A new search for Madeleine McCann stirs global attention, Baudi breaks down her investigation on Netflix’s Don’t F with Cats, and the disturbing manhunt continues for a father accused of killing his three daughters. Doron Ofir — the casting mind behind Jersey Shore and RuPaul’s Drag Race, and co-creator of LA Comic Con — discusses Ed Gein, 'The First Monster.' Reality TV icon, pop culture junkie, and true crime addict. Tune in for all the details.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This program features the individual opinions of the hosts, guests,
and callers, and not necessarily those of the producer, the station,
it's affiliates, or sponsors. This is True Crime Tonight.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to True Crime Tonight on iHeartRadio, where we talk
true crime all the time. It's Wednesday, June fourth, and
we have a stacked night of headlines. I'm so happy
you're here. Listen the search for the Madeline McCain. It's
been reopened and it's possible that her family may find
some justice. Luigi Mangioni, we haven't talked much about him.
(00:40):
He has some major requests from behind bars and Gabby
Patito's mom. She recently gave a shocking interview, and we're
going to cover why this is getting so much attention.
I'm Stephanie Leidecker and I head U KAT Studios, where
we make true crime podcasts and documentaries, and I get
to do that with producer and host Courtney Armstrong and crime.
I'm analyst Body Move in the best company imaginable.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So, ladies, where where should we begin with this?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Well?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
I can talk about Madeline McCann because I literally leapt
out of my chair when this news broke and I
had the phone in my hands and I jumped up. Yeah,
you know, you see her name in the headlines and
it's you know, shocking. So for those that don't know
anything about the Madeleine McCann story, let me just kind
of start there. So Madeline was a little girl. She
(01:31):
and her family, her Lovely Flame family, were vacationing in Portugal.
In Portugal, the Algarve is a really like common, really
common destination for those that live in Europe, like a
lot of it's not like uncommon to go to Algarve
in Portugal. Well, they were vacationing in from the United
Kingdom with her parents, Kate and Jerry McCann, and her
two year old, twin siblings and a group of family friends.
(01:53):
And it would be often, you know that they would
they would put the kids to bed and kind of
go to like the neighborhood little russ where you can
literally see the building where they were staying. So it
felt very safe, and they had done this numerous times.
So they went to go eat and the kids fell
asleep about eleven thirty. They went to go eat. They
were on the ground level and you know, while her
(02:14):
parents dined with friends and family every you know, ten
twenty fifteen minutes, they would go check on the kids. Well,
on one of the check ins that they went to
go check in on the kids, they opened the door
and poor Maddie Madeleine is missing, and she's the only
one missing her. The other kids were not missing. It
really kind of blew up from there. There was a
national manhunt for Madeline. The Portuguese National Police. They're you know,
(02:40):
desperate to find her because you know, the Algarve is
known to be a safe tourist area for all these
Europeans very s and the worst thing that can happen is,
you know, a little girl goes missing. I mean, it's
just it's awful.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
And they were on spring break. They were with like
seven other families. You know, you can kind of picture it.
It's like a resort. It was very almost enclosed, all right.
So it wasn't like they were gallivanting down on main
street and their kids were asleep and left alone, because
they got kind of some bad press for that. It
was also a different time, but they were still within
the within eyes distance from where the kids were resting.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They were two hundred feet away. I mean, that's that's
a very short amount of space and the door was
unlocked for I guess that are a worse now, but.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Right, right, So what the news is, though, the news is,
and if you also don't know, there is a suspect,
and there's been a suspect for many years. His name
is Christian Bruckner and he's a German citizen who lived
in Portugal at the time and Neilgarve. And he was
kind of like I would say, a handyman kind of person,
(03:46):
like he would work odd jobs and he kind of
lived he couchsurfed a lot, and he lived in like
a camper. And he's the top suspect because he made
like a kind of like startling confession to an informant
who's identity has been protected by the German police and
saying that you know, it's it's pretty terrible. He said,
(04:06):
she didn't even scream, is what he said. And so
he's been the top suspect. And he's also currently serving
time in Germany for a completely separate assault on an
elderly woman, a rape charge.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
He raped an elderly woman. He ranked a serving time
behind bars for that crime.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Right, so in twenty sixteen, and you have to You
have to understand, twenty sixteen is nine years after she disappeared.
It's many, many years. They searched Christian Bruckner's home in
Germany and they found like a cash of thumb drives
buried under under his dog. And on these thumb drives.
(04:47):
We don't know everything, right, we don't know everything that's
on these thumb drives, but on these thumb drives were
terrible conversations, like horrific conversations he was having on Skype
and he was, you know, kind of admit pretty terrible
things that he wanted to do to little girls, and
he wanted to It's pretty disgusting.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
It's not what he's disgusting.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
And they also found swimsuits, like seventy five swimsuits alleged
that were for toddlers. So not to get too graphic
and sad, but you know, this guy seems like a
real sicko.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
So now that you know who Christian is and like
where he was during the time Madeline went missing, while
police have basically said that his phone was kind of
in that area when Madeline went missing, and you know,
of course, like I said earlier, he was living there
at the time. He lived there on and off for
like ten years. Well, so the police for whatever, and
(05:42):
we don't know why. But as of yesterday, twenty five
national Portuguese policemen along with the German police are searching.
They're they're searching an area. They're focusing on an area
in which he lived, this cottage area in which it
was his primary residence. So again we don't know why,
(06:02):
though they haven't given us the public any indication on
what they've learned. But I mean, if you think about it,
you know, he's this man has been in prison for
a couple of years. There has to be some kind
of audible confession of some kind that they've run across,
or maybe he said he dumped her body somewhere, you know, somewhere.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
We're only things, not body.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
My thought is with the investigation that there must be
something that has to do potentially with underground or a
hint of that, right, because a lot of the investigative
materials that they're bringing sort of go down around into
the ground where like wells and pipes would be in
the infrastructure. So that's a very big part of this investigation.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Right, and keep in mind it's eighteen years, right, so
you know, a real hats off to law enforcement. By
the way, this was like the most covered case of
a missing person in the world, right, it got coverage for.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
So so long.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
We've all been really waiting. But it's been quiet for
a long time now. So to have this be reopened again,
there must be something very major, substantial exactly.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
I agree also, and thankfully we've moved past this. But
do you remember how big an investigation happened around the
poor parents. Yes, yeah, I was just really under a suspicion.
I mean, they really went through it, and look, they
were the target.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Initially.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
The initial thought was that they there was an accident
or something and their daughter.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Died sleeping medication or something.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Exactly, and they covered it up. And look, they stayed
together to this day. You know, both mom and dad
were renowned, really well respected physicians.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Dad's a cardiologists.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
You know, these are very smart, elegant humans and can
you imagine, like you, all of the eyes of the
world are on you. But they stuck together and you know,
remain married to this day, and you know, frankly remain hopeful.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They criticized.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
They were criticized, it really heavily, specifically by American press.
I you know, of course that's all I've got access to.
I don't really have access to the UK press at
the time in two thousand and seven, right, but they
were really criticized for not being like not crying enough,
crying too much, not being emotional, being too emotional, like
they could not win for losing, you know. I mean,
imagine you've just lost your daughter, one of one of
(08:21):
your children, and now on top of everything, you're being
criticized by people who really have no idea what is
going on. It's got to be just terrible. And I
really they really do seem like lovely people, and I
really do hope that they get some answers.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I truly do.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
It does kind of have a similar thing to you know,
infamous cases like Jean Benet Ramsey, right, where a mom
and dad were targeted for so so long, and even
now today that's up for discussion again, right, because there's
been new information.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
It's pretty astounding.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Like she had that very Madelin McCain had that iconic picture, right,
the little blonde hair with the bangs and the eye defect. Yeah,
she had two different color eyes, right, there was a
pair or a speckle in her pupil. If I remember
it looked.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
Like a birthmark.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's but it's it's a real identifier, right,
And I think from that case, a lot of things
have changed, just you know, in the world, how we
see vacations for that matter. You know, yes, they had
the doors open, and you know that was a different time, right.
And you know European lifestyle, everyone's sort of a group effort.
There's community. It's a lovely elegant resort. You know, this
(09:27):
kind of shaped things for all of us obviously, because.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, you leave, you have to lock your doors.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Now, this type of thing, you know, really came under
a lot of consideration. So our hope is that they
definitely find some answers.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah, you know, And there's a couple of things I
wanted to talk about with Christian Bruckner, the suspect, just
to give people an idea of like why the German police.
The German police basically have said that they have concrete
evidence that he's responsible, which is astounding to me. In
June of twenty twenty, that's when they said that German
prosecutors stated they have Kong and I'm using quotes concrete
(10:01):
evidence that Christian Bruckner killed Madeline. You know, at the time,
he was, you know, living there. On the night of
her disappearance, his phone received a thirty minute call near
the resort at the same time.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
She vanished, what does that mean? So well, what does
that mean?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I read that as well when I was doing research,
and I don't know what that implied.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
He he was dating a woman at the time, and
she's a British woman who had been his girlfriend, you know,
for some time. She said that on the night before
Madeleine's abduction, he told her, I have a job to
do in Praya Deluze tomorrow. That's the resort they lived,
where they were at. I have the job to do
in Praya de Louze tomorrow. It's a horrible job, but
(10:43):
it's something I have to do and it will change
my life. You won't be seeing me for a while.
That is what his girlfriend says. He said the night
before Madeleine went missing. So is it a job? Did
he get her for somebody?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh my god, Oh my god, goodness. I can't even
think about it. It makes me crazy, I know, I know,
it's nausey. So and even no matter what the You know,
we've been told this from family members that we've interviewed
of missing kids, like you want answers, right, you can't
eat a meal because you feel like you should be
out searching. Nothing makes sense until you have at least
(11:18):
some closure one way or the other.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
So our fingers are.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Crossed, right, right, Well, hopefully we'll get answers now. The
investigators said that the searches should conclude by Friday of
this week, so in a couple of days now, you know,
it might be actually Thursday night for us, you know,
when these these searches end. But I'm hoping they find
something before then. As Courtney mentioned, they brought ground penetrating
radar and all kinds of machinery to perform these searches,
(11:42):
so they're looking in a specific spot.
Speaker 6 (11:45):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Wow, it's pretty frightening.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
But you know, we'll see hopefully, hopefully they'll they'll find
something and they can lay poor Matty to rest in
her home country with her family, and hopefully we can
put this, you know behind us. In this Chris Bruckner
person can can get a trial. Yes, and yeah, well
know what happened with poor Mattie. It's been eighteen years in.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
The eleven o'clock hour, we'll be discussing an alleged Santa
Anna serial cat killer was evaded law enforcement for two weeks.
Join the conversation eight eight eight thirty one crime we
want to hear from you keep it here. On True
Crime tonight.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
There was this very interesting Gabby Patito interview that her
mom gave regarding her daughter's passing, and it's it's pretty
shocking some of these things that she's bringing to the surface.
And also a serial cat killer, which obviously is right
up Body's alley. You know, if you don't know this already,
Body was the star of the Emmy Award winning Don't
(12:55):
f with Cats, which you can always catch on Netflix,
so obviously she has plenty to say on the topic.
And then Luigi Mangione, is it Mangione or MENGIONI If.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
You say Mangione, I say MANGIONI.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
There you go. You know, interesting thing about his little
time behind bars. You know, he's being housed at the
same facility as Diddy and Sam Bankman.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
That's right, Federal Crimes. That's a Federal crime cop in place.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, I mean talk about it like I don't know,
is it's also the same place where Epstein died. I
think he was kept there for a moment, but no,
I think there is a broken facility. I could be
wrong about that. So, you know, court, should we start
with Luigi?
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Yeah, absolutely so. Just yesterday, the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer,
Luigi Mangioni, his defense team filed emotion and in this
motion they are urging the New York judge to allow
Mangioni to appear with no handcuffs or bulletproof vest.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Like in street clothes. Is that the idea that they
want him wearing a.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Suit, just just not shackled, just not with the vest.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
And because he's already wearing street clothes, he's already wearing
like everything he wears is scrutinized too, already, like he's
wearing green. This means that like people are going crazy
over things that he's wearing.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
He did have that strange thing with his lawyer where
they were both dressed identical.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
That was a weird thing with the red maroon.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah sweaters and the blouse underneath. And yeah, if you're
not familiar with this case, I'm sure you are now
that we're talking about it, because it was everywhere. Luigi
Maanngione was a twenty six year old who shot and
killed right and planned site the CEO healthcare executive Brian Thompson,
and has since been brought into custody and is awaiting
(14:42):
his death sentenced trial. And is it for death, Yes,
it's exast sentence trial.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
So it's interesting because he's facing eleven charges in New
York State. Now, New York State does not have the
death penalty. It was abolished. I think it was back
in maybe two thousand and No, two thousand and four
is when it was abolished. The last state execution was
actually back in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But he's also charged federally and that is where the
death penalty sentence potentially comes in if he's found guilty,
and the federal charges include murder through the death of
a firearm and some moving around instead.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
He's that he's accused of printing.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah it was a three D gun, right, And he
was also found with you know, a manifesto, And it's
not looking great for him, but obviously he does deserve
a fair trial. And you know, there was that huge
purp walk when he first was brought into custody.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Do you remember that.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
It was like Succession the show on HBO. Right, the
helicopter landed and he was like, you know, they really
gave him a purp walk. Right, the mayor was there,
he was shackled and like the city of New York.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Was like behind them. It was iconic. Exactly, it was
like it it's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And his lawyers, I don't really love that because again,
it's giving such a high profile perp that's not normally
how it goes down obviously, so is that performative? Are
the optics of that unfair to his defense? And I
guess that's what they're trying to get ahead of now.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Well.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
I think also that the crime itself was so wild
to see on the streets of New York. So this happened,
and I know, for it's been a minute since he's
been in the news, but at the time, I feel
like almost everyone was glued to their screens. It was
back in December six forty five in the morning, just
walking around, people are walking to work, and we see
(16:32):
victim Brian Thompson, who often gets really lost in this.
He is the CEO of United Healthcare. He's the man
who lost his life. He was fifty years old, fathered
two teenage boys who, by all accounts he adored. He
was walking to work to attend a meeting and then
he was shot by a massed assailant on camera, and
(16:52):
the assailant then fled the scene on a bike.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
What else is going on with Luigi?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Their Courtney, Well, you're right, Courtney, because the victim really
does get law in the sauce on this one. And
Brian Thompson, you know, again, this was a person that
has a very full life and was executed not okay,
obviously for all the obvious reasons. And also Luigi's a
very unexpected assailant, right, and he got so much attention,
and some of it I was a bit conflicted about.
(17:17):
Everyone was calling him the hot assassin, or that he
had a they were like Timothy Shalome lookalike contests because
air quotes. He's a handsome twenty six year old man
Ivy League graduate. You know, he went to penn University
of Pennsylvania, very prestigious, top of his class, you know,
really really upwardly, mobile, loving family, doesn't totally meet the
(17:39):
m O.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Very popular.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
He had tons and tons of friends, so you know,
all of all of the media really kind of ate
up his his appearance because he was you know, air quotes, dreamy,
their words, not mine, and that was really strange, like
here somebody is being put to rest, their funeral is
happening for the Brian Thompson and his family, and meanwhile,
all the news is common mensing on how you know
(18:01):
Luigi should be freed and he's so handsome and he's
too pretty for prison is yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
I mean he was on I was looking today just
you know, researching around and reminding myself. There were snl
skits with him exactly a lot of the topic being he's,
you know, so good looking people couldn't get enough, but
he's He was also very well known as the delay, deny,
depose guy, and that's because those words were written on
(18:27):
this spent casings that came out of the cartridges of
the gun, and those words harken back to delay, denied, defend,
which is really well known phrase in the insurance industry
that when insurers try to push off to avoid paying claims. Right, So, Stephanie,
I think that's part of what it was, was not
(18:48):
just his looks, but sort of the Robin Hood mystique.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
And that's so true, but it's also so bogus.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
First of all, he didn't even have United Healthcare at
number one, number two and actually happened. Trust me, we
were all down the rabbit hole real time and social
media and looking through his social media, and we were
able to identify very quickly along with the you know,
other journalists, that he had a back injury. He had
had a back injury after college, who was living in
I think Honolulu, surfing accident and excruciating pain and had
(19:18):
had a very important surgery that left him in agony
to some extent. And you know that a little bit
tracks right. Maybe he was having issues with his healthcare
provider and that was making him amped and then some.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
But he didn't even have that same insurance.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So even all this, you know, the casings and the
secret messaging and it al was a lot of nothing.
Think his manifesto was kind of a peter out, like
it starts strong and he has something to say, kind
of like there was no there's really no end game.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
There's no big message. There really wasn't.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
Well, he was really into the Uno Bomber, and I
was super into the Enobarmer. The manifest I was hooked
on that, and I still kind of oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Okay, I informed on this one as much. Listen, deep level,
I know the top line.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
If you guys ever want to go on vacation, I
can do a whole show on the nabomber. Okay, Like
the manifesto was, I was fascinated by how he got
caught b via his writings and what. Anyway, I digress,
but I think that revolutionized him a little bit, is
what I'm trying to get at. You know, if you
take the unibomber at face value, just on the manifesto
(20:24):
without him actually hurting anybody, the things that he said
in the manifesto were really interesting and kind of like revolutionary,
and if you are going through something traumatic, as in
Luigi with this back surgery, potentially I think that reading
that manifesto and getting in is into it as he
did could have revolutionized him a little bit and set
him off to target healthcare based on his experience and
(20:46):
targeting the head of the snake, which is basically United Healthcare.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
I think that's listen, this is just a theory. There's
no proof of this. This is body movements theory only.
But I think that that helped revolutionize him.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I really do.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
I totally agree. I remember early days going down. As
Stephanie mentioned, his socials, but also his goodreads, where yeah,
certain books. It's very interesting and I think the revel is,
you know, his being revolutionized does hold water potentially in
his document, manifesto, whatever you want to call it. Part
of what was found on Mangion after the five day
(21:23):
manhunt when he was found at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania,
outside of New York. So it was only two hundred
and sixty two words. Part of it read quote. These
parasites simply had it coming. A reminder, the US has
the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world,
yet we rank roughly number forty two in life expectancy.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Okay, there's better ways to go about this messaging. And
by the way, absolutely he's twenty six years old. Can
you imagine his parents. They're a very prominent family in Baltimore.
He comes from, you know, tons of cousins. If you've
seen family photos, there's like so many cousins and you know,
loving family around him.
Speaker 6 (22:00):
Him.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
What a waste.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Now he's just going to waste in prison till the
end of days if convicted allegedly allegedly unbelievable.
Speaker 5 (22:07):
Absolutely, and that's part of what his defense is arguing.
Why they're saying he shouldn't be put in the shackles.
It'll make him be perceived as dangerous and behind bars.
He has been a model prisoner, one hundred and sixty days.
He's never had a misconduct. Really, yeah, so you know
(22:27):
that's why they're saying, Listen, he doesn't deserve more prejudicial
treatment with these shackles.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So we'll see there's no jury right now. What's prejudicial?
I'm very hard to get a jury or that, you know,
just for the jury pool.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
It's for the it's for the motion, it's for the
jury pool. I think just having him seen, no.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah, no, he should be I want to talk more
about me too. When we come back, we're going to
be hearing some super juicy details about the Gabby Patito story,
and later in the show at eleven, we're going to
be talking about the alleged Santa Anna serial cat killer.
I have a lot to say about that stick around
true crime tonight.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So where should we begin with this new update on
Gabby Patito and her mom.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
You all might remember you know, Gabby.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Patito was that blonde, beautiful young girl who was doing
this van trip with her then fiance, Brian Laundry, and
they were basically, you know, taking video of themselves, taking video,
you know, documenting blocking blogging. Yeah, I'm like from nineteen ten,
so they are. They were documenting this like van trip
(23:42):
over the summer, and Brian and Gabby were they were
basically high school sweethearts. And then they had moved to
Brian's house where he was living with his mom and
dad in Florida. They're originally from Long Island, so Gabby
was living with him, and look, they're young, they're you know,
she was twenty two years old, and they decide to
do this epic road trip, and you know, it starts
off really great, and at some point it goes really
(24:04):
sideways and becomes this real look into domestic violence in
a way I can't even describe. So long on the
short of it is, Gabby doesn't return home. The whole
nation was looking for her. I'm sure you guys were
as well. We were all down on wanting her home.
She ultimately turned up dead, and and look, she turned
(24:24):
up dead through strangulation and apparently blunt force trauma to
her head, and the family was going crazy. We were
all the whole the whole nation was going crazy looking
for her. And then Brian the fiance Brian laundry. He
basically returns home to his parents' house with the van,
but without Gabby. So think about that, while the parents
(24:45):
can't get answers, right, the parents, so Gabby's parents are
blowing up their phones. Obviously they want to know what's happening.
We haven't Gabby, you know, just like my mom, I
talked to her ten times a day, right, So Gabby
was very frequently in touch with her her family, and look,
they were having some like spats here and there, and
mom didn't really think too much of it. But after
(25:06):
a few days she starts to get super nervous, so
naturally she starts calling Brian's parents. Gabby was also living
with them, so they're all very close, and it's radio silence,
total radio silence. And then, sure enough, if you know
the story already to spar with me, Brian ultimately turns
up dead. He took his own life and left behind
a letter explaining why he had to kill Gabby because
(25:30):
she slipped or she injured herself into get her out
of pain. He basically had to kill her. It was
like a mercy killing of sorts, a mercy killing. Yet
he left her her sweet body in the cold to
roten Be. You know all the things. So this is
a pretty like major story. We all know the answer.
But very recently, Gabby's mom has said that she believes
(25:54):
that Brian's parents may have actually killed him. He claimed
apparently that he committed suicide because he couldn't live with
the grief. But now you know, Gabby's parents are not convinced,
and Gabby's mom is really outwardly saying Brian's parents are
the problem. I forgive Brian, may he rest in peace.
I do not forgive that mother. And there's something wrong
(26:17):
with her because also when they went to get Gabby's belongings,
the house was already gutted apparently, and all of Gabby's
things were already gutted. There was already a big cover
up and play. And look, if you've seen that documentary again,
I feel like we're like Ciskel and Ebert always with
the documentary, right, But it's a very interesting watch if
you haven't seen it. It's also on Netflix and it
(26:38):
really does show them and all of the video that
they were taking along the way on their trip, and
it's pretty harrowing because at one point you'll remember, they
got pulled over, yes, and this body can the footage. Yeah,
basically there was an altercation. Police get involved and separate them,
and Brian is sort of acting like, oh, it was
(26:59):
her fault. It was her fault, and she's sort of
conceding to that, but she looks petrified and then of course,
in her sweet face.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
In this bodycam footage, you can you can see in
her face, I just I look back at this and
I just want to scream because her sweet face, she's like,
I guess it's my fault.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Right now.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
They got pulled over because it was reported that he
was slapping her right yes or something, and then it
got totally turned around real time in front of the
police that she was the aggressor exactly right exact and
you can see now we learned too that I guess.
There was a selfie taken by Gabby and in this selfie,
(27:41):
she's in the back of the police car and she's
begging for her phone. You know, she just wants to
call her mom and I just it's so heartbreaking. And
in this selfie that we just now have access to,
you can see her face markings. It really is a
cautionary tale.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
On so many levels. I watched that the clip of
the video of it's Nicole Schmidt is Gabby Potito's mom,
and yeah, she specifically said I think it's very possible
they did something and.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
That they were culpable.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Right, So imagine the harrowing hours when you're looking for
your daughter and looking for him as well, right, Like
they just want answers period the end. You don't even
you're not assuming anyone's dead. You're just assuming that there's
you know, maybe she's in a hospital, or maybe they've
had a fight, or you know, maybe she lost her phone.
You don't go to she's been you know, left for
dead by her fiance. But regardless, the mom was really
(28:36):
being Brian's mother, meaning the accused killer. His mother was
really cagy the entire time. So to make the suggestion
that they killed him and that he did not take
his life, that's pretty major because what do you make
of that?
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Like, what do you do? God, this is a horrible
question to even ask, what do you do your son
comes home with the van and without his girlfriend, do
you and in their case, they all remember they all
went to this camp like this camp.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Yes, Brian Landry's family with the parents and I believe
his sister too, go and pack up to go on
a trip. They went to his hand. It was so odd,
I mean beyond.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And well the reason they say they did that is
because they wanted to make a plan. So they went
into the woods, into this air quotes camping place so
they wouldn't have cell service and that they would be
able to kind of get in a group huddle and
put a plan in place. And that plan was ultimately
for Brian to go off into the wilderness and rather
than facing prison, he would take his own life. Or
(29:36):
Gaby's mom would say, or the parents killed him.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I don't know. Well haven't they been in litigation.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So the Potito family, and by the way, I guess
totally related Joe Potito, Gabby's father, has created an organization
who that I admire greatly.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Gabby was a beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
Young woman, blonde hair, blue eyes, and you know, she
got a lot of attention. And Joe Patito just a
remarkable man recognized like gosh, Mike, you know, of course
he's probably very happy his daughter got all this attention.
But his organization, the Potito Foundation, are now bringing awareness
to you know, black and brown people who go missing,
(30:19):
and you just have to really admire, like they've taken
this tragedy and really turned it into something so just.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
I could cry.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
It brings tears to my eyes to think about the
just it's so inspirational. But my point in bringing all
this up is they have been in litigation with the Laundries,
I think civilly to sue for like wrongful death or something,
because they're they're implying that they knew that Gabby was
out there, they knew she was in you know, exposed
(30:50):
to the wild in past and didn't do anything and
didn't help recover her or anything. So maybe through this
litigation some kind of disc rehappened, you know, because once
you open litigation with somebody, now you're you have reciprocal
discovery happening. I'm kind of wondering, like, there's got to
be something there for for Gabby's mom to utter those words,
(31:11):
you know, she's basically saying. I think specifically the mom is.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Responding to the mom. He is not into Brian's mom.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
She she quote calls her a sociopath and also quote
they know what he did. They being Launcher's parents, they
know what he did. He helped him. I just want
to say, it's really imperative to say that this is
Gabby Potito's mom, Nicole's opinion, This is her opinion, and
what we know is fact is that a Florida medical
(31:40):
examiner has ruled Brian Laundry's death as a suicide.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
So just.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Behind a note and you know that all sort of tracks.
But again, like you're that, it sounds like allegedly that
should become a drinking game. We should call it the
allegedly game. How many times do we say allegedly? But
you know, in reality, yeah, her body was out there
for far longer than it should have been, and the
agony that they were put through, perhaps unnecessarily. If Brian
(32:09):
Laundry's parents were in fact aware that this had happened,
that is criminal in my opinion, one hundred percent, I.
Speaker 5 (32:16):
Think, and even if not legally criminal, even dialing back
to way in the beginning, when again Gabby's parents were
just saying, hey, where is she and not getting a
call back from her fiance's parents. That again not in
court of law, that in itself is criminal. We want
to hear your thoughts about Snight's case. Give us a
call eight eight eight three to one. Crime. We're talking
(32:36):
about Madeline McCain, Luigimanngioni, Brian Landry. So we want to
hear really everything that you have to say. So there's
a couple of quick headlines that are happening now, and
the first one say that is not the word. There's
a police hunt continuing for a father who is alleged
to have killed his three daughters in Washington State, and
(32:59):
it is a search for thirty two year old Travis Decker.
His wife who is excuse me, his ex wife, who
is divorced from mister Decker, said that he has been
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and is currently unmedicated, which
just adds to sort of the potential chaos of this search.
(33:20):
So we're going to get into it in a big
way tomorrow. But a tip came in just I think
a couple of hours ago. I believe that he was
potentially seen in McCall Idaho's day.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
So if you're in that if you're in that area,
keep your eye out, you google his name, that you
get his image and be on the lookout because he
is considered dangerous.
Speaker 5 (33:42):
Very dangerous. We'll put a link on our socials and
if you do have any information, you are encouraged to
call the US Marshall Service at one eight hundred three
three six zero one zero two. Again, we're going to
put this on our social and we're going to really
get into it tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, it's such a look at you know again, mental
illness is something that we should have a therapist or
a psychoanalyst on or someone to kind of shed some
light into this because if you think about the Luigi
I'm not saying anything.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I'm not suggesting that I know if he was or was.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Not mentally ill, but it does seem like a through
line here of you know, how do we like spot
some of this stuff and prevent some of this stuff
because bipolar is really difficult if not treated, and you
know what a horrible.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
Ending or in this case, borderline personality. That's right, Let's
try and find someone who can talk us through it
a little bit. One other headline, this happened the Austin
Police Department. They're investigating it. Another body that was found
in Ladybird Lake in Austin, Texas. So for the past
over the past three years, at least thirty eight bodies
have been found there. That so, listen, insane, it's insane.
(34:52):
I gasped as well, bodies I did, so what well
when I read a little bit further so, mainly the
causes of death have been attributed to accidental drownings. Suicide
is the number two cause, and drug ode verdoses and
natural causes. So so far, only one case has been
(35:13):
ruled to murder, but about half a dozen of the
cases remain unknown.
Speaker 4 (35:18):
Oh, but the bodies aren't being dumped there. It's not
like a dumping site, right, it's just accidents and.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
Well, you know all of all of those things, A
lot of accidents, and there's a lot of accidents and
drownings and bodies.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
So we'll come back, you know, joining us later in
the show. Doronto Fear true crime pop culture expert for sure,
and of course body is going to be tracking a
potential serial cat killer. All that and much much more
true crime tonight where we talk true crime all the time.
(35:57):
Let's talk about this terrible serial Yeah, what is that about?
I kind of want to start with you know this,
this stuff is kind of near and dear to my heart,
so I do appreciate the time to talk about this stuff.
I know it's not, you know, the typical true crime
kind of thing, but it it definitely has the menacing undertones, right,
and it can definitely lead, as we all know and
(36:20):
have witnessed to, you know, further deviant behavior leading to humans.
So I'm just gonna kind of briefly kind of go
over this because it is hard to talk about. I
mean it, listen, this kind of stuff is very hard
for me to talk about, but it is so I think,
super important. I'm just trying to be as honest as possible.
It's difficult to talk about. There's a guy in Santa Anna.
His name is Alejandro Olavero Sacosta, and he has been
(36:43):
charged with killing you know, upwards of twenty five housecats
in the Santa Anna area. And you know, I'm from
this area of Orange.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
County, and you know, so I know like the area,
I know the neighborhood. I know, you know, this is
a very you know, caring neighborhood. These people love their pets,
and their cats are being brutally murdered by their neighbor. Well,
he was charged in April of twenty twenty five, and
he got bonded out because you know, again, judges have
(37:14):
minimums and maximums that they can do, and you know,
animal cruelty isn't necessarily this big crime, right. So the
problem with that is is that they're just kind of
looking at the charge, right, They're not really looking at
how he did this, all right, So what he would
do is he would lure these animals to his home
with food. What m So he would open, like, let's say,
(37:37):
a can of tuna, all right, and put it in
his windowsill. And this is just me basically opining what
he did. He is being accused of luring them with food,
for sure, but officially I'm telling you this is my.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Theory of what he would do.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
And he would get these pets, and again, these are
not like feral cats. These are people's loving pets. And
then he would brutally kill them. He wasn't just killing them,
he was stomping on them. He was beating them. And
that's the thing that's really not being taken into consideration
is how menacing he was to these animals. And so
(38:14):
he got bonded out and he was supposed to reappear
in court on May twenty first, but he didn't show up.
So the judge rightfully so increased his bond to five
fifty I'm sorry, fifty thousand dollars and issued a benchward
for his arrest. Well, when they go to his house,
he's nowhere to be found, and he's been on the
run ever since and nobody has seen him. And you know,
(38:35):
it's scary because you know the statistics. I do panels
on this on crime con with accredited doctors. You know,
these are not statistics I made up. These are coming
from real doctors that do these panels with me. I
did a panel with doctor Chris Mahani Mahandi and he,
you know, informed me that about all these statistics, like
(38:56):
perpetrators of animal abuse are three point two times as
likely to have a criminal record in five point three
times more likely to have a record of at least
one violent crime.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
And a lot of women that show up in domestic
violent shelters, you know, they say they suffered through their
abuse for so many years, oftentimes because the husband or
the boyfriend or the partner or whatever would be threatening
to kill their dog or their animals. So you know,
this isn't this isn't just something that you know, I'm
(39:27):
pulling out of the air. This is like scientific research, right.
Speaker 6 (39:30):
Well.
Speaker 5 (39:31):
Also, yeah, and statistically, as you were saying, significant as
a marker of potential future human abuse. Yeah, because really
you're taking some a vulnerable being and you're asserting your dominance.
And in this case, as you were saying, you know,
the horrible things you said about his manner of killing
(39:51):
these cats, I mean, that's an aggression that lives within
a person and it is coming out in one way
and can often lead into you.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
Know, right, because if he's the way he's doing this
is like he's almost getting pleasure out of it, and
at some point the cat isn't enough. Right, And again,
this is not about the cat. It's about I mean,
obviously I love cats.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I'm a huge I'm a little allergic, but I love them.
Oh No, I have a cat. I love her so much.
I have a tattoo of my you know, deceased cat
on my arm. I love my cats. But it's not
about the cat, you know, It's about how they're doing it.
Like he was stomping, he was getting pleasure, in my opinion,
allegedly allegedly allegedly from from doing these things. And you
(40:35):
know it's a control thing, right, and eventually, at some
point it's not going to be enough to satisfy that urge,
and he's going to step up, right, and what's the
next step a person? And you know I experienced this firsthand, right,
we wouldn't talk about that experience too. Let's talk about
doing ough with cats body there.
Speaker 5 (40:55):
You really had some unbelievable statistics. I've seen some of
your panels and if I'm remembering, didn't a study find
that's something like almost fifty percent of convicted rapists and
about thirty percent of child molesterers had a history of
animal cruelty.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah, it's sure wi stuff. Yeah, Like it's really a tell,
it really is.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
And then you know, like in my experience too, you know,
I of course dealt with Luca Mgnauta, who, by the way,
I hate saying his name, So I'm going to refrain
from that moving forward, if that's okay with everybody.
Speaker 5 (41:27):
Yeah, but in my name at your mouth?
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Yeah yeah, in my experience, you know, before he even
uttered the words that he was going to move on
to humans because he did utter those words in messages
to us. And I'll give a little backstory on that
if you guys want, but yes, please do. Okay, So yeah,
oh man, where do I begin? Just turn on don'nuf
with cats and then you'll get the whole story. But
you know, in twenty ten, I ran across a video
(41:53):
that was posted online, and you know it, I thought
it was a cat video and I always watched the
Q who doesn't?
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Right? Who does?
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Cue?
Speaker 4 (42:00):
I always watch these It lifts my spirits, right. Well,
it didn't turn out, you know, it started that way,
but it didn't end that way. It ended pretty gruesomely
with this like hooded person, you couldn't see this person's face,
you know, putting these beautiful cute kittens that he was
loving on into a plastic bag and then putting a
(42:21):
vacuum up to it and sucking the air out.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
And that was the video.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
And he put it up on a YouTube channel called,
you know, called catch Me if you Can, and that
was like, oh, okay, I was challenged, Yeah, okay, you
know I was enraged. Honestly, I was like because I
felt duped, you know, I was like, oh, look at
these cute cats. And then oh, I was just horrified.
I was absolutely horrified. And again it was the way
(42:45):
in which he had done it, just like with you know,
the suspect in Santa Anna. And by the way, speaking
of Santa Anna, I just want to if you're listening
in Santa Anna, I'm so proud of that neighborhood for
protesting and demanding justice. They are not staying quiet, and
you know what, kudos to you, Kudos to you guys.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Keep it up.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
I'm definitely watching. But you know, it's the way in
which which the guy with this hood over as was
doing this. And I started kind of investigating the video.
And when you're doing that, you know, you're you're dumping
the video out. You're looking at every frame. You know,
a ten minute video has thousands of frames, right, thousands,
and you're looking for things that can help identify where
(43:27):
in the world. Why I even begin looking, right, because
in an upload to the internet, that could the guy
could be in Egypt, exactly right, he could be in
South Africa, he could be in New Zealand. I have
no idea, right, So you start looking at things in
the room they can't modify or change, and you're looking
at light bulbs. You're looking at outlets, specifically outlets, right,
(43:49):
because everywhere you go they're different, right, Outlets in North
America or in the United States at least look you
know a certain way, but the outlets in England look
totally different.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Right, smart our analyst work right now or this analysis, Well,
that's what you're I never would think that, who would
think that, I would not know to even look for
the outlets.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
But it's such a good point.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
Yeah, that's what we focused on. So, you know, we
started doing those kinds of things. We started looking at,
you know, because you also released a series of photos,
and the photos he released were uploaded to a website
called photo Bucket, and photo Bucket would not strip the
metadata from these photos. It would leave it intact if
it still existed. And we found a bunch of photos
(44:31):
that led us to a serial number of a camera. Okay,
the serial number of the camera he used to take
these photos. So that kind of you know, keeps you
keep narrowing down, basically is what you're trying to do.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
It's a puzzle.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
It's like this, it's a puzzle, and I mean, give
me a puzzle, Give me a puzzle. I'm all about
the puzzle. Well, as time went on, he ended up
doing the same thing with three out three more cats, right,
and so well two more videos, I should say.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
And then you know, we.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
Started, we found out who he was, and we started
talking to him, trying to get trying to get him help.
We were never threatening, We were never you know, like
we're gonna get you.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Never.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
It was just like we want you to get help, like,
you know, because clearly there's something wrong. When he started
communicating he was going to move on to animals or
I'm sorry, to humans, and so you know, we're working
with the police in Ontario and Montreal where we attract
him to eventually, and they were just kind of like,
you know, it's this is cats. What do he want
(45:30):
us to do? Right, And we were like, no, you
don't understand. He's going to move on to people. And
two months after we spoke with the police of Montreal
where we at tracked him to, he ended up killing.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I'm sorry. He ended up.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Killing international student from China shouldn Lynn, and he filmed
it and sent us the video I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
You know, I think about this every day.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
I think every day, and I hope that the people
in Santa Anna know that people are watching and we
have your backs. Yeah, and I definitely have your back,
and I hope that law enforcement and the judges and
everybody in charge takes this very seriously.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
And you certainly have all of our support, and we
will cover this much more in the future. We are
going to be joined by pop culture expert Dorano Fear.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Also he's a partner in La Comic Con. He's also
an executive producer and just fn't forget he's responsible for Snookie.
He's responsible for Snooky exactly the greatest director.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
If you've seen Jersey.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Shore, you'll know his work because he casted Jersey Shore
and so many more. So I'll let him speak for himself,
but we're really excited to have him here. And yeah,
he's gonna he's gonna teach us a little bit about
ed Gean.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
I'm obsessed already.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
It's a little too scary, but he's gonna This is
gonna be an interesting twist because it has been. It's
been the inspiration to so many movies, Hannibal, Elector and
you know, Ghostface or Scream, et cetera. So durn Opear
is in the.
Speaker 6 (47:10):
House Hi everybody.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
Hi, Hi, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
Are you all right?
Speaker 5 (47:16):
Ed Gean?
Speaker 6 (47:17):
Huh, Well, listen, when you guys asked for me to
potentially come on the show and talk about things that
I love, you know, I'm an executive producer, I'm a
comic geek, I'm a horror fan, and I am a
true crime aficionado. And for me, horror and true crime
go hand in hand. And I think that since this
is the first week you guys are on, we should
(47:37):
start with what I consider literally the first American monster,
and that was ed Geen. And you know, so when
people think of notorious killers, whether it was Dahmer, you know,
or even fictional ones like Hannibal Lecter, long before them,
it was ed Gen And we're talking mid nineteen fifties.
(47:58):
A little backstory on ed Geen. For about a decade
there was unsolved gray robberies and people didn't understand where
the robberies were coming from. And in nineteen fifty seven
police raided a small farmhouse and they discovered the body
of at least one of two of his victims, Bernice Warden,
who was a hardware store owner. But worse was that
(48:21):
they found that Ian had a pension for interior design,
and the home and the shed were filled with artifacts
made from human skin.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Right like lamb sheets, lampshades made he was lampshades.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
What skulls was a.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Nipples a butcher belt involved.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
No, this is too much a nipple belt.
Speaker 6 (48:45):
Yeah. He had bowls made out of human skulls. He
had chairs upholstered with human skin. He had a belt
made from nipples. And the most disturbing element was he
had a full woman suit sown from body parts dug
up from local graves. And so ed Gean in nineteen
fifty seven shot not only the Midwest, but the world,
and he literally became the thing that horror movies are
made out of. And he was the inspiration which then
(49:08):
led Hitchcock to create Norman Bates and Psycho. He was
the inspiration for Leatherface and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series.
He was partially the inspiration for sentence of the Lambs
we Bill, and you know there are correlations to Angela
from you know, the nineteen eighty sleep Away Camp movie,
(49:29):
as well as Doctor Elliott from Dressed to Kill. So
he really spawned a pop culture fascination that no one
else had ever done before him, and he is what
I consider the birth of modern horror and the true
first Monster, so much so that Ryan Murphy is about
to release his third installment of his franchise Monster and
it is ed Geen And you know, this is the
(49:51):
follow up to the Dahmer series on Netflix, and then
the second one was The Menandez Brothers. And here comes
the next face of horror for mar and audiences to
hear the whole story.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
So is he considered like a serial killer or did
he Where does he fit in that landscape?
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Because those movies you just mentioned, they're all so different.
You know, that's I never knew it was based on anything.
Speaker 6 (50:14):
What makes him fascinating was that he really only killed
two people, but his legacy is endless. You know, he
was the first killer to transform murder into a kind
of ritual theater. It was not a serial killer. He
never traveled, he didn't hunt the roadways. He was in
a very small town in Wisconsin. He was raised by
apparently a very domineering mother who was extremely religious. Under
(50:35):
this kind of theory that you know, she was the
only good woman, which then leads you to understand how
Norman bas and the idea of psycho came about. He
was considered a psycho sexual identity collapse, mental illness, And
this is very different from the concept of trans because
(50:55):
he did not think he was a woman. He wanted
to actually be his mother. He built. Yeah, he built
the suit in order to be able to climb into
it after her death. Oh and there's so much there's
so much more surrounding this. You know, we know that
his brother actually there's a story behind it, Boddy. I
think you was the one that actually filled me in
on that first.
Speaker 4 (51:15):
Right, Like, his brother kind of went missing and they
found there was a fire in the farm or you know,
the farm crops, and when the first responders came, they
cleared the fire, but they also found the body of
his brother in that area. But he wasn't touched by
the fire, and they kind of thought maybe, but they
never proved anything. What else can you tell us about
(51:37):
this first monster, dron.
Speaker 6 (51:40):
So to build more on what body was talking about. Yeah,
but in nineteen forty four, there was a fire, a
burning marsh vegetation fire on the property and it got
out of control. So when the local fire department responded,
they found Henry his brother, and his brother was found
face down, bruised, but no signs of smoke in elation
and that time, they never they never, they never went
(52:03):
into it. You know. They said that he was officially
ruled an accident due to apphixiation, but no autopsy was
ever performed and while no charges, yeah, well, no charges
was ever put against ed. They do believe that he
killed his brother, and theories suggests that Henry would have
to like confronted ed about his domineering mother because the
thing was is that ed Geen was considered sort of
(52:26):
a town oddity where his brother was well liked, well known,
and did not have the same issues that he had
with his mother.
Speaker 5 (52:36):
So do you think Doron was he potentially jealous of
having to share his mother with his brother? Know whether
she was alive or dead or.
Speaker 6 (52:45):
I don't know, well, incidents talk about the fact that
the brother had left early on and that he was
against his mother, Augusta. That was her name, Augusta, so
you know, I don't know. So she may have been
able to focus her mental illness on ed and it
could be a story of longtime abuse, which again doesn't
justify the level of the crimes. But no one had
(53:07):
ever seen anything like this before. This level of depravity
had never been experienced or even heard of before, which
is what why I say he's sort of the father
of modern horror, and so he's not a serial killer.
He's just a murderer in the worst sense.
Speaker 2 (53:24):
Do you feel like we're kind of you know, listen,
this is not me so boxing, that's certainly not my intention.
But given that Ryan Murphy, whose work I really I
really like, is doing this as the next you know,
monster for his scripted series, are we glorifying this a bit?
Much like it used to be kind of a rule
that you stayed away from the actual perpetrator to you know,
(53:45):
you stayed away from the killer even right because you
didn't want to give them a stage. Sometimes these types
of murderers that are especially performative, you know, giving them
more of a giving them more FaceTime frankly on the
news or otherwise, it's sort of kind of feeds the
beast a little bit. Are we doing that because you know,
we were talking about this earlier about the Menendez brothers,
(54:05):
and are we glorifying Dahmer or is that just you know,
am I just overthinking that?
Speaker 6 (54:11):
No? It's no, No, it's legitimate. It's a legitimate thing
that I deal with constantly, especially when talking about pop culture.
The issue here is are we turning villainy into heroism?
And Ryan Murphy is an interesting aspect of this because
what he did with Dahmer, which by the way, was
a brilliant limited series.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
It was being.
Speaker 6 (54:30):
Cinematically so well acted, you know, all of it. However,
that he took a very specific lens on Dahmer and
he made Dahmer hyper sexualized with very slow panning shots
of him working out, and he turned it very homo erotic.
He did. He got a lot of backlash for it, absolutely,
but he didn't shy away from it because he did
the same thing with the Menendez brothers.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
Yes, he did do it in fact, yes, yeah, volume
I think he leaned into it, of.
Speaker 6 (54:57):
Course he did. And what I'm looking at now is
that even the casting choice is going to be playing
a game.
Speaker 3 (55:04):
So you know, he's so handsome, like that's again, he's
like a hero.
Speaker 6 (55:09):
So here you go. So are we glorifying it? Are
we hyper sexualizing it? Are we turning it into you know,
remote fantasies? Do I think?
Speaker 5 (55:17):
So?
Speaker 6 (55:17):
Yes? Is it capitalizing on morbidity. Yes, you know, my
type of horror is I like happy horror, meaning comedy
horror like Scream, But even Scream in its own yielded
multiple copycat killers, really really viole. Yes, we'll save that
for another front.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
About that, I didn't know that. I want you to
go see Final Destination. Have you seen that yet? That's
my kind of horror film because it's more of like
a roller coaster. You know, you feel scared, you know,
it's not you know, it's not so insidious.
Speaker 6 (55:51):
Well, but think about ed game for a second. Psycho
was the first ever real horror movie to gain critical
acclaim globally. Now I'm not talking about Nasparato, and I'm
not talking about sort of the universal monsters that came before.
And we have to remember that horror is a reflection
of human fears of its time. So when you look
at horror in the fifties, it was all from beyond.
(56:11):
It was the Blob, the attack of the fifty foot Woman.
It came, you know, from space. This was a reaction
to nuclear you know, the atomic bomb, the space race.
It was the unknown, it was you know, large spiders,
Valley of the Ants, you know, and in the fifties
we didn't have this kind of horror. And when this happened,
(56:33):
Psycho was the first to put in a real vision
of what psychopathy could really be. And it horrified the world.
And it didn't lead any immediately into the concept of
serial killers or flasher movies. What came after that was
a lull. And what we did get was this this
(56:54):
sort of new vision of horror that led to the
women's rights amendments. So in the seventies, when women's rights
got their right the broad burning the pill, suddenly the
reaction became sort of slutshaming because the slasher movies brought women.
Who was the final girl? It was always the virginal one.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Oh my gosh, yeah, that show. All the ones were
the first to go.
Speaker 6 (57:23):
That's what it was. It was about was promiscuous teens
finding a new sort of sexual revolution. And what led
to that, if you go, if you go step back
just half a decade, we dealt with all sorts of
religious horror, the exerting, oh, well, you're.
Speaker 3 (57:35):
Gonna stay with us, so yeah, don't go anywhere. I
don't want to hear more about all.
Speaker 4 (57:39):
Of this stick around because We've got a lot more
to dig into. Duran's gonna stay with us. I'm going
to tie him to his chair to talk about all
of our favorite true crime TV shows and then we
want to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
So keep it here.
Speaker 2 (57:49):
True Crime Tonight, back with Doronto Fear. He is our
pop culture crime expert, and he is one of the
best in the business in many different ways. And we've
been talking about ed Geen and sort of this person's
(58:12):
influence on scary movies.
Speaker 3 (58:14):
And we were curious, you know, to hear from you. Deran.
What are you watching right now.
Speaker 6 (58:19):
In terms of true prime.
Speaker 2 (58:21):
Yeah, like any documentaries or you know, anybody Courtney or body.
If there's anything that we must be watching. You know,
we want to know always always.
Speaker 6 (58:30):
I just I just binge watched on AMC Plus and
it's also available on sun Dance. The Preppy Murder, the
Death in Central Park that came out in twenty nineteen.
I'm linked to that unfortunate party and that is fascinating
for me. Number one, I lived it sort of adjacent
to it. And number two, again, I was fascinated by
(58:51):
this concept of the monster that we didn't see and
if people don't know this story. It follows you know,
the Robert Chambers and this was the crime of the
Center before OJ like the whole world watched a handsome
nineteen year old six well four Upper East sider yuppified
in a time of excess, and he murdered Jennifer Levin,
(59:15):
a beautiful eighteen year old, killed her in Central Park.
Her body was found, shirt hiked up, no underwear, strangled.
He did admit to it. But what was shocking about
that documentary and why to watch it is it goes
into the first ever trial and how this was the
first case of true victim shaming on a global scale.
(59:38):
They changed the narrative and made him the victim, and
that she was ultimately so promiscuous that he had a
fighter off she was one. Yeah, that was and that
is a testament of how far we've come as a
society and the me too movement. And it is a
horrifying case and if you watch it thoroughly, you can't
help it start to question the motives of the system.
Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
What happened to him? Actually, come to think of it
is is he still behind bars? Like I kind of
forget how that one pays off?
Speaker 6 (01:00:08):
Ooh, that's a whole other story. He ultimately from the trial,
the jury was hung and he took a pleat deal,
so the prosecution, the prosecution was never able to find
him guilty. And what was shocking about that case was
that the whole world championed him against her, what as
the innocent victim. It's a harrowing tale of justice gone wrong,
(01:00:29):
and at least the documentary gives her a voice for
the first time, because every major newspaper covered it as
it was her fault or his doing, or it was
done because of rough sex his and he was so
good looking that that's how they claimed it, going back
to this concept of beauty. So he was arrested, he
(01:00:50):
went to jail, he served, he was got five to fifteen.
He was released, Yeah, from bad behavior while he was
in there. He didn't get five, He stayed the whole fifteen.
He was released. He was then recharged under drug charges
and he actually got eighteen years for the drug charges,
which is so much more than the actual murder of
this innocent eighteen year old girl who had her whole
(01:01:10):
life ahead of her, was just about to leave and
go to Boston University. And that is that is, that
is the tragedy of that case. He was released now
after the second stint in twenty twenty three. Wow, he's out.
Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
That's so interesting. I actually don't know that I was
aware of that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
I feel like we should probably dig dig into that
a little bit further.
Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
I didn't realize he had been released.
Speaker 5 (01:01:32):
Yeah, I certainly want.
Speaker 6 (01:01:32):
To see that doc Wow, So that's what I'm watching.
Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Yeah, Courtney, body, what about you guys?
Speaker 5 (01:01:41):
Okay, I actually had kind of a groundbreaking moment. I
watched Sins of Our Mother on Netflix.
Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
Lorie Vallo, Yes, Lorie Vallo did though.
Speaker 5 (01:01:54):
And as a reminder, we spoke a little bit about
it the other day. But it's the most complicated case
known to man that Stephanie summarized her so well. But
Lourie Valley, Lourie Valo da Bell left in her wake
a husband who's been murdered, her husband, her new husband's
(01:02:16):
former wife, two of her children who were found buried
in her backyard. It's a really sordid tale. So I
had not seen the documentary Sense of Our Mother on
Netflix until just this week. I had forgotten because I
had deemed Lori Valo just demonic and a monster, and
those are the words I said. I had forgotten that
(01:02:38):
her oldest son was sweetest, yes, but that he was
raped at the hands of Lorie Valo's former husband. And
there's audio of her saying, if I don't turn to
the church, which is what seems to have led her
on this murder spree, then I will turn to murder
speaking about her ex husband. So it just connected the
(01:03:00):
dots that I don't know. I just I had empathy
for her I'd never had before, because I could really
understand being just broken knowing that someone I was married
too did that to my son.
Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
I totally hear you, in your right, she did Lorie Valo.
We're speaking of this also known as the Doomsday mom,
or as I call her killer Mom. I think she's
the pits. And honestly, yes, that was a terrible thing.
We had done an episode with Nancy Grace's show in
Justice with Nancy Grace and interviewed the Sun and he's like, darling,
(01:03:36):
and can you imagine he'd been through so much and was,
you know, very devoted to his mother. And while yes,
you could see that as a wicked tipping point. But
there's so many other countless stories about Lorie Valo that
show her to be a bad egg from jump and manipulative,
and it was almost as though perhaps she took this
(01:03:56):
inciting incident to this terrible thing that happened to her
son and kind of allowed it to give her a
little justification, because remember, she killed her own children, so
she's like, oh, you know, how dare have somebody to
do that to my son? Which, by the way, how
dare that anybody do that to her son? Of course,
but then she went on to kill her own kids
(01:04:17):
and bury them in shallow graves and currently is looking
at another trial because she also apparently tried to kill
her niece's ex husband and she's going to be on
trial for that now representing herself.
Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
That got delayed.
Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
We were going to cover that this week, but we
will obviously do so when that trial kicks in.
Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
But like, what a joke.
Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
She's a clown and she's taking up a lot of time,
and she's killed so many people.
Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
She's a straight up serial killer. Don't get them started, Courtney, don't.
Speaker 5 (01:04:46):
I know, wind you up.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
So bad?
Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Well, yeah, by the way, same similar. I mean, I'm
gonna sound like I'm a nut right now, because Ruby
Frankie have you guys heard this one. Yes, she's the mother. Also,
it's on Hulu. It's called The Monster in Our House
or The Monster in the House, and it's the Ruby
Frank story. And she was again a very lovely, loving mother,
(01:05:14):
had many children, and she was one of the original
like vloggers that would do basically videos with her family
for money and all of her little nuggets. They were
on this like YouTube channel called eight Passengers, which I
kind of remember seeing like they lived in Salt Lake City,
very wholesome, very religious, beautiful family beyond measure. And I
(01:05:37):
don't want to spoil it, but she's recently been arrested
and is looking at thirty years behind bars, because you know,
the image that she put.
Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Forward is anything but.
Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
And I made the mistake of watching this last night
and I couldn't sleep. She got so under my skin,
I guess the way Lori Valo does too, because again
they look so loving and nice on the outside and
then their total psychopaths on the inside, and what they've
done to children is unimaginable. So that one I really
recommend because it has so much found footage like home video,
(01:06:12):
and obviously they were videotaping their lives. I keep saying
videotaping again, like nineteen eighty. I mean, honestly, there's all
this footage though that they've been shooting throughout the years.
Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
So it's pretty compelling to be in the beehive. Buddy,
what about you? What are you watching?
Speaker 6 (01:06:29):
Wow?
Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
Okay, So my girlfriend and I every weekend, like our
weekend kind of revolves around what are we going to watch?
And we kind of sit at home and she presses
play and ipress play right, and we watch. And this
weekend we decided to watch the titan Remember the sub
that imploded down at the Titanic. Oh yeah, ocean Gate.
Now listen, I know that doesn't seem like true crime adjacent,
(01:06:51):
but listen, it is.
Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
For sure.
Speaker 4 (01:06:53):
The United States government is looking at possible charges against
ocean Gate for manslaughter. Five people died in this in
this sub And when you watch the documentary, I was
blown away at I mean, the guy that that ran
this this company ignored every expert and when there were
(01:07:14):
cracks in the hole, he was just like, oh.
Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Well, you know, like it was a complete scam scheme.
Speaker 4 (01:07:21):
He was he was taking tickets and then fixing things
with that ticket money and then like it was awful, right,
And so I was.
Speaker 6 (01:07:28):
Prayed and he was praying on narcissism, which is either
a crazier element to this because it is diabolical.
Speaker 4 (01:07:35):
Absolutely diabolic. And okay, here's how there's another thing though,
the tailen All murders. I watched that and I was stunned.
You guys, you know, I told you I was obsessed
with the unibomber get this and the talent numbers. Did
you guys know, no, listen, did you guys know that
they suspected Ted Kenzyinski the unibomer of this?
Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
Why did not?
Speaker 5 (01:07:57):
Really?
Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
And you know, I'm obsessed with this. I had no idea.
Speaker 6 (01:08:02):
So for people that don't know, it was about you know,
this was in the eighties when tail and all, you know,
people were dying, they were poisoning and like grocery stores,
so you went and like took two for your headache
and died. And so when that happened, it created a frenzy.
The outcome of that, interestingly enough, is the reason why
we have safety steal seals.
Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
That's right, m H. Absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
So those are two I absolutely recommend if you get
if you get a chance, and obviously don't have with cats.
Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Do you know? Check that out?
Speaker 5 (01:08:31):
Oh yeah, fas number one. Well, listen, thank you so much, Dern.
It is always our greatest pleasure to speak with you
and so happy to have you on our first week
of our show.
Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 5 (01:08:45):
Yeah, anyone who wants to and everyone should follow Doran
on his socials at doran oh fear cast and also
pre sale tickets are available now for La Comic Con
Love Comic Love Gravir tickets, get.
Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
A yes to having you soon come back tomorrow Yeah yeah, yeah,
and then again, if there's anything that you want us
to be covering, or anything that you don't want us
to be covering, we have very thick skin, so go
ahead just give it to a street.
Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
You know. The whole idea for this is that.
Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
You know, we're just kind of all around a kitchen
table together and talking about the news of the day
and hopefully bringing some a weirdness to stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
So I will stop talking. I know, Court, WHI should
we go to? First?
Speaker 5 (01:09:31):
Well, listen, I have a DM that I is definitely
worth hearing. It's from Matt from Baltimore. Thank you for
reaching out, and so they wrote, despite everything. Luigi has
maintained his innocence. There is a lot of conversation around
his motives and support, but no one seems to be
questioning whether or not he's the one who actually did it.
(01:09:53):
Have we forgotten that he's innocent until proven guilty?
Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Good point, that's a real fair point. So An actually
because I this is terrible.
Speaker 5 (01:10:05):
And I'm actually glad you put out in my bias,
I was actually thinking that whether Luigi fired the gun
was on the table or not, but it entirely is.
So that's a bad bias I had in my mind.
He has pled not guilty to everything, and his lawyer,
Thomas Dickey, he stated there had that. He has said,
(01:10:28):
I haven't seen any evidence linking luigiman Gioe to the
shooting of CEO Brian Thompson, and even the further said
his defense attorney that the ghost gun excuse me, that
was found on him when he was arrested, it has
not been definitively matched to the one in the death.
Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Soa and no, and also like they have this like
surveillance footage and obviously the shooting, then they have him
on hood exactly, and that's also been brought into a
question is you know, is this a look alike? Although
wasn't he found with the bag with like fake IDs
in it? And you know, obviously this manifesto that kind
of spe and the ghost and the ghostcun but but fair.
Speaker 5 (01:11:11):
I mean, our legal system is and it's true until
proven guilty. So absolutely heard. Thank you. Do we have
any other Did you guys have any other dms?
Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Yeah? Like you, Courtney, I didn't get any dms, No one.
I have one.
Speaker 4 (01:11:25):
And it's kind of interesting hydrocrime tonight. It seems like
the amount of money and resources poured into the McCann
case is completely disproportionate from other comparable missing person's cases.
I even have some friends who think the whole case
is a money laundering scheme. I think that's absolutely ridiculous.
That's absurd, It's absurd.
Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 4 (01:11:45):
I don't think any amount of money could, you know,
be too much on anybody, And I think that's absolutely
an absurd money laundering scheme.
Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Come on, I think I really just hope that she
comes home safe, and I'm just going to keep putting
it out there regardless of what some of the new
developments have suggested. We're just going to keep putting out
good energy that you know, positive things to come from that.
And again tomorrow we'll have some more details on that
as well. I always want to say thank you guys
for staying with us. It's been a great night. We're
(01:12:15):
definitely going to be back tomorrow talking Diddy and also
the Karen Ree trial heats up, so stay with us.
This is True Crime Tonight where we talk true crime
all the time.
Speaker 6 (01:12:26):
Good Night,
This program features the individual opinions of the hosts, guests,
and callers, and not necessarily those of the producer, the station,
it's affiliates, or sponsors. This is True Crime Tonight.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to True Crime Tonight on iHeartRadio, where we talk
true crime all the time. It's Wednesday, June fourth, and
we have a stacked night of headlines. I'm so happy
you're here. Listen the search for the Madeline McCain. It's
been reopened and it's possible that her family may find
some justice. Luigi Mangioni, we haven't talked much about him.
(00:40):
He has some major requests from behind bars and Gabby
Patito's mom. She recently gave a shocking interview, and we're
going to cover why this is getting so much attention.
I'm Stephanie Leidecker and I head U KAT Studios, where
we make true crime podcasts and documentaries, and I get
to do that with producer and host Courtney Armstrong and crime.
I'm analyst Body Move in the best company imaginable.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
So, ladies, where where should we begin with this?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Well?
Speaker 4 (01:07):
I can talk about Madeline McCann because I literally leapt
out of my chair when this news broke and I
had the phone in my hands and I jumped up. Yeah,
you know, you see her name in the headlines and
it's you know, shocking. So for those that don't know
anything about the Madeleine McCann story, let me just kind
of start there. So Madeline was a little girl. She
(01:31):
and her family, her Lovely Flame family, were vacationing in Portugal.
In Portugal, the Algarve is a really like common, really
common destination for those that live in Europe, like a
lot of it's not like uncommon to go to Algarve
in Portugal. Well, they were vacationing in from the United
Kingdom with her parents, Kate and Jerry McCann, and her
two year old, twin siblings and a group of family friends.
(01:53):
And it would be often, you know that they would
they would put the kids to bed and kind of
go to like the neighborhood little russ where you can
literally see the building where they were staying. So it
felt very safe, and they had done this numerous times.
So they went to go eat and the kids fell
asleep about eleven thirty. They went to go eat. They
were on the ground level and you know, while her
(02:14):
parents dined with friends and family every you know, ten
twenty fifteen minutes, they would go check on the kids. Well,
on one of the check ins that they went to
go check in on the kids, they opened the door
and poor Maddie Madeleine is missing, and she's the only
one missing her. The other kids were not missing. It
really kind of blew up from there. There was a
national manhunt for Madeline. The Portuguese National Police. They're you know,
(02:40):
desperate to find her because you know, the Algarve is
known to be a safe tourist area for all these
Europeans very s and the worst thing that can happen is,
you know, a little girl goes missing. I mean, it's
just it's awful.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
And they were on spring break. They were with like
seven other families. You know, you can kind of picture it.
It's like a resort. It was very almost enclosed, all right.
So it wasn't like they were gallivanting down on main
street and their kids were asleep and left alone, because
they got kind of some bad press for that. It
was also a different time, but they were still within
the within eyes distance from where the kids were resting.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
They were two hundred feet away. I mean, that's that's
a very short amount of space and the door was
unlocked for I guess that are a worse now, but.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Right, right, So what the news is, though, the news is,
and if you also don't know, there is a suspect,
and there's been a suspect for many years. His name
is Christian Bruckner and he's a German citizen who lived
in Portugal at the time and Neilgarve. And he was
kind of like I would say, a handyman kind of person,
(03:46):
like he would work odd jobs and he kind of
lived he couchsurfed a lot, and he lived in like
a camper. And he's the top suspect because he made
like a kind of like startling confession to an informant
who's identity has been protected by the German police and
saying that you know, it's it's pretty terrible. He said,
(04:06):
she didn't even scream, is what he said. And so
he's been the top suspect. And he's also currently serving
time in Germany for a completely separate assault on an
elderly woman, a rape charge.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
He raped an elderly woman. He ranked a serving time
behind bars for that crime.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Right, so in twenty sixteen, and you have to You
have to understand, twenty sixteen is nine years after she disappeared.
It's many, many years. They searched Christian Bruckner's home in
Germany and they found like a cash of thumb drives
buried under under his dog. And on these thumb drives.
(04:47):
We don't know everything, right, we don't know everything that's
on these thumb drives, but on these thumb drives were
terrible conversations, like horrific conversations he was having on Skype
and he was, you know, kind of admit pretty terrible
things that he wanted to do to little girls, and
he wanted to It's pretty disgusting.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
It's not what he's disgusting.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
And they also found swimsuits, like seventy five swimsuits alleged
that were for toddlers. So not to get too graphic
and sad, but you know, this guy seems like a
real sicko.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
So now that you know who Christian is and like
where he was during the time Madeline went missing, while
police have basically said that his phone was kind of
in that area when Madeline went missing, and you know,
of course, like I said earlier, he was living there
at the time. He lived there on and off for
like ten years. Well, so the police for whatever, and
(05:42):
we don't know why. But as of yesterday, twenty five
national Portuguese policemen along with the German police are searching.
They're they're searching an area. They're focusing on an area
in which he lived, this cottage area in which it
was his primary residence. So again we don't know why,
(06:02):
though they haven't given us the public any indication on
what they've learned. But I mean, if you think about it,
you know, he's this man has been in prison for
a couple of years. There has to be some kind
of audible confession of some kind that they've run across,
or maybe he said he dumped her body somewhere, you know, somewhere.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
We're only things, not body.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
My thought is with the investigation that there must be
something that has to do potentially with underground or a
hint of that, right, because a lot of the investigative
materials that they're bringing sort of go down around into
the ground where like wells and pipes would be in
the infrastructure. So that's a very big part of this investigation.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Right, and keep in mind it's eighteen years, right, so
you know, a real hats off to law enforcement. By
the way, this was like the most covered case of
a missing person in the world, right, it got coverage for.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
So so long.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
We've all been really waiting. But it's been quiet for
a long time now. So to have this be reopened again,
there must be something very major, substantial exactly.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
I agree also, and thankfully we've moved past this. But
do you remember how big an investigation happened around the
poor parents. Yes, yeah, I was just really under a suspicion.
I mean, they really went through it, and look, they
were the target.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
Initially.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
The initial thought was that they there was an accident
or something and their daughter.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Died sleeping medication or something.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Exactly, and they covered it up. And look, they stayed
together to this day. You know, both mom and dad
were renowned, really well respected physicians.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Dad's a cardiologists.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
You know, these are very smart, elegant humans and can
you imagine, like you, all of the eyes of the
world are on you. But they stuck together and you know,
remain married to this day, and you know, frankly remain hopeful.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They criticized.
Speaker 4 (07:59):
They were criticized, it really heavily, specifically by American press.
I you know, of course that's all I've got access to.
I don't really have access to the UK press at
the time in two thousand and seven, right, but they
were really criticized for not being like not crying enough,
crying too much, not being emotional, being too emotional, like
they could not win for losing, you know. I mean,
imagine you've just lost your daughter, one of one of
(08:21):
your children, and now on top of everything, you're being
criticized by people who really have no idea what is
going on. It's got to be just terrible. And I
really they really do seem like lovely people, and I
really do hope that they get some answers.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
I truly do.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
It does kind of have a similar thing to you know,
infamous cases like Jean Benet Ramsey, right, where a mom
and dad were targeted for so so long, and even
now today that's up for discussion again, right, because there's
been new information.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
It's pretty astounding.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Like she had that very Madelin McCain had that iconic picture, right,
the little blonde hair with the bangs and the eye defect. Yeah,
she had two different color eyes, right, there was a
pair or a speckle in her pupil. If I remember
it looked.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
Like a birthmark.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's but it's it's a real identifier, right,
And I think from that case, a lot of things
have changed, just you know, in the world, how we
see vacations for that matter. You know, yes, they had
the doors open, and you know that was a different time, right.
And you know European lifestyle, everyone's sort of a group effort.
There's community. It's a lovely elegant resort. You know, this
(09:27):
kind of shaped things for all of us obviously, because.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yeah, you leave, you have to lock your doors.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Now, this type of thing, you know, really came under
a lot of consideration. So our hope is that they
definitely find some answers.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
Yeah, you know, And there's a couple of things I
wanted to talk about with Christian Bruckner, the suspect, just
to give people an idea of like why the German police.
The German police basically have said that they have concrete
evidence that he's responsible, which is astounding to me. In
June of twenty twenty, that's when they said that German
prosecutors stated they have Kong and I'm using quotes concrete
(10:01):
evidence that Christian Bruckner killed Madeline. You know, at the time,
he was, you know, living there. On the night of
her disappearance, his phone received a thirty minute call near
the resort at the same time.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
She vanished, what does that mean? So well, what does
that mean?
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I read that as well when I was doing research,
and I don't know what that implied.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
He he was dating a woman at the time, and
she's a British woman who had been his girlfriend, you know,
for some time. She said that on the night before
Madeleine's abduction, he told her, I have a job to
do in Praya Deluze tomorrow. That's the resort they lived,
where they were at. I have the job to do
in Praya de Louze tomorrow. It's a horrible job, but
(10:43):
it's something I have to do and it will change
my life. You won't be seeing me for a while.
That is what his girlfriend says. He said the night
before Madeleine went missing. So is it a job? Did
he get her for somebody?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh my god, Oh my god, goodness. I can't even
think about it. It makes me crazy, I know, I know,
it's nausey. So and even no matter what the You know,
we've been told this from family members that we've interviewed
of missing kids, like you want answers, right, you can't
eat a meal because you feel like you should be
out searching. Nothing makes sense until you have at least
(11:18):
some closure one way or the other.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
So our fingers are.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
Crossed, right, right, Well, hopefully we'll get answers now. The
investigators said that the searches should conclude by Friday of
this week, so in a couple of days now, you know,
it might be actually Thursday night for us, you know,
when these these searches end. But I'm hoping they find
something before then. As Courtney mentioned, they brought ground penetrating
radar and all kinds of machinery to perform these searches,
(11:42):
so they're looking in a specific spot.
Speaker 6 (11:45):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Wow, it's pretty frightening.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
But you know, we'll see hopefully, hopefully they'll they'll find
something and they can lay poor Matty to rest in
her home country with her family, and hopefully we can
put this, you know behind us. In this Chris Bruckner
person can can get a trial. Yes, and yeah, well
know what happened with poor Mattie. It's been eighteen years in.
Speaker 5 (12:08):
The eleven o'clock hour, we'll be discussing an alleged Santa
Anna serial cat killer was evaded law enforcement for two weeks.
Join the conversation eight eight eight thirty one crime we
want to hear from you keep it here. On True
Crime tonight.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
There was this very interesting Gabby Patito interview that her
mom gave regarding her daughter's passing, and it's it's pretty
shocking some of these things that she's bringing to the surface.
And also a serial cat killer, which obviously is right
up Body's alley. You know, if you don't know this already,
Body was the star of the Emmy Award winning Don't
(12:55):
f with Cats, which you can always catch on Netflix,
so obviously she has plenty to say on the topic.
And then Luigi Mangione, is it Mangione or MENGIONI If.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
You say Mangione, I say MANGIONI.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
There you go. You know, interesting thing about his little
time behind bars. You know, he's being housed at the
same facility as Diddy and Sam Bankman.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
That's right, Federal Crimes. That's a Federal crime cop in place.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Yeah, I mean talk about it like I don't know,
is it's also the same place where Epstein died. I
think he was kept there for a moment, but no,
I think there is a broken facility. I could be
wrong about that. So, you know, court, should we start
with Luigi?
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Yeah, absolutely so. Just yesterday, the alleged United Healthcare CEO killer,
Luigi Mangioni, his defense team filed emotion and in this
motion they are urging the New York judge to allow
Mangioni to appear with no handcuffs or bulletproof vest.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Like in street clothes. Is that the idea that they
want him wearing a.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
Suit, just just not shackled, just not with the vest.
Speaker 4 (14:03):
And because he's already wearing street clothes, he's already wearing
like everything he wears is scrutinized too, already, like he's
wearing green. This means that like people are going crazy
over things that he's wearing.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
He did have that strange thing with his lawyer where
they were both dressed identical.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
That was a weird thing with the red maroon.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah sweaters and the blouse underneath. And yeah, if you're
not familiar with this case, I'm sure you are now
that we're talking about it, because it was everywhere. Luigi
Maanngione was a twenty six year old who shot and
killed right and planned site the CEO healthcare executive Brian Thompson,
and has since been brought into custody and is awaiting
(14:42):
his death sentenced trial. And is it for death, Yes,
it's exast sentence trial.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
So it's interesting because he's facing eleven charges in New
York State. Now, New York State does not have the
death penalty. It was abolished. I think it was back
in maybe two thousand and No, two thousand and four
is when it was abolished. The last state execution was
actually back in nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
But he's also charged federally and that is where the
death penalty sentence potentially comes in if he's found guilty,
and the federal charges include murder through the death of
a firearm and some moving around instead.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
He's that he's accused of printing.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah it was a three D gun, right, And he
was also found with you know, a manifesto, And it's
not looking great for him, but obviously he does deserve
a fair trial. And you know, there was that huge
purp walk when he first was brought into custody.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Do you remember that.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
It was like Succession the show on HBO. Right, the
helicopter landed and he was like, you know, they really
gave him a purp walk. Right, the mayor was there,
he was shackled and like the city of New York.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Was like behind them. It was iconic. Exactly, it was
like it it's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And his lawyers, I don't really love that because again,
it's giving such a high profile perp that's not normally
how it goes down obviously, so is that performative? Are
the optics of that unfair to his defense? And I
guess that's what they're trying to get ahead of now.
Speaker 6 (16:10):
Well.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
I think also that the crime itself was so wild
to see on the streets of New York. So this happened,
and I know, for it's been a minute since he's
been in the news, but at the time, I feel
like almost everyone was glued to their screens. It was
back in December six forty five in the morning, just
walking around, people are walking to work, and we see
(16:32):
victim Brian Thompson, who often gets really lost in this.
He is the CEO of United Healthcare. He's the man
who lost his life. He was fifty years old, fathered
two teenage boys who, by all accounts he adored. He
was walking to work to attend a meeting and then
he was shot by a massed assailant on camera, and
(16:52):
the assailant then fled the scene on a bike.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
What else is going on with Luigi?
Speaker 2 (16:56):
Their Courtney, Well, you're right, Courtney, because the victim really
does get law in the sauce on this one. And
Brian Thompson, you know, again, this was a person that
has a very full life and was executed not okay,
obviously for all the obvious reasons. And also Luigi's a
very unexpected assailant, right, and he got so much attention,
and some of it I was a bit conflicted about.
(17:17):
Everyone was calling him the hot assassin, or that he
had a they were like Timothy Shalome lookalike contests because
air quotes. He's a handsome twenty six year old man
Ivy League graduate. You know, he went to penn University
of Pennsylvania, very prestigious, top of his class, you know,
really really upwardly, mobile, loving family, doesn't totally meet the
(17:39):
m O.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Very popular.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
He had tons and tons of friends, so you know,
all of all of the media really kind of ate
up his his appearance because he was you know, air quotes, dreamy,
their words, not mine, and that was really strange, like
here somebody is being put to rest, their funeral is
happening for the Brian Thompson and his family, and meanwhile,
all the news is common mensing on how you know
(18:01):
Luigi should be freed and he's so handsome and he's
too pretty for prison is yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:05):
I mean he was on I was looking today just
you know, researching around and reminding myself. There were snl
skits with him exactly a lot of the topic being he's,
you know, so good looking people couldn't get enough, but
he's He was also very well known as the delay, deny,
depose guy, and that's because those words were written on
(18:27):
this spent casings that came out of the cartridges of
the gun, and those words harken back to delay, denied, defend,
which is really well known phrase in the insurance industry
that when insurers try to push off to avoid paying claims. Right, So, Stephanie,
I think that's part of what it was, was not
(18:48):
just his looks, but sort of the Robin Hood mystique.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
And that's so true, but it's also so bogus.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
First of all, he didn't even have United Healthcare at
number one, number two and actually happened. Trust me, we
were all down the rabbit hole real time and social
media and looking through his social media, and we were
able to identify very quickly along with the you know,
other journalists, that he had a back injury. He had
had a back injury after college, who was living in
I think Honolulu, surfing accident and excruciating pain and had
(19:18):
had a very important surgery that left him in agony
to some extent. And you know that a little bit
tracks right. Maybe he was having issues with his healthcare
provider and that was making him amped and then some.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
But he didn't even have that same insurance.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
So even all this, you know, the casings and the
secret messaging and it al was a lot of nothing.
Think his manifesto was kind of a peter out, like
it starts strong and he has something to say, kind
of like there was no there's really no end game.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
There's no big message. There really wasn't.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
Well, he was really into the Uno Bomber, and I
was super into the Enobarmer. The manifest I was hooked
on that, and I still kind of oh yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:59):
Okay, I informed on this one as much. Listen, deep level,
I know the top line.
Speaker 4 (20:04):
If you guys ever want to go on vacation, I
can do a whole show on the nabomber. Okay, Like
the manifesto was, I was fascinated by how he got
caught b via his writings and what. Anyway, I digress,
but I think that revolutionized him a little bit, is
what I'm trying to get at. You know, if you
take the unibomber at face value, just on the manifesto
(20:24):
without him actually hurting anybody, the things that he said
in the manifesto were really interesting and kind of like revolutionary,
and if you are going through something traumatic, as in
Luigi with this back surgery, potentially I think that reading
that manifesto and getting in is into it as he
did could have revolutionized him a little bit and set
him off to target healthcare based on his experience and
(20:46):
targeting the head of the snake, which is basically United Healthcare.
Speaker 6 (20:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
I think that's listen, this is just a theory. There's
no proof of this. This is body movements theory only.
But I think that that helped revolutionize him.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
I really do.
Speaker 5 (21:00):
I totally agree. I remember early days going down. As
Stephanie mentioned, his socials, but also his goodreads, where yeah,
certain books. It's very interesting and I think the revel is,
you know, his being revolutionized does hold water potentially in
his document, manifesto, whatever you want to call it. Part
of what was found on Mangion after the five day
(21:23):
manhunt when he was found at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania,
outside of New York. So it was only two hundred
and sixty two words. Part of it read quote. These
parasites simply had it coming. A reminder, the US has
the number one most expensive healthcare system in the world,
yet we rank roughly number forty two in life expectancy.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Okay, there's better ways to go about this messaging. And
by the way, absolutely he's twenty six years old. Can
you imagine his parents. They're a very prominent family in Baltimore.
He comes from, you know, tons of cousins. If you've
seen family photos, there's like so many cousins and you know,
loving family around him.
Speaker 6 (22:00):
Him.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
What a waste.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Now he's just going to waste in prison till the
end of days if convicted allegedly allegedly unbelievable.
Speaker 5 (22:07):
Absolutely, and that's part of what his defense is arguing.
Why they're saying he shouldn't be put in the shackles.
It'll make him be perceived as dangerous and behind bars.
He has been a model prisoner, one hundred and sixty days.
He's never had a misconduct. Really, yeah, so you know
(22:27):
that's why they're saying, Listen, he doesn't deserve more prejudicial
treatment with these shackles.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
So we'll see there's no jury right now. What's prejudicial?
I'm very hard to get a jury or that, you know,
just for the jury pool.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
It's for the it's for the motion, it's for the
jury pool. I think just having him seen, no.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah, no, he should be I want to talk more
about me too. When we come back, we're going to
be hearing some super juicy details about the Gabby Patito story,
and later in the show at eleven, we're going to
be talking about the alleged Santa Anna serial cat killer.
I have a lot to say about that stick around
true crime tonight.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
So where should we begin with this new update on
Gabby Patito and her mom.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
You all might remember you know, Gabby.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Patito was that blonde, beautiful young girl who was doing
this van trip with her then fiance, Brian Laundry, and
they were basically, you know, taking video of themselves, taking video,
you know, documenting blocking blogging. Yeah, I'm like from nineteen ten,
so they are. They were documenting this like van trip
(23:42):
over the summer, and Brian and Gabby were they were
basically high school sweethearts. And then they had moved to
Brian's house where he was living with his mom and
dad in Florida. They're originally from Long Island, so Gabby
was living with him, and look, they're young, they're you know,
she was twenty two years old, and they decide to
do this epic road trip, and you know, it starts
off really great, and at some point it goes really
(24:04):
sideways and becomes this real look into domestic violence in
a way I can't even describe. So long on the
short of it is, Gabby doesn't return home. The whole
nation was looking for her. I'm sure you guys were
as well. We were all down on wanting her home.
She ultimately turned up dead, and and look, she turned
(24:24):
up dead through strangulation and apparently blunt force trauma to
her head, and the family was going crazy. We were
all the whole the whole nation was going crazy looking
for her. And then Brian the fiance Brian laundry. He
basically returns home to his parents' house with the van,
but without Gabby. So think about that, while the parents
(24:45):
can't get answers, right, the parents, so Gabby's parents are
blowing up their phones. Obviously they want to know what's happening.
We haven't Gabby, you know, just like my mom, I
talked to her ten times a day, right, So Gabby
was very frequently in touch with her her family, and look,
they were having some like spats here and there, and
mom didn't really think too much of it. But after
(25:06):
a few days she starts to get super nervous, so
naturally she starts calling Brian's parents. Gabby was also living
with them, so they're all very close, and it's radio silence,
total radio silence. And then, sure enough, if you know
the story already to spar with me, Brian ultimately turns
up dead. He took his own life and left behind
a letter explaining why he had to kill Gabby because
(25:30):
she slipped or she injured herself into get her out
of pain. He basically had to kill her. It was
like a mercy killing of sorts, a mercy killing. Yet
he left her her sweet body in the cold to
roten Be. You know all the things. So this is
a pretty like major story. We all know the answer.
But very recently, Gabby's mom has said that she believes
(25:54):
that Brian's parents may have actually killed him. He claimed
apparently that he committed suicide because he couldn't live with
the grief. But now you know, Gabby's parents are not convinced,
and Gabby's mom is really outwardly saying Brian's parents are
the problem. I forgive Brian, may he rest in peace.
I do not forgive that mother. And there's something wrong
(26:17):
with her because also when they went to get Gabby's belongings,
the house was already gutted apparently, and all of Gabby's
things were already gutted. There was already a big cover
up and play. And look, if you've seen that documentary again,
I feel like we're like Ciskel and Ebert always with
the documentary, right, But it's a very interesting watch if
you haven't seen it. It's also on Netflix and it
(26:38):
really does show them and all of the video that
they were taking along the way on their trip, and
it's pretty harrowing because at one point you'll remember, they
got pulled over, yes, and this body can the footage. Yeah,
basically there was an altercation. Police get involved and separate them,
and Brian is sort of acting like, oh, it was
(26:59):
her fault. It was her fault, and she's sort of
conceding to that, but she looks petrified and then of course,
in her sweet face.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
In this bodycam footage, you can you can see in
her face, I just I look back at this and
I just want to scream because her sweet face, she's like,
I guess it's my fault.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Right now.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
They got pulled over because it was reported that he
was slapping her right yes or something, and then it
got totally turned around real time in front of the
police that she was the aggressor exactly right exact and
you can see now we learned too that I guess.
There was a selfie taken by Gabby and in this selfie,
(27:41):
she's in the back of the police car and she's
begging for her phone. You know, she just wants to
call her mom and I just it's so heartbreaking. And
in this selfie that we just now have access to,
you can see her face markings. It really is a
cautionary tale.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
On so many levels. I watched that the clip of
the video of it's Nicole Schmidt is Gabby Potito's mom,
and yeah, she specifically said I think it's very possible
they did something and.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
That they were culpable.
Speaker 2 (28:14):
Right, So imagine the harrowing hours when you're looking for
your daughter and looking for him as well, right, Like
they just want answers period the end. You don't even
you're not assuming anyone's dead. You're just assuming that there's
you know, maybe she's in a hospital, or maybe they've
had a fight, or you know, maybe she lost her phone.
You don't go to she's been you know, left for
dead by her fiance. But regardless, the mom was really
(28:36):
being Brian's mother, meaning the accused killer. His mother was
really cagy the entire time. So to make the suggestion
that they killed him and that he did not take
his life, that's pretty major because what do you make
of that?
Speaker 3 (28:51):
Like, what do you do? God, this is a horrible
question to even ask, what do you do your son
comes home with the van and without his girlfriend, do
you and in their case, they all remember they all
went to this camp like this camp.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Yes, Brian Landry's family with the parents and I believe
his sister too, go and pack up to go on
a trip. They went to his hand. It was so odd,
I mean beyond.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And well the reason they say they did that is
because they wanted to make a plan. So they went
into the woods, into this air quotes camping place so
they wouldn't have cell service and that they would be
able to kind of get in a group huddle and
put a plan in place. And that plan was ultimately
for Brian to go off into the wilderness and rather
than facing prison, he would take his own life. Or
(29:36):
Gaby's mom would say, or the parents killed him.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
I don't know. Well haven't they been in litigation.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
So the Potito family, and by the way, I guess
totally related Joe Potito, Gabby's father, has created an organization
who that I admire greatly.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Gabby was a beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
Young woman, blonde hair, blue eyes, and you know, she
got a lot of attention. And Joe Patito just a
remarkable man recognized like gosh, Mike, you know, of course
he's probably very happy his daughter got all this attention.
But his organization, the Potito Foundation, are now bringing awareness
to you know, black and brown people who go missing,
(30:19):
and you just have to really admire, like they've taken
this tragedy and really turned it into something so just.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
I could cry.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
It brings tears to my eyes to think about the
just it's so inspirational. But my point in bringing all
this up is they have been in litigation with the Laundries,
I think civilly to sue for like wrongful death or something,
because they're they're implying that they knew that Gabby was
out there, they knew she was in you know, exposed
(30:50):
to the wild in past and didn't do anything and
didn't help recover her or anything. So maybe through this
litigation some kind of disc rehappened, you know, because once
you open litigation with somebody, now you're you have reciprocal
discovery happening. I'm kind of wondering, like, there's got to
be something there for for Gabby's mom to utter those words,
(31:11):
you know, she's basically saying. I think specifically the mom is.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
Responding to the mom. He is not into Brian's mom.
Speaker 5 (31:19):
She she quote calls her a sociopath and also quote
they know what he did. They being Launcher's parents, they
know what he did. He helped him. I just want
to say, it's really imperative to say that this is
Gabby Potito's mom, Nicole's opinion, This is her opinion, and
what we know is fact is that a Florida medical
(31:40):
examiner has ruled Brian Laundry's death as a suicide.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
So just.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
Behind a note and you know that all sort of tracks.
But again, like you're that, it sounds like allegedly that
should become a drinking game. We should call it the
allegedly game. How many times do we say allegedly? But
you know, in reality, yeah, her body was out there
for far longer than it should have been, and the
agony that they were put through, perhaps unnecessarily. If Brian
(32:09):
Laundry's parents were in fact aware that this had happened,
that is criminal in my opinion, one hundred percent, I.
Speaker 5 (32:16):
Think, and even if not legally criminal, even dialing back
to way in the beginning, when again Gabby's parents were
just saying, hey, where is she and not getting a
call back from her fiance's parents. That again not in
court of law, that in itself is criminal. We want
to hear your thoughts about Snight's case. Give us a
call eight eight eight three to one. Crime. We're talking
(32:36):
about Madeline McCain, Luigimanngioni, Brian Landry. So we want to
hear really everything that you have to say. So there's
a couple of quick headlines that are happening now, and
the first one say that is not the word. There's
a police hunt continuing for a father who is alleged
to have killed his three daughters in Washington State, and
(32:59):
it is a search for thirty two year old Travis Decker.
His wife who is excuse me, his ex wife, who
is divorced from mister Decker, said that he has been
diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and is currently unmedicated, which
just adds to sort of the potential chaos of this search.
(33:20):
So we're going to get into it in a big
way tomorrow. But a tip came in just I think
a couple of hours ago. I believe that he was
potentially seen in McCall Idaho's day.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
So if you're in that if you're in that area,
keep your eye out, you google his name, that you
get his image and be on the lookout because he
is considered dangerous.
Speaker 5 (33:42):
Very dangerous. We'll put a link on our socials and
if you do have any information, you are encouraged to
call the US Marshall Service at one eight hundred three
three six zero one zero two. Again, we're going to
put this on our social and we're going to really
get into it tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, it's such a look at you know again, mental
illness is something that we should have a therapist or
a psychoanalyst on or someone to kind of shed some
light into this because if you think about the Luigi
I'm not saying anything.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I'm not suggesting that I know if he was or was.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Not mentally ill, but it does seem like a through
line here of you know, how do we like spot
some of this stuff and prevent some of this stuff
because bipolar is really difficult if not treated, and you
know what a horrible.
Speaker 5 (34:28):
Ending or in this case, borderline personality. That's right, Let's
try and find someone who can talk us through it
a little bit. One other headline, this happened the Austin
Police Department. They're investigating it. Another body that was found
in Ladybird Lake in Austin, Texas. So for the past
over the past three years, at least thirty eight bodies
have been found there. That so, listen, insane, it's insane.
(34:52):
I gasped as well, bodies I did, so what well
when I read a little bit further so, mainly the
causes of death have been attributed to accidental drownings. Suicide
is the number two cause, and drug ode verdoses and
natural causes. So so far, only one case has been
(35:13):
ruled to murder, but about half a dozen of the
cases remain unknown.
Speaker 4 (35:18):
Oh, but the bodies aren't being dumped there. It's not
like a dumping site, right, it's just accidents and.
Speaker 5 (35:24):
Well, you know all of all of those things, A
lot of accidents, and there's a lot of accidents and
drownings and bodies.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
So we'll come back, you know, joining us later in
the show. Doronto Fear true crime pop culture expert for sure,
and of course body is going to be tracking a
potential serial cat killer. All that and much much more
true crime tonight where we talk true crime all the time.
(35:57):
Let's talk about this terrible serial Yeah, what is that about?
I kind of want to start with you know this,
this stuff is kind of near and dear to my heart,
so I do appreciate the time to talk about this stuff.
I know it's not, you know, the typical true crime
kind of thing, but it it definitely has the menacing undertones, right,
and it can definitely lead, as we all know and
(36:20):
have witnessed to, you know, further deviant behavior leading to humans.
So I'm just gonna kind of briefly kind of go
over this because it is hard to talk about. I
mean it, listen, this kind of stuff is very hard
for me to talk about, but it is so I think,
super important. I'm just trying to be as honest as possible.
It's difficult to talk about. There's a guy in Santa Anna.
His name is Alejandro Olavero Sacosta, and he has been
(36:43):
charged with killing you know, upwards of twenty five housecats
in the Santa Anna area. And you know, I'm from
this area of Orange.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
County, and you know, so I know like the area,
I know the neighborhood. I know, you know, this is
a very you know, caring neighborhood. These people love their pets,
and their cats are being brutally murdered by their neighbor. Well,
he was charged in April of twenty twenty five, and
he got bonded out because you know, again, judges have
(37:14):
minimums and maximums that they can do, and you know,
animal cruelty isn't necessarily this big crime, right. So the
problem with that is is that they're just kind of
looking at the charge, right, They're not really looking at
how he did this, all right, So what he would
do is he would lure these animals to his home
with food. What m So he would open, like, let's say,
(37:37):
a can of tuna, all right, and put it in
his windowsill. And this is just me basically opining what
he did. He is being accused of luring them with food,
for sure, but officially I'm telling you this is my.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Theory of what he would do.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
And he would get these pets, and again, these are
not like feral cats. These are people's loving pets. And
then he would brutally kill them. He wasn't just killing them,
he was stomping on them. He was beating them. And
that's the thing that's really not being taken into consideration
is how menacing he was to these animals. And so
(38:14):
he got bonded out and he was supposed to reappear
in court on May twenty first, but he didn't show up.
So the judge rightfully so increased his bond to five
fifty I'm sorry, fifty thousand dollars and issued a benchward
for his arrest. Well, when they go to his house,
he's nowhere to be found, and he's been on the
run ever since and nobody has seen him. And you know,
(38:35):
it's scary because you know the statistics. I do panels
on this on crime con with accredited doctors. You know,
these are not statistics I made up. These are coming
from real doctors that do these panels with me. I
did a panel with doctor Chris Mahani Mahandi and he,
you know, informed me that about all these statistics, like
(38:56):
perpetrators of animal abuse are three point two times as
likely to have a criminal record in five point three
times more likely to have a record of at least
one violent crime.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
And a lot of women that show up in domestic
violent shelters, you know, they say they suffered through their
abuse for so many years, oftentimes because the husband or
the boyfriend or the partner or whatever would be threatening
to kill their dog or their animals. So you know,
this isn't this isn't just something that you know, I'm
(39:27):
pulling out of the air. This is like scientific research, right.
Speaker 6 (39:30):
Well.
Speaker 5 (39:31):
Also, yeah, and statistically, as you were saying, significant as
a marker of potential future human abuse. Yeah, because really
you're taking some a vulnerable being and you're asserting your dominance.
And in this case, as you were saying, you know,
the horrible things you said about his manner of killing
(39:51):
these cats, I mean, that's an aggression that lives within
a person and it is coming out in one way
and can often lead into you.
Speaker 4 (40:00):
Know, right, because if he's the way he's doing this
is like he's almost getting pleasure out of it, and
at some point the cat isn't enough. Right, And again,
this is not about the cat. It's about I mean,
obviously I love cats.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I'm a huge I'm a little allergic, but I love them.
Oh No, I have a cat. I love her so much.
I have a tattoo of my you know, deceased cat
on my arm. I love my cats. But it's not
about the cat, you know, It's about how they're doing it.
Like he was stomping, he was getting pleasure, in my opinion,
allegedly allegedly allegedly from from doing these things. And you
(40:35):
know it's a control thing, right, and eventually, at some
point it's not going to be enough to satisfy that urge,
and he's going to step up, right, and what's the
next step a person? And you know I experienced this firsthand, right,
we wouldn't talk about that experience too. Let's talk about
doing ough with cats body there.
Speaker 5 (40:55):
You really had some unbelievable statistics. I've seen some of
your panels and if I'm remembering, didn't a study find
that's something like almost fifty percent of convicted rapists and
about thirty percent of child molesterers had a history of
animal cruelty.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah, it's sure wi stuff. Yeah, Like it's really a tell,
it really is.
Speaker 4 (41:17):
And then you know, like in my experience too, you know,
I of course dealt with Luca Mgnauta, who, by the way,
I hate saying his name, So I'm going to refrain
from that moving forward, if that's okay with everybody.
Speaker 5 (41:27):
Yeah, but in my name at your mouth?
Speaker 4 (41:30):
Yeah yeah, in my experience, you know, before he even
uttered the words that he was going to move on
to humans because he did utter those words in messages
to us. And I'll give a little backstory on that
if you guys want, but yes, please do. Okay, So yeah,
oh man, where do I begin? Just turn on don'nuf
with cats and then you'll get the whole story. But
you know, in twenty ten, I ran across a video
(41:53):
that was posted online, and you know it, I thought
it was a cat video and I always watched the
Q who doesn't?
Speaker 3 (41:59):
Right? Who does?
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Cue?
Speaker 4 (42:00):
I always watch these It lifts my spirits, right. Well,
it didn't turn out, you know, it started that way,
but it didn't end that way. It ended pretty gruesomely
with this like hooded person, you couldn't see this person's face,
you know, putting these beautiful cute kittens that he was
loving on into a plastic bag and then putting a
(42:21):
vacuum up to it and sucking the air out.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
And that was the video.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
And he put it up on a YouTube channel called,
you know, called catch Me if you Can, and that
was like, oh, okay, I was challenged, Yeah, okay, you
know I was enraged. Honestly, I was like because I
felt duped, you know, I was like, oh, look at
these cute cats. And then oh, I was just horrified.
I was absolutely horrified. And again it was the way
(42:45):
in which he had done it, just like with you know,
the suspect in Santa Anna. And by the way, speaking
of Santa Anna, I just want to if you're listening
in Santa Anna, I'm so proud of that neighborhood for
protesting and demanding justice. They are not staying quiet, and
you know what, kudos to you, Kudos to you guys.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
Keep it up.
Speaker 4 (43:03):
I'm definitely watching. But you know, it's the way in
which which the guy with this hood over as was
doing this. And I started kind of investigating the video.
And when you're doing that, you know, you're you're dumping
the video out. You're looking at every frame. You know,
a ten minute video has thousands of frames, right, thousands,
and you're looking for things that can help identify where
(43:27):
in the world. Why I even begin looking, right, because
in an upload to the internet, that could the guy
could be in Egypt, exactly right, he could be in
South Africa, he could be in New Zealand. I have
no idea, right, So you start looking at things in
the room they can't modify or change, and you're looking
at light bulbs. You're looking at outlets, specifically outlets, right,
(43:49):
because everywhere you go they're different, right, Outlets in North
America or in the United States at least look you
know a certain way, but the outlets in England look
totally different.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Right, smart our analyst work right now or this analysis, Well,
that's what you're I never would think that, who would
think that, I would not know to even look for
the outlets.
Speaker 3 (44:07):
But it's such a good point.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
Yeah, that's what we focused on. So, you know, we
started doing those kinds of things. We started looking at,
you know, because you also released a series of photos,
and the photos he released were uploaded to a website
called photo Bucket, and photo Bucket would not strip the
metadata from these photos. It would leave it intact if
it still existed. And we found a bunch of photos
(44:31):
that led us to a serial number of a camera. Okay,
the serial number of the camera he used to take
these photos. So that kind of you know, keeps you
keep narrowing down, basically is what you're trying to do.
Speaker 3 (44:43):
It's a puzzle.
Speaker 4 (44:43):
It's like this, it's a puzzle, and I mean, give
me a puzzle, Give me a puzzle. I'm all about
the puzzle. Well, as time went on, he ended up
doing the same thing with three out three more cats, right,
and so well two more videos, I should say.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
And then you know, we.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
Started, we found out who he was, and we started
talking to him, trying to get trying to get him help.
We were never threatening, We were never you know, like
we're gonna get you.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Never.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
It was just like we want you to get help, like,
you know, because clearly there's something wrong. When he started
communicating he was going to move on to animals or
I'm sorry, to humans, and so you know, we're working
with the police in Ontario and Montreal where we attract
him to eventually, and they were just kind of like,
you know, it's this is cats. What do he want
(45:30):
us to do? Right, And we were like, no, you
don't understand. He's going to move on to people. And
two months after we spoke with the police of Montreal
where we at tracked him to, he ended up killing.
Speaker 3 (45:43):
I'm sorry. He ended up.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
Killing international student from China shouldn Lynn, and he filmed
it and sent us the video I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
You know, I think about this every day.
Speaker 4 (45:58):
I think every day, and I hope that the people
in Santa Anna know that people are watching and we
have your backs. Yeah, and I definitely have your back,
and I hope that law enforcement and the judges and
everybody in charge takes this very seriously.
Speaker 5 (46:17):
And you certainly have all of our support, and we
will cover this much more in the future. We are
going to be joined by pop culture expert Dorano Fear.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Also he's a partner in La Comic Con. He's also
an executive producer and just fn't forget he's responsible for Snookie.
He's responsible for Snooky exactly the greatest director.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
If you've seen Jersey.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Shore, you'll know his work because he casted Jersey Shore
and so many more. So I'll let him speak for himself,
but we're really excited to have him here. And yeah,
he's gonna he's gonna teach us a little bit about
ed Gean.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
I'm obsessed already.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
It's a little too scary, but he's gonna This is
gonna be an interesting twist because it has been. It's
been the inspiration to so many movies, Hannibal, Elector and
you know, Ghostface or Scream, et cetera. So durn Opear
is in the.
Speaker 6 (47:10):
House Hi everybody.
Speaker 5 (47:11):
Hi, Hi, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
Are you all right?
Speaker 5 (47:16):
Ed Gean?
Speaker 6 (47:17):
Huh, Well, listen, when you guys asked for me to
potentially come on the show and talk about things that
I love, you know, I'm an executive producer, I'm a
comic geek, I'm a horror fan, and I am a
true crime aficionado. And for me, horror and true crime
go hand in hand. And I think that since this
is the first week you guys are on, we should
(47:37):
start with what I consider literally the first American monster,
and that was ed Geen. And you know, so when
people think of notorious killers, whether it was Dahmer, you know,
or even fictional ones like Hannibal Lecter, long before them,
it was ed Gen And we're talking mid nineteen fifties.
(47:58):
A little backstory on ed Geen. For about a decade
there was unsolved gray robberies and people didn't understand where
the robberies were coming from. And in nineteen fifty seven
police raided a small farmhouse and they discovered the body
of at least one of two of his victims, Bernice Warden,
who was a hardware store owner. But worse was that
(48:21):
they found that Ian had a pension for interior design,
and the home and the shed were filled with artifacts
made from human skin.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
Right like lamb sheets, lampshades made he was lampshades.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
What skulls was a.
Speaker 5 (48:41):
Nipples a butcher belt involved.
Speaker 3 (48:43):
No, this is too much a nipple belt.
Speaker 6 (48:45):
Yeah. He had bowls made out of human skulls. He
had chairs upholstered with human skin. He had a belt
made from nipples. And the most disturbing element was he
had a full woman suit sown from body parts dug
up from local graves. And so ed Gean in nineteen
fifty seven shot not only the Midwest, but the world,
and he literally became the thing that horror movies are
made out of. And he was the inspiration which then
(49:08):
led Hitchcock to create Norman Bates and Psycho. He was
the inspiration for Leatherface and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series.
He was partially the inspiration for sentence of the Lambs
we Bill, and you know there are correlations to Angela
from you know, the nineteen eighty sleep Away Camp movie,
(49:29):
as well as Doctor Elliott from Dressed to Kill. So
he really spawned a pop culture fascination that no one
else had ever done before him, and he is what
I consider the birth of modern horror and the true
first Monster, so much so that Ryan Murphy is about
to release his third installment of his franchise Monster and
it is ed Geen And you know, this is the
(49:51):
follow up to the Dahmer series on Netflix, and then
the second one was The Menandez Brothers. And here comes
the next face of horror for mar and audiences to
hear the whole story.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
So is he considered like a serial killer or did
he Where does he fit in that landscape?
Speaker 3 (50:07):
Because those movies you just mentioned, they're all so different.
You know, that's I never knew it was based on anything.
Speaker 6 (50:14):
What makes him fascinating was that he really only killed
two people, but his legacy is endless. You know, he
was the first killer to transform murder into a kind
of ritual theater. It was not a serial killer. He
never traveled, he didn't hunt the roadways. He was in
a very small town in Wisconsin. He was raised by
apparently a very domineering mother who was extremely religious. Under
(50:35):
this kind of theory that you know, she was the
only good woman, which then leads you to understand how
Norman bas and the idea of psycho came about. He
was considered a psycho sexual identity collapse, mental illness, And
this is very different from the concept of trans because
(50:55):
he did not think he was a woman. He wanted
to actually be his mother. He built. Yeah, he built
the suit in order to be able to climb into
it after her death. Oh and there's so much there's
so much more surrounding this. You know, we know that
his brother actually there's a story behind it, Boddy. I
think you was the one that actually filled me in
on that first.
Speaker 4 (51:15):
Right, Like, his brother kind of went missing and they
found there was a fire in the farm or you know,
the farm crops, and when the first responders came, they
cleared the fire, but they also found the body of
his brother in that area. But he wasn't touched by
the fire, and they kind of thought maybe, but they
never proved anything. What else can you tell us about
(51:37):
this first monster, dron.
Speaker 6 (51:40):
So to build more on what body was talking about. Yeah,
but in nineteen forty four, there was a fire, a
burning marsh vegetation fire on the property and it got
out of control. So when the local fire department responded,
they found Henry his brother, and his brother was found
face down, bruised, but no signs of smoke in elation
and that time, they never they never, they never went
(52:03):
into it. You know. They said that he was officially
ruled an accident due to apphixiation, but no autopsy was
ever performed and while no charges, yeah, well, no charges
was ever put against ed. They do believe that he
killed his brother, and theories suggests that Henry would have
to like confronted ed about his domineering mother because the
thing was is that ed Geen was considered sort of
(52:26):
a town oddity where his brother was well liked, well known,
and did not have the same issues that he had
with his mother.
Speaker 5 (52:36):
So do you think Doron was he potentially jealous of
having to share his mother with his brother? Know whether
she was alive or dead or.
Speaker 6 (52:45):
I don't know, well, incidents talk about the fact that
the brother had left early on and that he was
against his mother, Augusta. That was her name, Augusta, so
you know, I don't know. So she may have been
able to focus her mental illness on ed and it
could be a story of longtime abuse, which again doesn't
justify the level of the crimes. But no one had
(53:07):
ever seen anything like this before. This level of depravity
had never been experienced or even heard of before, which
is what why I say he's sort of the father
of modern horror, and so he's not a serial killer.
He's just a murderer in the worst sense.
Speaker 2 (53:24):
Do you feel like we're kind of you know, listen,
this is not me so boxing, that's certainly not my intention.
But given that Ryan Murphy, whose work I really I
really like, is doing this as the next you know,
monster for his scripted series, are we glorifying this a bit?
Much like it used to be kind of a rule
that you stayed away from the actual perpetrator to you know,
(53:45):
you stayed away from the killer even right because you
didn't want to give them a stage. Sometimes these types
of murderers that are especially performative, you know, giving them
more of a giving them more FaceTime frankly on the
news or otherwise, it's sort of kind of feeds the
beast a little bit. Are we doing that because you know,
we were talking about this earlier about the Menendez brothers,
(54:05):
and are we glorifying Dahmer or is that just you know,
am I just overthinking that?
Speaker 6 (54:11):
No? It's no, No, it's legitimate. It's a legitimate thing
that I deal with constantly, especially when talking about pop culture.
The issue here is are we turning villainy into heroism?
And Ryan Murphy is an interesting aspect of this because
what he did with Dahmer, which by the way, was
a brilliant limited series.
Speaker 3 (54:29):
It was being.
Speaker 6 (54:30):
Cinematically so well acted, you know, all of it. However,
that he took a very specific lens on Dahmer and
he made Dahmer hyper sexualized with very slow panning shots
of him working out, and he turned it very homo erotic.
He did. He got a lot of backlash for it, absolutely,
but he didn't shy away from it because he did
the same thing with the Menendez brothers.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
Yes, he did do it in fact, yes, yeah, volume
I think he leaned into it, of.
Speaker 6 (54:57):
Course he did. And what I'm looking at now is
that even the casting choice is going to be playing
a game.
Speaker 3 (55:04):
So you know, he's so handsome, like that's again, he's
like a hero.
Speaker 6 (55:09):
So here you go. So are we glorifying it? Are
we hyper sexualizing it? Are we turning it into you know,
remote fantasies? Do I think?
Speaker 5 (55:17):
So?
Speaker 6 (55:17):
Yes? Is it capitalizing on morbidity. Yes, you know, my
type of horror is I like happy horror, meaning comedy
horror like Scream, But even Scream in its own yielded
multiple copycat killers, really really viole. Yes, we'll save that
for another front.
Speaker 2 (55:37):
About that, I didn't know that. I want you to
go see Final Destination. Have you seen that yet? That's
my kind of horror film because it's more of like
a roller coaster. You know, you feel scared, you know,
it's not you know, it's not so insidious.
Speaker 6 (55:51):
Well, but think about ed game for a second. Psycho
was the first ever real horror movie to gain critical
acclaim globally. Now I'm not talking about Nasparato, and I'm
not talking about sort of the universal monsters that came before.
And we have to remember that horror is a reflection
of human fears of its time. So when you look
at horror in the fifties, it was all from beyond.
(56:11):
It was the Blob, the attack of the fifty foot Woman.
It came, you know, from space. This was a reaction
to nuclear you know, the atomic bomb, the space race.
It was the unknown, it was you know, large spiders,
Valley of the Ants, you know, and in the fifties
we didn't have this kind of horror. And when this happened,
(56:33):
Psycho was the first to put in a real vision
of what psychopathy could really be. And it horrified the world.
And it didn't lead any immediately into the concept of
serial killers or flasher movies. What came after that was
a lull. And what we did get was this this
(56:54):
sort of new vision of horror that led to the
women's rights amendments. So in the seventies, when women's rights
got their right the broad burning the pill, suddenly the
reaction became sort of slutshaming because the slasher movies brought women.
Who was the final girl? It was always the virginal one.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Oh my gosh, yeah, that show. All the ones were
the first to go.
Speaker 6 (57:23):
That's what it was. It was about was promiscuous teens
finding a new sort of sexual revolution. And what led
to that, if you go, if you go step back
just half a decade, we dealt with all sorts of
religious horror, the exerting, oh, well, you're.
Speaker 3 (57:35):
Gonna stay with us, so yeah, don't go anywhere. I
don't want to hear more about all.
Speaker 4 (57:39):
Of this stick around because We've got a lot more
to dig into. Duran's gonna stay with us. I'm going
to tie him to his chair to talk about all
of our favorite true crime TV shows and then we
want to hear from you.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
So keep it here.
Speaker 2 (57:49):
True Crime Tonight, back with Doronto Fear. He is our
pop culture crime expert, and he is one of the
best in the business in many different ways. And we've
been talking about ed Geen and sort of this person's
(58:12):
influence on scary movies.
Speaker 3 (58:14):
And we were curious, you know, to hear from you. Deran.
What are you watching right now.
Speaker 6 (58:19):
In terms of true prime.
Speaker 2 (58:21):
Yeah, like any documentaries or you know, anybody Courtney or body.
If there's anything that we must be watching. You know,
we want to know always always.
Speaker 6 (58:30):
I just I just binge watched on AMC Plus and
it's also available on sun Dance. The Preppy Murder, the
Death in Central Park that came out in twenty nineteen.
I'm linked to that unfortunate party and that is fascinating
for me. Number one, I lived it sort of adjacent
to it. And number two, again, I was fascinated by
(58:51):
this concept of the monster that we didn't see and
if people don't know this story. It follows you know,
the Robert Chambers and this was the crime of the
Center before OJ like the whole world watched a handsome
nineteen year old six well four Upper East sider yuppified
in a time of excess, and he murdered Jennifer Levin,
(59:15):
a beautiful eighteen year old, killed her in Central Park.
Her body was found, shirt hiked up, no underwear, strangled.
He did admit to it. But what was shocking about
that documentary and why to watch it is it goes
into the first ever trial and how this was the
first case of true victim shaming on a global scale.
(59:38):
They changed the narrative and made him the victim, and
that she was ultimately so promiscuous that he had a
fighter off she was one. Yeah, that was and that
is a testament of how far we've come as a
society and the me too movement. And it is a
horrifying case and if you watch it thoroughly, you can't
help it start to question the motives of the system.
Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
What happened to him? Actually, come to think of it
is is he still behind bars? Like I kind of
forget how that one pays off?
Speaker 6 (01:00:08):
Ooh, that's a whole other story. He ultimately from the trial,
the jury was hung and he took a pleat deal,
so the prosecution, the prosecution was never able to find
him guilty. And what was shocking about that case was
that the whole world championed him against her, what as
the innocent victim. It's a harrowing tale of justice gone wrong,
(01:00:29):
and at least the documentary gives her a voice for
the first time, because every major newspaper covered it as
it was her fault or his doing, or it was
done because of rough sex his and he was so
good looking that that's how they claimed it, going back
to this concept of beauty. So he was arrested, he
(01:00:50):
went to jail, he served, he was got five to fifteen.
He was released, Yeah, from bad behavior while he was
in there. He didn't get five, He stayed the whole fifteen.
He was released. He was then recharged under drug charges
and he actually got eighteen years for the drug charges,
which is so much more than the actual murder of
this innocent eighteen year old girl who had her whole
(01:01:10):
life ahead of her, was just about to leave and
go to Boston University. And that is that is, that
is the tragedy of that case. He was released now
after the second stint in twenty twenty three. Wow, he's out.
Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
That's so interesting. I actually don't know that I was
aware of that.
Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
I feel like we should probably dig dig into that
a little bit further.
Speaker 3 (01:01:29):
I didn't realize he had been released.
Speaker 5 (01:01:32):
Yeah, I certainly want.
Speaker 6 (01:01:32):
To see that doc Wow, So that's what I'm watching.
Speaker 3 (01:01:37):
Yeah, Courtney, body, what about you guys?
Speaker 5 (01:01:41):
Okay, I actually had kind of a groundbreaking moment. I
watched Sins of Our Mother on Netflix.
Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
Lorie Vallo, Yes, Lorie Vallo did though.
Speaker 5 (01:01:54):
And as a reminder, we spoke a little bit about
it the other day. But it's the most complicated case
known to man that Stephanie summarized her so well. But
Lourie Valley, Lourie Valo da Bell left in her wake
a husband who's been murdered, her husband, her new husband's
(01:02:16):
former wife, two of her children who were found buried
in her backyard. It's a really sordid tale. So I
had not seen the documentary Sense of Our Mother on
Netflix until just this week. I had forgotten because I
had deemed Lori Valo just demonic and a monster, and
those are the words I said. I had forgotten that
(01:02:38):
her oldest son was sweetest, yes, but that he was
raped at the hands of Lorie Valo's former husband. And
there's audio of her saying, if I don't turn to
the church, which is what seems to have led her
on this murder spree, then I will turn to murder
speaking about her ex husband. So it just connected the
(01:03:00):
dots that I don't know. I just I had empathy
for her I'd never had before, because I could really
understand being just broken knowing that someone I was married
too did that to my son.
Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
I totally hear you, in your right, she did Lorie Valo.
We're speaking of this also known as the Doomsday mom,
or as I call her killer Mom. I think she's
the pits. And honestly, yes, that was a terrible thing.
We had done an episode with Nancy Grace's show in
Justice with Nancy Grace and interviewed the Sun and he's like, darling,
(01:03:36):
and can you imagine he'd been through so much and was,
you know, very devoted to his mother. And while yes,
you could see that as a wicked tipping point. But
there's so many other countless stories about Lorie Valo that
show her to be a bad egg from jump and manipulative,
and it was almost as though perhaps she took this
(01:03:56):
inciting incident to this terrible thing that happened to her
son and kind of allowed it to give her a
little justification, because remember, she killed her own children, so
she's like, oh, you know, how dare have somebody to
do that to my son? Which, by the way, how
dare that anybody do that to her son? Of course,
but then she went on to kill her own kids
(01:04:17):
and bury them in shallow graves and currently is looking
at another trial because she also apparently tried to kill
her niece's ex husband and she's going to be on
trial for that now representing herself.
Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
That got delayed.
Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
We were going to cover that this week, but we
will obviously do so when that trial kicks in.
Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
But like, what a joke.
Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
She's a clown and she's taking up a lot of time,
and she's killed so many people.
Speaker 3 (01:04:42):
She's a straight up serial killer. Don't get them started, Courtney, don't.
Speaker 5 (01:04:46):
I know, wind you up.
Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
So bad?
Speaker 2 (01:04:53):
Well, yeah, by the way, same similar. I mean, I'm
gonna sound like I'm a nut right now, because Ruby
Frankie have you guys heard this one. Yes, she's the mother. Also,
it's on Hulu. It's called The Monster in Our House
or The Monster in the House, and it's the Ruby
Frank story. And she was again a very lovely, loving mother,
(01:05:14):
had many children, and she was one of the original
like vloggers that would do basically videos with her family
for money and all of her little nuggets. They were
on this like YouTube channel called eight Passengers, which I
kind of remember seeing like they lived in Salt Lake City,
very wholesome, very religious, beautiful family beyond measure. And I
(01:05:37):
don't want to spoil it, but she's recently been arrested
and is looking at thirty years behind bars, because you know,
the image that she put.
Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Forward is anything but.
Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
And I made the mistake of watching this last night
and I couldn't sleep. She got so under my skin,
I guess the way Lori Valo does too, because again
they look so loving and nice on the outside and
then their total psychopaths on the inside, and what they've
done to children is unimaginable. So that one I really
recommend because it has so much found footage like home video,
(01:06:12):
and obviously they were videotaping their lives. I keep saying
videotaping again, like nineteen eighty. I mean, honestly, there's all
this footage though that they've been shooting throughout the years.
Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
So it's pretty compelling to be in the beehive. Buddy,
what about you? What are you watching?
Speaker 6 (01:06:29):
Wow?
Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
Okay, So my girlfriend and I every weekend, like our
weekend kind of revolves around what are we going to watch?
And we kind of sit at home and she presses
play and ipress play right, and we watch. And this
weekend we decided to watch the titan Remember the sub
that imploded down at the Titanic. Oh yeah, ocean Gate.
Now listen, I know that doesn't seem like true crime adjacent,
(01:06:51):
but listen, it is.
Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
For sure.
Speaker 4 (01:06:53):
The United States government is looking at possible charges against
ocean Gate for manslaughter. Five people died in this in
this sub And when you watch the documentary, I was
blown away at I mean, the guy that that ran
this this company ignored every expert and when there were
(01:07:14):
cracks in the hole, he was just like, oh.
Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Well, you know, like it was a complete scam scheme.
Speaker 4 (01:07:21):
He was he was taking tickets and then fixing things
with that ticket money and then like it was awful, right,
And so I was.
Speaker 6 (01:07:28):
Prayed and he was praying on narcissism, which is either
a crazier element to this because it is diabolical.
Speaker 4 (01:07:35):
Absolutely diabolic. And okay, here's how there's another thing though,
the tailen All murders. I watched that and I was stunned.
You guys, you know, I told you I was obsessed
with the unibomber get this and the talent numbers. Did
you guys know, no, listen, did you guys know that
they suspected Ted Kenzyinski the unibomer of this?
Speaker 3 (01:07:56):
Why did not?
Speaker 5 (01:07:57):
Really?
Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
And you know, I'm obsessed with this. I had no idea.
Speaker 6 (01:08:02):
So for people that don't know, it was about you know,
this was in the eighties when tail and all, you know,
people were dying, they were poisoning and like grocery stores,
so you went and like took two for your headache
and died. And so when that happened, it created a frenzy.
The outcome of that, interestingly enough, is the reason why
we have safety steal seals.
Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
That's right, m H. Absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
So those are two I absolutely recommend if you get
if you get a chance, and obviously don't have with cats.
Speaker 3 (01:08:30):
Do you know? Check that out?
Speaker 5 (01:08:31):
Oh yeah, fas number one. Well, listen, thank you so much, Dern.
It is always our greatest pleasure to speak with you
and so happy to have you on our first week
of our show.
Speaker 3 (01:08:44):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 5 (01:08:45):
Yeah, anyone who wants to and everyone should follow Doran
on his socials at doran oh fear cast and also
pre sale tickets are available now for La Comic Con
Love Comic Love Gravir tickets, get.
Speaker 2 (01:09:02):
A yes to having you soon come back tomorrow Yeah yeah, yeah,
and then again, if there's anything that you want us
to be covering, or anything that you don't want us
to be covering, we have very thick skin, so go
ahead just give it to a street.
Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
You know. The whole idea for this is that.
Speaker 2 (01:09:20):
You know, we're just kind of all around a kitchen
table together and talking about the news of the day
and hopefully bringing some a weirdness to stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
So I will stop talking. I know, Court, WHI should
we go to? First?
Speaker 5 (01:09:31):
Well, listen, I have a DM that I is definitely
worth hearing. It's from Matt from Baltimore. Thank you for
reaching out, and so they wrote, despite everything. Luigi has
maintained his innocence. There is a lot of conversation around
his motives and support, but no one seems to be
questioning whether or not he's the one who actually did it.
(01:09:53):
Have we forgotten that he's innocent until proven guilty?
Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Good point, that's a real fair point. So An actually
because I this is terrible.
Speaker 5 (01:10:05):
And I'm actually glad you put out in my bias,
I was actually thinking that whether Luigi fired the gun
was on the table or not, but it entirely is.
So that's a bad bias I had in my mind.
He has pled not guilty to everything, and his lawyer,
Thomas Dickey, he stated there had that. He has said,
(01:10:28):
I haven't seen any evidence linking luigiman Gioe to the
shooting of CEO Brian Thompson, and even the further said
his defense attorney that the ghost gun excuse me, that
was found on him when he was arrested, it has
not been definitively matched to the one in the death.
Speaker 2 (01:10:47):
Soa and no, and also like they have this like
surveillance footage and obviously the shooting, then they have him
on hood exactly, and that's also been brought into a
question is you know, is this a look alike? Although
wasn't he found with the bag with like fake IDs
in it? And you know, obviously this manifesto that kind
of spe and the ghost and the ghostcun but but fair.
Speaker 5 (01:11:11):
I mean, our legal system is and it's true until
proven guilty. So absolutely heard. Thank you. Do we have
any other Did you guys have any other dms?
Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
Yeah? Like you, Courtney, I didn't get any dms, No one.
I have one.
Speaker 4 (01:11:25):
And it's kind of interesting hydrocrime tonight. It seems like
the amount of money and resources poured into the McCann
case is completely disproportionate from other comparable missing person's cases.
I even have some friends who think the whole case
is a money laundering scheme. I think that's absolutely ridiculous.
That's absurd, It's absurd.
Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 4 (01:11:45):
I don't think any amount of money could, you know,
be too much on anybody, And I think that's absolutely
an absurd money laundering scheme.
Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Come on, I think I really just hope that she
comes home safe, and I'm just going to keep putting
it out there regardless of what some of the new
developments have suggested. We're just going to keep putting out
good energy that you know, positive things to come from that.
And again tomorrow we'll have some more details on that
as well. I always want to say thank you guys
for staying with us. It's been a great night. We're
(01:12:15):
definitely going to be back tomorrow talking Diddy and also
the Karen Ree trial heats up, so stay with us.
This is True Crime Tonight where we talk true crime
all the time.
Speaker 6 (01:12:26):
Good Night,
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