Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Kirsten Hatfield

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

It took decades and DNA science to catch a predator who was able to snatch a girl, Kirsten Hatfield, from her own room in the dead of night. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-kirsten-hatfield/    

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Britt, and today's story is a terrifying one. One that, if you're a parent, will have you double-checking your windows before you put your kids to bed tonight. Because it's the story of an eight-year-old girl named Kirsten Hatfield, who was taken from her own bedroom in the middle of the night with her mom just in the next room, and then she was never seen again. Our story begins in Midwest City, Oklahoma, in May of 1997. Kirsten lived in a small home with her mother Sharon and her three-year-old sister Faith. Faith and Kirsten actually shared a room and a bed, which reminds me so much of me and my little sister, when we were like five and three, we shared our room together in a big queen-sized bed, and I always felt so safe.

Like, yes, she was smaller than me, she was a little kid, we were both little kids. Yeah, but you have someone there, yeah. Yeah, there was another person there with me, someone who would also hear the things go bump in the night, but it was okay because nothing bad could happen if we were together. But unfortunately, looking back, I now know that's not the case. On the evening of May 13th, a Tuesday night, Sharon put her two girls to bed around 9, 9.30, which is pretty usual for a weeknight. Normally, she might read or tell stories, but on this night, little Faith was already asleep and she didn't want to wake her. So Sharon just laid alongside Kirsten for a little while, told her that she loved her, and then left the room.

Now, when she left, she pulled the door behind her but didn't close it all the way. She always left just a slight opening in case the two little ones needed her in the middle of the night. Around 3 a.m. that night, Sharon was startled awake by some noises coming from the girls room. At first, she figured maybe Faith was just talking in her sleep, or maybe one of them was woken up, so she gets out of bed and she starts walking down the hallway, but by the time she makes it to the door, all the commotion has stopped. Both must have been back asleep. She turned around to head back to her room when something caught her eye. Through her sleepy fog, something broke through. Something was different, but what was it?

She looked for a second at the door to the girls room. That was it. The door was closed. She thought she'd left it open like she did every night, hadn't she? But maybe one of the girls pushed it closed after she went to bed, or maybe she actually had shut it without realizing because she was so tired or just not paying attention. Sharon goes and walks to the girls room. She takes one or two steps to the door and then just kind of pushes it, ever so slightly open, allowing for there to be just a crack, but she doesn't go inside the room. Assuming her kids are fast asleep, she goes back to her bed as well. What she couldn't have known is that her oldest daughter, Kirsten, wasn't sleeping in her bed. While the neighborhood slept in their peaceful, safe little town, Kirsten was being carried away, away from her home and her mother, away from her sister Faith.

Now, the next morning at 7am, Sharon went to wake up the girls like she did every morning. But this morning was different, and this would be the morning she realized that her life would change forever. When she walked into the room, little Faith was in their bed, but there was no Kirsten. Sharon asked Faith, where's your sister? And she just kind of looked up at her mom, confused, not really sure how to answer. Sharon immediately started searching the house, the kitchen, the living room, the backyard. She started calling around to neighbors and even Kirsten's grandfather, who sometimes watched the girls. Sharon was frantic. Is Kirsten with you? Have you seen her? And he can barely understand why she's asking all this at 7 o'clock in the morning.

And when he says no, he realizes what Sharon is actually saying, that Kirsten is missing. And he says, you need to call 911 right now. She hangs up with him, and that's exactly what she does. She tells the dispatcher that her daughter is missing and she needs police help right away. She says, I went to her room. She is missing from her bed sometime in the middle of the night. Please come help me. Within minutes, officers arrive at the home to assess the situation. Sharon tells police the story of being woken up right around 3 o'clock in the morning. And it's at this time that it's like crashing in on her.

That those noises, the door being closed, it all seemed so innocent at the time. But she's sure now that it had some connection to Kirsten's disappearance. Police start searching and they searched just the home at first because really they expected to find Kirsten there. This is a little Midwest City, Oklahoma town. Kids don't get scooped out of their bedroom in the middle of the night by strangers. That just doesn't happen here, had never happened before. They were sure that they were going to find her. But they open every closet door. They check under every bed, behind every door, in every cabinet.

Kirsten wasn't in the house. And as they examine her room more closely, they found something very disturbing. The window of the girl's ground level bedroom was slightly cracked open. And worse, there was a small spot of blood on the window sill. I'm so glad my kids sleep on the second level. Just suddenly, I'm so happy. And nail those windows shut, Britt, because this is real. Very close to doing that as soon as we're done recording. So everyone's heart just sank and they quickly realized that they needed to shift gears.

That little blood spot tells them that they need to start looking outside the home. And when they do, they spot something chilling. In their backyard, there's a broken fence post, and next to that same area is a pair of little girls' underwear with blood on it. The officers asked Sharon to do the unthinkable. She has to look at them and tell them if that's the underwear Kirsten was wearing that night. Oh my God. And it was.

Police waste no time. They bring in the FBI, they seal off the entire neighborhood, even putting up roadblocks trying to find her. They canvass the entire neighborhood, going door to door, seeing if any of the neighbors heard or saw anything that night. They get some reports of dogs barking around 3 o'clock in the morning, which fits with the time Sharon woke up, but no one actually saw anything that could help tell them who was responsible for taking Kirsten.

After their initial search and canvass of the area without any results, police had to start their investigation, and they start where most do, with the people closest to the family. They truly believed that it had to have been someone who was comfortable with Kirsten, someone she knew, someone maybe faith knew too. So what they do is they bring in a child psychologist to talk to faith, even though she's just three, maybe she remembers something. She was in that very room with Kirsten and Kirsten's abductor.

She had to have seen everything, but whether she's able to comprehend what she saw and relay that is a whole other story. Now the child psychologist is able to get one thing out of faith in the entire interview. She just kept saying, A bad man came in and took my sister. A bad man came in and took my sister. But nothing more. She couldn't give them anything to go off of because she was just too young

and so young in fact that even years later she has no memory of that night at all. And even though she was just a toddler, she still to this day is really hard on herself about not being able to give the police more information to find the man who took her sister. With almost nothing to go off of, police decide to go to the media. They need everyone in their little town looking for Kirsten. When they go to the public, it works. Thousands of tips come flooding in and one of these tips looks really promising.

It's from a woman who says that her boyfriend threatened her and he had told her that basically if she didn't get in line, he would do the same thing to her as he did to Kirsten Hatfield. Now stuff like this comes in from a lot of cases. Either people really trying to seem tough and make people think they're like capable of these horrific crimes to scare them or just like the caller is making something up to get back at somebody and put them in investigator sites.

But this one, this one seemed a little more legitimate because the boyfriend she was talking about had a connection to the family. As it turns out, this threatening boyfriend was also good friends with Sharon's brother, aka Kirsten's uncle. So he would have known Kirsten, maybe even had been to their house before to top it off. This guy wasn't the most upstanding of citizens either. He had a history with drugs and encounters with the law

and he'd even gotten in trouble for assault and battery in the past. He was looking like a prime suspect, but they had a problem with their prime suspect. Their prime suspect had a great alibi. Back in this town in 1997, bars were open until like four in the morning. So during their window that Kirsten was taken, they thought three o'clock, maybe four o'clock, he was at a local bar and was seen by a number of people.

He couldn't have been the one that took her. They keep following up, lead after lead after lead, but it's getting longer and longer since Kirsten was taken from her room and their hope for her return becomes more and more diminished with each passing day. But Kirsten's mom refused to just lay in wait. She took search efforts into her own hands. From the time she woke up in the morning

till the time she closed her eyes at night, she was spending every moment of every day doing something to propel her daughter's case forward. Talking to media, passing out flyers, anything she could do to get one more pair of eyes looking for her daughter. What a hero. She truly was. I mean, she knew no other way.

Like she said, I couldn't just sit there. But even she had to change her strategy after so many years went by. She ended up going back to school to get a degree in criminology and eventually she got a job as a parole officer, specifically working with sexual offenders. And she said in an interview that while she thought of her job as protecting other people from sexual predators, secretly in the back of her mind,

she was always looking for someone to come across her desk that could somehow be linked to her own daughter's case. Oh my God, this is like a lifetime movie. It really is. I mean, she really wanted to solve it from the inside. For years, she kept on like this, almost two decades. In that time, she believed that her daughter really had passed away. And while there was always an ache and a yearning for justice,

at some point she said that there was just one night where she was holding faith and she just had this overwhelming peace come over her because she knew that Kristen was no longer with them, but she felt peace knowing that she was in heaven. Now in 2014, years had gone by. Nothing had happened. But this year, something happened. The cold case gets reignited

when a very strange tip was called into police. The police get a call from a lady who's in possession of something strange. Her grandmother had just passed away and so she was going through her house and found this journal. And inside this journal was a gruesome and detailed story that this lady's son had told about abducting and murdering Kirsten Hatfield. And a little side note to all of our crime junkies. This actually happens, like not all the time, but enough for it to be a thing.

Like if someone in your life dies, go through all of their writings because people tend to write down their secrets. So this journal says that Kirsten was taken from her room that night in May and then taken to a small house in a nearby town where she was tortured and then killed. This journal was so detailed that police thought there must be something to this and they needed to find proof that it wasn't all made up. And there might be some because according to this journal

there was a videotape of the entire event. So they tracked down the guy who was involved, the guy who supposedly told his mother this story. And of course, he says he had nothing to do with it. He swears he wasn't involved, but he isn't saying that it didn't happen. He says that he did know it happened because he knew the people who carried out the crime and his ex-girlfriend is actually the one who owned the house where she was taken.

So police ask him, okay, then where is this house? He points them in the right direction. They get a search warrant and teams of people descend upon this house. Investigators, CSI, they're taking pictures, taking swabs, doing luminal tests, and oh, the luminal tests. One technician said that the house lit up like a Christmas tree. Oh my God. There were pools of bloodstains, spatters, and cast off so much blood.

And all of the blood pattern seemed to fit in with what was written in the journal. Everyone on the scene was convinced they had finally found where Kirsten had died and maybe where she was laid to rest. Pieces of the floor and swabs were sent off for DNA testing to confirm what investigators thought they already knew. While they wait for those test results, they bring in a backhoe and start digging up the property in hopes of finding Kirsten's remains still buried there. But they dig and they dig and they dig without finding any bones

and without finding any signs of Kirsten. They do find something inside the house that makes their hearts fall into their butts. A box filled with a hundred videotapes. Wait, what? Yeah, and if you remember, the journal said the entire crime had been taped. So they had to sit one by one, tape by tape, watching every single one fearing that any minute they would be confronted with the gruesome images of what happened to Kirsten.

But a hundred tapes later, they had nothing. No tape of the crime. No bones or remains found in the yard. And the results of the testing, those had come back and it showed that it wasn't even human blood in the house. They had been sent on a wild goose chase and it sucks because you have to chase down these leads, especially years and years later when the case is called.

But it's so much wasted time. Exactly. They wasted time, they wasted money and it was all ultimately determined to just be fiction. Someone had likely seen Kirsten's story on the news. Then they wrote their own sick version of what happened and whether they were just delusional and believed it to be true or whether they were messing with police and the family is still unknown.

Well, and I feel like a lot of times we see this happen in cases and the next tip that comes in, everyone is really skeptical about. Right, and I think that's like the hardest part and why I said you have to chase these down when they seem so credible. But it's almost like crying wolf, like with every crappy lead you get and the more resources that get poured into each one, like they get less and less believable. Which is just heartbreaking.

More time passed and it seemed to the family that the only way they were going to find Kirsten was through another tip like this called in, as crazy as it seemed. After all, that's the only way they'd ever made progress in the case in the past. But what they didn't realize is that there would be a new detective given the case who would totally change the game for them. I think anyone who's been a crime junkie long enough knows how cold cases tend to work.

They get passed from detective to detective as people leave or are promoted and they're given to the next guy who fills the seats. And sometimes this kind of sucks because so much knowledge of the case is lost in the head of the guy that came before. But sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is exactly what a case needs. And in the case of Kirsten Hatfield,

her case depended on a fresh pair of eyes. A new detective came in, Detective Miller, and he decided he wanted to look at the case from square one, re-examine everything. And one of the ways to rework a cold case is by starting with the evidence. What do we have? What's already been tested and what hasn't?

And when the new detective looks at this, a huge piece of evidence pops out at him. Decades after the incident. And do you know what was never tested? I feel like there are so many answers. It was the blood found at the crime scene. That spot of blood on the windowsill and the blood found on... No.

Yeah, and the blood found on Kirsten's ripped underwear. It still sat in evidence untouched, untested. So this could be it. Maybe it was Kirsten's blood, but maybe it wasn't. And maybe it would lead right to her abductor. They asked the lab to run the blood through their system for testing. And sure enough, from the blood, they were able to pull an unknown male profile.

This was their man. Like, I want those clappy hands emojis that is like, this was their man. They got him. They got, well, they thought they got him. So police collect themselves. You know, they're so excited. They're like, okay, okay.

Our next step is we have to get this into CODIS, because surely our guy is in CODIS. There's no way this is his only offense. But like we all saw in the April Tinsley case, you can have a perpetrator with really no record, who just commits one horrible violent crime in their life and then maybe never again. And that's exactly what happened here.

They uploaded the DNA to CODIS, and there was no match. They were so close, and this is incredibly discouraging, but they're at least so much further ahead than they were 20 or so years ago. At least they had something to compare to suspects. More than alibis, more than phony journals,

this was scientific proof. So their plan was to go back through the case file and get DNA on every single male that they had talked to or interviewed or anyone who had any kind of contact with Kirsten before she went missing. So one by one, they meet with suspects, family members, neighbors,

and every single person was willing to submit a DNA sample. Every single person seemed happy to do anything they could to help push the case forward. And this was great, but a little concerning. No one was acting suspicious or even in the least bit like sweaty talking to police. So maybe their suspect wasn't anywhere in this file, but they couldn't let that thought get to them.

They just kept talking to people and kept submitting samples. And one day, they get a call from the lab, come meet us right away. We have your guy. There was a DNA match for the third person on police's list, the third person they went and talked to and collected DNA from. Nuh-uh.

Yep. Oh my God. It was a neighbor of Kirsten's, a man named Anthony Palmer. He lived just two houses away. You could even see his house from their backyard. When police canvassed the neighborhood initially, he was one of the very first people that they actually talked to.

His story back then was that he woke up around three in the morning because his dog was outside like going nuts. And he basically went to his back door, called his dog inside and then went back to bed. But he says he didn't see or hear anything. So police want to know, would his story still be the same 17 years later? When police bring him in, it's all easy peasy.

He didn't get flustered when they talked to him the first time. So they're hoping to keep this like very casual again and not arouse suspicion. They want to lock him in on a story. So when they first bring him in in the interrogation room, it's all chit-chat like nonsense things. They're talking about water and hydration and prescriptions. And then they slowly get into it.

Now you'll hear two detectives, and Tony Palmer. And I want to kind of thank you for coming down here to talk to me. Well, you know, as a state employee, you know, it's something we have to do. We have to abide by all the law enforcement and all that. And here's where we're kind of bad. We're still looking at the Hurston Hatfield night.

And we're going back and we're talking to a lot of people. And I know over the years... You weren't there the first time. They can't tell, were you? No, I was with Miller the last time we came to talk to you about the other deal. Over 17 years, I know in my life, I've changed a lot. And so we wanted to talk to you about if you can kind of tell me 17 years ago how your life was, how that neighborhood was,

what was going on in that neighborhood. I know I've read some of the reports from the interviews before and how it appears to me that they call you Uncle Tony around there because you care about the kids. You were feeding them with the kids. Basically, when I lived there, there was a bunch of older people. That was like a retirement life. Most of the people in that area were old retirees.

I like doing stuff all the time. I was always outside and somebody's working on their vehicle, got to go be a busybody and help them. Somebody's washing machine was broken down. There's older people, they can't do stuff. I've always been mechanically inclined where I could figure stuff out or help them move this. I've always been, I don't know about friendly, but neighborly.

Tony goes on to talk about he was like the younger adult in the neighborhood and kids would come over and he'd always grown up hungry and never wanted to see kids hungry so they'd come over and he'd feed them pizza or whatnot, but never really like knew like Kirsten or her sister specifically. He was just known in the neighborhood. Around this time, they decided to read him his Miranda rights, which we know means this thing's about to get real.

And they ask him, like, why don't you tell us that story one more time of what you remember on that night in May? Do you mind just initially kind of take us back to 1997 and go back over that maybe that evening before and into that morning when all of it all kind of started blowing up and just best you can tell us everything you remember and take your time. I know we're going back some years.

Yeah, I'm starting to get that old timer stuff, but really the only thing I can really remember is afterwards. You know, it was just a typical day. I went to work, went home, had supper, bus TV. You remember anything about the day or evening before? You said it was just a typical day. You worked all day and then went home. You remember anything unusual about that evening that stands out to you?

No, other than what I told them about, you know, seeing the white truck, you know, in front of their, the white Chevy truck in front of their yard. You know, like I said, I didn't have anything to do with those people. I didn't know them at all. It's not like I went, hey, yeah, you got to live good. No, it wasn't like that. Usually I was outside working in my yard, you know,

either top of the neighbors or kids would come by telling me, can you fix my bike? You know, stuff like that. You know, it wasn't like I'd tell them to come over or anything. They keep talking about his interactions with people in the neighborhood and while he said kids would come ask him to like fix their bikes or stuff, he said that he never knew or interacted with Kirsten and Faith or anyone in their family.

The only connection he had to them was that his buddy used to own the house that they now lived in and he admits to being in it before, but not while they lived there and it had been a while since his friend lived there. So he shouldn't have had any reason to be in the house since he said that he never talked to the girls. So police really want to nail him down on this. So there were never any times that Shannon asked for your help to fix this

or that or mow the yard for me or... Okay. It's the truth. And I didn't even recognize her when y'all showed me the pictures of her. That was the only time I could actually say, okay, that's, you know, I met her once afterwards. She was going up and down the street and, you know, she was still looking for her kid and, you know, I met her once.

I gave her some money so she'd have gas money so she could keep doing what she was doing, you know. Was this like in the days after or... Yeah, talking about days after. They go on like this for maybe another 20 minutes just asking him about his history with the family and he's saying over and over that he didn't know them, he didn't interact with them.

Part where he talks about how he has his own kid who's his whole world and then investigators drop the bomb. We've talked a lot about kind of the background. I want to kind of talk to you about some new information developed in this case, okay? As you know, Detective Miller got some buckle swabs from you a couple months back or whenever it was. There was a reason for that, okay? And we collected DNA samples from lots of people

but we had submitted, resubmitted some evidence from the case and got a DNA kid, okay? The reason those buckle swabs were being collected was we were trying to find the person responsible. Okay, we talked about had you ever been in the backyard, had you ever been in the house, all those things. And you said you hadn't. No, they were there, no.

Okay, well, I don't believe you. Tony, I don't think you're telling the whole truth, okay? Your DNA is in the backyard the morning that she was discovered missing, okay? And on her window. And on the paintings she'd been wearing the night before that were recovered in the backyard. No. No, not me, because I was not, no.

Huh. Yeah, that's the truth. Yeah, I find it far-fetched, but no. Because I don't know, I didn't know him. And maybe you didn't know him, Tony. But we, and I didn't have no business over there at all. That may be also. What we need to talk about is what you were doing in that backyard that night.

And what happened. We need to get to the truth. I have no idea what you're talking about. Tony goes on to deny any involvement for the rest of the interview, but like science doesn't lie. Yeah, I mean, we've said it before, I'll say it again. The season of justice is real, DNA is real, and it's here for the long haul.

How can you deny it? I don't know. And I don't know if he just didn't have an understanding of the way it works, or if he thought his best thing to do was stick to his story and pretend like he was set up. I mean, it's not like a defense that he made in court. But the one of the investigators was like, listen, this isn't a debate. Like we're not going back and forth here.

I'm telling you, you are at the scene, and now you need to tell me why or how you're doing it. Oh my God. But he just keeps on denying, denying, denying, and one of the interviewers even leaves the room and a new guy comes in. Now this new guy is Detective Miller, the one who was in charge of reworking the case.

He comes in and he and Tony are alone, and he slides a picture of Kirsten in front of him. I need the truth. I need the truth. I need to find her. I need to find Kirsten. Help me find her. Okay. Is there somebody else involved? I can't help you on that either.

I didn't help anybody or help myself take this group. Now as soon as Detective Miller slid that picture in front of him, Tony just slid it away. He didn't even want to be around it. You could tell like I read somewhere that he was like putting distance between himself and the victim. Now the interview goes on for another 30 minutes, and we will post this entire thing on our website,

crimejunkiepodcast.com. But Tony won't confess, and finally the investigators are done, and they place him under arrest. A confession would have been nice, but they don't need it because they have his DNA. Anthony Palma was convicted of Kirsten's murder, and he waived his rights to an appeal,

but he kept something, the location of Kirsten's body. During his sentencing, Kirsten's mother and her sister got to look him in the eyes and read their victim impact statements, and they actually told him that they forgive him, which means that they are much stronger women than I think I could be. Yeah, definitely. Me too.

But they told him that they'd been writing down all of their prayers, prayers of finding Kirsten, and they hoped that one day he would read those and finally give her back to them. Kirsten's mom had written to Tony in jail asking him to help her. She pleaded with him, please, please meet with me. I need to know where my daughter is so I can bring her home.

Shannon felt like she was getting close to resolution. She felt like any day now he was going to tell her where her daughter was. But just this January in 2019, Anthony Palma was murdered by his cellmate in their cell, and the answer to Kirsten's final resting place was lost with Tony's life. Are there any leads as to where she might be? So they did an extensive search of his property, like they brought in cadaver dogs,

they did ground penetrating radar, and this is like after he had been arrested, and nothing was ever found. But they never really thought she was there, because you see Tony worked for the Parks and Recreation Department for the state of Oklahoma, so he could have taken her anywhere. He had access to so many places,

wooded areas, lakes. I mean, they don't even know where to start. The possibilities are literally endless. So without Tony, the family's only hope is that one day, someone in Oklahoma, maybe camping or hiking, will come across Kirsten's remains so she can finally be brought home. Again, you can find that entire interview with Anthony Palma on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.

You can also follow us on social at crimejunkiepod on Twitter and at crimejunkiepodcast on Instagram. And don't forget to join our fan club on Patreon. There's a link on our website, and we do multiple episodes a month depending on what level you're at. You're the first to know about our merch store, which is sold out in a couple of days because of all of our fan club people. So make sure you're getting on there,

and if you need a little pick-me-up after this really dark episode, stay tuned because we're doing our frappet of the month. Crimejunkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Okay, Ashley, are you ready for frappet? Yes, I'm so excited for frappet. We missed last month, we like totally... Oh, I know.

I know, we're the worst podcasters ever, I'm so sorry for all of our frappet lovers. So we're going to double up, we're doing one this week and we're going to do another one next week. Okay, so today I'm going to tell you and all of our listeners the story of Iki, are you ready? Iki, you find the craziest dog names. Okay, so Iki's mom sent us a story,

and I just loved it so much. It started about three or four years ago. Iki's mom and her then-girlfriend had just moved in together and her girlfriend had really missed having dogs around. She grew up in a pet lover's paradise, they had all sorts of animals growing up, and this was kind of the first time she didn't have any pets,

let alone a dog in her life. And they had wanted dogs, but life, you know, it's not always a good time to get a dog, which I'm sure you disagree with, Ashley. Yeah, I don't know about this time. I got a dog my last year of college. It was nuts of me, but I don't regret it. Well, yeah, I'd say, but that's not the smart choice necessarily.

But they felt they were too busy for a dog and her girlfriend kept bringing home dogs that she would find and they would foster them for a while and then transition them to a forever home. So they fostered a bunch of dogs and were never really able to keep them. They had some pet rats, but I didn't know this, but pet rats don't have a super long lifespan.

And eventually they just got really tired of the heartache of getting rats and then, you know, them passing away far too quickly than either of them had ever wanted them to. The thing is, though, both our listener Lee and her girlfriend, Kinsley, they both have really bad anxiety. And on top of their lives being busy, they were kind of worried about that, but they decided that they really wanted a dog to help them with that.

You know, a lot of dogs are, if not officially, unofficially, you know, mental health support dogs. That's how my dogs are. We got Charlie registered as an emotional support dog. You did? Yeah, that's how we brought him to our wedding. And I'm like dying to take him on a Southwest flight because I heard they're pretty loosey-goosey with it.

So Lee and Kinsley decide that they are going to get a dog, something calm, something sweet, something like Kinsley's childhood golden retriever, just a big cuddly fluffball that will help them both with their anxiety. And, like, again, huge anxious person here. I totally get it. So they went out to start looking for guinea pigs as, like, a starter and, of course, came home with a puppy.

What does he look like? Or she, I don't know. So they had went to a pet store that had actually just gotten a litter of rescue puppies in, and there was only one left. Is it the cutest one? Kinsley went over to this puppy and picked her up. Oh. She was still in that, like, downy, fluffy puppy fur

where it's, like, baby's bottom equivalent of a puppy. And it was over. Yeah, you can't pick them up. What are you doing? So the puppy initially was named Niko, but Kinsley renamed her to Ikky after a mischievous character in a cartoon that both Lee and Kiki love. She was pretty well adapted and adorable.

She was potty trained immediately, which, like, call me, guys. I could still use help. But she would kind of just fall asleep on your lap at any given moment. She chewed on some chairs when she was teething, and one time she tried to swallow an entire bird whole. But that only happened once, and it was very unsuccessful. Was it a big bird?

They didn't say, just that it was a whole dead bird. In my mind, it's a giant robin at, like, the beginning of spring. Oh, see, Charlie went after a full-on goose. He's still known. This was two years ago, but he's still known at our dog park as the dog that killed a goose. Oh, my God, I remember that. Like, a full goose.

That's, like, to me, that's, like, natural selection. Like, you're the goose that lands in the dog park. Like, clearly, you're not super smart. But he, like, dropped it. So it's Saturday morning. Like, the dog part's felled, and he takes the goose in his mouth and drops it at the feet of the only four-year-old boy at the park who just starts weeping.

It was so tragic. We had to, like, leave. We didn't go back to the park for, like, a month, and it's still literally, like, a week ago. He's, like, someone was like, hey, that's the goose killer. I was like, yeah, that's my dog. Thank you. The goose killer.

Okay, so they get this adorable puppy, Ike. She's awesome other than, like, chewing on a couple chairs and trying to eat a bird hole. But she didn't really have the calm demeanor that they were looking for in a dog. Initially, they were told that she was a husky lab mix. Well, okay, that's exactly what I have. Whoever told you they had a calm demeanor was lying to you.

Well, let's take a second here, because she reached her full size at about 30 pounds. Oh, then she's definitely not a husky lab mix. Charlie's like a solid 70 and kind of small for a husky lab. Yeah. So she was pretty hyperactive and kind of high strung, and most likely, or she most resembled a Whippet cross, which, have you met Niles?

Yeah. He's like a giant Whippet cross. He's about 45 pounds, 50 on a bad day, and that's exactly why we got him, was he looked like a Whippet cross. And he's also pretty high strung, so I totally get it. I mean, God bless the people at Shelter's, but they don't know.

They just write something on a card and was like, this is what you're getting. Oh, they told me Niles was a beagle lab. Yeah, that's not real. And he's a dog. That's what he has in common with beagles and labs. Truth. She would go wild with excitement at the sight of any guest

and would literally run circles around her bestie, Makita, who is a Malamute. So again, husky feel. And she also had her own anxieties. She didn't like loud noises. And even if you would like whisper in her ears, it would make her upset. She loved to be near them, like literally on top of them,

but also just insisted that they play with her all the time. So it didn't necessarily help their anxiety feelings like they expected, but they also realized that Iki made them calm themselves down so they could best help her when she was anxious. So what they found was she actually would not be comforted if she noticed that they were getting anxious. So if she was anxious and they were anxious

and they were trying to calm her down, she realized that they were anxious and wouldn't calm down until they brought themselves down. Yeah, so not only did she probably feed off of it, she recognized that they weren't in a good place. Liar. I'm not going to be calm. You're not calm.

So how could, I mean, essentially how could they help her if they were in the same mental place, which I think is just like, speaks so highly to the bottom between dogs and their owners. And I kind of want to cry. Iki has calmed ever so slightly with age. She still acts like a puppy,

but she now has two motes. Very excited or, and I quote, a completely liquid cuddle bottle, which I love that visual. I've never heard it like that, but I'm always going to use liquid cuddle bottle. And Lay says that she is the best choice she's ever made and is so delighted to come home to her every day.

Both of them just don't on her and spoil her rotten and her anxiety seems to be improving along with both of her moms through the liberal application of love. And Ashley, do you want to see a picture of Iki before? Send immediately. Oh my goodness. I wasn't picturing him fully black,

but he's so cute. Look at his ears. Those are like shepherd ears. They do look kind of shepherdy, but I can totally see some of the whip it features too. That thin long nose. So delicate and beautiful. I love her.

People ask all the time, you guys, where you can see these prepped of the month pictures. So we always post a separate blog post outside of the episode for our prepped of the month. And if you go to our what is a prepped page because we had to make one, so many people were asking, you can see like they're at the bottom

like all the prepped blog posts are highlighted. So you can check them out there. This prepped is so cute cuddling with a little toy. Oh my gosh. I love him. I love him already. Yeah, Iki is super. She looks like a tiny little shulker.

Yeah, Iki's adorable. I miss Charlie. He's sleeping in the guest room right now. I need to go cuddle him. Amber, I think next week, I'm going to try and tell a prepped story, but I'm warning everyone because I tend to gravitate towards the really sad ones.

And I'm going to try. I'm going to try. I'm just going to... Yeah, maybe I'll pick one out for you because I like happy ones because I can't do sad ones. Well, let's see if it's possible. We'll see what happens.

We'll... We'll be back next week. We've got a brand new episode and a brand new prepped also up the month.