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Shop BOEM's new arrivals at BOEM.com. That is B-O-H-M-E dot com. Hello. And welcome to My Favorite Murder.
00:02:03
That's Georgia Hartstar. That's Karen Kilgariff. We're here with you. We are. It's mid-March.
00:02:10
It is. Things are kind of daylight savings-y. Ugh, my favorite. Chilling. I know, me too.
00:02:16
It just lifts this fog of darkness, I guess. Literally. Literally. Literally. Literally.
00:02:25
Although I do, you know, I'm an early bird. Oh, that's right. Do you like dark in the morning or dark at night?
00:02:30
Yes, I do. It's cozy, right? Yes. It's like going to camp or something. There's like, because also then, like you're saying, there is a fog, literal, that's out
00:02:43
and it makes me feel like I'm just up and at them. Yeah, you're like alone in the world a little.
00:02:50
Time for journaling. Time for introspection. Coffee and a good journal And a good
00:02:58
Get it on the page You know what I do like about waking up early Which I now have a puppy
00:03:03
And so I do more often Which I love the idea of it But I'm definitely like a late sleeper
00:03:10
I had that thing of like when I worked And went to school my whole life I was like if you ever get a chance to sleep in
00:03:15
You're fucking taking it And so I still do it to this day Can I just question you on going to school your whole life
00:03:20
That's a lie How dare you shame me the school of life can I point out it's real rave after rave
00:03:34
where I was learning and I'd wake up at 8am for it but yeah I still stand naps and sleeping in to me are like
00:03:44
if you can do that in your life then you are a rich woman but waking up early is like I love the idea of getting stuff done
00:03:53
But also when you take your puppy for a walk before 11, you can pretty much wear whatever the fuck you want.
00:04:00
And no one questions it. Like if you go for your walk with your puppy at one o'clock in the afternoon and you're wearing your bathrobe, there's like a change in the mental image of yourself.
00:04:14
Your neighborhood's mental image of you. Exactly. I thought she was classy. Yeah. Slippers on a robe at two in the afternoon. That's just like that shows my level of depression.
00:04:28
Right. Yeah. No. To keep that keep that under 9 a.m. if you're going to do that kind of curlers in the hair action out in the streets.
00:04:35
Don't take that to the streets. That's private. But, you know, I'll say in this in the exact same way.
00:04:40
Sometimes if it's early enough, I'll go, I'll put on clothes to, uh, to go onto the elliptical
00:04:47
machine that are tighter than clothes I would normally wear. It's my new thing. And that feels good to me personally, privately.
00:04:56
Yeah. To do that. Where I'm like, I know what I'm aiming toward. I know what I'm for you.
00:05:01
I'm looking at myself. Yeah. But then I'll be like, I should go get the mail. Because I'm essentially wearing a spandex outfit.
00:05:12
It's like running to get the mail in a unitard. Oops, just got to slip out real quick and grab the mail.
00:05:18
Oh, well. So that kind of gets the heart racing. Tell me if this is offensive, but I've coined my look, my pandemic look, which I really hope lasts, even when I leave the house, is new mom chic.
00:05:32
Yeah, not offensive. I'm not a new mom, nor will I probably ever will be. But damn, that like, fuck it mentality of like, I have other things to think about than what if my if I worn these sweatpants for three days and there's cat hair on them.
00:05:50
You know and part of that too is coming into your 40s and 50s where you start to realize who gives a fuck it crazy my outfit like you you truly begin to just release that grip of um concern about like the show of the show and instead it
00:06:11
like drink it in yeah this is the best i'm doing that also happens uh happened to me very much when
00:06:19
i started working very like high stress jobs that i was at all the time where i was like
00:06:23
Well, then the best you're going to get are some bootcut jeans. Yeah. A nice pair of clogs.
00:06:29
You want me your day? The same sweater every day. That's true. What am I supposed to do?
00:06:33
One could argue that there's like a and I had to put makeup on today for a thing.
00:06:38
So there was like this like, oh, oh, yeah, there she is. Kind of a feeling. So, yes.
00:06:44
But that doesn't need to be every fucking day. No. And also, I find you can slop on pretty much anything.
00:06:50
But if you have a nice eye line, mascara combination, kind of a solid, natural lip, but still a pronounced lip.
00:07:01
You're talking my language. Because, hey, look, anyone's ever only ever looking at your kind of like bust head, you know, shoulders up anyway, unless they stand back and really like take you in.
00:07:12
Which they should. Which they will. but you know that that was always my thinking where just like you know this is i'm gonna work
00:07:20
i'm gonna worry about the part that i know for a fact people are going to address and everything
00:07:25
else can't be my problem right now no i feel like the pandemic has fast forwarded us all to that
00:07:30
point all like two years you know how everything's like smoking takes five years off your lives well
00:07:34
the pandemic adds six years of not giving a shit yeah to your life so we've all fast forwarded it
00:07:42
to that feel that comfort of like the a reasonable shoe you know what i mean or it's just like will
00:07:48
anyone ever go back to heels only on stage that's like i have so many things that i'm not getting
00:07:54
rid of even though i'm like i'll never wear that again because of the idea that maybe we'll tour
00:07:58
again someday yeah and i'd be like well i'm gonna want that uh newsflash we're doing again
00:08:03
all right all right there's people who've been planning it but no i get it's like special
00:08:12
occasion where versus I just feel like young women put in such an effort these days from
00:08:18
from fucking the crown of their head to their perfectly pedicured toenails. And it's like, God bless.
00:08:26
I mean, do it. Yeah. What makes you feel good? Yes. But you also don't have to, which is an amazing option to realize.
00:08:32
That's right. And you're still a hot piece. You are. Just know that. You absolutely are.
00:08:39
It's also hot to put on like Budweiser pajama bottoms and a huge sweatshirt and pile your hair into a knot on the top of your head and go to the Redbox machine.
00:08:49
Amen. And ugly hats make your fucking shade your face. So who cares if they're ugly? You're taking care of your skin. I don't know.
00:08:58
It's interesting. It's interesting to take care of your skin and fight melanoma on a daily basis.
00:09:04
Right. It's interesting to do what Mark Zuckerberg did and put a full face of zinc oxide so that you truly look like a mime surfing.
00:09:13
That makes you go, hey, what's up with that person? What about that surfing mime?
00:09:17
Hey, there's an artist on Parade. He doesn't want to meet them. I bet he's evilly wealthy.
00:09:24
I think we're all going to be interested in much different things than we ever were before pre-pandem.
00:09:31
Hey, speaking of things we're interested in, right? What are you interested in? What are you interested in?
00:09:37
Oh, you mean these days? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some recs, some hot recs. Sure. Oh, I want to say one true crime update real quick.
00:09:44
Sorry, I just asked you a question and then cut you off completely. Don't worry about it.
00:09:48
That's how we do it. The case of Kristen Smart is heating up. Have you seen this?
00:09:53
It's like a 20 year old cold case. Everyone is kind of like, we fucking know who did this.
00:09:59
And maybe there's some there's some shoddy because she's the Cal Poly Technic in San Luis Obispo student who disappeared while she was being walked home by the prime suspect.
00:10:12
Yeah. And there was some shoddy work with the police, the campus security who just said she must have just taken off like that night and so didn't report it.
00:10:21
They changed the laws of report of campus reporting reporting to the authorities.
00:10:26
And so the prime suspects family's property is now being investigated and they're bringing cadaver dogs and ground penetrating radar.
00:10:37
So I really hope in the next few days we'll have some information about that. And there's also a podcast about the whole case that I really want to listen to that I guess has helped get some attention to this case and kind of in the same way I'll be gone in the dark, like revamped, you know, not taking away any of the investigators hard work, but revamped interest in the case.
00:10:58
And that's called Your Own Backyard. So I really want to check. That's great. Yeah.
00:11:03
Your Own Backyard, the podcast. So let's all listen. Yeah, for sure. That's very, yeah, lots and lots of people let me know that was happening on Twitter.
00:11:13
Thank you always for those updates. And yeah, it's very exciting. People in that area are, I think, really, really stoked.
00:11:20
And congratulations to a podcast for moving the wheels of just as long, hopefully, if that's if that is the case.
00:11:28
Sounds like it. But an actual podcast that I've been listening to and I was trying to find the host's name.
00:11:33
I went on like truly you were sitting there waiting as I went on four different pages and could not find it.
00:11:41
So I'll I'll I'll write it down when I listen to my next episode. But it's called The Opportunist.
00:11:48
And it is a podcast. It's so good. It a podcast series where they going to be highlighting normal people who basically stumble upon an opportunity to basically become evil and then choose to do it
00:12:06
Oh, that is a great idea. It's a great idea. And this first one is pretty mind blowing.
00:12:13
And it's essentially about an online cult. So it's pointing to this new habit that people have of kind of like, you know, it's the Facebook structure of living vicariously, living on the Internet and living vicariously through the people you meet and the things you read and what you choose to believe and what you're being fed.
00:12:36
That's on social media and the Internet. I think it's mostly Facebook and it is really mind blowing.
00:12:43
And anyway, so I highly recommend. Are these people accidentally stumbling into like scams or are they choosing to just completely exploit?
00:12:52
There is there's a woman you have to listen to it. But there's a woman who starts this website and she basically has a daily or a weekly Internet radio show where she just she is a Christian.
00:13:06
It starts out that she's Christian. Then she starts saying that she is the daughter of God and that she is getting messages from him.
00:13:13
And the messages have to do with chemtrails. They have to do with aliens. They have to do with the coming apocalypse. And it's pretty textbook cultish. But there are plenty of people that follow her that insist it's not. You just have to listen to it because it's that kind of thing where I think this is this age we're getting into where people are like, how is this happening?
00:13:41
How are people getting sucked into these entire belief systems with a person that they've never seen or met before?
00:13:48
People want answers. There's people out there who just like, for whatever reason, the day to day, you know, unanswered questions of life are too overwhelming and terrifying.
00:14:00
And so people are lonely and they work a ton. There's no meaning sometimes in people's lives, which I totally understand.
00:14:07
And when they find something that resonates, because oftentimes the people that start these things, oftentimes they start with the good intentions of if you are lonely, if you need, if you want to worship with other people, like this unifying thing of we're all the same religion or we have the same belief.
00:14:26
And then it kind of spins out from there. I'm like, well, how about this belief, too?
00:14:30
Why don't you take that on as well? I'm reading. So that's called the opportunist.
00:14:36
Just as a reminder. Awesome. It's great. I'm reading a true crime book called The Forest City Killer by Vanessa Brown about a serial killer from London, Ontario from 50 years ago.
00:14:50
So like I think it's like the 60s. And she's a really great. It has Michelle McNamara vibes.
00:14:57
She's a she owns a bookstore. Her and her husband own a bookstore. And she also is some I guess there's like people who are experts at rare writings.
00:15:09
So they're able to like they take old, weird like letters and stuff and are able to figure out their historical worth and their monetary worth just by understanding the vernacular and the language and stuff like that.
00:15:22
So she's totally like that alone is so fucking fascinating. But she's also obsessed with true crime.
00:15:27
and so and she gets a lot of characters coming in the bookstore and they all she suddenly finds the
00:15:32
serial killer that she'd never heard about before she's from london ontario she'd never heard about
00:15:36
it and suddenly everyone has a story about it from back then and so she just is like i gotta
00:15:42
write i gotta write the book i think i read this book too i think we got it in the mail
00:15:46
yes by it's great publishing company so it's called the forest city killer and i highly recommend it
00:15:52
Awesome. What about TV? Are you still in your Sopranos mode? Oh, yeah. An episode a night, probably two, because it's so good.
00:16:00
The mother in that should have won all the awards. Yeah. What's her name? Nancy. God damn it.
00:16:09
Now I can only think of Nancy Spungen. That actress's name, Stephen Nancy. Yeah. I just started looking at Google Stephen because you said the word Stephen.
00:16:20
Stephen Nancy? the sopranos wikipedia is so massive there's a separate page for casting i got it nancy lou
00:16:29
marchand marchand m-a-c-r-ch-a-n-d marchand marchand brilliant she she's the greatest
00:16:37
watch it for her alone she's just so good and she's been in tons of stuff she's in so many 80s
00:16:45
old school. She's been an actress since like the 50s, I think. Sure. I so I just finished a series
00:16:51
or four seasons. I think I started talking about this in the first season four years ago,
00:16:55
called casual on eight on Hulu. And yes, I love that show. So good. There were times where I was
00:17:03
like, I fucking hate these characters. They're all like kind of insufferable during certain seasons.
00:17:09
But then you realize that you're like, you care about them and their lives. And of course,
00:17:14
The actors are so great. Michaela Watkins. Michaela Watkins. Yeah. She's amazing.
00:17:20
Michaela Watkins. Michaela Watkins. She's just I love watching her act. And you end up caring about these people and they make so many mistakes and you still want them to win.
00:17:33
And so I watched it all through the season. What's it called? The end finale? Series finale.
00:17:42
Thank you. Sorry. so the series I just watched the series finale and like I almost cried
00:17:47
it was it was really good yeah that's a truly great show I I watched that a couple years ago
00:17:54
I feel like it was when I was first got Hulu and then I was like what this and at first I was like oh that guy cute And then I was like it Michaela Watkins You got to watch this because she is
00:18:05
I feel like she is one of those people who I watched her come up as like she is the hilarious sister-in-law and things.
00:18:13
Totally. She always gets this kind of like supporting role. And in this, she is she's so such a great actress and so hilarious and great to carry it.
00:18:25
It's like it's her and that her and the actor, the player brother, her brother. They're also a combination.
00:18:30
Laud, I guess. But they all still deserve these happy lives. And you're like rooting for them.
00:18:38
So we're all flawed. We're all flawed. We're all flawed. That's casual. One of us.
00:18:43
Casual on Hulu. Check it out. It's like one of those ones that like if I'd be eating lunch by myself, I would like just turn on an episode.
00:18:49
You know what I mean? But like I kept. Yes. Kept wanting to watch. It's real good, snappy, realistic dialogue.
00:18:55
Totally. Totally. Yeah. I like I like when stuff like that is it's funny in the realist way.
00:18:59
Yeah. I have just finished binging The Flight Attendant on HBO Max. How? I need to, right?
00:19:08
I loved it. Yes. There are people like I feel like people were recommending it in a hedgy way or like it's fun or it's kooky or whatever.
00:19:18
I was like, this is fucking great. Wow. It's directed beautifully. it's um kaylee cuoco is the lead and she's unbelievably great and compelling and a great
00:19:28
actress my good friend the great scottish actress michelle gomez plays the villain and she is the
00:19:36
greatest i love watching her act um yeah it's such a good show everyone in it the casting is like
00:19:43
perfection it's great um i i need it this is what i need also it's just like it's a bunch of stuff
00:19:49
happens. It's a really good pace. It's kind of crazy. And like, it's that kind of thing when you
00:19:55
lay there and it's just like, it entertains you in every way. Yeah, this will be my new lunchtime.
00:20:00
I need an episode show. Lunchtime. I don't know what it is about lunchtime where it's like,
00:20:05
I don't want to sit. I've been on my computer all fucking day. I want like a break. But yeah,
00:20:10
but I'm a I'm a latchkey kid. So I have to watch something on the TV while I eat from three to
00:20:15
eight. Yeah, that's right. So I'll sit and put something on and it's like a little break. You
00:20:21
know what I mean? Absolutely. I don't know. Yeah, I guess in my mind it was like everyone has a
00:20:26
lunchtime show, right? It's just me. My newer thing lately, in the beginning of pandemic,
00:20:33
it was like anything goes, do whatever you want all day long. Figure it like just slap whatever
00:20:38
together. Unfortunately, you have a lot of time to figure it out. Yes, you can you can test out
00:20:43
Any you can do any kind of pattern of a schedule. But since like the holidays, I've been trying to do get up early, drink the coffee, get the exercise out of the way, you know, answer emails like kind of have.
00:21:00
I actually realize I love structure. I always rebel against it because I no one can tell me what to do.
00:21:09
But then I sit there going, yeah, but I can like fucking relax. Relax and just do the things.
00:21:16
It's super easy. Stop making drama out of something that's just a just a email, like read the email and answer it at the end.
00:21:23
But I think that was. But you and I were overwhelmed in the beginning. We had so many emails and so many things we were supposed to be doing.
00:21:31
And we were all alone in trying to figure it out all the time. I felt like transferring to Zoom somehow made it that we had more meetings than before.
00:21:40
You know what I mean? like we have more meetings now than we ever did well you also have a way bigger staff
00:21:47
for exactly right and a lot more going on so that's why is this is this bragging corner this
00:21:53
is brag about how fucking hard running a network is corner i love it we love it we're the luckiest
00:22:02
what was i gonna say hold on what are you saying is it about emails emails and getting things done
00:22:07
structure. Oh, you're thank you. On this tip, and you and I both do this is I my therapist has been
00:22:15
telling us and I'll get this wrong, but I'll make it sound right. Is that procrastination is actually
00:22:20
it gives you a little bit of an adrenaline rush. Once you finally get the stuff done,
00:22:27
that you become addicted to it in a way where it's, it's like you get, you get a little high
00:22:35
off procrastination, which is why it's so hard to change that pattern of procrastination is
00:22:41
because you're actually getting something out of it. I think it's like, when you think of your brain
00:22:45
as like a reward system, it makes so much sense that you become this animal who, who, who, um,
00:22:55
who gets something out of putting, I don't know, get something out of putting things off.
00:22:58
and that's totally you and I thrive at last minute deadlines we're both really good at that
00:23:06
and I think like end up putting out some great content well also they're the thing that I've
00:23:11
always known and this this has to do with uh you know being a comic like the high that I would get
00:23:19
doing stand-up comedy it's so scary and it's so high pressure that then when I go into other things
00:23:26
I need I need that pressure still because I'm because I've already had kind of like this other kind of high.
00:23:33
And so, yeah, anytime I have a writing job, that's a pretty chill thing until you have a deadline.
00:23:39
And then it becomes this bizarre dance of like, how much are you going to push this deadline?
00:23:44
How the whole thing of it is it's a distraction kind of soap opera. Like you're creating the adrenaline that you that you thrive in just by putting it off.
00:23:55
Also creating a distraction from things that like, you know, for me, when I actually write, you're putting real things into what you write. And so sometimes
00:24:04
that's difficult and painful. So instead, you're just kind of like, oh, I can't do it right this
00:24:09
second. Right. When actually you're just like, just do it. Just barf it up. Who cares? Totally.
00:24:15
But totally. But I care, I guess. Do you want me to read you a quote? Please. A real good quote that
00:24:20
sometimes I leave this same notebook in front of me on this desk. So I'm here. It's the same
00:24:26
notebook for all the zoom calls for all my therapy appointments for random podcasts that I'm listening
00:24:32
to. And this is, uh, Oh, this was when I was listening to that, um, insecure in love book
00:24:38
that I've been listening to. Um, that's so good. And it's so more, it's so much more than just
00:24:45
attachment theory and all that kind of stuff. It's just kind of like how to, how to be better
00:24:51
at having relationships and be confident and self-compassionate. Yeah. Here's a quote from that that the author quoted.
00:24:59
And it's from August Wilson, the playwright. Confront the dark parts of yourself and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness.
00:25:08
Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel as a reminder of your strength.
00:25:18
Wow. Someone write that in fancy calligraphy and put it in a frame for me. I love it.
00:25:29
How about a cross stitch? How about a beautiful cross stitch of that? And that was actually about turning in an assignment that August Wilson had.
00:25:39
No, that's not true. Well, we just gave everyone an assignment, an art assignment.
00:25:44
So let's see who does it last. Whoever does it last understood the project. the skippers will do it last
00:25:52
should we talk about business? I haven't even looked at this piece of paper there's a merch explosion
00:25:59
taking place at the My Favorite Murder merch store if you're interested today Vince was like
00:26:04
hey I'm going to order some merch off your store do you want anything? I was like what?
00:26:11
he's getting there's a new Elvis design St. Elvis and so he's going to get a St. Elvis shirt
00:26:17
very sweet He likes you. I think that guy likes you. I think he likes me. I think that guy likes you.
00:26:24
You should text him right now. I think he's proud of us. Should I text him? Oh, my God.
00:26:28
Text him right now. Just see what he does. Okay. So we have a fucking spring 2021 merch explosion.
00:26:37
Do you see what that first thing said? Stay out of the woods. Jay. That can't be Jay.
00:26:44
Stay out of the woods. It's so funny. Sometimes everyone, like, they'll get one word wrong.
00:26:48
What was the other one? Oh, what was the fuck you one? Oh, here's the thing. Fuck you.
00:26:56
Fuck you. That I fuck everyone, which is so much more aggressive than here's the thing.
00:27:03
Fuck you. Here's the thing. Fuck you. That's not merch. That's just something you can yell hanging out your car window if you feel like it.
00:27:11
So we have a new stay out of the woods. Nope. We have a new stay out of the forest design that I love so much.
00:27:19
It's so like charming. It's very cottagecore, actually. It's so cottagecore. Bees.
00:27:25
Bees made it. Bees designed it. Bees made it. There's a new fuck politeness design that's so cool and like 70s looking.
00:27:34
And then we brought back the toxic masculinity design. So there's new shirts that you can get in like new colors and options.
00:27:42
And, you know, of course, there's koozies always. Always. Go over there if you feel like it, if you have any leftover money from your stimulus check.
00:27:52
That's my favorite murder dot com. And then just go to the store. You know how websites work.
00:27:56
You're not. You know how our website works. You're not talking about it for five years.
00:28:01
Five years. Oh, and speaking of us, while you're on the website, if you go to if you are in the fan
00:28:08
cult and join the fan cult, which you get you it's 40 bucks a year and you get merch that like
00:28:13
exclusive merch and exclusive offers on it. And you also get a lot of videos and stuff like that
00:28:18
and extras. And one of those are videos that we're doing now of low stakes advice that we get from
00:28:24
the fan cults we answer on video. And we have a lot of fun with them. So you can head over to the
00:28:31
forum, the fan cult forum, submit your low stakes advice questions, and answer other people's
00:28:36
questions if you want and then perhaps we'll answer your questions on a future fan cult exclusive
00:28:42
video do you have um just a problem not a huge problem you're not gonna do your taxes or anything
00:28:50
you do i mean there's we all have some big problems but just take those little little
00:28:55
things that are bugging you that's what we can help you with yeah um and not much else and please
00:29:00
no questions about fire safety we can't did you see the um the drawing someone sent us a picture
00:29:08
of the drawing and she basically was she did it the day that that uh that our mini-sode came out
00:29:14
we were talking there was even more stories about do not yes and but it says it says fire instead
00:29:20
of flower on the front of the bag posted it on our instagram so check it out it's so funny
00:29:25
It's hilarious and it's very true Now we have to Basically we have to continually
00:29:31
Reverse the information That we gave and tell people That flour It does not belong on a grease fire
00:29:39
Because it will catch on fire Because apparently that's what flour does People listen to us
00:29:44
I put it up on Instagram and I wrote This is going to stick with us isn't it Because it's going to
00:29:50
Well if we keep talking about it If we just tell everyone to shut up It won't but man that art was good I was really impressed that person just dropped everything she was doing and made some hilarious art for us proud of also someone did that um i wanted to tell you
00:30:06
and show you i don't know if you saw this it was when we were talking about um here it is
00:30:13
an artist named brainy um she did the art of uh the praying mantis and it says burbank anything
00:30:21
can happen. It's Burbank baby. And then it's like, did you see that? Yeah. Steven, will you have Jay post
00:30:29
that? Or who is it? Frank Mantis? So great. It's Burbank baby. Anything can happen. So good.
00:30:36
Should we do exactly right news corner? Sure. I think we got it. We found this out
00:30:41
in a meeting and freaked out that on That's Messed Up, the SVU podcast, the guest this week
00:30:47
is Wyclef Jean, the incredible musician I just think that's the coolest guest Isn't it?
00:30:57
Well it's right up there with I Said No Gifts Has Search Party's John Early That was the second one I was going to
00:31:04
Is America's Sweetheart So yeah I mean there's some great guests Happening This week
00:31:11
On the Exactly Right Podcast And it's Paul Holes' Paul Holes' birthday this week
00:31:18
Happy birthday Paul Holes Check out Murder Squad I want to tell you what Bridger did for his one, what was it?
00:31:26
One year, I Said No Gifts anniversary. So he has an I Said No Gifts account on Instagram that I highly recommend you follow.
00:31:35
It's just funny. It's because he's funny. But he always posts photos of what he got as a gift that week.
00:31:42
So he has this video that he posted of showing all the beautiful gifts. and he's placing them one by one into a big metal trash bin.
00:31:53
And then he sets everything on fire. Steven, can you see if we can... And that's for his birthday?
00:32:02
That's for his one year birthday. Look at him. He puts on gloves, throws a match.
00:32:08
I'm sure he filmed it so he did. And I was a little offended because I was like, what happened?
00:32:11
I got you some really nice shit. and there's just him laughing over a burning trash can in slow motion and I just it blew my
00:32:20
mind it was like oh you're a genius a comedy genius let's post it on we'll post it on the
00:32:28
episodes uh instagram right is that what I'm saying yes yeah how how funny it's like the most
00:32:34
thoughtful gifts everyone got him one by one he's lighting on fire yep that's because he cares to
00:32:40
show he cares. This is Ashley I from the Almost Famous Podcast. Can I be honest for a second?
00:32:46
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slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price void in Florida. All right. Should we get started? Should we tell each other some stories?
00:34:53
Okay. I think you're first, right? Okay. Okay. It's true. It's me. Okay. Steven, yeah?
00:34:58
Yep. I actually had Jay text you today because I became absolutely convinced that you were also doing the same story this week.
00:35:06
Because last week when we talked about Samantha and her hammer, the viral video where Samantha Hartso went through,
00:35:14
she found that she could take her medicine cabinet off of her apartment bathroom wall and go through it.
00:35:21
And she did it, which is horrifying. I feel like you're so disappointed in her for doing that.
00:35:26
It's just not smart. anyone could have fucking been in there in any corner. There was no lighting.
00:35:31
There was she was being cute. But imagine having to get back out. I just don't like it.
00:35:36
Squatter. Don't do it. Squatter rights are real. Stop doing things for the gram, everybody. So
00:35:41
so but underneath that thread, which I got sent, I would say 126 times on Twitter.
00:35:50
Thanks everybody for caring Underneath the thread of that which I always love to see I love people reactions I love to read people being hilarious And what just I knew there would be a varied group of reactions But then a very interesting thing happened which I really
00:36:09
liked. And also, I saw it in the thread there. But then also, listener named Melissa, her Twitter
00:36:17
handle is at C mouse run S E mouse run on Twitter. She sent this, this article as well. But under the
00:36:26
thread of that, an article was posted from 1997 from the Chicago reader called they came in through
00:36:33
the bathroom mirror, a murder in the project by reporter Steve. It's either Bogira or Bogira.
00:36:41
and everybody was saying this is like like everybody's freaking out about how creepy this
00:36:49
you know funny tiktok is it really it really happened it could be like so the alternative
00:36:55
of what you went through the option well this is it's basically the other direction and this is
00:37:01
like basically this is the thing you're fearing about what's happening to her has happened to
00:37:05
someone in real life already is what i'm telling you and so i'm now going to tell you about the
00:37:11
murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy. Almost all of this is based on this Steve Bojera's or Bojera's
00:37:19
Chicago Reader article from 1987. The majority of it, but there's also information that was from
00:37:26
a different article that the same reporter wrote that was kind of a follow up and also information
00:37:34
from a Reddit thread of Unsolved Mysteries and a Wikipedia page. So I'm going to read you.
00:37:42
We'll start with the second paragraph of the of this Chicago Reader article by Steve Bogera.
00:37:49
Ruthie Mae McCoy, 52, went through much of her life afraid. She was hounded by paranoia.
00:37:56
Her fears weren't soothed by her dwelling place the last four years. a high-rise building in the near Southside Chicago Housing Authority project known as ABLA,
00:38:06
where the van dropped her off this Wednesday afternoon, April 22nd. She lived in one of the
00:38:12
seven 15-story brown Y-shaped towers, hers named the Grace Abbott Homes, the most dangerous buildings
00:38:21
in ABLA. A claustrophobe in a closet might be more at ease than a paranoid like McCoy
00:38:27
in an Abbott high rise. The buildings feature dark malfunctioning elevators, pitch black stairwells, and cocaine and PCP attics on nearly every floor.
00:38:38
Fiends are really lurking in the shadows here. In these towers, you're crazy if you're not always
00:38:44
looking over your shoulder. McCoy lived at the end of a corridor on the 11th floor of the building
00:38:49
at 1440 West 13th Street. So that's how that article starts. And I will basically
00:38:56
try to sum the rest of it up for you because it is an unbelievable and very dense story.
00:39:04
But it's basically chilling. Just that first paragraph is chilling. So here's how it starts at 845 on the night of April 22nd, 1987.
00:39:15
Chicago's 911 dispatch gets a call from a 52 year old woman named Ruthie Mae McCoy.
00:39:20
She lives in the near west neighborhood of Chicago in a public housing complex called ABLA in the Grace Abbott Homes High Rise building in apartment 1109.
00:39:31
And she's calling to report something unbelievable that's happening in her bathroom.
00:39:35
In a panicked voice, she tells the dispatcher, quote, some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know, end quote.
00:39:42
Ruthie's disoriented sentences make it hard for the dispatcher to understand what's actually going on.
00:39:47
He asks her if people are trying to break in and she replies, yeah, they throwed the cabinet down.
00:39:54
I'm in the projects. I'm on the other side. You can reach can reach my bathroom.
00:39:58
They want to come through the bathroom. Unsure of how to categorize this report, the dispatcher sends police to respond to a, quote, disturbance with a neighbor.
00:40:08
The police are so slow in responding that 911 dispatch gets two more calls, one at 902 and another at 904, almost 20 minutes after the first 911 call, both from neighbors of Ruthie's reporting they've just heard gunshots in apartment 1109.
00:40:26
Oh, my God. So when the cops arrive at about 10 after 9, four police officers bang on Ruthie's door and announce themselves, but no one answers.
00:40:34
One of the officers tells dispatch, we think there may be someone in there holding somebody.
00:40:39
The officers have dispatch call back on the number Ruth called in from, and they listen from the hallway as her phone rings and rings.
00:40:48
But no one ever picks it up. One of the officers radios two others that are standing outside of the building and tells them to go down to the housing office that's a block away to get the spare key to Ruth's apartment.
00:40:59
When they come back with it, the key doesn't fit. So then they discuss breaking into Ruth's apartment, but instead they decide to knock on her neighbor's doors to try to gather more info about what's going on.
00:41:11
The apartment next door, 1108, is vacant. The neighbors across the hall don't answer, and the neighbors down the hall don't have much information to share, except for that Ruth, quote, always answers her door.
00:41:24
One officer reportedly tells dispatch, there's no answer. So I don't know if maybe she answered to the wrong person or what.
00:41:33
But even with that grave suspicion and two separate reports of gunshots being heard at 848, 38 minutes after trying to contact Ruth, the police give up and leave the scene.
00:41:44
She was calling in distress from her house and there were gunshots being reported.
00:41:50
Like, you just have to break the door down at that point. And you have no way to confirm with her that the emergency is over That doesn make any sense Yeah it does if you live in the projects Right
00:42:05
Essentially is what we're going to find out. A neighbor named Deborah Lasley, who lives down the hall, sees Ruth every morning when she drops by Deborah's apartment to say hi on her way out for the day.
00:42:15
And she also drops by when she comes back home on her way back to her apartment.
00:42:20
But on Wednesday, April 23rd, Deborah doesn't get any visits from Ruthie. So with the cops banging on the door the night before, Deborah is very worried.
00:42:30
So she calls the police for a wellness check. And six officers, along with a few Chicago Housing Authority security guards, show up to check on Ruthie again.
00:42:41
They knock and knock. But again, no one answers. And the police start talking about breaking down the door.
00:42:47
But Chicago Housing Authority security guards stopped them. They warned the police might face a lawsuit from the tenant for an unlawful break in.
00:42:56
And the police would not would be responsible for immediately replacing a broken down door.
00:43:01
Which can be what? Like, it's got to be 50 bucks, right? It's like deciding that's not worth the trouble.
00:43:07
The police leave Ruthie's apartment without any real investigation again. So now Deborah Lasley is sure something's terribly wrong.
00:43:15
She waits till the next day before she can get any help. She calls the project office and at one o'clock on Friday, April 24th, someone from the office arrives with a carpenter who drills through the lock in Ruthie's door.
00:43:30
And once the doors opened inside, they find Ruthie's body lying on her side on her bedroom, on the bedroom floor in a pool of blood.
00:43:39
There are papers and coins scattered around the room and four bullet holes are in her body.
00:43:43
There's one in her left shoulder, one in her left thigh, a third in her abdomen on the right side, and a fourth that's going through her upper right arm.
00:43:53
And that bullet cut through her chest and into her pulmonary vein. And at 4.35 p.m. on Friday, April 24th, she's pronounced dead from internal bleeding.
00:44:05
So I'll tell you a little bit about Ruthie Mae McCoy. She was born in Hughes, Arkansas in 1935, one of eight children.
00:44:13
hoping to find more job opportunities. The McCoy family moves to Chicago's South Side neighborhood.
00:44:21
But of course, it works hard to come by there, too. Ruthie's dad eventually finds work loading coal for distribution around the city,
00:44:29
but the pay isn't very good and the family struggles even harder in Chicago. Ruthie goes to Phillips High School for about a year before dropping out in 10th grade,
00:44:38
presumably to help with such a big family and by working and by taking care of her siblings.
00:44:45
But in her 20s, Ruthie's behavior starts to change. Relatives notice that she talks to herself
00:44:50
and experiences sudden fits of rage. And of course, this wasn't a time when mental illness
00:44:55
was talked about or widely known. So there's a chance her family did not know even what was
00:45:02
going on with her. And even if they did, they didn't have the resources to get her any proper
00:45:07
treatment. So Ruthie's mental illness goes undiagnosed and untreated. As she gets older,
00:45:14
she works as a laundromat attendant and a housekeeper, as well as holding down other odd
00:45:19
jobs. But her declining mental health makes it tough for her to keep any job for a sustained
00:45:25
period of time. And in between jobs, she relies on government assistance to get by.
00:45:32
Ruthie's mother is a devout Baptist. She raises her children in the church. And Ruthie's brother
00:45:37
Haywood grows up to become a preacher and he attributes all of Ruthie's problems to her
00:45:43
stepping, quote, out of God. He prays for Ruthie's health, but says that for God to intervene,
00:45:50
quote, people have got to want help. So when she's 27, Ruthie gets pregnant, although she never marries. In 1962, at age 27, she gives birth to her only child,
00:46:00
a daughter named Vanita. So Ruthie cares for Vanita as best she can, but her untreated mental
00:46:07
health issues make it the already difficult job of being a single mother even tougher.
00:46:12
Ruthie's hospitalized several times and Vernita is placed in rotating care, the rotating care of
00:46:19
relatives and friends. And although doctors will sometimes prescribe her medication,
00:46:25
Ruthie doesn't always take it. Or if she does, she gets taking it and then she runs out and she
00:46:31
can't afford to get any refills and her problems just start over again. As a child, Vernita
00:46:37
remembers seeing her mother talk to herself and curse at strangers, but she never understood why.
00:46:42
So Ruthie and Vernita spend the next 20 years living in a series of low-income apartments on
00:46:48
the south and west side of Chicago. When Vernita's in her early 20s, she becomes a mother herself.
00:46:54
But a year later, in 1983, she gets arrested on an aggravated battery charge and is sentenced
00:46:59
to a short stint in Cook County Jail. So while Vernita's in jail, Ruthie is left to take care of
00:47:06
her one-year-old grandchild in their Humboldt Park apartment, basement apartment, until the day that it floods and they're forced out.
00:47:17
Unable to afford another move, because you know how expensive it is when you're trying to get a new apartment, first, last, whatever else is involved.
00:47:24
You have to have a big chunk of cash usually. So Ruthie applies for emergency CHA housing, Chicago Housing Authority housing.
00:47:33
So we'll talk about the Chicago Housing Authority a little tiny bit The ABLA Homes is one of Chicago's public housing projects
00:47:43
That's located in the near Westside neighborhood These letters stand for each of the four developments of the complex
00:47:51
So they're the Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Quartz, and Grace Abbott Homes
00:47:56
The first of these four, the Jane Addams Homes is built in 1938 under Roosevelt's Public Works Administration program. And the last,
00:48:06
the Grace Abbott Homes, where Ruthie would eventually live, is built in 1955. Only the Brooks Homes remain standing today. They provide 330 low-income housing units,
00:48:18
but at its height, the AABLA had 3,596 units and housed as many as 17,000 residents.
00:48:30
During the 80s, Grace Abbott Homes, which was made up of two 33 two story row homes and then seven high rise buildings.
00:48:40
It's the home to roughly 3600 people, all of whom are black. Most of them are below the age of 18.
00:48:47
So it's tons of young people. According to a 1980 census, the average yearly income for families in Grace Abbott is forty five hundred dollars a year.
00:48:58
Oh, my God. The only moderately wealthy residents here are the drug dealers. So there's a drug dealing gang called the Paymasters that are a prominent force in Grace Abbott.
00:49:08
They take they often will take over empty units so they can operate anonymous anonymously.
00:49:15
And if anyone reports them to the police, they're known to respond by pouring gas on the snitch's front door and setting it on fire.
00:49:23
Wow. So violent crime is rampant in ABLA. And in 1986, the city of Chicago has a violent crime rate, the whole city, of about 22.9 crimes per 1,000 residents.
00:49:35
The ABLA's rate sits at 47.8 violent crimes per 1,000 residents. So the Grace Abbott high-rises have a reputation for being the most dangerous buildings in all of those projects.
00:49:51
So in his 1987 Chicago Reader article, reporter Steve Bojera cites a 1972 study of New York City high rises conducted by housing expert Oscar Newman.
00:50:05
And Newman's big takeaway is that high rises are the worst kind of buildings that you can use for public housing because they promote anonymity, which makes it easy, basically, for shady characters to hide.
00:50:18
And it's difficult to build a strong community in a setup like that. A Chicago historian and architecture expert named Devereaux Bowley Jr.
00:50:28
describes Grace Abbott Homes directly in his 1978 book on Chicago public housing, The Poor House, saying, quote,
00:50:36
more than any project built in Chicago to that date, which was 1955, the overall feeling of Abbott Homes is forbidding and the human scale completely lost.
00:50:47
Yeah. So, of course, Ruthie is well aware of the ABLA's reputation. So in May of 1983, in need of a new place to live within Chicago's public housing program, Ruthie tries her hardest to avoid winding up in one of those high rises.
00:51:04
She writes the CHA two letters, first asking to be placed near her family in the Southside's Wentworth Gardens, and the second letter just asking to be placed anywhere but in a high rise.
00:51:17
Despite her efforts, Ruthie is placed in apartment 1109 in Grace Abbott Homes' Y-shaped high rise building.
00:51:24
It also just feels like calling the police from there, even if they were on it, it's like a maze to even get to that front door, her front door, which seems like a maze.
00:51:37
not just a maze in the building itself but actually this this series of buildings and the
00:51:44
way things are set up originally it was designed they took out all the streets and it was designed
00:51:50
they they replaced it with these garden areas yeah thinking that that would encourage like
00:51:54
encourage the people that lived there to sit outside and socialize and like build a community
00:52:00
but of course instead would it made it incredibly difficult for like first responders to get inside
00:52:07
or people you had, you did have to know your way around it to get in. It made it even more isolated.
00:52:13
Wow. So from 1983 to 1985, which were their first two years at ABLA, Ruthie shared her
00:52:22
apartment with her daughter, Vernita, Vernita's two children and her boyfriend, Vernita's boyfriend,
00:52:27
Lewis Butler. They all got along great at first because Ruthie loves spending time with her
00:52:32
grandkids. But Ruthie and Louis start to butt heads because Louis reminds Ruthie of Vernita's
00:52:39
father and she accuses him of running around on her daughter. By 1985, Vernita, Louis and the kids
00:52:45
move out of the apartment. So now Ruthie's alone there. Yeah. And she she's alone with her mental
00:52:54
illness as well. So and now she's this, you know, she's upset. She misses her family. She misses
00:53:00
her grandkids. And this she starts it starts affecting the way she treats her neighbors
00:53:07
because there's kids everywhere. And she's always in arguments with kids. She thinks
00:53:12
their music's too loud. She thinks they're being a nuisance. It's always it's very upsetting
00:53:17
to her to basically have these kids around, but not her own grandkids. She starts carrying
00:53:22
a stick around that she threatens the kids with when things get out of hand. And of course,
00:53:28
they make fun of her. She has a reputation for being strange, of course, with the mental illness
00:53:33
issues. And police respond to these incidents on more than one occasion, but nothing serious ever
00:53:39
comes of it. They know her not as a violent person, but just someone who's argumentative.
00:53:44
On top of all that, as you know, the article, the chunk of the article that I read to you,
00:53:50
living alone in such a dangerous place is just ramping up Ruthie paranoia about being mugged or even worse She doesn paranoia it like likely she becomes obsessed with locks um she has her locks changed on her door twice she also develops
00:54:10
a habit of turning her neighbor's doorknobs and reprimanding anyone who leaves their door on wow
00:54:16
smart yeah she is the original lock your fucking door she does the same with cars in the neighborhood
00:54:22
setting off car alarms when she tests whether or not the car doors are locked. It sounds like my dad.
00:54:28
It is the thing of like you already have, like even if you just lived in anywhere,
00:54:34
you would already have this. If this was your mental illness, you already have this paranoia.
00:54:38
But then you have great reason to be paranoid. So her behavior grows stranger and stranger over time, of course.
00:54:47
Neighbors notice that she makes snow angels in the dead of winter. She also in the middle of the hottest summer, she'll be wearing thick layers.
00:54:56
Her weight fluctuates to extreme degrees. But the first truly serious situation arises on August 10th, 1986, when Ruthie brings Vernita's oldest child, Bobby, who was four years old at the time, to the ER at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center.
00:55:14
And Bobby has deep cuts on his face, his arms and his legs. she reports Bobby fell down the stairs while she was babysitting him.
00:55:22
But the health care workers there find Ruthie's behavior odd, of course. So they start to suspect that maybe she pushed Bobby down the stairs.
00:55:33
So they call the Department of Children and Family Services. Ruthie is outraged, of course.
00:55:41
The ER staff has to restrain her until Vernita arrives. or Vernita takes Bobby home and there is no they you know she basically explains what's going on
00:55:51
there's no interference with the DCFS but um she before she leaves she signs papers committing her
00:55:59
mother to the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute for evaluation and for treatment
00:56:04
um but it is and uh it's worth noting here that it's very common it's a very common thing that
00:56:12
we're all definitely hearing about more and more in these days in the white community of how racist
00:56:19
health care workers can be toward black people where the worst is assumed you come in with your
00:56:26
grandchild and you're so worried and you know whatever and suddenly it's you're the one that
00:56:31
did it and you can imagine how infuriating that would be to um to someone who's worried about the
00:56:38
grandchild. Yeah. So even though this seems like it's, it's, you know, like kind of like a bottom
00:56:46
for her at ISPI, Ruthie is diagnosed with residual type schizophrenia. And this variation is a bit
00:56:55
more subtle, but sees consistent behavioral problems like social isolation, talking to
00:57:00
yourself, acute superstitiousness and digressive speech patterns, and of course, paranoia. So
00:57:07
So Ruthie's discharged on September 19th, 1986, but she receives periodic treatment at Mount Sinai State Funded Psychiatric Center.
00:57:16
And this center serves a lot of other ABLA residents, some of whom have specific mental health issues and some who just seek refuge from the stress of life in the projects.
00:57:27
It provides community support services for Ruthie, such as group therapy, arts and crafts, community meals and GED classes.
00:57:35
Wow. Yeah. And so Ruthie's skeptical at first because she's consumed by years of feeling unable to trust her neighbors.
00:57:43
But she eventually warms up. And by early 1987, she finds real community at Mount Sinai.
00:57:50
She goes to the center three times a week. She participates in group therapy and arts and crafts sessions.
00:57:56
And soon she enrolls in the GED program on her first day. she tests um about at a seventh grade level but in a few short months she climbs up to a ninth
00:58:08
grade level wow and her ged teacher linda norman describes ruthie as an alert bright student um so
00:58:17
ruthie then becomes kind of a mother figure at mount sinai there's a lot of young women there
00:58:22
um in like in these group sessions who are talking about these boyfriends they live with them
00:58:28
they complain about you know wanting them to stay around so they give them money they you know they
00:58:33
want these relationships and ruthie tells all of them i know men like this stay away from them you
00:58:39
don't need them like she really enjoys that part of being able to you know in all her toughness
00:58:46
give the advice give kind of very loving motherly advice um according to a staffer named sandy
00:58:53
Siegel, Ruthie is warm and considerate and very well liked in this group. So for the first time
00:58:59
in her life, Ruth McCoy's mental illness is being treated and she's getting support services that she
00:59:06
badly has needed for years and years. And she's finding a place in her community and things are
00:59:12
starting to look up. And now we come to Wednesday, April 22nd, which starts out like a normal day for
00:59:18
Ruthie. She heads out to Mount Sinai in the morning, popping into her neighbor Deborah's
00:59:23
apartment on the way out to say hi. She gets on the van that takes her to the treatment center.
00:59:28
She spends the day involved in her regular slate of activities. And then toward the end of the day,
00:59:33
she discusses her housing situation with Sandy Siegel. And she tells her, I need help getting an
00:59:41
apartment somewhere else. I got to get out of there. And basically, she now can get out because
00:59:48
in September of 86, she applied for supplemental security income. And in February of 87, she found
00:59:54
out that she got it So her monthly income now doubles Instead of one hundred and fifty four dollars a month she now getting three hundred and forty dollars a month And she then also gets back pay
01:00:06
from when she applied in September. So she gets a check for almost two thousand dollars.
01:00:13
Holy shit. So she plans to use most of the check for the deposit for a new apartment.
01:00:19
But in the meantime, she uses it to buy a nice winter, like a good winter coat. And then, of course, some small household necessities that up until then she'd been forced to do without.
01:00:30
So it's all things are looking up for her. But her neighbors take notice of that.
01:00:37
On the van ride home that day, Ruthie tells the woman that was seated next to her, someone has threatened my life.
01:00:44
but they're not sure if it's a real if it's real if it's paranoia or what so the woman suggests that
01:00:51
Ruthie tell a Mount Sinai employee the next time that she's there but Ruthie shuts that down saying
01:00:57
that she doesn't want to get anyone else involved but around nine o'clock the same night Ruthie's
01:01:02
fears will prove to be very valid so after police discover Ruthie's body in apartment 1109 they
01:01:10
search the place for clues and aside from a small change scattered on the floor there's no money to
01:01:15
be found anywhere when vernita arrives to speak with police she tells them about the big check
01:01:21
that her mother just got had just gotten and cashed saying that she kept the cash in her apartment
01:01:27
and now that cash is gone along with ruthie's 19 inch tv and her cane-backed rocking chair
01:01:34
so renita looks around the apartment and notices ruthie's phone is missing also this is 87 so her
01:01:41
her landline is gone but when police got to the apartment the night of the attack you remember
01:01:47
oh yeah they could hear the phone ringing uh which means whoever broke in and murdered ruthie
01:01:53
was either still in the apartment when the police were standing outside or they came back after the
01:02:00
police oh my god i have fucking goosebumps so uh which is just yeah it's just insanely tragic and
01:02:11
frustrating that they were just right there and something really could have been done especially
01:02:16
if she died of internal bleeding which can be you know might have been able to be helped yeah
01:02:24
One of the officers, Detective Ray Loser, checks the bathroom and notices the medicine cabinet is missing, revealing a cavity in the wall with easy access to the pipes, which is an intentional design so that plumbers can easily service any issues that arise in the building.
01:02:45
And the other side, he can see the back of the medicine cabinet in apartment 1108.
01:02:51
what they don't find in Ruthie's apartment are fingerprints or any of the they find one bullet
01:02:58
casing they don't find three of the four so without much physical evidence police question
01:03:04
neighbors and they also discovered that apartment 1108's rent has been paid through May but the
01:03:11
people who stay there aren't on the lease and one of these people is a young man named Tim Brown and
01:03:20
he says that the woman leasing 1108 is an old friend who isn't staying there anymore,
01:03:25
so she gave him the keys. And Brown claims to have spent the day of April 22nd in apartment
01:03:30
1108 with this friend named Corey Flournoy. They spent that night partying on the far west side of
01:03:37
town. Police then question Flournoy, who gives the same story about partying on the far west side,
01:03:43
but the guys trip themselves up when they give different accounts of where they slept that night.
01:03:47
In a written statement, Tim Brown gives a new account of the events of April 22nd.
01:03:53
He explains that he and Corey were hanging out in 1108 when three more friends came over, Ronald Coleman, Edward Turner and John Hondras.
01:04:03
And Coleman heard of a new trick that some people in the building were using to rob adjacent apartments.
01:04:09
they found out that they could take off the medicine cabinets and get into what's called
01:04:15
the pipe chase which is the space between the walls and those passageways even though they're
01:04:21
only one and a half to two feet wide are big enough for someone to slip through either to
01:04:27
get into the next door apartment or to use an escape as an escape route if someone is coming
01:04:33
into the apartment to get away in the walls people in the wall i don't want that
01:04:38
it's horrifying and uh yeah it's it's horrifying it just makes all of it so much scarier totally
01:04:47
and so much crazier and that kind of thing where when she called 9-1-1 she couldn't explain it
01:04:54
yeah she couldn't she didn't get it she couldn't explain it and the people talking to her it
01:05:00
sounded like just crazy ranting totally and it was a complete reality in this building oh yeah yeah
01:05:06
Right. So so essentially, Brown, Coleman and Flora and I say they left the apartment and that's when Turner and Hondras decided to break into 1109.
01:05:17
So Brown, who claims he remained in 1108, he can hear a woman call out who's there.
01:05:24
Then he hears gunshots and sees Turner and Hondras leave 1109, Turner holding a TV and Hondras holding the rocking chair.
01:05:32
and he says they came back later to collect the shell casings so armed with all this information
01:05:38
the police search for edward turner and john hondrus they find turner first a day later in
01:05:44
his nearby row home apartment and a month and a half later they find hondrus in his ninth floor
01:05:50
grace abbott apartment both suspects suspects remain in custody until the trial so the trial begins in March 27th of 1990 So almost three years later What Yeah There no media coverage Yeah This murder is not does not make the Tribune It
01:06:11
doesn't make the Sun-Times. No one hears about it. So the only person in the courtroom who comes
01:06:16
in Ruthie's support is her brother, Willie, who testifies for the prosecution, talking about
01:06:22
Ruthie's life and her character. And because the crime scene had been tampered with in the days
01:06:27
between the murder and the discovery of her body, the prosecution has to rely on witness testimony
01:06:33
to prove the case. But there's so many different accounts of the events and all the different
01:06:38
people involved, and they're all conflicting and changing information. It's hard to tell what's
01:06:44
true and what's not. It takes three years from the date of Ruthie's murder for the trial to begin,
01:06:49
and then the trial itself lasts two years. But in the end, there isn't sufficient evidence to convict anybody of the crime,
01:06:58
and both Honduras and Turner are found not guilty. Oh, my God. In 1988, Vernita sues CHA for the wrongful death of her mother.
01:07:07
She argues that the design flaw of the building allowed for her mother's death. Yeah.
01:07:13
That it was extremely preventable had CHA made the medicine cabinets more permanent fixtures.
01:07:19
It's unclear if she ever won that case. So that information might be out there. It's just that couldn't find it.
01:07:28
But the the the problem is the Chicago Housing Authority, especially in the beginning, they they everything slowly became about saving money.
01:07:36
Right. So originally the plan was every building was supposed to have three janitors.
01:07:41
It all came down to one. There's they would they would skimp on every single thing.
01:07:46
They wouldn't fix anything. And, of course, lights would go out in hallways. They would, you know, they would never be replaced.
01:07:53
Or there was a janitor who went he wanted to remain anonymous. So his name wasn't in the article.
01:07:59
But he was talking about how you had to, like, go and get, you know, from the housing authority, you had to go get the light bulbs and then you'd put them in and people would take them.
01:08:08
Oh, of course. Because people needed things like light bulbs and that or people were smoking out of the light bulbs.
01:08:15
It's like, you know, so basically it was just easier. And like everyone just had to adapt to this thing of like, that's why all the hallways are dark.
01:08:24
Even though there's no exterior lighting, it's not like there's windows. So in these hallways, they even had like daylight.
01:08:31
It was just dark hallways. And just completely abandoned. Like the budgeting, everything is just, they ghettoized this as with that kind of neglect.
01:08:45
The level of neglect is unbelievable. OK, so but sorry, because I know this is so long, but it's just there's so much to the story.
01:08:52
So according to the autopsy report, it's unlikely that Ruthie would have survived the attack, even if she had been rushed to the hospital that night because one of the bullets hit her pulmonary vein.
01:09:03
But had the police but had the first police officers on the scene taken the initiative to enter her apartment or if the CHA had the proper spare key for the apartment, the culprits could have been caught at the time.
01:09:18
There would be no mystery surrounding the death and that it would have been a murder that was actually prosecuted.
01:09:24
Brought to justice. Fuck. Yeah. When reporter Steve Bajira questions the officer's decision to walk away from Ruthie's apartment the night of April 22nd, this is going to shock you.
01:09:35
They get defensive. Captain Raymond Risley tells Bajira he believes that most of the 911 calls that they get from the projects are hoaxes.
01:09:44
Dude, guess what? You still have to fucking look into them. Yeah. I mean, what else are you doing?
01:09:51
Yeah. Is it not why you get paid? Guess what? Some of them aren't, and you need to fucking handle those.
01:09:58
What about that? When asked if there are any statistics to support that claim that they're hoaxes,
01:10:03
Risley says that they don't need a formal study. They know they're hoaxes based on, quote,
01:10:08
the experience of the officers who regularly work those beats. We could drag this stuff out in a study, but it would be kind of expensive.
01:10:16
Oh, everything you just said was ugly. Ruthie's brother Willie McCoy does his best not to let his anger at the whole situation get to him
01:10:26
after Turner's and Honduras' acquittals Willie expresses his frustration freely quote justice does not proceed the way that it should if that had been a white woman had been
01:10:38
killed like that with two black guys charged they would have been convicted if that would
01:10:42
have been a white woman that called the police like my sister did you know they would have gone
01:10:46
into her apartment, you know it. The whole system we're living in is corrupt. Here's a quote from
01:10:54
that reader article. Quote, as for the police officer's failure to enter McCoy's apartment,
01:11:00
well, some 911 stories are just more significant than others. The death of Nancy Clay, a white
01:11:07
suburban white collar worker in a loop high rise blaze in May and indications that the 911 system
01:11:14
had failed her, prompted weeks of media coverage, a city council investigation, a council hearing
01:11:21
featuring testimony by the fire commissioner broadcast live on public radio and several
01:11:26
proposed ordinances. The performance of the police in the McCoy case didn't even merit a
01:11:32
departmental investigation. End quote. So this article was written in 1987 and the horror movie
01:11:39
Candyman was released in 1992 so that horror movie is based on a short story by Clive Barker
01:11:49
about a grad student researching urban legends including one about the Candyman who
01:11:55
if you say his name into the bathroom mirror five times he comes threw it and kills you. The grad student is white. The candy man is black. Right. And there's,
01:12:06
there's kind of proof that basically they got the idea from Steve Bougier's 1987 article that
01:12:14
basically went over like the details of living in these projects and how incredibly violent and
01:12:23
incredibly frightening. They were. And so here's one of the last quotes from Steve Ogier's article,
01:12:31
quote, Robert Ebert gave the movie. Oh, this is sorry. This is another article, actually,
01:12:36
that's about the connection of this movie to this story. Quote, Roger Ebert gave the movie three
01:12:42
stars. Urban legends tap our deepest fears, he observed. One of the most subterranean involves
01:12:48
the call for help that is laughed at or ignored. End quote for Roger Ebert. Ebert may not have
01:12:56
realized that in the projects, it was hardly a deep fear that calls for help would be neglected.
01:13:02
It was simply expected. If you want to know more about life in these projects, there are two books
01:13:14
that Steve Bougier recommends. One's called High Rise Stories, a collection of interviews
01:13:20
from former project residents. And another one by an author named Alex Kotlowitz.
01:13:27
That's from 1992. And it's called There Are No Children Here, an account of life in the Horner homes.
01:13:35
And that is the real life horror story of the murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy. Oh my, I feel like I got hit by a bus.
01:13:43
bus that's like heavy yeah it's just the detail the details of something like that where you think
01:13:51
oh it's like yeah from the outside it's like i remember seeing the picture underneath the thread
01:13:57
and the drawing from the reader article 1987 is like you know it's almost like skeleton hands
01:14:03
coming out of the of the mirror yeah which is of course horrifying and scary and and like a horror
01:14:10
movie. And then you read the article and you realize that the people in these places, a lot
01:14:16
of them were living in a horror movie. Right. And the fact that, I mean, just zero follow up
01:14:22
on the protocol of anyone, anyone of authority involved from the housing projects not having the
01:14:31
right key. And then the officers not following up that night to get their correct key, whether or
01:14:37
not they wanted to break the door down or not to the 911 operator. Yeah, it's just that there's no,
01:14:42
nobody cared. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. It really is like, you know, the big banner you put
01:14:50
on it, I think, in discussions with people who really know what they're talking about is like,
01:14:55
this is an example of systemic oppression, right? This is that example of if you have to live in
01:15:01
these buildings, and then this is what you have to live with. And then when you live in a place
01:15:06
like that, why wouldn't you want to get high? Why wouldn't you want to escape that? You know,
01:15:12
why like this, the idea that these things kind of feed into each other. And then from the outside,
01:15:17
there are people who feel justified in saying, oh, they're like that kind of they're doing it
01:15:22
to themselves. You don't matter as much because that's your that's your place in life. And you
01:15:28
need to stay as if it's your choice, right? As if it's your choice and and not that that's this
01:15:33
very rigged system. Totally. There's actually a documentary. It's a documentary called the Pruitt
01:15:40
Igoe, I-G-O-E, the Pruitt Igoe myth from 2011. That is so excellent. And it examines the
01:15:50
development and failure of a 1950s housing estate in St. Louis. So St. Louis, but it's so similar
01:15:58
in the reason they were built, the people they put into it and just threw them away.
01:16:05
And, you know, what happens when you house people in that situation and take away street
01:16:11
names and, you know, don't take care of the building. So it's called the Pruitt-Igoe myth.
01:16:19
And I highly recommend it. It's so incredible. It looks like it's on Pluto for free.
01:16:24
I feel like if you don't know what it's like, and there's like, you know, documentary footage
01:16:28
of that time, it's really excellent. Fucking great job. I'm so glad you covered that.
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Tax extra Alright, well I have a story for you Good It takes place in New Orleans in a similar time period.
01:18:56
This is the story. Someone suggested this for me on Twitter, and I had never heard of it.
01:19:04
It's the story of Jacqueline Davis, who was the first black woman to serve as a homicide detective in New Orleans.
01:19:12
Whoa. I know. Okay, awesome. That's nice. This will take a little swing upward, I think.
01:19:18
Well, okay. Some shit went down. really i can't imagine can't imagine there was corruption involved if you can believe it
01:19:26
but this is a strong female lead for women's history month and this woman is incredible so
01:19:35
i'm really excited to tell her story um i got information from the website called the appeal
01:19:40
an article by ethan brown which was really helpful um viona levy.org article by shana prince with a
01:19:49
an article by Michael Perelstein, the ClarionHerald.org article, an Ebony article about her from 1991.
01:20:01
That was done by Roxanne Brown and some other places on the Internet. There's not a ton of information or there's like repeating stories, but I feel like this woman's story is incredible.
01:20:12
So Jacqueline Davis was born on February 6, 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. When she was just three years old, her father, who was a delivery driver, died in a car accident while on his runs.
01:20:26
And her mother was also injured. So unfortunately, her mom kind of had a nervous breakdown after this.
01:20:34
And so she ended up mismanaging the lawsuit against her father's employer, as well as the inheritance he left behind.
01:20:41
Because of this, Jacqueline and her younger brother were sent to New Orleans so they could move in with their great aunt, Mabel Walker, and her husband, Willie, who was a merchant marine.
01:20:54
So they lived in a shotgun home in the historically black Central City neighborhood.
01:21:01
So here's a little fun fact. Mabel Walker, the great aunt, was known as Medea. And across the street, their neighbor.
01:21:10
No. I swear to God was Tyler Perry. No. And like, that's all I know. And I never saw any article that said that like that was the connection.
01:21:19
I didn't really look up if that's what he he's ever said that. But her fucking nickname was Medea.
01:21:25
And it sounds like she was this like big character. Wow. That's that's I didn't realize we were going to kick this story off with some Medea origin story.
01:21:37
Right. Like it has to be good. Yeah. Um, so fucking amazing. And it takes place in New Orleans, too, right?
01:21:47
Yeah, because Tyler Perry's from there. In this home, Medea tried to provide the children with a normal, loving household.
01:21:54
Sounds like she was a very caring caregiver. But here's the thing. On the side, she was kind of a madam of sorts for the merchant marines that came through town with her husband when he was in and out of port.
01:22:07
And they would board at his house, at their house. So Medea also worked in a nearby bar called Shadowland.
01:22:13
And this bar kind of had a violent reputation, as did the neighborhood. And it was during one of those violent altercations that Jacqueline witnessed that kind of made up her mind of the fact that she wanted to be a cop when she grew up.
01:22:28
What happened was she witnessed a man brutally assaulting a woman near the bar. and she says she remembers watching as the man punched and bit the woman.
01:22:39
But then to her surprise, the woman starts fighting back and ended up beating the crap out of her attacker.
01:22:47
And then the cops showed up and she was like, oh, this is trouble. And it turned out that the woman in question was a detective.
01:22:56
Oh, shit. Not just a detective, but a black detective. So her mind was blown. It was in the 70s, you know, and women accounted for roughly 2% of the police officers and people of color made up around 6% of police officers.
01:23:12
So this was like an anomaly. And from that moment on, Jackie vowed to work in the police force.
01:23:19
She said, quote, I just became not obsessed that every time I saw this woman, her name was Gail Miller, a.k.a. Christy Love.
01:23:26
I was just in awe. She says this policewoman inspired me because I wasn't a weakling.
01:23:32
I was a loner and I was a loner because I stuttered and people used to make fun of me.
01:23:37
So I would never talk. And this woman, I mean, she just did something to me. I just had never had a black woman to look up to.
01:23:43
I had always, unfortunately, been told I wasn't going to be nothing. I love that.
01:23:48
This becomes her like inspiration. So despite Medea trying to create a happy, supportive home,
01:23:54
It sounds like Jacqueline life was pretty chaotic One time a man who was staying over in their front room raped her when she was very young
01:24:06
And when she told her Aunt Medea about it, she says her Aunt Medea grabbed her shotgun and fucking took off looking for the guy.
01:24:14
And Jacqueline says she never found out what happened to him, but said, quote, if you knew Mabel Walker.
01:24:20
Davis says she was also unfortunately sexually abused by her great uncle. who began molesting her at age nine. And it went on for five years until he became sick and died
01:24:31
when she was 14 years old. I know. So she definitely went through a lot as a child.
01:24:37
But meanwhile, she excelled in school. And then she got pregnant when she was just 15.
01:24:42
She gave birth in 1974 and named her daughter Christina. And then when she was 17,
01:24:48
Medea passed away and Jackie was still able to finish high school. And she headed to college at
01:24:54
the University of New Orleans, where she studied chemistry. But being unable to afford child care,
01:25:00
she was forced to drop out. So she then worked menial jobs for a while to make ends meet. But
01:25:05
by the time she was 20, she was homeless and had to live in her car with her daughter.
01:25:10
They used a Burger King bathroom to freshen up. And she said, quote, that's when I decided to turn things around. I couldn't put my daughter through that.
01:25:18
So she was finally ready to pursue her childhood dream of joining the police force.
01:25:23
It took her five attempts to pass the test to become an officer, but she finally did in 1979, and she chose the New Orleans Police Department's urban squad as her first assignment.
01:25:35
So this meant she had to patrol the major housing projects in both the city and the West Bank, the area across the Mississippi River on its western banks.
01:25:45
She says she was assigned to public housing since the drug dealers, they had this scheme going where they use women as like their middleman because they were less suspicious for drugs and weapons because they were stealthier.
01:26:01
But it made it so that having a female officer on patrol there, it was easy and more comfortable to search those women.
01:26:09
And they kind of cooperated a little more with a woman detective. So she went on to be assigned to different districts around the vice squad, including the French Quarter in the early 80s, which was just a treacherous, dangerous time in New Orleans.
01:26:23
The street level sex work was rampant and Jacqueline's soft spokenness and small demeanor.
01:26:30
She was just five foot three. It made it so she didn't have this intimidating, you know, typical cop presence.
01:26:36
she was more affable and having grown up in a home where sex work was the norm she wasn't
01:26:43
judgmental and she had this special ability to deal with the issues that arise in that profession
01:26:50
she said quote i knew about prostitutes and pimps having lived with them most of my life
01:26:54
and that ability to get people to open up and talk especially in these grittier neighborhoods
01:26:59
got her attention from her superiors. She moved over to narcotics and was eventually assigned to the rape investigation unit,
01:27:09
where she solved 100% of her cases and was able to provide treatment to each and every victim.
01:27:18
Whoa. I know. She says that working on rape cases felt like therapy to her after having been a victim herself.
01:27:26
in the Ebony article I spoke about. She said, quote, it made me stronger and able to deal with what happened to me.
01:27:34
She said she was instrumental in arresting serial rapist David Flurry, who terrorized New Orleans in the mid-1980s
01:27:43
and was eventually given a mandatory life sentence on each of two counts of aggravated rape.
01:27:49
So she just has these cases that she's clearing where other officers can't. she's finally transferred to what is known as the most elite of all the units, homicide,
01:28:01
where there was just one other woman on the team at the time who was white. And there was only at the time four.
01:28:11
And there was only at the time out of 24 officers, only four were black. And so she was the first black woman to serve as a homicide detective in New Orleans, which is extraordinary.
01:28:22
Davis says about the other female officer, quote, they accepted her, but they didn't accept me because for one thing, I was black.
01:28:30
I'm a dark skinned black woman. And then I was arrogant. I knew I was good at what I did.
01:28:36
She was. Yeah. She should have known that. And this gets so fuck. I mean, this gets dark.
01:28:43
Her colleagues tormented her. You know, they would smash family photos on her desk.
01:28:49
They'd post photos of Aunt Jemima in her work area. They even placed dog shit in her desk drawer.
01:28:58
They would fuck with her ability to perform her job by telling. So tipsters would call in and there were much needed tipsters on her big cases.
01:29:06
And they'd say to them, she doesn't work here anymore. And like hang up on them.
01:29:11
And then they would rip her case files to shreds. Jesus Christ. I know. So like if you ever.
01:29:18
Yeah. I mean, it's the thing of like, yes, you've gotten here, but you've had to work 10 times harder than anyone else at it, which means you're 10 times better at your job.
01:29:29
Yes. And she already had like a perfect record. It's I bet you that made the dumb racist ones really pissed off.
01:29:37
Absolutely. And it's already such a nasty environment. And then it's like, how, you know, how dare you?
01:29:45
How dare you excel? These fragile male egos that are so easy to smash. Horrifying.
01:29:52
Let's do it. It got so bad that her supervisor and mentor from the time David Morales started having to keep her files in the trunk of his car for her It nonsensical It is It like get rid of that
01:30:07
Yeah. And it's like you have this hope that you join the police force because you want to do good.
01:30:12
And so it boggles the mind. He said, quote, as bad as it got, she never complained.
01:30:19
She just wanted to be accepted and she would take whatever they did to her. She persevered.
01:30:26
And despite the aggression she endured, her track record was stellar. She solved 88 out of 90 murder cases assigned to her in the 1990s.
01:30:36
Jesus. And she's in her mid-30s at this point. David Morales said she, quote, was the best I ever saw at solving a murder case and that her instincts were spot on and she had a knack to get normally reluctant witnesses to talk.
01:30:50
and therefore she was able to regularly crack cases other detectives had given up on.
01:30:56
Wow. On one murder case where the perpetrator found out that she was the detective assigned to the case,
01:31:02
turned himself in saying, quote, I figured you'd catch up to me anyway. Whoa. I know.
01:31:08
It's just like they're running, running and they turn and look around behind them like, oh,
01:31:11
forget it. Forget it. New Orleans was a notoriously dangerous place at the time, as I'm sure you can imagine.
01:31:17
In fact, between August 1986 and December 1986, there was a gunman on a killing spree.
01:31:25
He committed eight murders. And oftentimes the assailants he targeted were couples, which is just, you know, you think you're safe when you're in a couple walking down the street and you're not.
01:31:35
And he also committed several rapes and armed robberies. So Jacqueline pursued leads that other officers had blown off and ignored, including looking into a witness who always happened to be on the scene of these crimes and had a habit of approaching the homicide detective to give his statement.
01:31:56
And she notices that? Uh-huh. She said, quote, this guy would commit the murders and stay on the scene and go up to the homicide officer and pretend to be a witness of the murder he committed.
01:32:06
She says, quote, and the detectives took him to the homicide office and took a statement from him.
01:32:11
First of all, they were all saying, well, serial killers aren't black, so it's not him.
01:32:17
Totally blowing him off. They had him in their sights and they just blew him off.
01:32:21
When she, you know, she pointed him out, she said the detectives took him up to the homicide office and took a statement from him as a witness.
01:32:31
well I wind up getting the case wind up clearing the case and making a name for myself that a lot
01:32:36
of the detectives started getting pretty much upset about so yeah she's clearing these cases
01:32:41
and they're bad because they didn't yeah but and but also doing it in that smart way where
01:32:49
clearly it's like it's that thing where it's all of her her past becomes this huge advantage right
01:32:55
because she's seen a bunch of shit yeah she's lived through a bunch of shit and she's been there
01:33:00
So it's that that kind of thing of like it. She's she has a sense about things because she's she's like of the of the world of that and can see through that kind of stuff.
01:33:13
Yeah. Love it so much. And it is like, yeah, you're right. It's like these other people are seeing the world through their shades and, you know, through what their experiences instead of what life is really like and like not judging people because they've been in those situations before.
01:33:30
So it's just it's called empathy and you should everyone should try it. But it's also called just fucking paying attention, which a lot of people say they do and pretend to do, but actually don't do.
01:33:42
But when you have, you know, like are in situations where you kind of like are on your own, like a kid that essentially was orphaned.
01:33:51
You have to you have to pay very close attention and like you have to anticipate things.
01:33:58
She just was so wise, it sounds like. Yeah, totally. You know, she loved that. Yeah.
01:34:04
She was getting a ton of attention for how good she was at her job. She won awards.
01:34:09
She was invited to speak across the country. She was featured in a ton of articles like in Parade, Ebony, Essence, Reader's Digest and Jet in the early 90s, just to name a few.
01:34:21
And at one point, it was seemed inevitable that her life would be turned into a movie.
01:34:26
And in fact, Quincy Jones and Whoopi Goldberg at one time were competing to make a movie of her life.
01:34:32
So cool. Yeah. So again, dangerous, violent time in New Orleans. During the year, during 1994 alone, there were 424 recorded homicides.
01:34:45
Mayor Mark Morial said, quote, the city's soul is in jeopardy. One murder victim was nine year old James Darby, who had just written then President Bill Clinton a letter begging him to help stop the violence in his city.
01:35:03
He wrote he's nine years old. He wrote, quote, people is dead and I think that somebody might kill me.
01:35:08
So would you please stop the people from deading? I ask you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it.
01:35:14
But 10 days later on Mother's Day, he was in a park in New Orleans when he was shot and killed by a stray bullet that had been fired by a 15 year old who was trying to settle a score with a rival.
01:35:29
And I think that got headlines. Jacqueline was promoted from homicide detective to a position in internal affairs, which was a very sensitive position because it put her in charge of investigating complaints against fellow officers.
01:35:44
So they already have a grudge against her. I mean, this is like doubling down on that.
01:35:49
Yep. She slipped up on one case when she gave conflicting contradictory accounts at a civil service hearing against an officer regarding...
01:36:00
Her surveillance of that officer, basically, when she was asked if she saw her colleague who was accused of protecting and using cocaine with a known drug dealer at a residence, she said she didn't.
01:36:12
But later she contradicted herself and said that she had seen him. It seems like it was just a slip up.
01:36:18
And in fact, she had immediately corrected herself and her boss insisted, quote, this is not perjury.
01:36:25
It's just a discrepancy in a statement. but she was still suspended from the New Orleans Police Department for perjury for 30 days. So it
01:36:34
definitely seems like they tried, you know, if it had been someone else, someone that hadn't been so,
01:36:40
you know, hadn't had so many enemies, she would have been fine. But because it was her,
01:36:46
they wanted retaliation. Yes, of course. So over the next eight years, Jacqueline was shuffled
01:36:52
around in different districts, worked a lot of night shifts. And though she continued to earn
01:36:57
departmental commendations because of her excellent work, this like hype around her started to die
01:37:03
down. And I'm sure the hype rubbed a lot of people the wrong way too, because they thought they
01:37:08
deserved it somehow, or they had these big egos. Or they're just jealous. Yeah, exactly. The hype
01:37:14
around surrounding her started to die down, which she says she was a little relieved about. It seems
01:37:18
like she was kind of an introvert, although she had this big, bright smile and seemed so
01:37:24
welcoming. So Christina, her daughter, her only child, she had grown up and become a successful
01:37:31
woman. She was a high school teacher with a master's degree in physics, and she now had a
01:37:38
child of her own. It was Jacqueline's beloved grandson, Colin. So this was normal for officers.
01:37:44
I don't know if it now happens as well, but in their time off in July of 2001, Jacqueline was hired to work as an off-duty security guard for a private party at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans on Canal Street downtown.
01:38:00
So it was like a high-end affair. It was held in connection with the Essence Festival.
01:38:05
And after working the four day event, so it's it's blurry. But Jackie got into a verbal altercation with the promoters because they refused to pay for the security detail, the agreed amount.
01:38:19
And that included her and her other officers payment, including her partner, Lieutenant Sam Lee.
01:38:26
So the promoters wouldn't pay. Finally, finally, they reached an agreement about the payment.
01:38:32
And Jackie was like, OK, but I'm getting a signed receipt just to make sure that everyone knows there was no funny business.
01:38:38
There was nothing weird going on. She gets a signed receipt before leaving the hotel with their payment.
01:38:46
And, you know, it's signed by one of the promoters, this dude named Tim Crockett.
01:38:52
So despite it being settled, the promoters took the issue to the New Orleans PD and filed a complaint against Jackie and her partner.
01:39:02
They said that Jackie and Samuel demanded double the agreement price and intimidated them with their guns.
01:39:09
And despite Jackie not being named in the original complaint, both Jackie and Samuel went to trial in August 2002.
01:39:18
Oh, whoa. Yeah. So they took the word of the promoters over their own police, which, of course, everyone should be looked into.
01:39:28
It's not like, you know. Right. But this is a person who has like a stellar record and has busted her ass and done it all and still is like the second anyone comes in and goes, she may have fucked up.
01:39:41
It's like, well, then get like that is that thing where it's like, how how much more can you give?
01:39:48
Yeah. What would this be like if it were a white man? You know? Yeah. And she had a receipt, which they lost.
01:39:55
Her fucking attorneys lost that receipt that she gave them. And they were prosecuted by U attorney Sal Perricone Jurors were never able to hear her side of the events including of course her unwavering argument that she was innocent because her attorney didn want her to testify since it would give prosecutors the opportunity to question her about that way back perjury charge
01:40:21
So it's almost like, yeah, you got a slap on the wrist way back then, but it's going to haunt you forever and it's going to come back and bite you in the ass, you know, so like it just sucks.
01:40:33
That was from 1994, and it's 2002 at this point, you know, and they would still be able to question her integrity.
01:40:42
So and they lost the fucking signed receipt. So the acting U.S. attorney, Jim Letton, admitted that Davis's role in the case was not equal to her partner, Lee's,
01:40:53
a fact which then led them to offer her a generous plea bargain for her testimony against Lee, who was, of course, her friend,
01:41:00
which she refused despite the fact that she said they threatened to add a tax evasion charge if she didn't cooperate.
01:41:07
Wow. Yeah, which sounds completely illegal. Ultimately, Jacqueline Davis was indicted in federal court on extortion and conspiracy
01:41:18
and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison.
01:41:25
No way. Yeah. Yep. So one of the most celebrated cops in the history of the New Orleans PD who broke down barriers as the first black woman to become a New Orleans homicide detective had a near perfect record of solving cases after 21 years of experience.
01:41:42
Davis, now 45 years old, was sent to federal prison and suspended from the police force.
01:41:49
Her daughter broke down in sobs at hearing her mother's verdict. She left behind her daughter and seven-year-old grandson, Colin, who told her that he wanted to grow up to be a police officer just like her.
01:42:01
After she was locked up, it emerged that Tim Crockett, the promoter who had filed charges against them, had a history of extorting money,
01:42:10
having given a bad check to a nightclub in New Orleans just a month before the incident with Jackie.
01:42:16
And that charge was dropped when Crockett made those payments a couple of weeks after Jackie's trial.
01:42:22
So the prosecuting attorney must have known during the trial about those bad checks and never.
01:42:29
It's called the Brady violation, essentially. He had a bunch of other lawsuits against him going due to financial disputes,
01:42:37
some of which resulted in judgments against him and his company. And none of that was disclosed at the trial, even though it sounds like it's inevitable that they knew about it.
01:42:45
Yeah. Both Lee and Davis filed for acquittals. They were unsuccessful. Jackie served her 30 month sentence.
01:42:52
And it sounds like she was put in general lockup. And so she was like, I'm a police officer.
01:42:57
That's really dangerous for me. But a lot of the women in prison with her had heard about her and read about her and were like, we got your back the whole time.
01:43:06
Really? Yeah. I genuinely was so fucking worried. I know. Yeah. This is bad. They're like, they got you.
01:43:13
You're a legend. Yay. I love that. It says so much if you're a police officer in prison and they're like, you're cool.
01:43:21
Yes. Yeah. She was a legend. So she served her 30 month sentence. It drained her bank account, all the legal fees.
01:43:28
Her telephone and electricity were turned off. Her car was repossessed and she was forced to move into a halfway house in New Orleans.
01:43:34
So she's the celebrated figure. And this fall from grace is so dramatic and awful.
01:43:41
Push from grace. That's right. Her 20 year career as a police officer was over. She said, quote, it was like all the pain I had endured in my life finally caught up to me.
01:43:54
I realized that I had been using my job as an officer as therapy. And suddenly that was all
01:43:59
taken away from me. She took a job at the law office of her post-conviction attorney, Lori White.
01:44:06
So meanwhile Sal Perricone the man that Jackie says fucking destroyed her life the prosecuting attorney would remain a successful prosecutor for many years Jackie would maintain that her guilty verdict was due to his misconduct due to the fact that he knew
01:44:22
of Crockett's history of extortion and didn't disclose it at the trial. And in fact, in 2011,
01:44:27
she was fucking right and proved to be right. There were multiple claims and lawsuits, it turned
01:44:32
out, filed against him regarding his misconduct, including racist comments he made about people of
01:44:38
color using multiple pseudonyms online. Investigations of Perricone's gross misconduct
01:44:45
led to him being disbarred. And his commentary led to a defamation suit. He had posted more than
01:44:53
2,600 comments on NOLA.com, the website of the New Orleans Times Picayune, between November 2007
01:45:03
and March 2012, 2,600 comments using five different fake user accounts between 100 and 200 comments
01:45:12
related to matters being prosecuted by his office at the time that he posted. So you fucking
01:45:20
piece of shit. Corruption. Not good. No. He even allegedly admitted to intentionally not disclosing
01:45:28
Tim Crockett's previous offenses to win the case. Holy shit. I saw that in one article
01:45:32
I don't know. I said allegedly because I'm not totally sure on that. I just like the idea that some hacker or whoever they hired got in there and was just like, it's like, it's this guy.
01:45:44
In addition to being disbarred, his online comments forced a federal judge to overturn the conviction of the cops who shot unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge in the aftermath of Katrina.
01:45:58
And they later received much reduced sentences and it derailed an investigation.
01:46:04
And then it also derailed an investigation into crooked landfill businesses in the Jefferson Parish.
01:46:10
So he he just caused a lot of harm to the criminal justice to the criminal justice system.
01:46:18
Completely corrupted. His office and the people of his city. That's right. so in the end he argued that the court should consider mitigation considering mitigation
01:46:31
this is his excuse it's almost like the ambient excuse that he suffered from post-traumatic stress
01:46:37
disorder as the result of his experiences during his former careers as a police officer and fbi
01:46:43
agent so he was like give me leniency i have post-traumatic stress i was racist online because
01:46:50
I have PTSD. Yeah, I was racist and did so many, obviously, you know, legally wrong activities for 10 years because I had PTSD.
01:47:06
And sandbagged, very highly decorated cops. Totally. To jail. Totally. So that's his story.
01:47:15
And I think it's ongoing right now. But to end on a more positive note, in 2013, Jacqueline's grandson, Colin, graduated from the prestigious high school St. Augustine, where he was a drum major and participated in the Future Business Leaders of America.
01:47:33
And out of 108 students in his class, he graduated 25th. Whoa. Yeah. He was selected as a 2013 Louisiana scholar of the Horatio Alger Association, which helped him go on to study psychology at Xavier University of Louisiana.
01:47:51
His grandmother, Jacqueline Davis, paid for his high school tuition and provided a loving home for him while his mother lived in Texas after Hurricane Katrina.
01:48:01
about his mother and grandmother. He said, quote, I was raised by them. Everything I've learned,
01:48:06
I've gotten mostly from them. I cherish the women in my life and I plan on repaying them
01:48:10
for all the hard work they've done for me. So fucking sweet boy. Jacqueline later seemed relieved
01:48:18
when she said in an interview that her grandson of course who was a child wanted to someday join the New Orleans Police Department And later the feds said that he instead went into education
01:48:32
Oh, wow. That's really giving back. And I couldn't find any more information about him, but I thought that was really sweet.
01:48:42
When she was interviewed last summer by Ethan Brown for the appeal, she was speaking about the coronavirus
01:48:47
but I think it's apropos of this story in her life she said quote everyone that I loved and continue
01:48:54
to love I say this I will meet you in the afterlife I have no regrets God could take me tomorrow I have lived my
01:49:02
life and that's the story the heroic story of Jacqueline Davis the first black woman to serve as a
01:49:08
homicide detective in New Orleans whoa how badass is she like miraculously badass yeah that's such a good story i love that yeah me too she really
01:49:22
she went up against all of it and took those hits like she just she that's an unbelievable story
01:49:32
yeah i feel like i feel like she needs more recognition and more articles written about her
01:49:39
and more people to sing her praises because what an incredible story. Great job.
01:49:48
Thank you. All right. Well, you know. Thank you for listening. We appreciate you guys so much.
01:49:55
This is the fucking coolest thing we get to do in our lives. Thank you. Thank you.
01:50:01
Your constant support, your constant interaction, and always letting us know every cool news story.
01:50:12
Good. I mean, like these suggestions are from the listeners. And that's the that's the coolest thing is is finding out a story that when somebody
01:50:20
posted to you and goes, you have to read this, you won't believe it. And then you actually that's the experience you have.
01:50:26
And you're just like, yes, thank you. So thank you to both of the listeners who suggested both of the stories.
01:50:32
That's right. And thanks, everyone, for listening. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered.
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