Crime Junkie - Everyone Needs a True Crime Friend

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

There are Crime Junkies far and wide and SURPRISE! Conan O’Brien is in fact a Crime Junkie. On this special bonus episode, Ashley sits down with Conan to deep dive into what it is about true crime that has got them absolutely hooked. From the first case that caught each of their attention to the one that keeps them up at night, Ashley and Conan share it all! Can’t get enough of these two? Listen to their conversation on Conan's podcast Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts! Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/ to view the current membership options and policies. 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Conan O'Brien. Surprise! I have a special guest today. I actually got to sit down with Conan on his show, Conan Needs a Friend. That episode is actually available now if you want to listen, it's in the show notes, I link right out to it. But as we've been celebrating five years of Crime Junkie, I've been finding out more and more people from all walks of life are Crime Junkies, like you Conan, you're

a Crime Junkie. You know, I have to say it is something that I think is more prevalent than anybody has. We all want to figure these things out, and we all think that given the information we could figure it out. And so I love it, I've been fascinated by true crime for such a long time. So like what was your, how does that happen? I mean, take it from any angle, and I think the book that had a huge effect on me when I was young was I read In Cold Blood, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and he really did

invent this genre of, what does he call it, it's truthful, it's written like fiction but it's a real story. Yeah, and he did it from like the dual perspectives as well, which was so interesting for a true crime book. So you get the perspective of the Clutter family, and then you get the perspective of Hickok and Perry, and of course it's Truman Capote, so it's some of the best writing you'll ever come across. It's absolutely beautiful, and such a sad story.

And one of the things that freaked me out was the randomness of it. And I think that's something that grabbed me is when you're reading the accounts. This family, the Clutter family, they're as normal as you can get, and they just go to bed for the night, and they live in a town where nobody locks their door, and this is completely inconceivable. And they all go to sleep thinking, well, I'll see you tomorrow, and then these two people show up at whatever one o'clock in the morning at midnight one. And to me, that was incredibly chilling, that if you're young, and this idea that someone

could come into your home. How young were you when you read it? I was two. It was the first book I read. They taught it. It was like Good Night Moon, and then Good Night Moon first, which then I was like, this isn't scary. And then I read in cold blood, and then I went right to crime and punishment.

I think I would have been in high school when I read it, but I just was, and I think there's so many crimes, and the ones that really fascinate me are when a completely normal life is completely upended in this insane way, that those ones can kind of shock me more. And when you're a kid, the idea that someone could come into your house randomly, and it was so, it was so random to Hickok and Perry, they just, they had this goofy information that there was a lot of money in this farmhouse. Well, there wasn't. And there was really later on, no reason for them to think that there was.

They had heard like a rumor in prison, and then they said, okay, we're going to go and get this money from a farm. What? And they were convinced there was a wall safe filled with money. Well, there wasn't. And Mr. Clutter was trying to tell them, I don't have any money here, I don't have a wall safe. And how does it escalate to you kill the entire family?

Well, that has always, and you see this in a lot of cases where you take, I think this was Capote's thesis, and I think it holds out, which is that if you take disparate people, you and I separately might not hurt anybody. But if Ashley and Conan meet up and strike up a friendship at a Starbucks, and we start hanging out, we might together make a killing machine. And you see that, you see that again and again and again, where Leopold and Loeb individually wouldn't have done anything. But together.

It's toxic. It's toxic. They each, each one can trigger something in the other that doesn't exist independently. So that's a freaky thing. Yeah. When we were talking about you coming on this show, I'm like, I mean, he's a comedian. Like we're not laughing over here. I mean, someone told me about you going to the List Trail.

Yes. Is that real? Yeah. This is real. A lot of your listeners know it's, I mean, it's such a famous crime, but I think it's, I want to say 1971, John List living in New Jersey. He's got a daughter and I think two or three sons, wife, mother lives with them. And it's been the basis of so many different stories.

But he loses his job, doesn't tell anybody he's lost his job and just keeps going off to quote work, but he's just hanging out at the train station. Always the biggest red flag. Yes. The second someone, I've seen this over and over, the second someone's lying about going to work, going to school, whatever. The next thing they're going to do is kill their family. Right.

I have not told my wife that I ended my talk show a year and a half ago. I just keep going and saying, well, we had a great show today and she doesn't know that she was never watching it anyway. Not a fan. Not a fan. Not a show. That's fine. That's really funny because people are constantly saying, oh, and so Conan is your wife coming

to see you do this thing tonight and I laugh. No. No. She has a life and she hears this shtick at home and she's not having it. Yeah. So List is running out of money and then conveniently decides that his children are going down a path that will lead them to hell. And the only thing that he can do to save them is to kill them now.

I also see this a lot too, where it's like the worst thing you can do, but I can't tell you how many times it's, this is a little unique, but it's like, oh, well, we don't believe in divorce and I don't want to be ostracized, so I'm just going to kill my husband. I know. I know it's madness how often, I mean, there've been whole wars fought just because people thought I must do God's bidding. And so some of the worst things in the history of the world have been done in the name of this is what God would want.

And really, if you just scratch the surface, it's really, cause it seems like it's a good idea for you. You get all the insurance money. Yeah. And you didn't die. Yeah. You didn't die. Exactly.

And now you're marrying that woman that you had your eye on, who's at the perfume counter. I just made that up, although I've been going to this perfume counter a lot lately. And you're like, why are you at a perfume counter anyway? So I think that's fascinating that he came to this conclusion, I think out of his own self-interest, but he dressed it up. And then again, you just imagine these kids coming home from school one by one and he kills them all. He starts by killing his mother, then he kills his wife, and then he waits for the kids to

come home one by one. And then he, I mean, this is the creepiest touch. He lays them all out in this big ballroom and he calls the schools and says, we're taking a vacation. We will be gone for a while. And then he turns on the sound system in the home, which plays like this funerial, it's set to this like channel that plays funerial music. This is back before, you know, Sirius XM, but you can play, there's a funeral channel.

That was a beautiful plug. Yeah. It's beautifully, it's right above mine, 107 funeral music. It's also the lithium channel. It's the same kind of music. But anyway, the thing that fascinates me is he leaves and he gets away with it because they don't find the bodies for a couple of, for like months or like eight weeks or nine weeks.

So anyway, flash forward to, he's missing. And then finally, I think it was on America's most wanted, they did a reconstruction of what he would look like today and they got his face out there and someone said, wait a minute, I know him. They arrest him. He denies he's that person, which really takes guts. And then they say, by the way, can we see if there's a birthmark or, you know, on your left thigh and he says, yeah, okay, you got me.

So the trial starts, I am fascinated by this story. At the time I'm a writer on Saturday Night Live and so I'm in New York and the trial's in New Jersey, so I drive over to New Jersey and I've never done this before since and I walk in and I get a seat. Just I wanted to see this guy. And it wasn't like packed, like I think about some of the trials today that were that big and you can't get a seat in the court. They're literally like auctioning them off.

I called ahead VIP seating. No, no, I didn't, I remembered it was not that hard to get seating. So maybe this was before, I mean, today it would be very different. And you went every day? I didn't go every day. I think I went twice and I was looking at this guy because I was trying to figure out will I see something in him? Like you want to see this great intense horror and all you see when you look at these people

are their pencil pushers. You want to think that everyone else missed it and that you could spot if it was in front of you. Right. But I was there at that trial looking at List and, I mean, of course many years had gone by, but you could tell he was just, he was someone who could see him anywhere and you wouldn't think anything. And he seemed kind of bored by the proceedings and I think he knew the jig was up.

It's not like he's getting, he's going to be found innocent. I think he even, he was still going with his plea that he was trying to save their souls, I believe. Well, yeah, I mean, there was no doubting if it was him, he like literally left a letter there that was. Oh yeah. It was me, that's why. Yeah, he wrote a, he wrote a pastor, he wrote his pastor and said, I think this is the right

thing to do and I'm sure you'd agree. So that's one that really got my imagination going. I am obsessed with this idea of a family annihilator because that is one of, I don't really spend a lot of the time with the like, why do they do what they do? Because I always think these people aren't operating in logic the way that I am. So you can't like, so I understand crazy, I'd rather focus my energy somewhere else. But with these, this is one where I really want to get inside their head because you see like the Chris Watts who killed his family and it's not like they, it wasn't having

the kids and they, when they're babies, it's like you, your kids are eight, nine, 10. I mean, bliss kids were even in their teens. Yeah. Like how do you raise these kids their whole life and then be the one to do that? Like there's something about that I cannot understand. But I wish they would study it more. Like, like I don't, not that you could prevent it, but. I have to say there's one I would like to get your take on because usually you can figure

it out. I mean, when I say you can figure it out, I mean, detectives, professionals find out all this information and you more or less know what happened most of the time. There's one case that it's a terrible, terrible case, it's very famous and I just don't know what happened. It's never made any sense to me and that's Joan Benet Ramsey. It doesn't make sense and I was doing my late night show when it happened and I remembered the apartment I was living in and hearing about this and thinking, this is terrible.

What happened here? And then never found any satisfying explanation for what could have happened. And I thought, well, maybe Ashley will know or have an idea of what happened. I know. So this was actually my entry into true crime. I always say that I was tabloid height at the time when this happened. I was about her age and I remember literally being in the grocery store with her looking back at me, blonde hair, blue eyes like I was at the time.

And the way it scared you if it could happen anywhere, someone could come into my home. Again, someone came into her home and I'm like, wow, someone like me, this doesn't just happen to adults, someone would want to kill a kid. And I wasn't old enough to dive into it at that time and obviously I have in the years since, it's one of those cases that has just been covered and recovered and dissected every which way. And to your point, that's what's so weird is you can dissect it every which way and things still don't make sense.

They don't make sense and so much of the suspicion of the parents began with, well, they don't seem right in interviews. And I'm always very suspicious of that because, well, how is someone supposed to seem? Some people don't emote the way other people emote. That always bothers me. If parents lose their child, it's the most horrible thing anybody could imagine. And then to have people say, and maybe you did it because the way you talked on Oprah, something seemed a little off.

We covered this other case and we were on tour of another little girl who is six, her name is Isabel Celis in Arizona. And she in the middle of the night was taken from out of her window, disappeared. Years and years, they didn't know what happened. It was the same thing. Like people were coming for the family specifically her dad because he did some weird stuff. He was on the news. They didn't like how he was talking.

They avoided the news for so long and everyone's saying, well, if you didn't do it, you got it. Like, why aren't you asking for help? You're trying to hide things. And there was this interview with her mom where she can just barely keep it together. And she's like, I don't want to be here. I want to be with my daughter. I don't want to be asking for anything.

I would be a wreck if something happened to my kid and to your point to have people judging you because you didn't cry the right way or you were crying too much or it felt fake or you didn't use the right words. So that's a case where we've never covered it on our show. And I don't think I would because it's one that, again, has had no shortage of coverage. People know it. At this point, there's nothing I can add unless there's like a call to action. There's some DNA that they want tested at this point.

There was just an article recently where the prosecutor or the law enforcement came out and said they're kind of waiting for the technology to get better before they do that. What I have said openly is I don't think the family had anything to do with it. I think that they were traumatized on top of trauma and things have gotten so mucked up. And the crime scene was a disaster. It was a disaster. You know, we do also live in this age where everybody can get involved. Everybody can go online.

Everybody can access the information. Everybody can have a theory. And that can cloud things too because there's way too many perspectives at a certain point. And perspectives that actually don't have the whole story. Like what we have from news articles and on web sleuths is like the more that I've actually worked with family and investigators and seen real case files, I'm like, you get the tip of the iceberg and it's really easy to make assumptions when you don't see everything underneath.

And it's also wild how if you look at a specific case, I'm working on one right now where there are five people. And if I just told you about one suspect, you're like, hands down, they did it, lock them up. And you say that exact same thing about all five people, that's the only one you heard about. Right. And it's wild.

I remember another one that grabbed me at a very young age was the Manson murders, obviously one of the biggest stories of all time. But that one grabbed me because when you think about what the police walked in on, you know, in August of 69 at the, you know, the Polansky Tate home. And what they see is just this insane scene and what they all say as well, it's, you know, young people, Hollywood types, it was a, probably a drug deal gone wrong. And there's this chilling footage of Polansky giving a news conference and he's like crying and he's saying, you're wrong.

This Sharon wasn't like that. And this is before anybody starts to put it together. This is before Susan Atkins talks in prison. This is before they start reconstructing this whole insane series of events that led to these two nights of murder. And you, you couldn't imagine ever, unless you knew for certain that this has had happened never a million years. You think, okay, this starts with a guy who's in and out of jail for most of his life.

He's a hippie kind of cult leader. He wanted to be in music, but Terry Melcher told him, no, he's getting increasingly frustrated. So he comes up with this theory and then, you know, the twists and turns it takes to get that group of people to the Polansky Tate home in that night in 1969 is so insane. And so 75 dominoes have to fall the wrong way to make this happen. And the idea that they were able to put it all together and figure out exactly what happened is. It's kind of impressive.

It's very impressive. Yeah. I mean, that's so much of the problem to your point about the Jomini Ramsey case getting mucked up is like, the case is only good as good as the investigators that are working on it, who are only as good as the guys who taught them and everyone's like very human. And I, that's where I see so much stuff going wrong is just mishandling a scene, mishandling an investigation. That's what's made me cynical about the true crime space.

It's not that there's evil in the world. There always will be. It's more of how it gets handled after the fact is when you're young, you think like, well, there's police and then there's the court system and everything's to be fine and everything's not fine. Yeah. And also on the flip side of that, defense attorneys have gotten very good at always attacking the police.

So what is your like must watch, listen, your go to guide as a crime junkie? So the one that's, I travel a lot. First thing I do when I get into my hotel room a lot of times is if I don't have any to do when I want to detox is I flopped down on the bed and I turn on the TV and I scroll 50% chance I'll find a forensic files marathon or a law and order SVO. Yeah. I prefer the forensic files. There's two things on TV anytime I'm in a hotel room.

Yeah. Yeah. So I will watch forensic files and I've even come to love the late 80s clothing and there's a, there's a cheesy kind of production value to it because these things are really old, but they have a lot of them and they run them and it's like potato chips. Once you start each one is about 25 minutes and then it ends with she couldn't speak, but from beyond the grave, her DNA told the story, coming up, you know, they were eating Christmas dinner when there was a knock at the door.

Sadly, it wasn't Santa. And then you're right. I'm like, oh, I gotta watch that. And I've been late for dinner. I've been late for gigs. I've been late for jobs that I'm supposed to do because I had to find out, was it the guy from the shoe store, you know, with the eye patch or wasn't it? And so those are, those always get me going, the forensic files.

That is, that's a unique, like I got in that way too. Usually you hear like unsolved mysteries for me. It was like America's most wanted, but I love that you're a forensic file. Well, one of the reasons I like forensic files is it's not recreate a lot of, they'd have some kind of mini recreations, but I like to see like, oh, there's actual footage of the crime scene and you can see. So I'll take that every time because then you can, I don't know, that fires my, my sense of weight.

Maybe I can figure this out. I'm super into this. So how would you end up in comedy and not as like your own detective? They're not mutually exclusive. Let's put it that way, to be a comedian and, and I'd be a terrible detective because I'd be doing bits all the time. You know, I'd be, I'd be like, oh, well, what happened here? You know, and, and they would say, well, we found the body and, you know, and, and I

would be. The comedy won out basically, the comedy won out. Yeah. You can do a sketch and not talk about serial killers, but you couldn't hunt a serial killer and not do comedy. Exactly. Yeah. It's the, the dominant, the dominant gene was the comedy gene.

There's a really good thing. I'm sure you've watched it and people have watched it, but it's the, what is it? Is it the family next door? It's the case like two years ago or three years ago where a husband calls in and says his wife and kids. Oh, that's, that's the Chris Watts American family. Oh, okay. There you go.

That's Chris Watts. Yeah. One of the things that I saw with the Chris Watts one was they came out with it on one of these streaming services, I forget where Netflix and they have all the body cam footage. Now I find that fascinating because now knowing what we know, I'm able to, and this is a rare thing for your fans to check out if they haven't checked it out. How does someone behave when we, they have footage from the cops, a policeman's body cam of he pulls up to the house, he walks up, he knocks on the door and neighbors with

Chris and Chris Watts is there and he starts asking questions. And at this point, he's just a, from the policeman's point of view, everyone's point of view. He's just a dad who wonders where his wife and kids are. But now that we know that he's killed them all the night before and driven them out to this oil field and stuff the bodies in a pipe, when you look at that footage, I find it riveting because one thing I noticed is his arms are crossed almost the entire time. I don't even notice that, but. Which is really like protective.

Yeah. And I've, there's so many shows now where they question people and they release the footage of the questioning session and you can know afterwards that the person did it. But at the beginning, you see the person relax, but the minute they start to ask more and more questions that close in, arms folded is just classic protective stance and it's really fascinating to watch him. His arms are crossed a lot and again, his behavior is off. And I think in that case, they, they were probably on to him right away.

I think they were suspicious of him right away, but it's, it's an interesting perspective to have now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you can pass the judgment because we know the ending. Exactly. Yeah.

I'm, once I'm sure I'm right, then I'm very judgmental. Once you're sure you're right. I'm curious if you have the granddaddy of them all and it's, it's so in the past, but Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper is kind of the granddaddy of them all because he kind of invented it. It was letters to the press and he had this attitude and the crimes are horrible. Then there's no satisfying, we got them moment and it takes place in this kind of a Dickensian London that all seems very gothic and creepy and strange now, but also fascinating.

It seems so fictional. Yeah. It's so far away and I have no idea what happened there. I think there, I don't remember the name, but I remember there was this theory that he left and came to the United States and was operating here, which would be really interesting, but I don't know. And I, I think I haven't gotten so hung up on that one because I don't believe we will ever know.

Yeah. Like it's so long. We're not talking evidence. There's, there is no conclusion anymore and I think you could spin and spy, which people have. I mean, how many books have been written? How many documentaries? It was...

Yeah. It's never going to be solved. It's a little bit, it's like the D.B. Cooper. There's just things, which isn't a murder, but it's, you don't know for sure and you never will know. We'll never know. But that's one that still tugs every now and then.

I'm like, what? I'm in there. It's this person. You could have answers to one case. Like you can, you can know everything that happened, but just for one. Oh, wow. That's a really good man. Well, I have to say, one of the first one that comes to mind, which I brought up was

Joe Benet Ramsey. I just, because it doesn't make, nothing makes sense to me there. So maybe. Maybe that one. Maybe that one. When I was a kid, I would have said JFK's assassination, but I subsequently did a ton of reading and this book came out by a terrific writer named Gerald Posner, case closed, I think.

You know, you read it and you go, oh, right. It's impossible that Oswald didn't do it. Yeah. And I know anyone listening right now because people love to see, you don't get it, man. I love a conspiracy theory. Yeah, but. I understand. He, there's.

But sometimes they just did it. He did it. Yeah. He did it. And I think you can even see now a lot of the conspiracy, JFK conspiracy theorists have moved on and now they're, there's so many conspiracy theorists that you can have now about politicians in Washington that are much more insane than anything that JFK people came up that I think that.

They're distracted. People are distracted. Yeah. They'll be distracted for a long time. Yeah. They aren't getting any better there. Exactly. But yeah.

What about you? Is there one for you? Oh man. I think Robert Juan, if you, do you know that one? Tell me about Robert Juan. So he was a lawyer in DC back in 2006. We did an episode on this and he decides like it's late one night. He decides he's going to stay at his friend's town home instead of going home, but they're

like kind of the same distance apart. So no one knows why he decided to stay the night there. And he like gets in sometime at like 10, 30, 11, whatever. He has a glass of water. He goes to bed. And 45 minutes later, the three guys that live there, one of them is calling 911 saying they found him stabbed in his bed. And police get there, all of the three guys are like in their robes, like looks like they're

freshly cleaned. There's a knife sitting on the guy, but they're never able to figure out what happened. There's no force entry. There's nothing. There's not even blood. Like the way they stabbed him, like it was a lot of internal bleeding, but not even everywhere else. And everyone believes that the three guys there know something are lying or just not telling

the whole truth. And their story is they just woke up and found him this way. Yeah, that they were all in their rooms. They heard maybe like a scream or some grunting. And when they went and looked to see what was, they found him stabbed to death. They're like, we heard, oh, they also say they heard the, you know, when you like have an alarm system, you open the door, it like does those beep, beeps. They hear that.

They thought their other roommate had come home, but he's dead. The end. Like, and there's a lot of like wild details in it. When did this happen? How recently? 2006. Okay. And so the, and the three guys, so they're in like a polygamous relationship, which

was like just sent the media off like wild. And the one was like into like BDSM stuff. And so there's all these theories about him drugging Robert and trying to like, it's, it is, I'm telling you, a wild one. But these three have been questioned by everybody and they always, they hold up. I mean, I don't know that they hold up, but there is, there's not enough to say anything happened. Right.

Right. Yeah. I would love to know what happened there. Cause I, and I think those are the ones that are really fascinating when I'm like, there are a few people involved and there's no way you know nothing, right? They say, you know, if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras, but then there are the zebras in the world, right? The Israel keys.

Um, yeah. I think that we also live in an era where we're certain because of technology, DNA, all the tools we have now that, oh, we'll figure it out. And so when there's just no answer, it leaves you dumbfounded, which I think, you know, for most of mankind's history, people have had to settle with, I don't know, and about everything, including, you know, yeah, I just, I don't know. And then, uh, in the 20th century, we've started coming up with all these incredible, um, tools at our disposal and people can say, no, we have, this is you using the murder

victims ATM card and that's you, you know, we have a photograph of you and so, uh, we get a certainty now that I think we've gotten a little spoiled by because every now and then something happens. I mean, there was a murder a week ago, two weeks ago for, for, uh, the kids at, uh, yeah. It's, yeah. And it's this terrible murder and when it first happened and I read about it, I thought, well, this will be figured out really quickly because, as you know, 99.8% of these, you

know, it's pretty clear what happened. They figure it out. This one, it's been complete radio silence. I've, I mean, they don't seem to have any idea what happened to these for college students. Which was a lot like, uh, the Delphi case that we had, um, right in my backyard, which just almost six years later got an arrest. Was it because of DNA evidence? They won't say.

So they, they, there's this whole drama on, will they, won't they release the, um, the arrest documents, which by the time this airs, they, they've made a decision on that. But we don't know exactly what led to this guy being arrested. They say, so I've heard new eyes on the case. Someone just went back and saw the right thing. But I don't think it's DNA because it's been, it's been, to me, it's been too long if it was DNA. They would have had that a while ago, but I don't know.

Right. DNA, pretty miraculous. It's a miracle. It's insane. I know that that's a big topic for you and a cause, but it's incredible. It did, uh, how many cases get overturned or how many times they can say, wait, nope, not you. Yeah.

Sorry, you can move along now. Sorry about the eight years in prison, but you know, it's, uh, it's, it's really remarkable. Yeah. Well, this is amazing. It was great to meet another crime junkie. Oh, trust me. Be the podcast one. I'm a fan and, uh, and really happy that you were willing to let me hang out and, um, let

my freak flag fly for just, for just a little bit of time. And, uh, thank you very much, Ashley. Thank you. Uh, you, you do an amazing show and I, this was really fun to get to hang with you. Oh, this was awesome. And for everyone who wants to support you as a crime junkie, where can they find Conan needs a friend? Conan O'Brien needs a friend is available wherever you find your podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crime junkie is an audio Chuck production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?