favorite movies.
00:15:35
I could watch that. I know every word to that sword fight, that epic sword fight.
00:15:41
True and not comedic sword fights bore the ever loving shit out of me. Also, the swords are different because the swords that they use in Game of Thrones are super heavy.
00:15:51
And the ones in Brits of Sparrow are like this real thin epies or something. Oh, what a shoe.
00:15:58
I didn't know you were a sword expert. These are the things I'm slowly going to reveal to you over the next 22 years.
00:16:07
Six years down. 22 to go. Can you believe we've been doing this for six fucking years?
00:16:13
Can you believe we have to do it for 28 total? Can you believe we're contractually obligated by the government?
00:16:24
What if we are secret spies for the government? We're definitely like CIA moles for sure.
00:16:29
I feel like saying a secret spy for the government is a negating thing. It proves you're not.
00:16:36
What if we call ourselves secret squirrels like the cartoon? Do you think that show or is that even deeper undercover?
00:16:43
Yeah. Now I'm confused even. There's no way they could be spies. Yeah, that's what you thought. Because we swear. Well, you're fucking idiots. They laughed about it in episode whatever this is. But it turns out they were actually telling us the true Easter egg that it's the truth right in your face. You just don't expect it. Yeah. Well, that's your Game of Thrones corner. I mean, I actually I'll keep going. Now that my Internet's back and my Wi-Fi, I'm going to go back to it because I paused it to kind of see it to wait and see it because I thought maybe she'll binge a whole thing and go crazy.
00:17:15
for it. But yeah, no, that's just HGTV. Yeah. If you want to binge, love it or list it with me.
00:17:22
We can do that. Fucking love that show. I think you would like that show, actually.
00:17:26
Is that the open floor plan one where everyone wants an open floor plan so they can watch their
00:17:30
kids do homework while they cook? That's actually HGTV. That's not a actual motto of HGTV.
00:17:36
Except for cheap old houses which is one of my it one of my favorite Instagrams And they got an HGTV just they just go to old houses like crazy old houses that are all under a hundred grand in the middle of fucking nowhere
00:17:51
And they don't buy it. They don't show you how to change anything. They just point out the special parts of it.
00:17:56
And they go to people's houses who have bought cheap old houses and show you what they've done and how they've kept it classic.
00:18:03
Yes. It's just cheap old houses. They're the loveliest people. Cheap old houses goes right on the list.
00:18:09
Like it's shocking that they got a show because there's absolutely no open floor plan to be found.
00:18:15
Right. Those old houses, having lived in one for a very long time. Where? Oh, in San Francisco?
00:18:22
No, no, no. My old house in Burbank. Oh, we're talking like Victorians. No, no. Not to say that I would ever be on cheap old houses, but I'm saying the floor plan would make no sense.
00:18:33
It's like, oh, here's a three foot hallway connecting the front bedroom to the back bedroom in a bathroom.
00:18:39
But like you can't open both doors at the same time or you're blocked in. Yeah, it was clearly people were just doing their best with the space they had and the materials given.
00:18:49
That's right. I respect it. But but that sounds amazing because those are the kind of things like when when I was looking for this house, looking on Zillow and just seeing seeing houses that like it.
00:19:01
I mean, LA doesn't have as many of them because people it's if you go to San Francisco for a minute.
00:19:06
I was like, what if Vince and I move to San Francisco? And so I was looking for houses and I'm just like, this is not fair.
00:19:12
Why can't these be in Los Angeles? Because we ruin them because we put marble and beige and open floor plans on every on everything.
00:19:21
People are like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make this wall all copper.
00:19:25
Huh? And then we're going to put in some skylights. So every day at four o'clock, the wall catches on fire.
00:19:32
And that's the look. That's going to be the look this season. It's going to be it and in.
00:19:37
And then we're going to put marble with deep veining on every surface. There was I there was a house when I very first started looking that I was that is basically what we're describing right now.
00:19:48
And the marble looked like 1000 spilled cups of coffee. Exactly. Where I was like, this would stress me out.
00:19:57
So it would never seem clean in here. No, it's hideous. It's crazy. But I mean, but there's some people that are like, I'll pay hundreds of thousands of dollars
00:20:04
for that. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, man, people love a tacky chandelier.
00:20:11
Oh. Like chandelier. Totally. Your dog is licking my palm right now. It's kind of adorable.
00:20:17
These dogs are stressing. There is a lightning. There was a thunder and lightning storm in Los Angeles.
00:20:22
Out of nowhere. Of all places. I almost got my car washed today. That's how much I didn't expect it.
00:20:27
I mean, I'm lazy, so I didn't. But yeah, like it was as if we were in like Kansas.
00:20:33
It was the best. I love it. And these dogs are just like, sorry, we don't know what's going on.
00:20:37
It was so cute when Cookie was like, I've never heard thunder before. What is crappening?
00:20:42
Was she like one ear up, one ear down, one ear turned to the side? She's like, Mom, what are you doing?
00:20:47
She's like, thinks probably that I'm doing something. Yeah, she is. She's like, please, please stop doing that.
00:20:52
Well, she's heard me fart before, so she's probably like, geez. Dang. What did you eat for lunch?
00:21:00
Landed it. Ten out of ten. Look at this Olympic style podcasting humor. Speaking of comedy.
00:21:10
You missed it. We're back. Tell your sister. We're back. You missed it. Tell your cool mom.
00:21:18
And ask your grandma for her hometown story. Your grandma was a murdering her long before anybody knew what a murdering her was.
00:21:24
That's right. And we appreciate her. Yeah. High five. High five. Speaking of podcasting, should we do Exactly Right Corner?
00:21:32
Sure. Hey, we have a net. We have a podcasting network because we thought we needed more jobs.
00:21:37
Yeah. And we were right. And that's just what we need. Turns out we need even more.
00:21:42
So we just want to highlight a couple quick of the podcast episodes that are up this week
00:21:47
that we just are fucking obsessed with and love so much. All the podcasts on our network are just beautiful people doing gorgeous things.
00:21:53
People we believe in. People that we're thrilled to be partners with. That's right.
00:21:57
People who we invest in their talent because we know that they have a future in this biz.
00:22:04
Yeah. And we want to hitch our wagon to their star. We don't want to grab on and go for a ride.
00:22:10
Come on. So, Karen, do you want to announce? Oh, yeah. One of our favorite podcasts on this network is Do You Need a Ride, which is my other podcast.
00:22:21
Oh, yeah. Your third job. You can push him off. No, it's OK. He's just he just won't stop.
00:22:26
He looks like a seal. He does. Lay down. Lay down. Frank is just kind of coming at Georgia in this way where he's staring like she owes him five dollars.
00:22:35
It's insanity. Lay down. So this week on Do You Need a Ride with Chris Fairbanks and Karen Kilgariff, we have the guest, the great Dave Holmes,
00:22:43
whose podcast Waiting for Impact is about to come out next week. And so he was a guest on Do You Need a Ride?
00:22:50
He's the funniest. He's the man is just he knows how to podcast. He's good at it.
00:22:54
He's such a professional. So that's Do You Need a Ride? And what else we got? Check that out.
00:23:00
And then the other one I want to highlight is cousin of the podcast. That's right.
00:23:04
My actual seriously cousin, Dr. Dan Peters, his podcast Parent Footprint with Dr. Dan,
00:23:13
that I just love so much. This episode is called Embracing Culture, Food and Friendship with Karen
00:23:21
Chan, who is this incredible former food blogger, attorney, mom and founder of this independent book
00:23:29
publisher that creates children's books to increase representation of characters of color
00:23:34
in the books children read. So it's a really important, wonderful, lovely episode. That's
00:23:39
Right. The parent footprint. And then also, you guys, it really helps the podcasts to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:23:47
It just really boosts their visibility, which is so important for these podcasts that are just starting out.
00:23:52
So like if you're listening on the, for example, if you're on the Apple app, you just as you're listening, go up and hit that little plus.
00:24:00
Then you're subscribed. It counts for something. It's that easy. And then you see all those stars that don't that are blank. You hit them.
00:24:06
Hit five. I mean, hit five if you want. I'd say hit five. Obviously, we deserve five.
00:24:12
Roger Ebert, hit five. Are you withholding your love? What if you, yeah, give it away.
00:24:18
Give it away. Give it away now. Also, we have some beautiful merch. One of our newest designs, I don't know if you've seen it.
00:24:27
It says look, listen on it. And it truly is one of my favorite shirts that we've ever made.
00:24:30
I love it. It's very camp. It looks like a camp shirt. Yeah. There's a ringer. there's there's a couple different versions but take a look at that because it's a it's just a
00:24:41
classic yeah we have a lot of cute designs there a lot of cool ones coming out and just so you know
00:24:45
we're not because we want a fourth job karen and i pick out every single design and every color of
00:24:52
shirts and every type of like we're our hands are all over it so i don't know yeah uh were you afraid
00:24:59
people thought that we were yeah we were we had some other people doing it for us yeah so like
00:25:04
why would I care if you don't care? But like we care. Oh, we care. Yeah. We touch every single piece of merch.
00:25:09
We fold it ourselves. We fold it. We ship it. Why am I yelling? That's our biz, right?
00:25:16
Yeah. I don't know how to help you, Frank. Frank won't stay. He won't leave Georgia's side in a way that it's like she's an old farmer who died and
00:25:27
he's sitting on her grave. Yeah. Waiting for me to come home. Except for he's panting and staring.
00:25:34
And it's super creepy. All you need is a slice of Swiss cheese. A little creeper.
00:25:41
Swiss cheese pervert. Well, you just made it creepy. So thank you. I thought it was really sweet.
00:25:46
And then you had to go and. All right. Should we get it started? Let's do it in here.
00:25:52
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00:28:00
All right, Georgia. I'm excited because this week I'm covering a story that's renowned,
00:28:09
that over the years people have asked us to cover over and over and over again. And I don't know why we haven't yet, but I'm doing it right now.
00:28:20
And it is the Hinterkaifeck murders. I saw your paper before I'm so bummed I was trying really hard
00:28:30
this is the first time I ever have known your story before you told it to me should I have pretended?
00:28:36
oh my god no shit fuck so let's see this is exciting, this is definitely one of those stories
00:28:46
that people are always like, when are you going to do this? yes, please talk about it
00:28:50
The cool thing is when we come late to the table for stories like this, of course, almost every true crime podcast has covered it.
00:28:59
So there's so much research. Of course, there's one million theories on Reddit that are fascinating.
00:29:04
Yes. Seem, you know, you read something and then you're like, oh, and then somebody comes right in and like, this sounds like an urban legend.
00:29:12
Right. And then you're like, oh, it does. So you get to have the whole journey of a very old cold case that that is just probably never going to get solved.
00:29:22
Yeah. So some of the sources on this case file podcast it case 124 Hinterkaifeck research and writing by Aaron Monroe The Hinterkaifeck murders horror on a Bavarian Farm by Arkham Rebel That darkideas Hinterkaifeck Murders on Wikipedia
00:29:41
Oh, I thought of a new segment for us which is that I just hit random on Wikipedia
00:29:46
and I'm going to read you the article I love it so much We'll start that next week
00:29:51
And don't start it on your fucking podcast I'm sure there's a million people who are like, hey, we do that
00:29:58
I just forgot that there's you if you're bored. It's so weird. I literally was thinking we're like, we're thinking about this the other day.
00:30:07
Really? Yes. Like that. That's a thing. It's such a I always get thing. I always get Wikipedia pages when I do it.
00:30:13
And I'm like, oh, I have 10 minutes to kill. Let's see what I can learn. Yeah. And it'll just be like, it's the flag of Finland or something where I'm like, OK, this is this is general trivia.
00:30:25
Someday you're going to pay trivial pursuit and need to know. Yeah. these things yeah let's do it next let's do it next week okay great perfect there was a
00:30:32
timeline of events that was all in german and jay translated it using google translate which i
00:30:39
absolutely love and google translate what a great pair what a team what a team and that was um
00:30:45
compiled by a man named hans richter and it's the murder case of hinterkaifeck so that's a www.hinterkaifeck
00:30:53
slash mord.de. Where the hell? This is truly international. Don't send people to spam pages.
00:31:01
Sorry. You could go and get my really high interest mortgage. Sorry. Mental Floss has
00:31:11
an article called The Chilling Story of the Hinterkaifach Killings, Germany's Most Famous
00:31:15
Unsolved Crime by Sonia Vitomsky. And allthat'sinteresting.com, the gruesome tale of the
00:31:23
unsolved hinterkaifac murders by katie serena uh gotta love all that's interesting all right i
00:31:29
will tell you this even though you know it and so does everybody else i haven't read about it in so
00:31:34
long so this will be like a like a brand new thing okay we're gonna visit it again for the
00:31:40
first time that's right let's go there as as i was uh reading jay's research it reminds me a lot
00:31:46
of uh the man from the train my my book obsession that is the the serial killer that was going around
00:31:56
america on trains killing families in their houses in rural america all around during the
00:32:02
dust bowl right i think it was like late it was like turn of the century my favorite time
00:32:08
turn of the century love that time man on the train no internet Do do the book, the man from the train.
00:32:17
For someone who loves this book so much, I fuck it up a lot. But that book is by the author Bill James and his daughter, Rachel McCarthy James.
00:32:27
And if you are looking for a true crime book that is going to be factually dense and yet absolutely horrifying as a story where you think, oh, my God, how do I never know about this?
00:32:40
Read the man from the train. I will keep on recommending it until year 28 of this podcast.
00:32:46
Okay. But anyway, let's talk about this actual case. Okay. So it's the 1920s and farmer Andreas Gruber, who's 63 years old, lives and works at the Bavarian Hinterkaifach farm located about 43 miles north of Munich, Germany.
00:33:05
I'm going to totally go for it in all of my German pronunciations in this episode.
00:33:10
I was impressed that you even the title was so well done. Well, it's called phonetic pronunciations.
00:33:18
I mean, it's all there. But those Germans, the Germans. But also, it's actually it's not as if you really look at the word, it's not as confusing as it seems.
00:33:27
OK, yeah, go for it. Don't let the umlauts fool you. The German language is very accessible.
00:33:34
She said knowing no words in it. Okay. He shares this farm and home with his wife, Cecilia Gruber. She's 72.
00:33:45
Oh, a little bit older. I like it. Their widowed daughter, Victoria Gabriel, who's 35. And Victoria's two children, Cecilia, who's named after her grandmother, but she goes by the name Celie.
00:33:56
So I'm going to call her Celie for the rest of this. And a little boy named Joseph, who's two.
00:34:01
So Thursday, March 30th, 1922, Andreas is outside on the farm and he notices human footprints in the snow leading from the forest, which is called the Witch's Wood.
00:34:13
Oh, chill. Which is right, like, basically next to their property. There's just this little forest sitting there called the Witch's Wood.
00:34:22
Cool, cool, cool. Jay sent this to me earlier because I said, could you please write up a summary of the Witch's Wood and all the hideous things that have happened there?
00:34:30
And he's like, I can't find any information on the Witch's Wood. Oh. He said, but I am seeming that the German name for Witch's Wood is Hexenholtz, which objectively rules.
00:34:41
Hexenholtz is your death metal band. Hey. There's a gig tonight in Witch's Wood.
00:34:48
Bring all your white makeup. Okay. So these human footprints go along next to the property up to the farm's machine room where all their big machines are.
00:35:02
But there's no footprints leading back to the woods. So Andreas follows those. He discovers the lock on the machine room's door has been broken, but he looks inside.
00:35:12
He finds no one and there's nothing out of place. Later that night, while the family's sitting at home, Andreas and everybody hear what sounds like footsteps in their attic.
00:35:22
He goes up there to investigate looks around finds nothing The creepiest part about both of these incidents is that he being watched Like we know now that someone in the dark recesses
00:35:35
Yep. Of Witch's Wood. Is watching him walk around those places. Yep. Yes. I mean, it's, mm-hmm.
00:35:43
Could you move into a farm next to a place called Witch's Wood, do you think? I mean, the first part, the farm part, is a hell no.
00:35:51
Oh, okay. Then it's off the table, entirely. It's not a problem here. Okay, got it.
00:35:55
Though the footprints, the broken lock, and the sounds from the attic are all odd, there's nothing missing, so Andreas isn't too concerned.
00:36:03
And their small village is a very safe place where everyone knows everyone, so he tells a few neighbors that these weird things are happening, but he decides not to report it to the police.
00:36:11
Because he doesn't think there's really anything to report. A little less than two weeks later, on Saturday, April 1st, 1922, two coffee salesmen, Hans and Edward Shirofsky, show up at the Hinterkaifeck farm to take the Gruber's coffee order.
00:36:27
That's a double duty. Two people need to do that. Yeah. Because they're like, OK, we need a pumpkin spice latte.
00:36:33
Venti. They're so specific on their coffee orders. I love the idea in 1922 they would come and make sure that you had coffee at your house, at your farm.
00:36:43
Yeah. OK, they knock on the door and the window. No one answers. They look around the property. There's no sign of anyone being at home. All they see is the gate to the machine house open. So they leave without investigating any further. They're just the two coffee salesmen. It's, you know, MYOB.
00:37:00
None of our business. Exactly. So another three days go by and the school teacher notices that Celie is absent from school and not to mention the entire Gruber family was absent from the usual Sunday services at their town church.
00:37:14
Now, Victoria actually is nicknamed the Lark because she has such a beautiful singing voice.
00:37:20
And so she is especially missed by her church choir. Then on April 4th, 1922, a local machine assembler named Albert Hoffner goes to Hinterkaifeck at 9 a.m.
00:37:31
for a previously scheduled appointment to fix what is called the food chopper engine.
00:37:37
Now, sure. I text Jay and I'm like, this is this has to be a translation issue. please find out what a food chopper is because i not that i'm a big farmer or anything but i did
00:37:48
grow up in a rural area no one ever talked about fixing the food chopper unless they meant a
00:37:53
cuisinart so what is happening and sharpen a knife to sharpen the knife and he basically said
00:37:59
what they did was they took composty type stuff or stuff from what they had sown in the fields yeah
00:38:06
and this was a machine where they could throw anything in there and it would basically become
00:38:11
the feed for the animals and stuff so it was a quiz it's like a giant farmy cuisinar it's animal
00:38:16
farm cuisinar in yoy so albert waits about an hour for andreas or anyone from the gruber family
00:38:25
to greet him but no one shows up he only hears um the farm animals and a sound of the dog barking
00:38:33
but there's no sign of the gruber so he finally decides he'll just go fix the food shopper by
00:38:37
himself. Get it started. He works for about four and a half hours. He doesn't see anyone from the
00:38:43
family the entire time. And he leaves at 2.30 p.m. But as he's leaving, he notices the barn,
00:38:51
which had been closed when he got there, is now open. And he also notices that the dog that had
00:38:56
been inside the barn barking is now tied up by the front door. So he thinks one of the groupers
00:39:04
has come home and he's now confused as to why they wouldn't come and say hi to him because
00:39:09
they he had an appointment to come and fix the food shopper so are you mad at me yeah um so now
00:39:15
the whole town is wondering about where the gruber family is so around 3 30 one of the neighbors
00:39:22
named lawrence schlittenbauer sends his son johan and his stepson joseph so johan 16 joseph's nine
00:39:31
They go over to Hinterkaifach to see if they can find the Gruber family. They soon return to say the same thing everyone else has been saying, which is that farm is deserted.
00:39:40
But this makes no sense to Lawrence. So he grabs two other neighbors, Michael Paul and Jacob Siegel, and the three go back over to Hinterkaifach.
00:39:50
And they try opening the front door of the house. It's locked. So they go around back to the barn.
00:39:55
This is a big L-shaped building. And their house, like the living quarters are in the front part.
00:40:01
And then there's a connected area that connects them to all of the animal stalls and then the back barn area.
00:40:08
So it smells great. It's all super cozy and everyone's all together. So they try opening the front door.
00:40:17
It's locked. They go back around to the barn and they try to get into the house through the connecting door, through the barn.
00:40:24
And as they walk through the animal stalls, they stumble over an old door that's laying on top of a pile of hay.
00:40:31
Then Michael sees a foot sticking out from under the door. So Lawrence pulls on it and reveals the lifeless body of Andreas Gruber.
00:40:39
The men lift up the old door and they find three more bodies, Cecilia, Victoria, and the seven-year-old Celie.
00:40:48
Horrible. The three men rush inside the main house through the connecting door, looking for two-year-old Joseph, hoping that he's still alive.
00:40:57
They run into Victoria's bedroom only to find him dead in his bassinet with a terrible head wound and one of his mother's dresses laid across him.
00:41:07
So they search the rest of the house and they're surprised. They find even another body, a woman lying on the floor in a pool of blood covered by a blanket in the second bedroom.
00:41:17
And she soon identified as 44 year old Maria Baumgartner She had just been hired as the Gruber new maid She only arrived I think the day before
00:41:28
So she had truly just gotten there to start this job. After searching the entire house, Lorenz Schlittenbauer decides to stay and guard the property while Michael Pohl and Jacob Siegel run to get the police.
00:41:43
So I'll tell you a little bit about this farm and the family. So the farm's situated between two towns. So it's southwest of a town called Groburn and it's north of a town called Kaifak. So the name Hinterkaifak literally translates to behind Kaifak. So that's why they call that farm that.
00:42:02
Then Witch's Wood, my favorite place in the entire world that I want to go to so badly.
00:42:06
I'm going to retire too. Is right in the center of. It's a forest that sits between Groburn and Kaifach right along the southeast corner of the farm.
00:42:16
And so Cecilia Gruber, she inherited the farm when she was 35 after her first husband died on May 21st, 1885.
00:42:26
And she soon after started a relationship with the Hinterkaifach farmhand, Andreas Gruber, who was 27 at the time.
00:42:35
They married a year later on April 14th, and they went on to have three daughters, but only their oldest, Victoria, survives into adulthood.
00:42:46
Man. So it's hard, hard living. Yeah. Andreas is a hard worker. He doesn't hesitate to help others with their neighboring farms, but he does have a very dark side, very disturbing what's found on this farm.
00:42:59
He's very physically abusive to his wife. And rumor has it that the other two daughters died young because of his abuse and his and starvation that they suffered.
00:43:10
And to make matters worse, in 1903, when Victoria is 16, she tells a neighbor, Mrs. Schlittenbauer, that her father is raping her.
00:43:18
Oh, my God. She hates to be around him, but she has nowhere else to go. So she stays on the farm and she she basically works really hard on that farm.
00:43:26
Yeah. She keeps herself busy by singing in the church choir and she hangs out with friends as often as she can.
00:43:32
In April of 1914, when she's 27, Victoria marries a man named Carl Gabriel. So Cecilia gives the newlyweds the deed to the Hinterkaifach farm, but she and Andreas will continue to live there.
00:43:47
It's clear that Andreas doesn't like Carl. Carl complains that Andreas constantly bullies him and denies him food. It seems pretty, pretty rough. Yeah. In that household. It it causes problems in Carl and Victoria's marriage. But ultimately, they work through it. They have a daughter together, Celie. But then Carl leaves to fight in World War One. And it's when Victoria is still pregnant. And he dies a month before Celie's born.
00:44:16
Oh, man. So Victoria and Seeley are the sole owners of the Hinterkaifeck farm. In 1915, six months after Carl's death, both Andreas and Victoria are convicted of incest taking place between 1907 and 1910. Yeah. And this is the most fucked up part about it. Victoria spends a month in prison.
00:44:38
So she's arrested with her father as if she is somehow. You know what I mean? It's so it's really fucked up and very upsetting.
00:44:48
She's in prison for a month. Andreas goes for a year. And after they're released, they both go back to Hinterkaifeck.
00:44:56
And yeah, that's tragic. So then three years later, Victoria gives birth to Joseph.
00:45:02
and on the birth certificate under father the initials ls are listed but victoria has no known
00:45:11
official relationship with anyone at the time of course it's you know the 20s it's rumors begin to
00:45:18
circulate about andreas being the father but no one ever finds out the real identity of joseph's
00:45:24
father to this day no one knows okay so now we're back to the investigation okay so word about the
00:45:29
situation at Hinterkaifex spreads through the town like wildfire. And by six o'clock,
00:45:34
townspeople show up in droves, which was the thing that used to happen back then.
00:45:39
And Lorenz is the one who stayed behind to protect the property. He starts walking people
00:45:46
through the house and giving them a tour of the crime scene. Dude. Yeah. Look over here. Look over there. Touch this.
00:45:53
Also, take that. There is a dead two year old in a bassinet. Like, what in the hell?
00:46:01
It's it's horrifying. So someone suggests to him that letting people in before the police get there is maybe a bad idea.
00:46:09
But strangely calm, Lauren's just says it's too late. They're already here anyway.
00:46:15
One visitor even goes into the kitchen, makes themselves a snack. I'm sorry. Pause on that.
00:46:22
What the fuck? Right. now hey i'm hungry after that tour i don't i mean the first thing that comes to mind which is
00:46:32
entirely made up by me but it's like you know it's hard times it's way back in the day people
00:46:40
are you you know when you work on a farm you see death every day at least animal death yeah so maybe
00:46:47
they're a little bit like kind of just numb to it. Maybe. Maybe a little more. Yeah, you don't want to snack after
00:46:55
you fucking see a dead body. A whole family murdered. A whole family. Slaughtered.
00:47:00
Okay. So we've both decided that was a bad thing that that person did. When the local police do
00:47:07
finally arrive, they quickly realize they're in over their heads. Not only have all these town people walked through the crime scene,
00:47:14
but Lawrence and Michael have moved the bodies from their original position and,
00:47:18
so they can only piece together what the original crime scene looked like. Suspicious.
00:47:23
Right? I don't like it. I don't like that at all. So they call in the Munich police for help,
00:47:28
who show the next morning on April 5th, 1922. An investigator from the Munich police named Georg Reingruber,
00:47:37
look at me, doing it. Great. He leads the investigation, and here's how he does it.
00:47:42
He takes a quick look around, he decides it was a robbery gone bad, and he leaves.
00:47:47
Goodbye. Give me a snack. Goodbye. I mean, so basically the other officers that are still there, they continue to dig for clues.
00:47:54
Luckily, inside the main house, investigators find a large sum of money and lots of jewelry.
00:48:00
So that quickly rules out this robbery gone wrong theory. Plus, the only room in the house that appears to have been ransacked is Victoria's.
00:48:09
But with the entire family dead, no one can be sure if anything of value is missing.
00:48:14
When the investigators go up into the attic, they find a bunch of hay strewn around on the floor.
00:48:20
This leads them to deduce two things, that one or possibly two people have been sleeping in the attic and that they put that hay down possibly to mute their footsteps on the floorboards.
00:48:33
Creepy. Yes. So they spot a rope tied to a crossbeam that goes along the attic ceiling and it goes out a window.
00:48:41
And then they notice outside the window that there are shingles that are broken, indicating that someone or several people have accessed the attic by way of the roof.
00:48:53
Oh, no. Lock all your windows, even if you're like, it's the third floor. No one can get in.
00:48:57
Also, if you're checking around and maybe it wasn't there when Andreas checked it the first time.
00:49:03
Yeah. But like if you hear footsteps anywhere, you, you know. They're footsteps. They're probably footsteps.
00:49:10
Even if you don't see people, look for things that would enable people to be there.
00:49:14
Yeah. Straw, rope. Yeah. Are those at least two weapons from the game Clue? A pipe.
00:49:22
Pipe, a pile of straw. A pile of straw, you know, a pair of knitting needles. So court physician Dr. Johann Baptist Eilmuller conducts the autopsies on all these victims.
00:49:36
so 72 year old Cecilia has been strangled and her skull has been cracked he counts seven blows to her head
00:49:45
Victoria's skull is also smashed and she has nine strange star shaped puncture wounds
00:49:52
and signs of blunt force trauma on the right side of her head now this is really horrible the skin on
00:49:58
Andreas's face is shredded and bloody and his cheekbones are actually sticking out like his
00:50:04
face has been mauled Yeah. And Celie's jaw is smashed. She has open circular wounds on her neck and face. And Dr. O'Muller concludes that the older three victims in the barn died instantly. But they find tufts of Celie's own hair in her hands, which they believe means that she suffered maybe even for hours in pain and duress, either seeing her family get murdered or being tortured.
00:50:36
They're not sure. Oh, my God. And then inside the house, both Joseph and Maria had very similar wounds, both died by blows to the head that left their skulls shattered.
00:50:47
So it's very up close, personal, horrifying MO. Brutal. Dr. Al Mueller also concludes that the killer or killers must have lured each of the four members of the family into the barn one at a time.
00:51:01
So the theory is that after the first person was attacked, the second person came out hearing their screams, followed by the third and then the fourth.
00:51:10
But when police test out whether shouts in the barn can be heard from the living quarters, it turns out the sound doesn't travel that far.
00:51:17
Another theory is that the killers may have let various animals out of the barn to draw everybody out one at a time.
00:51:24
But that's so sinister. Yeah. That idea. And then the maid stays back with the baby.
00:51:31
Right. A search around the Hinterkindfack grounds proves fruitless. A recent rainstorm melted most of the snow.
00:51:38
So even a canine team can't find any clues or sniff anything out. And with no murder weapon and no strong leads, police interview the Gruber's neighbors and other people close to the Gruber's, including their previous maid, who was named Kreschance Rieger,
00:51:53
trying to piece together the events that led up to this murder. So basically, Kreschens Rieger is 23 years old.
00:52:04
She's hired as the Gruber's live-in maid in November of 1920. But during her time with the Gruber, she sees the worst of Andreas's disgusting behavior.
00:52:14
She witnesses him lock Victoria in the closet to prevent a suitor from proposing to her,
00:52:20
stating Victoria will be his and his alone for as long as he lives. Another occasion, Crescens accidentally walks in while Andreas is raping Victoria in the barn.
00:52:33
She also hears strange sounds coming from the attic, and she has the persistent nagging feeling that she's being watched.
00:52:39
Oh, dear. She soon becomes convinced that Hinterkaifeck is haunted. But when she reports this to Andreas, he dismisses the whole thing.
00:52:47
He doesn't believe her. In August of 1921, just 10 months after she starts working with the Gruber's,
00:52:54
Kreschansk quit six months before the Gruber family is murdered. So she kind of had just worked there.
00:53:00
Yeah. And then months later, in March of 1922, various neighbors recalled Andreas mentioning some strange happenings on the farm.
00:53:08
First one of the two front door keys goes missing And then secondly a Munich newspaper arrives on the front porch of the house
00:53:19
But the problem is, Andreas doesn't subscribe to that newspaper. Creepy. When he asked the postman about it, postman says that he didn't deliver that newspaper, and no one else in the area subscribes to it.
00:53:30
Then Andreas notices scratches on the lock on one of the sheds, indicating someone had tried to break in.
00:53:38
He searches the property to see if he can find the intruder. Doesn't find anybody.
00:53:43
Doesn't find any other clues. Soon after, Andreas finds the footprints in the snow leading from Witch's Woods to his machine room on Thursday, March 30th.
00:53:52
He spots his neighbor, Lorenz Schlittenbauer, out in the fields. And so he decides to go tell Lorenz about these creepy things he keeps finding.
00:54:01
Yeah. Lorenz says that he hasn't seen anything suspicious, but he offers to call the police for Andreas.
00:54:08
But of course, then Andreas turns him down, saying he can protect himself, but probably doesn't want the police anywhere near his house.
00:54:16
And then so here I wrote, here's me in that situation. If that's if I offer to call the police for someone there, I can do it myself.
00:54:23
And it's like, OK, then shut up about it. Like why you bring it up to me? I'm trying to help you.
00:54:27
I feel like I would call the police because them saying they don't want me to call the police is suspicious.
00:54:32
Yes. Let's turn all the neighbors against all the other neighbors. OK, that same day, March 30th, Victoria meets with a woman named Francesca Schaefer.
00:54:42
And so basically the Grubers are trying to hire a new maid. Francesca says her sister, Maria Baumgartner, will take the job.
00:54:49
Although Maria suffers from both mental and physical handicaps, they're minor. She needs the work and Victoria wants to hire her and lets her sister know that she would love to hire her.
00:55:01
But when Victoria returns home with the good news, Celie would later describe to a school friend that her mother got into a violent quarrel after that.
00:55:11
And after that quarrel, Victoria disappears and is later found in Witch's Woods.
00:55:17
Oh, where there's a staircase underground. I made that up. Where does it go? The next day, March 31st, 1922, around five, Francesca arrives at Hinterkaifeck with Maria and drops her off.
00:55:32
And as she's leaving, Maria runs back out to hug her sister one last time before saying goodbye and starting the job.
00:55:40
So Francesca Schaefer is the last person to see Maria and the Gruber family alive.
00:55:46
Wow. So when investigators put together a timeline of events, they suspect the murders must have taken place on Friday, March 31st, 1922, between 8 and 11 at night.
00:55:59
But in the days between the murder and the discovery of bodies, it is apparent that someone was on the farm, tending to the animals and keeping a fire going inside the house.
00:56:13
Oh, yeah. Diabolical. So around 1130 that night, a local named Michael Plackel reported seeing a stranger burning something foul smelling in Hinterkaifeck's outdoor oven.
00:56:28
When Michael tried to get a better look at the man, the man shined a light toward Michael, obscuring his view.
00:56:34
So Michael fled the scene. and then in the early morning hours on Saturday April 1st a local farmer and butcher named Simon
00:56:43
Rieslander is heading home when he sees two strangers at the edge of witch's wood
00:56:49
and when they see Simon they quickly turn away so he can't see their faces and it isn't until days later when Simon suspects they could be the culprits so
00:57:01
So. Lawrence, Michael and Jacob are among the first people interviewed, right, because they're first on the scene and they discovered the bodies.
00:57:09
But Lawrence is quickly singled out when Michael and Jacob report Lawrence's odd behavior.
00:57:16
They both report that Lawrence was strangely stoic upon seeing the Gruber's dead bodies.
00:57:21
Also, when questioned by police, Lorenz Schlittenbauer swears up and down that he didn't let anyone into the house
00:57:28
after he, Michael, and Jacob discovered the bodies, but several other witness testimonies,
00:57:34
along with obvious physical evidence, prove otherwise. It's soon discovered that Lorenz's connection
00:57:41
to the Gruber family goes beyond just being neighbors. In 1918, after his first wife passed away,
00:57:48
Lawrence and Victoria begin as the Germans like to say hooking up and then I looked up
00:57:57
the translation for friends with benefits it's wow I don't think it really sounds like that
00:58:04
I'm impressed though I'm trying to make this feel legit I'm trying as hard as I can
00:58:13
a year later in 1919 her son Joseph is born Victoria's son Joseph was born and the LS listed on the birth certificate could stand for and
00:58:24
probably stands for Lawrence Schlittenbauer. So Michael and Jacob also thought it was strange
00:58:29
that Lawrence would run into the living quarters so quickly after finding the first four bodies,
00:58:35
almost as if he knew there was no killer inside the house. Okay, right. In the moment,
00:58:41
And Lawrence explains that he wants to, quote, find his son, indicating that he believes he truly was Joseph's father.
00:58:49
But with the rumors of Andreas's rape of his daughter now confirmed to be true, there's a chance that Joseph was actually Andreas's biological son.
00:58:58
Yeah. Not to mention Lawrence was the man who had proposed to Victoria when she got locked in the cupboard by her father Okay So given all this Lawrence would have a clear motive to seek revenge against Andreas and his family But why her Yeah
00:59:14
right. And why his son? Yeah, just the dad, just the creep fucking piece of shit dad. Right. But
00:59:22
here's a possible theory. Yeah. Lawrence had been under immense stress in his personal life because
00:59:29
he had since married another woman they had a baby who passed away only a few weeks after it was born
00:59:35
but you know yeah that usually doesn't grief usually doesn't make people kill a family so
00:59:44
who knows still police can't find any hard evidence tying lawrence to the crime um he says he's a
00:59:51
happily remarried man he has no reason to harm the grubers and police chalk his odd behavior up to
00:59:57
being in shock, which is very possible. Yeah. And his knowledge of the farm lay out due to his relationship
01:00:02
with Victoria. So he knew where to go. Lawrence was cleared of the crime. But of course,
01:00:09
as it will happen, townspeople some townspeople maintain their suspicions about him.
01:00:15
He files several civil suits for slander against townspeople and he wins everyone. Wow. So he was like,
01:00:23
yeah, you can zip it. Yeah. Stop talking shit. So three years later, in 1925, a neighbor reportedly sees Lawrence visiting the Hinterkaifeck grounds and they strike up a conversation.
01:00:35
And Lawrence makes a comment about how the killer or killers couldn't bury the bodies at the time of the murder because the ground was frozen.
01:00:43
Well, that could be true. Could be true. But it seems incredibly suspicious to the neighbor because Lawrence also farmed the same land.
01:00:52
So the neighbor is incredibly suspicious about this. Yeah. But because Lawrence farms the same land, he would know exactly what the state of it was. It wasn't like he had no other experience with it. And then years later, Lawrence dies in 1941 and he is never officially tied to the murders.
01:01:12
So investigators and their second and most short lived theory is that the murderer was actually a Victoria's husband, Carl Gabriel, who was reportedly killed in December 1914 in a shell attack in France in World War I.
01:01:31
But his body was never recovered. And so they theorize that because of Andreas's incestuous crimes, that Carl survived the war and came back to seek his revenge.
01:01:46
But it doesn't make sense because, first of all, there's many soldiers who report having seen him die in battle.
01:01:54
Yeah. And just because they couldn't recover the body. Again, it's like just kill the dad, like whoever would kill young a baby.
01:02:02
No, it doesn't. That wouldn't make any sense at all. Unless, you know, he comes back and sees that she's had a baby with someone else.
01:02:09
And kills his own daughter, too. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't hold up, really. Carl's body is never recovered, but he was officially confirmed deceased by the Central Prosecution Office for war losses and war graves.
01:02:22
Okay, so the third theory is that the murders were an act of murder-suicide. so because of their horrible family secret of andreas raping his daughter and the fact that it
01:02:39
became so well known um that you could theorize that he wiped out his whole family before taking
01:02:47
his own life out you know shame deep-seated guilt the whole um rage he sounds like a rage issue maybe
01:02:55
He killed everyone. And then I was like, well, to kill myself, too. Right. Then people who have that theory are like, well, you could also say Victoria could have the same motive because she possibly mothered his child and was abused by her father for years.
01:03:12
Maybe she reached a breaking point and decided to just end the family's suffering, including her own.
01:03:18
But the only problem with these theories is none of the wounds of any of the victims could have been self-inflicted. And on top of that, a year later in 1923, the Hinterkaifak Farm Building is torn down. And in the demolition, they find murder weapons.
01:03:37
They find what's called a matic, which is basically it's a pickaxe multi-tool. So it looks like an axe on one side and like kind of a hoe thing on the other.
01:03:50
So you could like use either side. And then a pen knife. And they're found covered in blood and buried beneath the attic floorboards.
01:03:59
Whoa. Yeah. So you couldn't. Okay. So there's no way that either of those people could have gone and hidden the murder weapons in the attic.
01:04:07
And it's interesting that they're hidden in the attic where people were hiding or theorized are hiding because then it would make sense.
01:04:14
They would go back and put them in that place. Also, the mattock has a star shaped bolt on it that matches the puncture wounds found on some of the victims.
01:04:24
A neighbor confirmed that the mattock was Andreas's and he had actually made it himself.
01:04:29
So after ruling out suspects that were close to the family, investigators look around for strangers who could have done it.
01:04:35
And one of the notable suspects is Josef Bartle. In 1919, just a few years before the murders at Hinterkaifach, Bartle had robbed a family 13 miles away in the village of Ebenhausen.
01:04:49
He was captured He was sent to a nearby insane asylum in Gunsburg but he escaped in 1921 Given his mental instability investigators and witnesses find it plausible that Bartle would commit the crime and then stay at the farm for days afterwards tending to the cattle and making
01:05:09
himself at home. But they could never find any hard evidence against him. It's all circumstantial
01:05:15
based on his record and proximity. And they also can't find him. So, yeah. So he's, they basically,
01:05:23
he's clear to the crime. They also look at brothers Carl and Anton Bickler. According to
01:05:29
the former maid, Anton worked on the Hinterkaifak farm during the potato harvest of 1920. And his
01:05:36
brother was also a farmhand, but he was lazy. Carl was lazy and Anton was not. So the maid says that
01:05:45
Anton had a particular interest in the Gruber family. Other sources say that Carl had the idea
01:05:51
to scare the family into giving them their money by killing Andreas. So police go back to Simon Rieslander, the butcher and the farmer,
01:06:03
to ask him about the two strangers he saw early that morning near the Witch's Wood.
01:06:10
They show him pictures of the Bickler brothers and say, could these be the men you saw?
01:06:15
And he says, they could be, but I can't know for sure. on may 2nd 1922 a police report is made saying carl purchased a drug to knock out the family dog
01:06:26
and that's enough to lead to his arrest on may 5th 1922 but carl has an alibi saying that he was
01:06:33
working on another farm at the time of the murders and he has witness testimony confirming that alibi
01:06:39
so he's released um like six days later uh and the dog never barked at anton so if they had
01:06:48
partnered up for a crime, Anton could have just calmed the dog down himself. They didn't need to
01:06:53
drug it. Okay, so then 20 or so years later, a woman by the name of Chrysanthia Meyer,
01:07:04
she's on her deathbed and she makes a final confession to her priest. She says brothers
01:07:09
Adolf and Anton Gump are responsible for the murders at Hinterkaifeck. She claims Adolf has
01:07:15
been in a romantic relationship with victoria but when he found out about andreas he lost it
01:07:22
um his brother allegedly helps him murder victoria and andreas for revenge then murder the rest of
01:07:29
the household to ensure there are no witnesses um police don't investigate this lead for 11
01:07:35
years and by then adolf has already been dead for eight years and anton is arrested but he denies
01:07:42
any involvement and no evidence is found connecting him or his brother to the murders.
01:07:46
So he's held in custody for three weeks and then he's released without charges ever being
01:07:52
filed against him. So all in all, the police interview more than 100 suspects. They explore every conceivable possibility from, you know, close friends and family to
01:08:05
complete strangers, vagrants and anyone in the vicinity with a criminal record. shortly after their autopsies each of the victims heads were sent off to a medium in munich
01:08:15
to see if they could find any leads through the metaphysical realm but that it provides no leads the case runs cold and it is officially closed in 1955
01:08:29
um it's been reopened a number of times between 1955 and 2007 but much of the original evidence
01:08:40
is either lost or like has been touched and held so much that they just can't help people anymore
01:08:47
yeah in 2007 however the first and fell brook police academy decides to reopen the case um
01:08:56
And some say it's like to actually relook at it and try to solve it. Another say it was just for this cold case is used as a sample case for trainees to practice on.
01:09:09
They have a theory. They look over everything and they have a theory. But because the person that they believe is responsible for the murders has long been dead.
01:09:20
And of course, the Gerber family has long been dead. they decide not to release who they believe the everything uh all the evidence points to
01:09:32
because they can't defend themselves right and and because it would the family um still lives in
01:09:39
the area yeah and so it would hurt their standing and reputation and there's it would never be able
01:09:46
to be prosecuted so they decide to keep their theory a secret but tell us please right i know
01:09:52
quick text. It's out of respect for, you know, the family members that are people that are close to
01:09:59
the crime. So basically it is believed that we will never know for sure who killed the Gruber
01:10:07
family at Hank Hinter Kaifak Farm. And that is the legendary cold case of the Hinter Kaifak murders.
01:10:15
Damn. I didn't know a lot of that. Me either. That is crazy. Good job. Thank you.
01:10:22
In researching this, I realized I have a true passion for a Germanic forest areas named after witches in any way.
01:10:37
Clearly, this is clearly the direction your life is now going to go in. I mean...
01:10:42
I'm happy for you. Thank you. It feels great to know when something really moves you.
01:10:49
Yeah. That's a great feeling. Go after your dreams. There is an overhead picture.
01:10:54
So the farm's not there anymore. There is... there's like a memorial. Oh. And then it's just kind of big open field.
01:11:02
But there's, you can see online, there's overhead photos. We'll post one. Where the witch's wood is still right there.
01:11:10
It's like this weird little rectangle of forest just right there in the middle of fields.
01:11:16
Creepy. Who planted that? Why is it there? What's in the center? It's weird because I'm listening to a book right now,
01:11:24
like a scary ghosty book and in it, uh, in near the woods is just like a rock formation called the devil's hand,
01:11:33
which like fits that perfectly. Is it real? No, it's fiction, but it's scary. It's called winter people.
01:11:41
Okay. By Jennifer McMahon. Nice. Jennifer McMahon has a similar idea to my stairs that go underground,
01:11:49
but it just goes in a different direction. Up or down, pick one. Uh, great job. Thank you.
01:11:56
Needed to be told. Yeah. Let's see. I have to admit right now, please for a long time when people would tell us to do this case,
01:12:04
there is another cold case that happened in Iceland that I would always get it confused with.
01:12:12
Okay. So that'll never happen again. I promise you as my podcasting partner and anyone else listening that this is what it's for me.
01:12:22
This is what it's all about. I'm not one of those people with true crime that can or is interested in remembering dates or details in that kind of studied way that many people are.
01:12:34
And God bless. Right. We just like hearing the stories. I like the story and I like to know what's possible.
01:12:44
Yeah. And we like to tell a friend who's equally interested in the story about it.
01:12:49
Yeah. I don't need to know more than you about true crime. not at all I just want to I want to be told stories about it and I want to tell you the ones
01:12:57
that fascinate and horrify me yeah well I want to watch your eyes lie open in uh surprise and shock
01:13:06
the way mine do yes that's the fun part about doing podcasts like this yes it's in all our years of paying attention to this do you know this one right yeah yes I do but I want
01:13:19
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01:15:54
But listen, speaking of do you know things about other things, I'm going to tell you, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about the history of the lie detector test.
01:16:05
Oh, my. That is interesting. Right? Yes, it is. It's adjacent. And it's controversial.
01:16:13
And it's been around. So I'm going to talk about how it was invented and all that stuff.
01:16:17
And then I'm going to tell some stories proving just how unreliable and parable they are.
01:16:23
Okay. So the sources I used are the Science Museum in London the American Psychological Association a Law Info article written by Christina Majasky the book Betrayal written by Tim Wiener the Anti blog the National Registry of Exonerations and a Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology article written by Don Grubin and Lars Madsen Nice All right Karen First lie detector test like technically lie detector test can be traced back to China circa 1000 BC What Yeah Not the kind we know today
01:17:03
but the idea of detecting lies through a thing. Suspected liars are forced to put a handful of
01:17:10
rice in their mouth and then spit it out after a specific amount of time. The test is based on the
01:17:17
idea that fear and anxiety cause decreased saliva, which in turn causes dry mouth, right?
01:17:25
You could tell someone's lying or high. So if they spit the rice out after a time and it's dry,
01:17:34
then that person's found guilty of lying and is sentenced to death. Unfortunately,
01:17:39
this is not a very good lie detector and pretty much everyone's just killed. Yeah. Right. So the
01:17:44
search. But I like the intention. Yeah. I like that they're trying to figure it out. Yeah. It's like
01:17:49
cause and effect. This happens when this happens. So if this doesn't happen, then that's what this
01:17:54
means. Yeah. Burn the witch. Right. Murder at the stake. The search for a way to detect lies
01:18:02
continues many tests are created along the way for example with one test a suspected liar sticks
01:18:09
their hand in boiling water and then removes it and if their hand is injured in any way they are
01:18:15
a liar uh obviously olden days that's from who's i don't know whose theory i don't know so you
01:18:25
So unless you have mannequin arm. Yeah. Well, it's a thing of like, if the witch drowns when we drown her, she's a witch.
01:18:34
It's like, well, you just killed a person. Yeah. Either way. Those people in charge just want to kill people.
01:18:42
That's exactly right. Yeah. In the 1950s and 60s, the CIA experiments with LSD as a truth serum, which sounds like a fucking nightmare.
01:18:51
Yeah, for real. But like the dry rice, none of these tests are accurate in any way.
01:18:57
As time goes on, researchers question whether or not there are any actual physiological signs of lying that we can't see with the naked eye, like increases or decreases in heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.
01:19:09
And after multiple studies, researchers find out that, yes, lying does cause some changes that we can't see.
01:19:15
So the next step is to figure out how to measure these changes. In 1921, a policeman and physiologist in Berkeley, California, John A. Larson, is tasked by his close friend, Berkeley police officer, August Vollmer, to help find a scientific way to interrogate suspects, which you and I have both, of course, read about.
01:19:35
Yeah, on The American Sherlock by Kate Winkler Dawson. The Exactly Right Podcast, Tenfold More Wicked and Wicked Words.
01:19:42
She is one of the best true crime writers there is. If you if you haven't read American Sherlock, you really have to.
01:19:49
It is it's mind boggling. This guy was at this source and center of so much stuff.
01:19:56
Yeah, totally. It's really good. So I you know, so we already knew about this because we read.
01:20:02
Because we can read. Try it. So one of the reasons this police chief, August Vollmer, wanted this new method to find out of like interrogation method is because his police officers can't stop using the barbaric technique.
01:20:16
known as the third degree. Remember the third degree in like old timey gumshoe stuff?
01:20:21
Sure. Just basically means beating the shit out of someone you suspect until they admit to doing it,
01:20:27
which obviously doesn't fucking work and essentially just gets you a lot of false
01:20:31
confessions and lawsuits. Yeah. So Larson uses the work of previous researchers to create a polygraph instrument,
01:20:39
Basing it on the systolic blood pressure test, pioneered by psychologist William Moulton Marston, along with his wife, attorney and psychologist Elizabeth Holloway Marston, which I want them to come to every dinner party of mine.
01:20:56
Can you imagine the Marstons at your dinner party? The most fascinating couple in the fucking history of the world.
01:21:02
Georgia, I love this gravy. Let me tell you about how I cracked the case by getting this fucking lying criminal to admit that he was doing it.
01:21:12
That's right. Long cigarette. Cigarette no holder. A fucking just dry martini. Multiple dry martinis.
01:21:20
I feel like she, what was her first name again? Her name's Elizabeth Holloway Marston.
01:21:24
Elizabeth Holloway Marston absolutely has cocktail onions in her martini. Cocktail onions. You're told. No twist.
01:21:31
I want my breath to reek. Yeah, I'm not here to make friends. I'm Elizabeth Marston Hollis Winterfell.
01:21:40
That's right. So they create this machine that monitors and records a suspect's blood pressure, heart rate and respiration all at one time.
01:21:51
So the suspect is hooked up to the polygraph and is then asked a series of questions.
01:21:56
Of course, we know we've all seen fucking Law and Order. Yeah. normal questions. Hi, is your name Karen?
01:22:02
Yes, no. Right. And then questions like, hi, you know, did you kill people or whatever?
01:22:08
You have to say hi. Hi, it's me again. Just been sitting here this whole time. Anyway,
01:22:14
moving on. Hi, is your dog's name George? Okay. Everyone's a big fan of Larson's lie detector
01:22:20
and his protege, Leonard Keeler, starts helping further develop the instrument. Although a big part of his motivation is to make
01:22:28
a shit ton of money off of it by like patenting it. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. He's like, lies.
01:22:34
That's the biz that you want to be in. Let's detect people. Yeah. So this dude Leonard Keillor helped set up the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern which is the first U forensics lab Yep So here a little tidbit of information
01:22:53
One of the students in his class, cartoonist Chester Gould, it said that he based his character named Dick Tracy on Leonard Keillor.
01:23:06
Wow. Yeah. So that's the kind of guy he was, I guess. She. All right. At first, Keillor makes the lie detector portable, then adds a galvanic skin response channel, question mark, which measures sweat gland activity.
01:23:23
Oh, scientists. OK. Eventually, the FBI buys the his version of the polygraph instrument.
01:23:28
And that serves as the prototype for the modern polygraph that we all know and love and hate today.
01:23:34
Right. So it has improved and gone digital today, but they still use the same technique and parameters as before.
01:23:43
But it's still subjects heart rate and blood pressure are assessed with a cuff. Respiration is measured, all this stuff.
01:23:53
But there's like a thing that wraps around your chest to test that. Skin conductivity is measured through electrodes on fingertips, all that fun stuff.
01:24:02
Examiners still ask the same questions. Some are controlled. Some are like, are they relevant? Whatever. And then when the question is over, the examiner goes over the responses and looks for patterns. According to the American Psychological Association, quote, a pattern of greater physiological response to relevant questions than to control questions leads to a diagnosis of deception, which is so silly. Like if someone asked me, did you kill someone? I feel like I'd panic and be like, no. Yeah, I wouldn't be like, chill about it.
01:24:32
right and then also the people who are chill about it who are most often murderers sociopaths
01:24:39
psychopaths they don't have those reactions they don't have those feelings about it no they don't
01:24:44
have consciences yeah so according to the american psychological association the main issue with
01:24:51
polygraph testing is that there is quote no evidence to prove that any pattern of physiological
01:24:56
reactions is unique to deception so in the same way that everyone grieves differently everyone
01:25:01
fucking lies differently. You know that when I was like four years old, my mom told me she could
01:25:08
tell when I was lying. Oh, right. It's the perfect trick. And then I just I was always like, yeah,
01:25:13
I know. She knows. Yeah. But she probably didn't. She fucking didn't. How would she know? I was
01:25:19
like, well, that's how I am. It's right there on my face. And then it like only year like when I
01:25:23
was in high school and I lied the first time I like went to a party or something. I was like,
01:25:27
She was lying to me. Yeah, that just worked. Yeah. What the hell? Mom. Basically, everyone's reactions are different.
01:25:35
Another reliability issue is that people can, quote, beat a polygraph with countermeasures
01:25:40
like, quote, simple physical movements, manipulating yourself to believe what you're saying and
01:25:46
the use of fun drugs. Yeah. There are lots of videos and articles as well as manuals.
01:25:52
And they're actual people whose job is to train someone how to beat a lie detector test.
01:25:57
So they're like, hey, I have this test, lie detection test coming up. Can you help me?
01:26:02
So now that people have figured out a way to make money on one side and then right there on the other.
01:26:07
That's right. Put up your stand. Go right ahead. Sure. Even the Supreme Court has said, quote, there's no reliable scientific evidence about the accuracy of lie detector tests.
01:26:17
However, they haven't banned polygraphs. It's up to the state to make their own rules about whether or not they're allowed in court.
01:26:23
Most states just don't allow it to be admitted as evidence. But a handful of states do allow them, but only if both parties agree to let them be admitted.
01:26:33
And if the judge rules, the results admissible, which rarely happens. So. They also used to be used like in in the job force.
01:26:44
So like bank tellers, store employees and other workers who handled cash. Like if cash went missing, they could hook those fucking employees up to a lie detector and be like, did you steal that money?
01:26:55
Yeah. So in 1988, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act was passed, which forbades testing in the private sector workplace.
01:27:03
But it is still used in hiring by the CIA, the FBI and the DEA. And also before anyone can get a security clearance by the government.
01:27:13
Right. Yeah. You know, this made me think of is if I could give anybody one piece of advice.
01:27:22
Don't steal. It's such a problem. I thought you were going to say ask for a lawyer and never take a polygraph.
01:27:29
No, just don't. That's better. It always like when you first start thinking about it, it's just like this would be easy and I would get this thing.
01:27:38
you're the what you open up is this world of doubt and people thinking you're a bad person
01:27:48
even if you like i i just remember debt i dabbled in this taking money out of the till
01:27:55
like and i did it twice i've told you the story a million times and immediately my boss at that
01:28:00
coffee place was like i think the janitor and his son are stealing and i was like all of a sudden i
01:28:06
I was just like, oh, my God, what am I doing? I was just justifying it to myself.
01:28:10
Like, I want to buy beer and I'm barely being paid. Right. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
01:28:14
It doesn't work that way. You can rationalize things all you want. But at the end of the day, you could be impacting somebody else's life horribly just by being kind of selfish and or lazy or whatever.
01:28:26
And the shame, the shame you feel, I think, of yourself. I stole a lot of stuff as an unruly teenager.
01:28:31
And I still look back and I like that not the kind of person I want to represent myself Correct And most of us deep down aren really like that but right Whether it desperation or convenience opportunity whatever just just take a step back because
01:28:48
I swear to God, the problems that come up after are a hundred times bigger than what you're taking.
01:28:54
Totally. That's a hundred percent true. Okay. This is, you didn't think that you're going to
01:29:00
get lectured in the middle of a lie detector test thing, but I really just, I think of the young
01:29:05
people. And I just go, God, if you just like, just don't do it. Just don't. It's all Karen thinks
01:29:11
about is the young people and how to be a beacon of light. Because they give me so much on TikTok.
01:29:16
I want to give something in return. Look at their dances and their lip syncs. Beautiful.
01:29:22
Inspiring. Okay. There are countless examples now of how unreliable polygraphs are. So we just
01:29:28
talked about this on the last mini. Between 1982 and 1984, 43 women had gone missing and or were
01:29:36
found dead in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington area. Many of these women were found near the
01:29:41
Green River. So naturally, the serial killer responsible for these murders is dubbed the
01:29:47
Green River Killer. In May 1984, Gary Ridgeway is brought in for questioning, having been arrested
01:29:54
in the past for soliciting sex workers, which made up the majority of the Green River victims.
01:30:00
A polygraph is administered and Gary is asked a series of nine questions, including,
01:30:07
did you kill these women? And he totally passes the test completely. Yeah. It shows no deception whatsoever.
01:30:16
He's a fucking lizard. He has no conscience. That's right. As a human being. And because he passes the polygraph, simply because he passes the polygraph, he's cleared as a suspect completely.
01:30:28
Police go back to focusing on a guy named Melvin Foster, who's innocent, but who failed a polygraph in 1982.
01:30:37
So they go back to focusing on him. Meanwhile, Gary keeps killing until he's caught by DNA in 2001.
01:30:45
He's later found guilty of murdering 49 women and is sentenced to prison for life.
01:30:50
Had the police not relied on that polygraph test and just cleared him as a suspect, at least six women would not have been killed.
01:30:57
Horrifying. So he basically got a free pass after that and was like. Just if there's one thing I want to teach you on this podcast, besides not steal.
01:31:08
You have to remember sociopaths and psychopaths are built totally different. Yeah.
01:31:14
When they when they are about to do something, you won't sense it. There's a there's a million stories on a million different podcasts, but you hear about it all the time of a person.
01:31:26
Super nice chatting with you. Yeah. No one would have walked you to your car. He was so unassuming.
01:31:32
You'd never think you blah, blah. I'm so sick of hearing it. And then it's like and then the second you go, oh, no, I'm not going to go there with you.
01:31:39
Their eyes turned to inky blackness and they become the devil in front of you. It is this that it's every true crime story and people have to remember it.
01:31:49
Yeah. Don't believe anyone. Don't believe anyone ever. Ever, ever. Okay. Sorry, I'm going to stop lecturing you during your own story.
01:31:58
Oh, is this about me? I thought you were talking to the teenagers. Shit. I'm talking to teens and ourselves.
01:32:04
And I don't even know what I'm... You know what it is? I had seven o'clock coffee.
01:32:07
I was just going to say, that is a huge mug and it is empty now. And not because you spilled half of it on the carpet.
01:32:13
If I could give you all one piece of advice, do not drink coffee after seven. It makes you lecture people.
01:32:19
Karen turned into a lecture gremlin. And here we are. It's called being a professor.
01:32:25
OK. OK. Sometimes a truthful person will fail a polygraph. In 2006, Emmanuel Mervilis was
01:32:33
arrested in New Jersey for armed robbery and aggravated assault. He offers to take a polygraph
01:32:38
being like, dude, I'm totally innocent. Let me do this. Let me do a quick lecture. Never
01:32:43
fucking do that. No. Always ask for a lawyer, even if you're innocent. Stay away from polygraphs.
01:32:48
That's right. And he then agrees that whatever the results are, they can be used at trial.
01:32:52
So that's the only way they're like admissible in court. If there is a trial, he says.
01:32:57
So but he's like, well, I'm going to clearly be innocent. So there won't be. He takes the polygraph.
01:33:02
He fails, asks to take another one, but he's denied. So at his 2008 trial, Lieutenant John Kaminskas testifies that he's, quote, never encountered a situation in which someone was showing signs of deception and that it later came out that they were truthful.
01:33:18
So he's like, tells the jury, this is, this is, he's lying. And there's no way he's not.
01:33:25
Yeah. So, of course, the jury believes him because he is lieutenant. And so they say Emanuel must be lying.
01:33:32
And there's even witness testimony that Emanuel was not involved in the robbery and assault,
01:33:38
but he still found guilty and sentenced to 11 years. Oh, my God. In 2011, a New Jersey court reverses Emanuel's conviction because the polygraph results were
01:33:47
relied on too heavily. Two years later, he's retried and found not guilty. And there's a ton of stories out there that are similar when an innocent person fails a polygraph and is wrongfully convicted based on that evidence alone.
01:34:01
On June 12, 1997, John Arthur Aykroyd is giving a woman named Marilyn a ride home.
01:34:09
And during the drive, she falls asleep. And when she wakes up, John is dragging her from the truck where he rapes her at knife point.
01:34:18
So as soon as she's able to, she reports the rape to the police on June 28th. She's given a polygraph. What? Yeah. The 30 plus questions she's asked include, do you actually feel you were raped as you described to me? And quote, is there something else you're afraid I'll ask?
01:34:36
A question about even though I told you I would not like just fucking trying to get her to show deception in some way.
01:34:44
Right. And she does show deception on four questions and she fails the polygraph test.
01:34:50
Why the fuck would she have to take a polygraph test? That is question number fucking one.
01:34:56
So then John is questioned about the rape. He tells police that he did give her a ride home, but basically she initiated the sex and it wasn't rape.
01:35:06
He passes the polygraph because no charges are filed. He's free to keep attacking women.
01:35:12
And he quickly escalates to murder. So in 1993, John Aykroyd is convicted of the 1978 murder of Kay Turner and is sentenced to life in prison.
01:35:22
He also pleads no contest to the murder of his stepdaughter. My God. Roshanda. John is also thought to be responsible for the 1992 murders of Sheila Swanson and Melissa Sanders, but he dies in prison before he can be charged.
01:35:37
So the rape victim failed the polygraph. He passed. And he is a fucking rapist and murderer.
01:35:44
Oh, my God. Yeah. Sometimes failing a polygraph can lead to an innocent person falsely confessing to a crime they didn't commit.
01:35:51
But on April 8th, 1993, motorcycle shop owners Morris and Ruth Gager are murdered on their farm.
01:35:58
And the next day, their son Gary discovers their body and calls 911. And since there isn't any evidence of forced entry, Gary's taken in for questioning and interrogated for 18 hours.
01:36:08
Oh, my God. He's given a polygraph. The results are inconclusive, but the police lie to him and say that he failed it.
01:36:15
So he starts to think that maybe he did kill his parents. I mean, after 18 hours, you're fucking delusional.
01:36:21
Yeah. They get him to discuss a hypothetical situation saying that maybe he did kill them during an alcohol induced blackout.
01:36:28
None of this is tape recorded. And he doesn't sign a confession, but all these hypothetical statements are admitted in court as confessions.
01:36:36
And he's found guilty and sentenced to death. And then basically, in 1995, federal authorities find out that two members of the outlaws motorcycle gang could have been the real killers.
01:36:46
And it isn until March 1996 that the appellate court rules that the hypothetical statements shouldn have been admitted and a new trial is ordered And later the two outlaw gang members are convicted and Gary receives a pardon based on innocence from the governor
01:37:02
Good God. Yeah. So, yeah, it's fucked up. It's a terrible fucking thing that shouldn't be used anymore.
01:37:09
To end on a high note, remember pioneering psychologist William Moulton Marston and his wife and our best friends that go to our dinner parties?
01:37:19
Yes. attorney and psychologist Elizabeth Holloway Marston. Yes. So and they were the ones who studied a connection between emotion and blood pressure and lying.
01:37:28
Well, they go on to create Wonder Woman. What? Yeah. Yeah. So he got a job with like what's later DC Comics to help like, I don't know, with scientific
01:37:45
stuff with characters. Oh. And they were both just huge feminists and women empowered people.
01:37:53
And so they create this female superhero who debuted in 1941. And her magic lasso of truth.
01:38:02
Yes. Is obviously a nod to the lie detector, which they helped create. Amazing. That rules.
01:38:09
Right? I that I've never heard that connection before. That's so cool. Isn't that random?
01:38:15
That's actually like the reason I got interested in the story is because I read that and I was like, what in the actual fuck?
01:38:20
So then I read more about it. And then also there's a book called The Truth Machine by Dr. Jeff Bunn.
01:38:27
If anyone wants to read more about that, there's a lot of just crazy stories about how much it sucks and doesn't work.
01:38:33
Yeah. Yeah. And that is this history and some stories about the lie detector. Amazing.
01:38:39
That was great. Thank you. Really? Because also we've heard about that a ton. Yeah.
01:38:45
But it comes up constantly. Yeah. And people are asked to take it or it comes into investigations, it seems like, that I read about all the time.
01:38:54
Well, it seems like people nowadays, at least smart people, think that it's a really great tool to use as an interrogation tactic.
01:39:03
Uh huh So if you interrogating someone and you threaten the lie for them to take a lie detector and they are like they they know they not going to pass it Yeah Then they maybe confess like Chris Watts that fucking horrible monster actually did that when they were like you going to take a you know he knew he was going to fail it Yeah
01:39:23
So it's really like, if you're a good investigator, you can utilize the threat or the deception that,
01:39:30
you know, comes out of a lie detector as a tool to get a confession. Right. So that's ideal. But
01:39:36
a lot of times, of course, it doesn't work that way. Wow, that was great. Thank you.
01:39:40
I want to stick the mic out the window and see if we can hear California rain. I saw lightning through your blinds.
01:39:47
Let's see if George might lose it. But let's see really quick if it's actually raining outside, because this is the first rain in how long?
01:39:55
Like a serious rain in a year and a half. Yeah. It's pouring. Everyone in fucking Idaho, wherever is like, fuck you.
01:40:06
Like, we don't care. But here's the thing. we have a serious drought water issue in California.
01:40:14
And we don't have seasons. Let's just get one nice thunder and lightning strike.
01:40:19
Ooh, is this an ASMR podcast? I think so. I want to stick this out the window. Yeah, do it.
01:40:24
Yank that whole thing. Let's just, you know what? I think it'd be nice to end this show
01:40:31
with just a little sound effects of real California rain. Thanks, Georgia. Oh, it's just lightning.
01:40:40
You're my gas. Oh, it's supposed to go. Okay, ready? Wow. Wow. Good one. Woo! We did it!
01:41:01
Thanks, you guys, for listening. We appreciate you. You know, rate, review, subscribe.
01:41:06
And just, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. And the fact that you have been with us the whole time has been a surprising and beautiful fact of our lives.
01:41:19
And we'll be here for another 22. And men's 22. Max 28, baby. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
01:41:28
Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an Exactly Right production Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton Associate producer Alejandra Keck Engineer and mixer Stephen Ray Morris Researchers Jay Elias and Haley Gray
01:41:46
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01:41:51
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01:42:03
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