00:00:00
This is exactly right. that may have been about sex. Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall
00:00:33
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You think you're in control until you realize you're not.
00:00:45
As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft.
00:00:53
I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about the moment ordinary lives take an unexpected turn.
00:01:00
Real people, real stories, and the split second that changes everything. New episodes drop every Thursday on the Exactly Right Network and the iHeart Podcast Network.
00:01:10
Listen to The Knife on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:15
You know the famous author Roald Dahl. He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy?
00:01:22
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
00:01:28
All episodes are out now. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
00:01:33
What? Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
00:01:40
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to My Favorite Murder.
00:01:48
I'm Bridger Weiniger. I host the podcast I Said No Gifts on Exactly Right. And every week I invite a guest on and then they try to ruin my day by breaking my no gift rule.
00:02:00
So we have a lot of fun. We have some very funny guests and I get a lot of gifts.
00:02:05
So feel free to listen or don't. It's up to you. Now, I know what you're thinking.
00:02:10
You're thinking, oh, I wish he were Karen in Georgia. And look, I wish I were Karen in Georgia, too.
00:02:17
But there's really nothing I can do about that. There's nothing you can do. Just imagine I'm your babysitter your parents hired after they've already gone through their nine first choices.
00:02:26
So I'm very excited to be guest hosting today. I can still remember years ago when Karen told me she was going to be starting a podcast about murder with her friend Georgia.
00:02:37
And I thought, oh, that sounds nice. I'm sure they'll have fun. And now here we are years later.
00:02:44
My favorite murder has at least 11 listeners. And, you know, I was a fool. Now here's the show.
00:02:50
So, I had two choices of Karen's stories. The first was the International Dunes Hotel murders, which growing up in Salt Lake City
00:03:18
was legendary. We would drive past that hotel all the time and talk about how the swimming pool was haunted.
00:03:24
That's not what I'm going to talk about. I settled on another story from episode 76, and it's very close to my heart because I was the person who suggested it to Karen.
00:03:34
And I believe this is still the only murder I've suggested to Karen that she wasn't already aware of.
00:03:42
You have to be careful, you know, when you bring up murder stories with Karen because she knows all of them.
00:03:48
She's the genius. She's the encyclopedia. So it's a bit of a badge of honor that I knew one murder she wasn't familiar with.
00:03:57
It's another story I heard mentioned of growing up in Utah, and I don't want to give away too much because it's got twists.
00:04:03
And Karen tells it so well. She really tells it perfectly, better than other people who have tried to tell this story, in my opinion.
00:04:10
But I will say it does involve some of my favorite things, things like Radio Shack, fraud, deep financial trouble, talking salamanders, and also someone named Button.
00:04:23
Very special. Also, Karen says, look at this rat bastard, which I feel like would make a great T-shirt.
00:04:30
Just putting a merch idea out there. And now here is the murderers of Master Forger Mark Hoffman.
00:04:37
okay mine is uh it's hard sometimes as we've talked about to get for me to get my homework done
00:04:48
no it's yeah and especially when i will work on something for a while and then if i have a friend
00:04:54
who goes have you ever heard of this one i will switch immediately and go do my friend i switch
00:04:59
i switch you know you're halfway done it's not like you're just reading about it no i switch all
00:05:04
the time yeah and and so many of these stories because you know you guys are just as into true
00:05:11
crime if not more than either of us so oftentimes you feel like i'm only telling a third of this
00:05:16
story i know there's so much more i should have read an entire book about this whatever that's
00:05:21
what other people do um so sometimes i'll bail just because i know a story has much more to it
00:05:27
and i should invest more time you're not going to give it just do it justice right exactly someone
00:05:31
else already has but this one was so juicy and i loved it so much my friend bridger is the one who
00:05:36
told me about it he's a hilarious he's very famous on twitter and he's a great uh writer and he uh
00:05:43
grew up in utah so he was like have you ever heard of this one and i had never heard anything about it
00:05:49
turns out there a forensic files there lots of stuff there um an amazing book but anyway i just give you I give you what I know So we at salt and we in salt Lake city Okay What this Is there a call Is it called anything I not going to call it anything because I usually do that and then I end up giving it away I totally understand
00:06:08
So we're in Salt Lake city the morning of October 15th, 1985. And a man named Steve
00:06:13
Christensen, who is a businessman, a husband, a father of four and a Bishop of the Mormon church.
00:06:19
He arrives at his office on the sixth floor of the judge building in downtown Salt Lake city.
00:06:23
one time I did a story and it was that horrible one about the woman throwing her kids off the top
00:06:30
of the hotel in Utah in Salt Lake City even right and in that I threw out the the random idea
00:06:38
that it was a very uh because you know all of Utah I assume is very Mormon that Salt Lake City
00:06:46
would be a conservative town well I was couldn't have been more wrong about that would like to
00:06:51
say now i now know because of making that mistake that actually salt lake city is the like liberal
00:06:57
part of utah and it's a college town and it's the hip place and it's probably best case scenario
00:07:02
and if you're looking for i don't know a great shirt or um really cool flats i'm not i don't know
00:07:09
so steve christensen gets to his office he sees a brown wrapped box shaped package in front of his
00:07:17
office door and his name's written on top of it he picks it up and it immediately immediately
00:07:22
explodes oh fuck here i thought it was something else and this is fucking let's do it yeah so it
00:07:29
was a pipe bomb steve has killed the department of alcohol tobacco and fight yeah it's it was a pipe
00:07:36
bomb that was made with concrete nails were inside and concrete nails are the nails you use
00:07:42
to pound in they're not made of concrete you're they're the really strong industrial size nails
00:07:47
that you pound into concrete. So the person that made this pipe bomb wanted the person who picked it up to be killed.
00:07:53
Wow, what a bummer. Yeah. So the ATF officers arrive. They begin to piece the bomb back together
00:07:59
to figure out that it's a pipe bomb and that was activated by a mercury switch that would go off when the package was picked up
00:08:07
and tilted one way or the other. So the minute the mercury shifts. Exactly. It's in a little glass circuit
00:08:14
And if it is laying on one side of this little glass thing, and then when you pick it up, if you put it in, chip it one way or the other, the circuit connects and that's when the bomb explodes.
00:08:26
So they know from a bomb like that, that the person, that the bomber dropped that box off because they would have to make sure it stays exactly the way it is.
00:08:36
And they couldn't mail it. Yeah, you can't just give it to somebody else. Okay. So also inside the bomb were Tandy brand batteries, which is, as many RC enthusiasts know, Tandy is the Radio Shack brand of batteries.
00:08:52
Really? Uh-huh. So they start going around to the local Radio Shacks trying to find out who's bought batteries there, you know, the past week or whatever.
00:09:02
they also find out that Steve Christensen had recently worked at a financial company called
00:09:08
CFS which after doing huge business in the 70s and the early 80s had started losing money and
00:09:16
was in serious trouble so this is the part that I actually found really interesting because
00:09:19
so the 80s were like a time of big money that's when everybody pretended to be rich and preppies
00:09:26
And, you know, it was a very eyes odd Coke time. Yeah. And apparently Salt Lake City in that time was a hotbed for financial fraud.
00:09:35
Really? Yeah. So what people would do, con men would go to Salt Lake City and they would kind of like
00:09:42
get get into the Mormon church. They would either pretend they were Mormons or they would befriend higher ups in the Mormon
00:09:49
church. And then when they would do business, they would like say they were in securities or
00:09:54
whatever stocks. bond. They're like, I got a ground floor fucking thing to get in on. Exactly. And then the elders
00:10:01
or whoever in the church would be like, oh, this guy is trustworthy. And so then all the parishioners
00:10:06
or Mormons, I'm not sure what you call the general word for it, but all the people in that church
00:10:13
would then trust that person and buy into whatever thing that that person was bringing to the table,
00:10:19
whether it was high finance or also very popular pyramid scheme, vitamin sales got to be very popular back then.
00:10:28
Yeah. So it was kind of an, there was lots of Amway low grade Amway kind of bullshit going on.
00:10:35
Did they get the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins they needed?
00:10:41
I don't know, but it was a, it was a kind of thing they call it affinity fraud and it happens in lots of
00:10:47
different different kinds of religions this is why my money is under my bed right you and trust no
00:10:53
one yeah um it's the same it's the the assumption that quote unquote one of your own is going to
00:10:59
look out for your best interest as opposed to an outsider i don't trust anyone do you no i'm
00:11:05
i'm scared of my fucking cousin isn't financial whatever the fuck and i like i'm scared well
00:11:12
Well, because it's it's so anyone can tell you anything. And if you don't know exactly what's going on, you it's 100 percent pure trust.
00:11:21
Yeah. And people are that into money like they're into money and they want it. Yeah, exactly.
00:11:26
OK, well, so it's the same thing Bernie Madoff did. Yeah. To he got 20 billion dollars, as you well know, watching that documentary from wealthy Jewish people.
00:11:35
A guy named Alan Stanford did it to Southern Baptists. Um, he had a 7 million or $7 billion empire that fell.
00:11:43
Um, there was even a con man named Monroe L. Beachy who became a trusted within the Amish community.
00:11:51
And he went to prison for orchestrating a scheme that defrauded 2 investors many of them his friends and neighbors What a dick So it just a very common practice of like this idea that your religion would would stand
00:12:07
for your good morals and that that therefore the business is trustworthy. It's almost worse con than just, you know, clients, because, yeah, these people are trusting
00:12:18
because they because if you're in their religion, it's because you believe the same things they
00:12:22
do you you have the same morals they're they're they're going right on the inside you know they're
00:12:28
not just standing out and like rolling the dice that maybe you'll believe them and maybe not they're
00:12:32
they're asking you they're playing on your ultimate faith yeah um which is very ugly and and um in the
00:12:39
mormon religion i believe a lot i know lots of mormons i've grown up i grew up with mormons
00:12:46
one of my good friends that I used to work with, Betsy, is a Mormon. And, you know, it's,
00:12:53
it's a very moralistic, they, the life they live is really, the whole idea of it is that you live
00:13:00
this life based on your faith. So it's like, my friend just said it the other day, he's like,
00:13:04
Mormons really walk the walk. Yeah. So it's not just, and I may, maybe I'm only saying this
00:13:10
because of all those, like design websites that you see these days. And when you trace them back,
00:13:15
it's like a young Mormon family but it's like the most beautiful you know table setting yeah and the
00:13:21
cutest design and it's like here's a great thing for your baby I've heard so many bloggers like
00:13:26
famous bloggers or like the big ones that have beautiful websites are Mormon for some reason yeah
00:13:30
because it's kind of like it's the whole idea of like home building yeah and like putting the best
00:13:35
into your home right and being ambitious and always having something anyways yeah yeah I mean
00:13:42
And these are insane generalizations, obviously. We're not speaking for every single person that's in the religion.
00:13:46
But there is just there's something to that. There's something to that where there's it.
00:13:52
There is there seems to be an innocence that that in the 70s and 80s con men were like, oh, we can exploit this this community, this sense of community that they have.
00:14:02
Two hours after Steve Christensen's attack, there's another bombing at the home of Gary and Kathy Sheets.
00:14:10
Gary Sheets was Steve Christensen's boss at CFS and his wife, Kathy, was the one who picked up the package.
00:14:17
It exploded in her hands and she was killed. Oh, my God. I never heard of this. I know.
00:14:23
So now the police are thinking that these bombings are related to the failed CFS business dealings.
00:14:29
And so it could be retaliation from an old employee or even the mafia. Oh, my God.
00:14:35
Um, police talked to the Sheetz 13 year old next door neighbor who saw a tan minivan pull
00:14:42
into the Sheetz driveway the night before around midnight and thought it was suspicious.
00:14:46
But all he saw was the car. He didn't see anybody, um, anybody get in or out. Um, but then they also talked to a jeweler who worked on the fifth floor of the judge
00:14:56
building, one floor below Steve Christensen's office. Um, his name is Bruce Passy.
00:15:01
And he tells the police that the morning the morning of the bombing, he got into the elevator with his father and there was a man standing in the elevator wearing a letterman jacket, but with no letter on it.
00:15:13
And he was holding a brown like paper wrapped box that said to Steve Christensen on the top of it.
00:15:21
Oh, shit. And so he Bruce Passy describes this man to the police saying he is a white male, five foot eight, medium brown hair.
00:15:31
The next day, there's a third bombing. This time it's inside a car and the victim is seriously injured, but he's not killed.
00:15:40
It's 30 year old Mark Hoffman. He is rushed to the hospital where he's in critical condition.
00:15:47
But he ends up being able to tell the police that he'd opened his car door and the package was sitting on the driver's seat with the action of opening the door.
00:15:56
It fell off and exploded. Oh, good. So he didn't get the full impact. Right. But he had a fingertip blown off.
00:16:03
He had a huge wound in his knee where parts of the explosives went into his kneecap, like his knee area.
00:16:12
So he was he was pretty badly injured. But this but immediately the police are suspicious because if he had his fingers blown off, that doesn't that means that the box was in his hands, not on the seat and then tumbling to the ground.
00:16:28
Also, with the direction, the guy in forensic files explains it really well, but it's basically the way they know bombs explode in the directions they go.
00:16:37
If the thing was in his knee, then he could not have been standing outside of the car.
00:16:42
He must have been inside of the car leaning over. And so they basically reconstructed.
00:16:47
I want to watch that. I'm like trying to picture it in my head. Basically, they with the trajectory of the stuff that flew out of the bomb, which hit him, they realize he must have been leaning over the center console, holding the box and basically inside the car.
00:17:04
So his story. Why would you lie about that? Why wouldn't you just tell him exactly?
00:17:08
I love when cops figure that out. like this person killed themselves and it's like no the trajectory like yours last week the
00:17:14
trajectory shows yes that that person couldn't have killed themselves and and that's the relatively
00:17:20
new forensic part that's like what forensic files is all celebrating because it's like we you would
00:17:26
never have known that until forensics comes in and and is like hold up so the police search um
00:17:33
mark hoffman's house and they find a letterman jacket just like the one that bruce passy said
00:17:38
the guy in the elevator was wearing. And they also find, they also see that he has a tan minivan.
00:17:44
Oh shit. And there's gunpowder that they find traces of around his house that matched the brand
00:17:50
used in all three bombings. There you go. So Mark Hoffman maintains his innocence says he the victim And he demands to take a lie detector test And he does They give him a lie detector test and he passes with flying colors
00:18:06
Oh, shit. Yeah. So the police start looking into who this guy really is. So Mark Hoffman was born in Salt Lake City on December 7, 1954, raised in a strict Mormon household.
00:18:18
He was a mediocre student, but later he was tested to have an IQ of 169. Wow. Which is insanely high.
00:18:25
That's one point over mine. I feel like in stories I've read, people who are like mad geniuses are usually in like the mid 130s to 140s.
00:18:37
I was going to say that. Like, I feel like very, very, very fucking smart is like 130.
00:18:42
I think so. But like then genius is like 160 something. And maybe. I like us trying to guess what genius IQ of.
00:18:51
the dumbest way well i know when my brother was a kid with fucking attention issues they tested him
00:19:00
and he had like one very high up there because it's like well he's just fucking bored yes that's
00:19:05
why so yeah and i never i was not that smart and i was never bored no i was always you're like this
00:19:11
just bored not smart and bored um okay so he collected coins as a teenager and when he was
00:19:22
when he was young uh that's a weird cut and paste he collected coins as a teenager and uh at some
00:19:29
point he forged a rare mint mark on a dime that was verified by an organization of coin collectors
00:19:36
to be genuine and when he was a kid he tricked the shit out of fucking professional coin people
00:19:41
Exactly. He got he got the taste early of like, you know, it's impressive. I think so, too.
00:19:47
This don't kill people next. I mean, so in seven in 1973, he volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary.
00:19:57
When he came back from his mission, which was in England, he enrolled as a pre-med major at Utah State University.
00:20:03
he married Dora Lee Old in 1979 they eventually have four children together and she filed for divorce in 1987
00:20:12
so in 1980 Hoffman claims to have found a 17th century King James Bible with a document inside that
00:20:22
he claimed to be the transcript that Joseph Smith who was the founder of the Latter Day Saints
00:20:29
Church he had a scribe named Martin Harris, and it was supposed to be a transcript that Martin Harris brought
00:20:38
to a Columbia classics professor in 1828 that was originally copied by Joseph Smith from
00:20:46
the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon. So I'm going to say this probably incorrectly, but the general idea of the founding of the
00:20:56
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is Joseph Smith found golden tablets that he
00:21:01
dug up and from those tablets he wrote down the tenets of the religion okay um and a a an angel
00:21:10
appeared to him as he dug up those tablets to help him okay um so basically he presents this
00:21:19
document they freak out because they're like they had never it's a historical document from their
00:21:23
church they'd never seen before and the um the church ends up buying it from hoffman for twenty
00:21:29
thousand dollars so this not only sets him financially but it also sets his reputation
00:21:36
as a historical documents dealer i wonder where he said he found it oh is it inside the king james
00:21:42
bible so he okay so he was already um trying to become like a historical book okay dealer so one
00:21:50
of the book okay one of that makes sense it was a really old it was a 17th century king james bible
00:21:55
So then it was like inside that. Got it. Got it. OK. So basically, he then starts for the next several years selling forged, quote unquote, lost LDS documents to the church.
00:22:11
The most notorious of which was the Salamander Letter in 1984. So he basically starts forging pieces of historical text and bringing them to the church.
00:22:24
And as as a church member himself going, I found this, I found this. Now, the church is part of it is like a little bit like, oh, yeah, we need to we need to be owning these papers.
00:22:36
And sometimes he would donate them and sometimes they would buy them from him. But essentially it was it was text that they that was relevant to them knowing about their own religion and the founder of their own religion.
00:22:49
So the one that is the most infamous is the salamander letter, which basically said that when Joseph Smith dug up those tablets, it wasn't an angel that appeared to him, but a white salamander.
00:23:03
So so that was such a change of the historical record. And they had never heard that before.
00:23:09
They'd never heard it before. It was super freaky. And it was kind of like they didn't know if they should announce it.
00:23:15
It put them in a really weird position. Yeah. Because suddenly it's a very non-religious sounding and almost like a magical witchy sounding version of the story of how their church is founded.
00:23:26
Right. That's what Salamander is kind of like not as cool as a snake. Is it a snake?
00:23:31
No. Well, but snakes are in like Christian religion are evil. Right. So there's there's just something weird about it's an albino salamander like as opposed to an angel and I think he could have done better
00:23:45
well a bear The albino bear a blue bear a blue Well, it turned out he was actually forging all of these documents and he had lost his faith in
00:24:00
And when he was a teenager, like he went on his mission, basically, he felt a lot of pressure
00:24:04
from his family, because he was raised in such a strict Mormon household. But he was trying to
00:24:09
embarrass the church. So he was writing these documents and changing these stories, and basically
00:24:17
adding in little inconsistencies and mistakes, so that the church would kind of be scrambling and
00:24:25
not knowing what their official approach should be. And he was like a master forger because he had already sold.
00:24:36
Let's see this. Here's the list. He'd forged unpublished poems by Emily Dickinson, signatures of Mark Twain, a full handwritten
00:24:46
letter supposedly written by Betsy Ross. No. He tricked the Library of Congress.
00:24:52
He tricked Sotheby's. Wow. He sold signatures by George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson.
00:25:01
Wow. Nathan Hale, John Hancocks, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton.
00:25:07
Wow, this guy is so lucky. He just finds all this shit. Yeah. And makes a shit ton of money off of it.
00:25:14
There was somebody named Button Gwinnett. No, there wasn't. His signature was the rarest and therefore the most valuable of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.
00:25:23
The guy named Button signed the Declaration of Independence. Or girl. Oh, sure. No way.
00:25:30
But little Button Gwinnick got up there. He also said he claimed to have discovered a famous document called the Oath of the Free Man, which is believed to be or, you know, some say the precursor to the Declaration of Independence.
00:25:44
It's from the 1600s and it was worth over a million dollars. Oh, my God. But this they never knew it existed until he came along.
00:25:53
They knew it existed, but there were no copies of it in America. So he had claimed he found one, and he was trying to sell that,
00:26:02
but the sale of that was kind of held up because they were questioning its authenticity.
00:26:07
Finally, someone's like, you know what we should do? Well, in this, it's funny because I think in the forensic files,
00:26:13
they start talking about how because it's within the church and the way he did it.
00:26:18
He was a master manipulator. He was super smart. so he knew how to do it where they would not they didn't question the documents because of who he was
00:26:28
and what he had already sold so it was like well if he sold something to the library of congress
00:26:32
yeah and sotheby's and all these places what are we gonna we're gonna question him yeah this guy's
00:26:37
an expert and he's a mormon so get him all the way in on the inside um but he also would buy really
00:26:43
expensive things so he was always broke even though he would make big money on selling these
00:26:48
forgeries he would then buy like rare books and he was buying things so that he could then forge
00:26:54
other things later right i mean it's very complicated and there's a there's a book called
00:27:00
the poet and the murderer by simon worrell and that is it tells the story of mark hoffman but
00:27:08
specifically from the view of him pretending to have discovered poems by emily dickinson and the
00:27:16
public library in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is where she was from, collects money to buy these
00:27:23
heretofore unpublished lost Emily Dickinson poems that were fake. Yeah. So he's, he's like a, he,
00:27:32
he was like one of the greatest forgers or the, you know, most infamous forgers anyone had ever
00:27:39
scene working it uh he's doing it so essentially what happened was he was trying to sell some new
00:27:47
set of documents to the church steve christensen knew a little bit about um and antiquities and
00:27:54
old documents and so he was questioning he was like i heard this guy is being uh questioned about
00:28:01
the oath of the freeman they're they're not even sure like he's under investigation we need to look
00:28:06
closer at these papers calling him out yeah so what he did was he plants a bomb at steve christensen's
00:28:12
office to kill him then he planted the other one at gary sheet's house to make it look like it had
00:28:18
something to do with cfs instead of anything to do with him shit that's fucking tricky yeah i mean
00:28:24
this guy is you know yeah tricky he's a trickster uh he was eventually arrested in january of 1986
00:28:33
charged with a total of 27 counts, including murder, forgery, possession of an unregistered machine gun,
00:28:41
and fraud. Jesus Christ! Yeah. That's it. Literally, Jesus Christ. And a salamander.
00:28:47
So he... Albino salamander. Albino. You can't forget the albino part. I mean, all of their beliefs
00:28:54
for hundreds of years are one thing, and then he gives them paper that's like, it turns out an albino salamander had a say.
00:29:00
They're like, you know, an angel sounds cooler, So we're just going to stick with that.
00:29:03
They're like, we now we need to have a really big meeting. And what if we have to start fucking praying to an albino salamander?
00:29:09
I mean, would that ever even have been a choice? No, they say also. So he had like 600 forgeries that got sold and are in the market where they're still finding them.
00:29:20
Yeah, I was going to ask. Yeah. So they're apparently and he wrote a letter from jail explaining which things that he did were forgeries.
00:29:28
Because some things, obviously, when he started out, he kind of, there were valid ones.
00:29:32
So, but they're saying that they're like, there's some Daniel Boone signatures out there that are fake.
00:29:41
That like, there's, because there were hardly any in the first place. But then Mark Hoffman comes along and suddenly there's four that are in the marketplace, which brings the value down.
00:29:52
And it turns out, you know, three of them aren't real. Do you think that his forgeries are now worth money A lot of money Mm To murderino types Yeah Or like is there a forger museum
00:30:05
I'd go to that. I would too. I mean, I think overall, the historical signatures are going to be worth the most.
00:30:12
Of course. Because they're like the, you know. But I feel like there's got to be like the Smithsonian or some kind of thing that's just like, you know, it's history.
00:30:21
Look at this rat bastard in that department. Look what happened. Yeah. Yeah. I just think it's funny that he did it so much.
00:30:28
And when you see the paper, like he would bake the paper in the oven. Yeah, I was going to ask. Like the lighter. Yeah, exactly.
00:30:34
Like an old Western. Yeah. All that. They found all this, you know, they found ink that he specifically mixed to match.
00:30:44
But then the when the the guy who finally started investigating it forensically, he was like the new ones all glow blue underneath a microscope.
00:30:54
because they're new yeah and so he was just really easily able to once they knew yeah start
00:31:00
investigating all of them and just be like none of this is real yeah sorry this letter from betsy
00:31:04
ross that's crazy i bet he'd be good at the lettering challenge he might be gotta have good
00:31:10
handwriting he would add in he'd be like i believe that this is a real um i don't know where i was
00:31:19
going back anyhow he initially maintained his innocence uh but at a preliminary hearing
00:31:26
the prosecutors showed so much evidence of his forgeries and his debts and all of the evidence
00:31:33
linking him to the bombs that instead of risking the death penalty he pled guilty to two counts of
00:31:39
second degree murder a count of theft by deception for the salamander letter um an account of fraud
00:31:46
for the sale of the McClellan collection, which was that last collection he was trying to sell
00:31:50
when Steve Christensen stepped in. He confessed all of his forgeries in open court.
00:31:57
He was, in January 1988, he was sentenced to five years to life in prison. He's spending life in prison.
00:32:04
Five years. Wow. And he's still there. Still there. Wow. Yeah. That's Mark Hoffman, everybody.
00:32:13
At first I thought you were going towards the Ted Kuzin key route when i heard about a bomb oh to be killed by a bomb do you ever open envelopes and
00:32:21
you're like i don't know what this is going to be yes well that's my moths thing i never think
00:32:26
it's a mom though um a bomb though well or a mom just a mom coming to tell me to sweep up the kitchen
00:32:33
honey do those dishes oh what is that fear they're just sitting there you let them soak for too long
00:32:39
yeah you can't just let things soak in cold water karen it's true but also this was the 80s when like
00:32:45
this was back when you could walk into an office building with a plain package i feel like
00:32:50
you know as worrisome as it all sounds we don't live in that world anymore it's like
00:32:54
that was definitely a very pre-9-11 era yeah except i yeah yeah but maybe not you know what i mean
00:33:05
well you i'm scared i know i know you can't be um wow that's fucked up good job thank you
00:33:13
Before NXIVM, Nancy Solzman wanted to help people. Being able to help somebody, it's probably the biggest motivator of my entire life.
00:33:22
She trained in something called neuro-linguistic programming. People loved our training.
00:33:27
Then, everything changed. Yeah, and they called it a cult. How does a method designed to improve lives end up in a cult?
00:33:35
A knife in the hands of a surgeon is an amazing tool. A knife in the hands of a murderer is a weapon.
00:33:42
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:34:12
It's unconventional therapy for you every day. Open your free iHeartRadio app, search DJ Hester Prince Music is Therapy, and start listening now.
00:34:21
Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin.
00:34:26
For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children.
00:34:33
The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation.
00:34:39
For others, it's surviving the unthinkable. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air,
00:34:47
many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then.
00:34:52
The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.
00:34:57
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00:35:04
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00:35:10
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00:35:15
Listen to The Knife on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:21
Wow. Now, isn't that a, well, I don't want to say wonderful story, but it is an incredible tale.
00:35:28
And, you know, you don't get a lot of murder and talking salamanders combined. So I love it. I absolutely love it. And I still feel like there's room in the world for religion started with a talking salamander. Somebody should think about it.
00:35:43
Now, I want to get into George's story, which is also fascinating. It's the sleepwalking murderer from episode 160.
00:35:52
This one is truly a wild story and as someone in a relationship with a man who sleepwalks a little bit personal for me It you know I live in terror because of this story And all I saying is that if my boyfriend ends up killing me in his sleep I want this guest hosting episode of My Favorite Murder to be played in court
00:36:13
Now, the story involves murder. There's gambling, marital trouble, someone waking up covered in blood.
00:36:20
It's got it all. I really and speaking of waking up covered in blood, I feel like if you wake up covered in anything, you're probably in trouble.
00:36:27
So and it's just the beginning of a great story. So let's hear Georgia tell the story now.
00:36:33
Should we? So this is mine. I was originally going to do like a three, three different topics on this, three different murders on this subject.
00:36:42
But then reading the most famous one, I was like, this is a fucking story in itself.
00:36:46
OK, so this is the case of Kenneth Parks, a.k.a. the sleepwalking murderer. Remember? Yes. I remember. Yes. But remember? Remember? I feel
00:36:57
like this is a combination of several different, um, investigation discovery shows that I've watched,
00:37:05
but I feel, okay, go ahead. Yeah, no, I, I, I kind of remember it and you first hear it. It kind of
00:37:10
reminds me of like the, the woman who spilled McDonald or McDonald's coffee on her lap. And
00:37:14
you're like, Oh, that's a, you know, this legend, that, that crazy woman. Yes. And then you see the
00:37:18
documentary about it. I can't remember what it's called. And you're like, oh, this is legitimate.
00:37:23
Yeah. So I kind of, you'll have to tell me what you think, but all right. So I got a lot of
00:37:27
information from Psychology Today. There's an article by a woman named Barrett Brugard. She's
00:37:33
a PhD, obviously, and a bunch of other letters. Is there an M in there somewhere? I'm sure.
00:37:39
A little C, a big C. And little dots and stuff. Yeah. She's very smart. Yeah. And then also there's
00:37:44
a paper called the homicidal synambulism, a case report in the sleep research society.
00:37:49
It's like crazy. Okay. Hey, hey, Karen. Hey, sleepwalking is relatively common in childhood.
00:37:56
Did you know that? I did not. Have you ever slept walked? Not that I know of. Yeah. But there's a
00:38:01
good chance that I did. I woke up, was traumatized and then just went back to sleep by myself. Lots
00:38:07
of stuff happened in the middle of the night where my parents wouldn't get up because I was very high
00:38:12
maintenance right in in the nighttime sure so my mom was always like go to bed go back to sleep yeah
00:38:16
um so about 15 20 percent of all children sleepwalk only about two percent of children
00:38:21
mostly boys weirdly go on to be adult sleepwalkers so it's not a huge fucking thing in adults
00:38:27
don't try to say that it is exactly okay don't come at us with sleepwalking um there have been
00:38:33
about 68 cases of homicidal sleepwalking 68 uh-huh and like in throughout history okay and
00:38:40
And that only goes until 2005 because that's what Wikipedia told me. Got it. Wikipedia is.
00:38:45
I don't know if there's been one since then. Is that the year everybody stopped doing Wikipedia?
00:38:49
That's when everyone stopped. Homicidal, sombranilism, and Wikipedia. Okay. But this is arguably the most famous one.
00:38:57
May 1987. We're outside Toronto, Canada. And here's Kenneth Parks. He's a 23-year-old married man.
00:39:06
He's married to a woman named Karen. What's up, Karen? Hi. Who she played by in the 1997 TV movie, The Sleepwalker Killing.
00:39:15
97. Justine Bateman. Hilary Swank. Close. Same vibe. Yeah. And they had a five-month-old daughter together.
00:39:27
And at the time, Ken is under extreme stress. So the previous summer, Ken played by a 1997 TV movie, The Sleepwalker Killing.
00:39:36
Chad Lowe. Charles Easton which I think is weird he's the dude from Nashville the show Nashville there's
00:39:42
like the hot country guy sure him okay okay um so Kenan developed a gambling problem his friends
00:39:49
had like taken him gambling to the horse races he was like whatever and then he won some money
00:39:54
and then he was like oh shit it's on and couldn't stop fucking he got the fucking fever he got the
00:39:59
horse race fever okay and so he quickly fell into deep fucking debt to cover these debts he starts
00:40:06
taking money from he and his and Karen savings. I think he forges a couple of checks as well.
00:40:12
I'm getting a debt stomachache. Are you okay? It's just, I know the feeling. You're in debt and then you're, you're doing something pretending it's going to solve it
00:40:22
when you know, deep down, it will not help. But there's no other way to fix it as quickly as
00:40:27
if you did win. Yes. I actually, there was one month where I did not have my rent
00:40:33
and I honestly considered there was somebody that I knew like very tangentially and through comedy
00:40:40
whose father was a professional gambler and I almost called him to say can I please give you
00:40:46
$200 just to see if your dad could turn it into something I mean his dad if he were any good
00:40:51
wouldn't say no I would hope same but also the guy would be like hey since you never talked to me
00:40:56
go fuck yourself is probably what would have happened how yeah um scary feeling sad solution
00:41:02
My solution was never get a job. Isn't that interesting? Well, Ken's solution is that he began to steal from his employer where he worked in electronics.
00:41:14
So he's just fucking trying to, you know, win back the money constantly, but he keeps losing it all.
00:41:20
And by the time his employer finds out about the fact that he's been stealing, he finds out, they find out in March 1987, he's stolen $32,000 from them.
00:41:30
Oh, shit. That's too much money. Also, that means he's stealing and betting and stealing.
00:41:36
That means he's in debt, probably triple that. That's just how much he's taken. Yes.
00:41:40
Obviously, he's fired and he's charged with fraud and, but he's awaiting trial. So he's out.
00:41:46
But this is real stress. Here we go. This isn't just like, oh, I'm, I'm slightly nervous.
00:41:51
And he has a five month old daughter too at the same time. So before getting into this debt though Ken had a good marriage to Karen and he had a really good relationship with her parents 42 mother Barbara Ann Who knows how old he is
00:42:06
Dennis Woods, the father-in-law. He was, interestingly, 18. Isn't that neat? It's kind of, it's a sexy little.
00:42:13
We can do it, ladies. Yeah. In our 40s. Happy Galentine's Day. Marsha. Cynthia. Cynthia and Marsha.
00:42:22
Let's see. Okay, part of the reason why her parents fucking adore him. Part of that reason is because they had gotten married really young.
00:42:29
And when Karen and Ken first met, she was a runaway. And Ken convinced her to return home.
00:42:35
So they were like, Ken, thank you so much for getting us our baby back. And we're so grateful for it.
00:42:40
We love you. Everything. And by all accounts, he was a super sweet dude. She, Barbara, and the mother-in-law called him her gentle giant.
00:42:49
And it kind of seemed like they were this like replacement for his parents because his parent, he wasn't close to his parents ever.
00:42:57
And they kind of weren't involved in his life. So, you know, he had this lovely in-law set of parents.
00:43:04
Yeah. You know. And they said that he was closer with Karen's parents than his own.
00:43:08
Okay. But after losing his job because of all that fucking money, remember, Ken is unshamed.
00:43:16
That's not true. He's proud. He's the opposite of unshamed. He's deeply shamed. Completely shamed.
00:43:21
And he can't find a new job. And so he stops visiting Karen's parents because he's so embarrassed and doesn't want to like
00:43:28
talk to them about it. And he does also continue to gamble, which of course makes his and Karen's marriage fucked up.
00:43:35
So it is an addiction. It is an addiction. That's like a hundred percent. It's so horrible.
00:43:40
I just, the idea of that where it like defies logic and you're like, look, I'm super broke.
00:43:45
Let me just gamble this money. It feels like you have hope when you're doing it.
00:43:49
Like I've been to Vegas a few times. I feel like that could be, I shouldn't live near anywhere near a place where you can gamble
00:43:54
because it's so fun. Yes. And you have this like, maybe me feeling. And that feeling for like somebody that's always wanted to be a performer or an actor
00:44:05
gets real kicked up when you're just like, is this when I become special? Like how many times, the first time I went to Vegas with friends, when I moved to LA,
00:44:14
we drove out there. we got there within, I would say two hours, I had lost $300. And that I was like, I did not have
00:44:23
money. So I was just like, Oh no, I can't do this. And then you realize how boring it is there when
00:44:28
you don't have money because all there is a gamble and drink. That's all. Well, one time in like
00:44:33
fucking 2001, I won $300. So now it's been what a hundred years. And I'm still like, but I can
00:44:39
maybe win even though I won't. Right. The amount of money I've actually lost there is much more,
00:44:45
is a lot more. Can I just add one more story? Because I won once on one of those oversized
00:44:50
machines. And I, it was very odd. It was like the last day we're going to leave, whatever
00:44:55
stuck in $10. I won $400. You would have thought it's classic me that I won 4 million. I was just
00:45:04
like, thank you everyone. And like reaching out to touch people and stuff. You grab some woman's
00:45:09
flowers. That's just walking by and throw them at yourself. She's like, those are mine. It's my
00:45:13
anniversary it was the most and then taking the the coins from that oversized thing over to the
00:45:21
cashier those dirty fucking disgusting ass coins you licked every single one of them i was scared
00:45:26
to death yeah i was positive that was when the heist was gonna take course they want your 400
00:45:30
400 precious dollars ridiculous uh i still pay the play the lottery though okay it's fun it's so fun
00:45:38
So, yeah. So that's very stressful. So much fucking money. He continues to gamble, though. And she's like, dude, bro, what the fuck? Yeah. And since he had started gambling the summer before, his personality had completely changed. Obviously, he stopped socializing. He starts to suffer from pressure headaches and he gained 70 pounds.
00:45:59
Oh, no. Yeah. He's just like addiction central. Dude, I relate. Yeah. Yeah. He suffers from insomnia and he would only sleep for four to six hours a night, which
00:46:09
sounds like a lot of sleep to me. I know. That's not bad. But he slept on the couch a lot and he'd go to, you know, he'd sometimes go entire nights
00:46:16
without sleeping at all. And then he had the fucking baby. So that's like double time, non sleepy times, you know, he eventually agrees to go to Gambler's
00:46:23
Anonymous. And in that May, he agreed to stop gambling. and he agreed to tell both his grandmother
00:46:32
about what was going on and Karen's parents who he was super close to. He was like,
00:46:37
all right, we'll go over there on a Sunday and I'll confront, you know, confront them?
00:46:42
No. No, it shouldn't be like that. No. Listen, you motherfuckers. I have a fucking gambling problem.
00:46:48
You're making me bet on horses. Right. So he agreed to do it and he agrees to tell him
00:46:53
about the upcoming trial for fucking fraud that he has going on too. Oh, that's a lot.
00:46:57
Shit is fucking bad right now. So the day, so it's one of those things where it's early in the morning of the day.
00:47:05
So 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, the day he was supposed to later that day, obviously, go tell his grandmother and his beloved in-laws about what was going on.
00:47:15
So it's May 24th, 1987. The night before, he falls asleep on the couch watching SNL.
00:47:23
at about four in the morning he gets up from the couch where he'd been sleeping puts on his shoes
00:47:29
and jacket walks out the front door which he left unlocked which he never fucking did
00:47:34
and he drove the 14 miles to the house of his in-laws in the toronto suburb of scarborough
00:47:40
he drove he sleep drove yeah fuck that's if you believe this oh that's the other thing too is like
00:47:47
some people are like bullshit right right so when ken rises at their house he takes a tire iron
00:47:53
from the car trunk and he uses his key that he has to their house to open the house,
00:47:57
goes to the bedroom of his in-laws. He first strangles his father-in-law, Dennis, until he is unconscious.
00:48:05
Then he proceeds to beat his 42-year-old mother-in-law, Barbara Ann. 42 years old.
00:48:11
42. He beats her with the tire iron and stabs her repeatedly with a kitchen knife.
00:48:17
Oh, my God. He then stabs his father-in-law. Barbara is found in a room five to six feet away from the bedroom, and she'd sustained six salve wounds through her chest,
00:48:27
one through her shoulder blade and a fatal wound through her heart. And now it's fucking awful.
00:48:32
I'm sorry. No. Barbara dies, but Dennis survives barely. Oh my God. And there were other kids in the house.
00:48:41
I think teenager. I don't know who else, because they were young. They were young.
00:48:45
They had other kids who were under in their teenage years. Right. And they woke up from the noise.
00:48:50
They start yelling and, but Ken left them alone and he walked out of the house. So the kids saw him.
00:48:56
I don't know if they saw. I feel like they just heard the noise. They heard. Maybe they saw something.
00:49:00
They all locked themselves in their room. Oh, yeah. So that would make sense. But he went, he goes to the door and just leaves.
00:49:06
He doesn't try to come towards them or anything like that. Right. Very weird. So it was almost like this is the mission.
00:49:11
Yeah. The end. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So from their house, he drives straight to the police station.
00:49:17
He gets there at 4.45 a.m. He's covered in blood. The police say he seems distressed and he was shaking.
00:49:22
he kept repeating and it's fucking many times that he says this i just killed someone with my
00:49:28
bare hands oh my god i've just killed two people i stabbed them and beat them to death it's all my
00:49:34
fault he says the police isn't that insane yes police also said that he seemed completely oblivious
00:49:42
and not in pain of the fact that he'd severed tendons in both his hands with the knives
00:49:48
oh he wasn't even fucking aware of it ew i know steven is gripping his hands so tight right now
00:49:56
hiding his hand if you hear skin on skin it's that's crazy isn't that you can't fake that
00:50:04
no tendons not not being in pain i guess like you could say something about like um adrenaline maybe
00:50:11
Maybe. But tendons, that's a bloody mess. And also you'd still have to be conscious in some ways.
00:50:18
I don't know. I don't buy that. I don't know. No, it's bananas. Maybe I just don't want to.
00:50:22
I'm in denial. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.
00:50:34
Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years until a confession changed everything.
00:50:45
I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:50:56
How much do you weigh, Wanda? Right now, I'm about 130. I'm at 183. We should race.
00:51:00
No, I want to leave here with my original hips. On the podcast to match up with Aliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
00:51:07
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, the art of trash talk and what it really means to be ladylike.
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00:51:26
This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security.
00:51:36
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00:51:43
and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app,
00:51:51
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I, so I, after reading this homicidal somnabilism report,
00:52:02
Thank you. I believe him. And I fucking didn't at first. I was like, well, bullshit.
00:52:10
I don really buy it But after reading that and all the details and stuff and like that particular thing bananas Also I just throw this in really quick To me it seems like if you faking it you would go home and get back into sleep and be like what do you mean I was up
00:52:27
Like you would be playing the part of someone who slept walked. Yeah. Because usually the picture you have of sleepwalkers is they go out, they do something and then they come back.
00:52:36
But he was bleeding so badly that he could have been like, oh, I need to get to the hospital.
00:52:39
how do I like make it seem like that? You know what I mean? True, true. So that's just an argument to that.
00:52:44
But turning yourself in does indicate that you're like, holy fuck. Because what if you woke up covered in blood?
00:52:52
I mean, it's like that, there's that amazing movie, Farrah Fawcett. It's the same.
00:53:00
It's basically the same thing. She wakes up covered in blood and doesn't know what happened because she's a blackout drunk.
00:53:04
Oh, shit. It turns out she got set up. Oh, fuck. spoiler alert okay um yeah i didn't tell you the name in the movie so i didn't spoil it for you
00:53:15
no one will ever watch it so you can't spoil something we're not going to watch okay ken
00:53:18
is arrested and he goes to trial to face charges of first degree murder of his mother-in-law and
00:53:23
attempted murder of his murder of his father-in-law um and his defense they have to they have to say
00:53:29
it in a certain way it's basically temporary insanity due to sleepwalking it's way more
00:53:34
fucking involved in that legally, but we don't need to do that right now. Right. You get it.
00:53:39
So that's all I get. That's right. While in prison, Ken undergoes all these sleep tests
00:53:45
and psychological tests. There's an EEG scan while he's sleeping that shows that he had some
00:53:50
abnormal brain activity during sleep. So he did legitimately have a sleep thing and periods of
00:53:55
partial awakenings, indicative of parasomnia. And it's fucking, I mean, I read a lot about this shit
00:54:01
and like sleepwalking and sleep talking and people actually committing crimes. And, you know,
00:54:06
a lot of them seem like, oh, I don't know about that. But this one seemed legit. Yeah.
00:54:11
He was studied for months by a team of psychologists, and they determined that he was in an acute state of emotional turmoil leading up to the attack. And that's what caused
00:54:23
him to lash out and kill these people that he loved and really had nothing to gain by killing
00:54:28
them. Right. And there was no anger or anything like that involved. It was just extreme stress.
00:54:34
Well, and they, he hadn't told them yet. They didn't know. Right. His wife is the one that knew.
00:54:39
So it seems like if you were going to do something to try to remove the fact from your existence. Just go upstairs and kill your wife. I mean, that to me, that would be a,
00:54:50
that's a really good point. Thanks. You're welcome. And like, yeah, that's a good point.
00:54:55
And it's almost like the thing he was so stressed about, which is telling his parent-in-laws, is the thing he acted out on.
00:55:03
Yes. Because that was what was in his brain. His brain wasn't functioning properly.
00:55:07
And it was like, neuron to neuron, go do this thing. It's like the fixation of if you get rid of them, you don't have to tell them.
00:55:13
Right. Right. You can see where the fucked up brain thing messaging would be there.
00:55:18
Yeah. Yeah. So let's see. Since there's allegedly no way to fake an EEG result, and since Ken had appeared to feel no pain when he arrived at the police station, it is determined that he was sleepwalking when he attacked his in-laws.
00:55:32
So, but there's like kind of some weird shit. Like Karen said she had never seen Ken sleepwalk, which I feel like she would have.
00:55:38
Right. She did say he was a really deep sleeper and sometimes she would talk to him, to her in his sleep.
00:55:44
His mother said she remembered only one incident of Ken sleepwalking as a child when his brother grabbed his legs as he like crawled out of a window.
00:55:52
Oh, shit. I know. So like there was something going on there. And Ken's grandfather and a lot of his family members sleptwalked and had some sleep issues, which it is hereditary, which I found interesting.
00:56:05
And children whose parents are sleepwalkers are two to three times more likely to become sleepwalkers.
00:56:11
Okay. Bananas. And my brother sleptwalked a little bit in his youth. And yeah, I don't know.
00:56:17
I did a thing one time and it was purely out of stress, but I wasn't, I was trying to go
00:56:21
to sleep and the stress built up and then I just jumped up and ran. And it was one of the weirdest things I ever done because I couldn really it was when I was still married and my husband was like what are you doing I was like I have to get out I have to get out Your body was like clean sleep clean sleep
00:56:37
Get out of here. You get out. Get out. And you get out. Yeah. It was super weird.
00:56:42
Holy shit. And it was just from like, I can't deal with this pressure anymore. Yeah.
00:56:46
I think stress will do that to you. Yeah. At trial, Ken says he didn't remember any of the details of the attack.
00:56:52
He said he remembered falling asleep on the couch sometimes after midnight. His fucking next recollection is his next thing you remember seeing is opening his eyes and seeing his mother-in-law's brightened face.
00:57:05
And her eyes and mouth are open. And while he's in prison, he is distraught and devastated.
00:57:12
And he's mourning this and he's just feels horrible. Karen's with him during the trial.
00:57:19
Oh. Ken says that after seeing his mother-in-law's face, he just sat there. He didn't.
00:57:24
He just like almost like woke up then. And then he heard the kids yelling. And he says he thought the kids were in trouble.
00:57:31
So he said he yelled, kids, kids, kids. But the kids said they only heard like grunting animal noises.
00:57:38
So he thinks like he's in a dream. He's talking and saying these words. But that's almost like that's what he thought.
00:57:45
It's the way somebody would if they were sleeping. Right. Thinking that they're saying something.
00:57:49
Totally. Yes. And so also, for some reason, Ken picked up the phone at the house and left it off the hook and also walked up to the bedroom of the kids, but didn't go in or try to at all.
00:58:00
So that's just a weird little, I don't know. Sorry, like as he was leaving? I don't know if it was before or after.
00:58:07
I think before he left, he went to the kids room. I don't know about the phone. Yeah.
00:58:12
Yeah. An Ontario Supreme Court jury deliberated for nine hours before finding Kenneth Parks not guilty.
00:58:19
Wow. The judge upheld the ruling saying that the state had failed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Parks was aware of his actions, which fucking upset a lot of people.
00:58:28
A lot of people call bullshit on it. I mean, there's really no way to tell. But based on what I read, I feel like it's true.
00:58:35
But am I just like being foolish? Jesus Christ. I just saw something out of the corner.
00:58:40
What? Is someone walking by? A ghost. Oh. Well, you know, it's funny. to me, this seems like, like you're saying the lady, the McDonald's lady that at first pass,
00:58:51
of course you say that because that sounds like the ultimate excuse, the best excuse.
00:58:55
It sounds like the beginning of a date line. Totally. He was sleepwalking. And there are a
00:58:59
bunch, there are a few of those that are there. I mean, it's almost like it, to me, it kind of
00:59:03
reminds me of the staircase where it's like, he says that she fell down this, you know, and it's
00:59:08
like, of course he said that he fucking killed her, but you know, but, and that's almost the,
00:59:12
this one's almost worse that a fucking, that he was sleepwalking. It's like bullshit. But then
00:59:17
like, what if it's true? Right. What if it's true? And, and what are the, what could actually
00:59:24
support that? Like, and those people took all that evidence and for nine hours worked through it and
00:59:29
went, yeah, he didn't do it. But at the same time, it's like, but he did still do it. Are you not
00:59:34
culpable at all in your sleep? Like he, is there some kind of like manslaughter or something,
00:59:40
you know like he just gets to leave he's done well but he did go to jail you said right well
00:59:45
just during the trial oh yeah yeah i don't know i mean that's horrible and yeah yeah what do you
00:59:52
say yeah what only he knows i mean like only he knows totally um i do know that they didn't stay
01:00:01
married only because a murderino fucking emailed us and said that she was friends with this girl
01:00:05
when she was younger and went over to her mom and stepdad's house before and she told her about it
01:00:11
so they weren't married anymore well how could you be though no how could you even if it was the
01:00:17
love your life you absolutely believed he was yeah that's just he's not innocent he still killed
01:00:22
your parents yeah but i mean like that it wasn't an intentional right plan can you imagine sleeping
01:00:28
next to him no i mean jesus well that that alone yeah that alone or just like yeah that's it's i've
01:00:34
I've punched Vince in my sleep before. Have you? Yeah. Like having a dream about a fight.
01:00:39
I might have punched him. It was so bad. And I sometimes talk Mostly yell Yell at my mom Oh yeah In my sleep Damn up I there so hard to find any information the most recent thing I found was that he was running for a spot on the
01:00:56
district school board in 2006 which mentioned that he had six kids ages four to 19 in 2006 so he
01:01:03
was in another relationship at some point right yeah and like you can't find anything else he
01:01:08
probably just wants to live his life and if he fucking didn't do it on purpose great but also
01:01:11
So like, can you imagine like knowing your past? It's crazy. It's horrifying. It's crazy.
01:01:17
It's horrifying. And that is the case of Kenneth Parks, a.k.a. the sleepwalking murderer.
01:01:23
Wow. The fuck? Yeah, that's. I mean, because there's ones we do where it's like they you describe their childhood and it's the worst thing you've ever heard.
01:01:32
So then when they become killers, then you're like, well, I it doesn't justify it, but I see how a plus b equals c.
01:01:39
Right. Right. But so this is a version of that. It is because you're like you can imagine being so under under so much stress brought on by yourself.
01:01:47
That's the thing, too, is like the stress he brought on was by himself. Yes. So it's also still like, well, you're culpable for that. Yeah. Are you culpable for the murder?
01:01:55
I mean, for the things that happen because of your choices and actions. Yes. I mean, it is. I mean, this is a real like conundrum in that way to be. Can you imagine being on that jury?
01:02:07
oh fuck shit up no and probably that you i bet there was sleepwalk right out of that
01:02:12
fucking jury i'd just be like sorry uh i don't believe in sleepwalking goodbye don't believe in it oh my god i think it's an urban myth i mean i can't imagine staying married
01:02:23
to the person after that no you couldn't you couldn't that's too much to ask yeah oh my god
01:02:28
man horrible that was heavy sorry no sorry i just told you a horrible murder story oh you mean like
01:02:37
the theme of this podcast we've been doing for three years. That's right. Yeah, wow.
01:02:42
Yeah. That is a rough story to hear, I know. But I think it's very interesting and also very comforting to hear someone else have difficulty
01:02:55
pronouncing some nambulant. That is a word I will never be able to say correctly.
01:03:02
And it's nice that I can hear other people struggle with it as well. So this is the end of me guest hosting
01:03:08
I hope you've had a wonderful time I hope you enjoyed these stories as much as I did
01:03:13
And if you want to find me again I'm Bridger Weineger I host I Said No Gifts here on Exactly Right
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