My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 248 - Congratulations, Smarty

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

This week, Karen and Georgia cover the survival story of Kara Robinson Chamberlain and the University of Alabama Huntsville shooting.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We at Wondery live, breathe and downright obsess over true crime and now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music, Exhibit C. It's truly criminal. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. How are you? Thank you. Honestly, everybody say it out loud right now. How are you? Good? Bad? Somewhere in between? Us too. All of the above. Good though. You get to be all things. Yes, good. Good, though. We're good.

You know, as of a week ago, I feel a lot better and lighter and nice and all those things. It's a relief. It's a joyous celebration. It's also a problem, but isn't that how it is these days? I'm being optimistic about the whole thing by not reading the news that much. Smart, good. And I'm hoping in my naivete that things will return somewhat to normalcy in the next year, but things have been so insane that normalcy is going to be insane. It just won't seem like it as much because things have been so insane. True. I mean, I will say just getting to sit, you know, the day they actually announced, to sit in my house and just get to watch people

around the world and in every city in America, literally gathering in the streets, dancing in the streets. My favorite was very early on. So people were taking video in Manhattan and in Brooklyn where people were just wandering out of their houses and standing there, banging pots and pans. And then somebody took this great video of the first time. It's just like people kind of realizing, oh, we're doing this. Let's do it. And then they're starting to just cheer, just cheer in the streets in Manhattan. And then a US postal truck comes around the corner and people go fucking insane. And that was like that moment where it's just like, yeah, this is the America I understand and know. If you're listening to this a year from now,

we're talking about the election, by the way. Oh, right. We're so up against it. We drove around the neighborhood. Vince was blasting a supersonic just for the fun of it. And our whole neighborhood, there's so much, there's footage of it was going crazy and cheering. Well, Los Feliz, obviously, which is like a really liberal neighborhood. It was so much fun. It felt good. It felt it felt like pure and it felt like this weight had lifted off everyone. And it was magical. It's so nice, especially as the votes, you know, continue to roll in the margin of the win. The eight out of 10 people believe Joe Biden was fairly elected. I mean, like this, that's the reality that we're now in. And I am so

so relieved and happy not only to be in that reality, but for the people who are absolutely in danger because of this past administration. I'm sure they feel intense relief. And then we also, we really clearly have a ton of work to do, a ton of work to do in this country. Absolutely. But I am in this moment, I'm proud of us. And I feel so much more hope than I have in a long time. For sure. I'm very, very proud of all the people, people we know, and also just people out there that started organizing on the local level. Yeah. Just separate from everything. The storyline of Stacey Abrams, having her election truly stolen from her in every way, shape, or form, and she doesn't quit. She doesn't say, fuck you, everybody. She doesn't,

she goes straight back home and she starts fairfight.org, which please give your money to that if you even have any, because holy shit, she got on the ground and reached out and started getting a hold of all those voters who have been suppressed for so long and making such a difference. It's so inspiring and amazing. And not just her. Of course, one of the first things she did on Twitter is start naming all the other people that worked with her. It's like that kind of impressive, really amazing leadership is so great to see and so something you can get behind. Hope. I can't stop talking about hope. I know. Well, that's the feeling. It's really nice. And look, that's not the only thing that's been happening lately because my sister

called to let me know that I appeared in my hometown newspaper in the, the column was called the buzz. So my sister actually said it to me like, so my pedal in the California is my hometown, hometown newspaper, the Argus carrier been going strong since, who knows, 1855. A long time. So she runs into our friend, Lisa Johnston, who we went to high school with and, and who's, you know, now lives near my sister. And she was like, did you see Karen in the Argus? And my sister's like, no. And she's like, you didn't. And she kind of didn't believe my sister. Right. Or was like, are you a bad sister? She's just like, oh, oh, we don't care about that. Right. The thought of the, of the thought of someone being like, you're in the fucking newspaper.

That's like a once in a lifetime thing. And you're just being like, I don't know. Didn't, didn't see it. Not interested. And then she sent my sister the link. And the picture, they used our picture, but it's, you know, sorry, I'm the only one that's from there. So Georgia got cut out. Amazing. I'm sure Irvine is running to do a, do a story on me too. Right. They're, they're answering better and going to clap back to the Argus courier story. But I just want to say all of this brag of this bragging corner is to say thank you to the person who was only listed as staff writer. So I don't know if it's one, if it's just one murdering or if there was three in the office, but this, the write up, because it was about how the paperback

book is coming out next year on my birthday. That's right. Stay sexy and don't get murdered. Our book is coming out on paper book, paper book. Why isn't it called a paper book? The book's actually made of plastic, but the cover is paper. So anyway, it's just about that, that's kind of the point. But within it, clearly there were so many references and insider thing it made me laugh so hard to read it. So I just want to say thank you staff writer, whoever you are, and, and don't be afraid to send a message to the Gmail letting me know what your actual name is, because you really glowed me up to my hometown. That's beautiful. I'm in the buzz section. I mean, that's, that's all. Mark, what did you want? From your hometown? Come on. Absolutely. I would

love for Irvine to acknowledge me one time. Just one. Instead of shunning this shit out of me. Okay, I have a question for you. Did you, did you watch, I know you were like, not totally keeping up with the vow. But did you watch seduced? Yes, I did. Fuckin' with India Oxenberg, her story about Nexium. Okay. Turns out Keith is just a whole another level of creep. Now, here's what I have to say, because we talked about the vow on this show when it first came out. And I actually said things like, it's just amazing to see the people on the inside actually calling, calling all this behavior, calling themselves or whatever. Yeah. Uh, no, they didn't. And when you watch seduced, they left things out that are not little things.

That footage of Keith Ranieri talking about how raping a baby is only an issue if you apply morality to it. Right. And if a child likes it and then doesn't find out it's immoral until someone tells them, as if then that's okay. He's a monster. And it's like, hey, hey, look, what is this about? Because this is executive success programming that was what it was supposed to be. What are you talking about? Right. Why are you talking about it? And it's so clearly like that's the breakdown in cults. Yeah. That's what starts to happen, which is you don't have to, why are you applying morality to everything? Why do you, why is the way you think so problematic? Right. Like he broke, he broke those people mentally in a way where not one

person in that room heard him say that and you didn't hear a cough. You didn't hear anybody go, whoa, nothing. They're all right there. I think Bonnie's face. Anytime they panned over to Bonnie, who was the original one who got the fuck out, she looks, you can tell she's like inching her way. She's fucking crab walking out the door a little bit. I feel like if someone made that statement, I, I would like to think, and you know what, this is why this is how people get in the cults, because they're thinking this way, which is very self-congratulatory. We have no idea. After I reported my calories to you and stayed up all night playing volleyball, I probably wouldn't, but I'd like to think that if I heard something that fucked up, I'd go,

hey, what are we doing? Hold up. Hi. Hi, hold up. Yeah. Yeah, that was shocking. And it really, it's interesting that they came out with that almost like a competing documentary, because that's the information people need to know. Which they're insisting it's not, but I really liked it. It also made me, and I won't spoil it, but there's a part in it that made Keith kissing everyone on the mouth even more disgusting than it was before. Do you know what I'm talking about? Does he lick a toilet? No. Was he dared to lick a toilet? I honestly, I got past the episode, which I think is either two or three, where he starts saying that intensely fucked up stuff about what you can do to women, what you can do to children, like all these things.

And I just started getting that feeling of like, this is horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My God. And then it was like, then it was the election week. So it was just like, I can't go back in. I can't go back in. I need less toxic masculine in my life. Not fucking more of it, please. But that's what's fascinating about him is he's just this little bland guy. Like that idea when they, I mean, lots of people have made this point and it's hilarious and true. They, all the followers talk about what a genius he is and how amazing it is. And then when you hear the things he actually says, none of it is genius, amazing, or even original. It's just the confidence he says it with and the determination he says it with that makes you think he knows what he's talking about. Yeah.

You know, for people who clearly are there because they have low self-esteem, that's like really going to work on them. Right? Right. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I honestly am really like 20, 21 years old. I definitely might have fallen for something. I don't know. Maybe not. There was like, what was it? Landmark forum? Yeah. Friends went to that. I was like, absolutely not. I'm not going to that. And I'm broke as fuck. How the fuck did they, how could they afford these classes that were thousands of dollars? I know. They took all their Battlestar Galactica money and sunk it right into that thing. It's so sad. I'm also, let's see what I'll see you watching or listen to or reading. I have been,

here's what I've been reading and watching. Nothing and the wall as I pace around my house staring and going like what's going to happen. Yeah. I can't like, I've been rewatching stuff that I know is super familiar. Yeah. Simply just so I can zone out. Yeah. Essentially. What have you been doing? Same thing. Pen 15 has been really comforting to me the new season. The new season is supposed to be amazing. It's great. And then I've had this realization that when I, now that I'm trying not to drink, there's like five extra hours every fucking day. It's crazy. It's crazy. Five extra hours and I don't feel like shit in the morning. And my life has just kind of taken this weird turn. Like I come downstairs around nine and it's

just like self care time. It's just nine. Yeah. That's new too. Yeah. So I've been stays upstairs and watching TV. Usually I would have stayed with him drinking until fucking 1230. But instead I come down, I take a bath. I listen to podcasts. A lot of like, I'm really big on health or wellness podcasts right now. Like mindfulness shit. And so mindfulness. That's my new podcast. Mindfulness shit. There you go. Then you're like, just be mindful. I don't know. Even picture an orange in your head. Be that orange. The cure for chronic pain again is like this podcast that I'm loving. There's an episode about healing the wounds of childhood, which is like fucking deep and relevant to everyone. And then it's about sobriety.

And so yeah, it's just been, it's been nice to be nice to myself. Not that it's going great. I got shitfaced on Saturday. It was a big mistake. I had been what but I think celebratory. I think the presidential election is more than valid. But I used it as an excuse and I knew I would. But yes. And you will again. And that's okay. Because this is an imperfect path as a person who has rolled down this path. Don't start again and never look back. Then that's the key. I definitely am. I also want to say like I've been saying about, I've been talking about all these books and podcasts I've been reading and listening to about quit lit and everything. But I also feel like I should mention that a couple months ago, my psychiatrist prescribed

this medication for me that is supposed to help curb cravings for alcohol specifically. So I don't want to seem like I'm this fucking sobriety unicorn that's just like doing it through reading and fucking literature. It's not that easy. So if you have a good psychiatrist and you need that help, maybe that maybe they'll prescribe it for you as well. Is it well be a trend? It's not well be a trend. It's specifically, it's not an antidepressant. It was originally just for that to help curb cravings for and withdrawals from what's it called? Opioids. Yes. For opioids and to kind of make it not work as well, which is really interesting. And then they found out it works for alcohol too. So, you know, just doing whatever works. I'm enjoying it. I'm excited

about it. I feel like it's definitely despite Saturday, it feels like a different, you know, you've been with me for, you know, every time for the past five years that I've been like, I'm quitting again. I'm quitting. I'm quitting. And I don't know, it feels different. And I'm looking forward to like identifying why I was pouring alcohol. It's not like I always thought I drink because it's fun. It's always been a positive and because of this and because of that. And now I'm realizing, no, it's actually, it's to subdue myself and to subdue my feelings. And so it's not fun. It's really not been fun for a while. It's now actually a negative and I need to look at it that way. True. Which is a difficult thing to do because then that means you don't get your

little escape patch. Right. And also, I think the thing that I talk about with my therapist all the time these days is these feelings we fear so much because they're from early trauma or a trauma moment at all. We fear them. We begin to cope around them. We build these crazy castles of coping mechanisms around feelings that we're so afraid of. If we figure out the way we can allow ourselves to feel them and practice actually just feeling them, we realize the worst has already happened. That's what my therapist has said to me like over and over for the past five years. The worst has actually already happened. You think you're anticipating something bad and like locking down in the anticipation. But what your brain is actually experiencing is what already happened.

And it can't be that bad again. It won't be that bad again. So you have to give yourself over to stop turning away and avoiding and do whatever and just kind of give yourself over to this is a big bad feeling. And once you feel it, you go, oh, yeah, feelings can't kill me. Maybe I was in truth truly being threatened before. But right now, as I sit in my kitchen and I'm right here crying or grieving or whatever it is. Or get triggered by someone saying something or doing something that just calls back to that time. You're not there anymore. You don't have to react as that person who was traumatized. I'm about to cry because this is all, this is everything I'm trying to learn right now and deal with. And I've got 20 years. It's some reason just hit me. It's

almost like I'm coming out of a cult. For 20 years, I've been covering that with alcohol. And the thought of feeling the feelings and my therapist, my new therapist calls them, those nice juicy feelings of love. At first, I was like, please don't use that word. But now, like, I get it. And it is like, I can't, I don't want to feel positive. I don't want to feel vulnerable and love. Positive is a trap. We all know that. Positive is this thing that happens right before you drop off the fucking face of the earth. Exactly. And that is a learned thing that, as my therapist said a million times, your trauma brain knows the experience that you had when you were nine and it never updates. It never updates. So that's how you know when things are black and

white, when things are desperate, it's life or death, all those reactions that you're in trauma. And so you go, you like, I can't look, there's, you know, I'm being threatened. And it's like, actually, if you can just even just pause and just feel you're not being threatened and this feeling won't kill you. And I'm learning the self talk of talking to myself like a child, like that child, you're okay now. I would just like to put a button on it by saying, it's just really nice. Like, you know, we've been doing this for almost five years, right? Mm-hmm. And you can get a lot of shit like tabled and worked out in five years. If you start going to therapy now, I feel entirely different than I did when I, when we started

this and I was in therapy, the things I talked about and the way I talked about it was very different than how I talk about things now. I'm an entirely different person. Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea and this can work for anything working out or quitting something or starting something is five years are going to pass anyway. It's, you can't, you can't put it off and not let the five years pass. They're going to pass. So where do you want to be five years from now? Work on it. You know, that's, now's the time to work on it. And even if you just do little bits, I believe the Japanese call it kaizen, which is small improvements every day. So you don't, it doesn't have to be, you know, this kind of

big, presentational American idol kind of look at my victory shit. Especially when we're in fucking quarantine. It's more like when you get up and make your bed and then you leave the room and come back into the room, it's so nice that you're like, ooh, it looks so nice. Yeah. Or what happened to me the other day, which was, uh, I can't, what did I have to go do? I think I had to go get a flu shot. And then when I came home, I had four minutes before we started podcasting and then some people working on my house showed up. So I didn't clean. There was clothes on my bathroom floor. Like I was 15 years old and my, and my bed wasn't made. And it was so embarrassing. And I was

just like, yeah, that's like the feeling of that isn't how I normally feel anymore. Cause I'm like taking care of things. And it was like, it was very like cut back to 1995. We're just like, Oh, I don't do this anymore. Why did I, you're an adult, like you're an adult now who takes care of her things. And, and that shows how much more you care about your life and respect yourself. And also it feels good, which is if you never do it, you're just assuming it won't, or it's a big pain in your ass where it's like work, work feels good. Um, uh, improving things feels good. Like, like taking care of yourself actually feels good. But when you're not doing it, I, my big thing was I used to always be like, look at that. I'm not doing that extra shit.

Because I never thought for a second it would feel better than I felt that it never, I didn't know, I didn't have the experience to know it felt better. My next step is to go to, or to virtually go to an Allen on meeting. So that's, that's my therapist kind of made, you know, has, has recommended that for me. So I'm gonna, that's gonna be my thing of like, I keep putting it off. I keep for like six fucking months. And it's, that's one of those things where it's like, take a bite, take a small bite of something and do it. It's not that you can't do it. It's that you won't do it. It's not like, I can't do that. I don't have time. No, I have time to do it because I'm not drinking. So I have those five hours. I won't, I will not do it. And I need to,

because there's a lot to fear, because it's vulnerability, it's exposure, it's, it is digging back into hard feelings and bad feelings, you know, there's crying coming, you know, there's some kind of big, or feeling, what if it doesn't work for me? What if I'm so broken that it's not going to work for me? So I'm not gonna do it. Can I just tell you is fucking classic alcoholism thinking I'm the one that's so broken it won't work for. Or like, I tried rehab once and it didn't work. So I'm not trying it again. That to me, like on intervention, when I see that, it's like, no, no, no, try it again. You know, but it is look, I empathize with myself in that all that thinking I've done the exact same fucking thinking because I'm a straight up addict. I want to feel special.

That's all I want. That's why I'm a motherfucking standup comic. That's why I can't have enough podcasts. I can't get myself out there more because there is a big fucking hole. It's been there since day one. I've tried to figure out ways to fix it. A lot of them have gone very badly. Many have been macaroni and cheese based tons of regrets, tons of, you know, looking back and going, wow, you blew it. And that's just kind of how it is when you have this specific thing. Yep. That's the sum total of life. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Hey, I want to do exactly right. Have you been trapped in your house for months? I can talk about anything. This is podcasting. It's fine. Most self-indulter.

Especially since you and I, the only person I talk to it pretty much is Vince and you these days. Yeah. Sorry, guys. We have some stuff to talk about. We needed to work some shit out. Now we can press record and start. We haven't been recording, right? Wait, let's see. We have a really exciting announcement. So first, let's talk about the new merch design that we put up this week. So to celebrate this awesome, exciting week in turn of events, we just dropped a new design and it's of the fucking hooray quote. Yep. Is that a quote? Yes. Thing, title? Kind of, yeah. It's so cute. It's designed by a friend of the family, Rowdy Cowlick on Instagram and Twitter. She's incredible. Do you know her if you were at the fan weekend? Right.

She was, it's her name's Hilary and she was the one there doing the stitching for everybody. If they bought a jacket, she does her stitching and she's a super talented artist. She's such a good artist. So we have mugs, sweatshirts, t-shirts. So check out the new fucking hooray design. It's fucking cute. I really love it. It looks like balloons. It's like balloons. It does. It's a real hooray feeling. Yeah. Well, then also, so we had a brand new podcast premiere. I saw what you did, Millie DeCerco and Danielle Henderson. It's a film podcast. It just dropped on Tuesday. It was weak. Yeah. Yesterday or two days ago for when you hear this. And if you haven't heard it yet, so it's called esteemed dirtbags. And they talk about two, they have like a double feature

where they discuss these movies. You can go watch them beforehand and then listen to the conversation. You can do it afterwards or maybe you've already watched it. It's such a good podcast. You guys, they're just fucking badass women that you will love listening to. I feel like it's your new going for a walk podcast or cleaning the house podcast where it's two friends talking about something they're really passionate about and excited about. And they have a lot of knowledge of and at its heart, it's just really about the two of them nerding out on something they're both excited about. Plus, plus a grandma, plus an incredible grandma segment at the end, which is a fucking already a hit. Danielle's grandma is the sorry,

sorry, Millie and Danielle, but Danielle's grandma is the breakout star. She is a horror movie loving grandma who gives advice. It's just a great podcast. So give it a try. It feels like you're like the new one in rotation that like makes you feel good, you know? Yeah. Oh, and, you know, rate, review and subscribe so that they get, so they get, you know, wanted charts. Yeah. The more reviews you have, I think the more the higher on the chart and the more stars you get, the higher you get on the charts and subscriptions. Like all of that matters and counts for people podcasting. It's really, it's a, it's a cool thing you can do to like, to like pay for your free podcast. Right. Exactly. And it's, and it really does actually impact and these guys deserve it.

You know what I mean? It's like such good work. Yeah. So if you have a chance, please rate, review and subscribe. We have nothing to do with it, but, but putting it on our network and we're proud of that alone. Yes. All right. Well, I had a little something to do with calling million being like, excuse me, but that's true. That's true. All right. I take it all back. No, no, sorry. I had to get again, can I just have some attention and credit for every goddamn thing that happens in the world? You may. Thank you. You may. Um, crying, crying. Is that everything? Hmm. I believe it is. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot. I know. Is that everything 42 minutes? Is that everything you're the first person I've seen or talked to all week long?

I put a dress on for you. I have been, I spent the entire day in like ratty pajama pants and my, like my dad's sweater from the like 1986 New York marathon and I looked at myself and I was just sad. My muck looks on and I was like, who is this girl? Do you want? Who is this person? So you dressed it up. So I put a dress on. You had this great idea recently that we make some videos for the fan cult and yours was that I put on dresses of like what I would be wearing if I actually went outside and saw people on the outfits. Beautiful vintage dresses. I have not stopped thinking about how exciting that's going to be. Yes. For two weeks. So great. Stephen, it's you, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say the, I haven't, I haven't done laundry in so

long that when Slayer sent us our everybody Slayer shirts, I've been wearing all the Slayer shirts. So it's a week of just all these like, and I'm not like a metal guy or anything like that. No, you're not. Oh, you're not? No, that's shocking. So it's just like every week, like going out to get groceries, just like the devil, you know, when students close scare children, that's when you know he needs to do laundry. Yes. It's fucking hilarious. I love that. That's amazing. Looking for a better cooking routine with meal planning, shopping and prepping handled. Hello Fresh has you covered. Hello Fresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can

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your first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder20 with code murder20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candice DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily, I share a quick 10-minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths, and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. I have decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse, FBI agent, and criminal profiler. On Killer Psyche Daily, I'll give you insight into cases like Ryan Grantham and the newly arrested Stockton Serial Killer. I'll also bring on expert guests to

dive deeper into the details, share what it's like to work with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia, and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey, Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. All right. Okay. This is a heavy one. This is one that I'm sure you've heard of throughout the many years I've been a murderer now and into true crime. This is a story I've seen on many TV shows and heard many times, but never really thought of it as a story that I should do. But it's also one of those ones where there's details in it that pop into my brain on a regular basis. I didn't think

to do it until the incredible survivor in this story started doing a TikTok account and told her story through TikTok and is this incredible survivor and an advocate. It had this incredible ending already, and now it's her being this incredible person and owning what she went through, and so I wanted to share it. So this is the survivor story of Cara Robinson. June 24th, 2002, it's a normal hot summer day in suburban Columbia, South Carolina. 15-year-old Cara Robinson is at her friend Heather's house. They're going to go to the lake that day and hang out. So before they leave, Heather's mom is like, can you just water the plants in the front yard before you go? Cara offers to do it while Heather goes and gets ready for the lake. So she's out

front watering the lawn, but unbeknownst to Cara, there's a murderer stalking the streets in the broad daylight. Originally, he had come to town looking for a different girl, one that he had targeted for weeks, taking notes as he followed her routine, targeted her, stalked her. But on that day, when he was ready and went to snatch her, she wasn't around. And actually, that morning, he had put his mother and wife on a plane to Disney World and had taken the week off of work unbeknownst to them and was like preparing to take this girl. Premeditated. Horrifying. Okay. But instead, he couldn't find the girl. So instead, he drove around looking for just another victim. He's in his mother's bright green

Pontiac Firebird. And he's specifically targeting that neighborhood because he believes that the young girls there live sheltered lives. So they're easier targets. They go more willingly. So eventually, he notices Cara. She's, it's pretty blonde in shorts in the front yard. Cara notices him drive up and thinking that she's someone he's someone she knew. She smiles at him and kind of comes towards the car. And he gets out of the car and asks Cara, like, are your parents home? And he has this like some magazines and kind of makes it seem like he's a magazine salesman, you know, kind of unassuming. He's at the button down shirt and a baseball cap. He's completely unassuming, normal looking, of course. But when he approaches Cara to hand her one of

the magazines, like he gets a little too into her personal space and she gets a strange feeling about him immediately. And sure enough, as soon as he gets close enough, he pulls out a handgun and presses it to the side of her neck and forces her quickly into the back seat of his car. Just like that. But what the man didn't know was that instead of picking a sheltered suburban victim, he had fucked with the wrong girl. And between the two of them, she was the only one who was going to survive. So there were neighbors who witnessed Cara leaving with the man. But to them, you know, from far away, it looked like she was going willingly with him. So initially, when law enforcement's called, they, of course, just

think she's a runaway. And what the neighbors hadn't seen, though, was that in the back seat of the car, there was a huge rubber made container. And the man had forced Cara to get into it in like a fetal position and put the lid on it. So she's completely hidden. Yes. So it's dark, it's cramped, but like almost immediately, Cara is determined to survive. And so she automatically starts taking note of everything going on. So every turn that's being made, every stop sign, she knows the town really well, she can tell when they get on the interstate. He drives about 10 to 15 minutes, pulls the car over, like on the side of the road, and he opens her container, and he calmly tells her he's going to tie her up and gag her. So he binds her wrists

and ankles, he gags her, he puts her back in the container, drives a couple more minutes before parking, and she's listened to every sound going, you know, happening, just totally aware of what's going on. He comes to the back seat, picks up the container and drags it across what Cara says feels like concrete. So Cara hears a door slam and when he takes off the lid there in his apartment. So he opens a container, he tells her that he's going to take the gag out, but keep the restraints on and don't fucking scream or make any noise. I have a gun, but she's still focused on her escape. So she looks, is looking around the apartment trying to get any information that'll tell her who this fucker is. She starts trying to look at his mail and see what his name is.

There's a fucking magnet on the fridge of the dentist that he goes to. She memorizes who the dentist is. Jesus. I know. And she memorizes, this is insane, the serial number of the Rubbermaid container. Fuck yes, she does. Every piece of information. Brilliant. And it's almost like, I bet in a way that was what's making her, making her calm in a way. She had a job, she couldn't have a job to do. Yes, you could not panic. So she's amazing. But oftentimes we can't control that. That's like an animal response. So somehow the way she did it, which is so brilliant is like, she hyper focused, you know, like it's awesome. Yeah, everyone reacts differently in a traumatic situation and no one right way is wrong or right. But this is just how she did it. And I think it's

inspirational. It's inspirational. So she is still focused on her escape. She tries to like chat with him to, you know, get information about him. And so she gets him to talk about himself, his time in the military. There's like a bunch of bird cages around and like lizards. So she asks questions about his pets. The man also asked Kara about her life. And he's like got a little pen and paper and is like taking copious notes about her life, asking her, you know, if she has a boyfriend, you know, all these details about her life, he writes it all down. And eventually she also overhears him having a phone call with his wife. Oh, yeah. So Kara and we of course know what's coming next. He makes her take a bath. Part of his MO is that he has her shave her pubic hair.

And then he rapes her repeatedly over the next several hours. And later he makes her smoke pot with him and take a valium kind of to make her sleepy. And when it's time for bed, he uses fuzzy handcuffs on a wrist and you know, like, I know, like the sex store fuzzy handcuffs. As if it's consensual. He's pretending. And he has rope. He shackles her to the bed frame. And he uses a D ring, which is like the hiking screw on hiking rings that a lot of like hipsters use as you know, as keychains and shit. Yeah, like a little carabiner. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it is. Because I hike. That's what I know. Because you're a rock climber. I love to climb rocks. So he attaches that to the rope around the fuzzy handcuffs or hands are raised

over her head. And he ties that to the bed post. She also has a restraint on her leg that's attached to the bottom of the bed. And then he falls asleep next to her. When Kara wakes up in the middle of the night, it's still dark out. He she hears this man, like lightly snoring next to her. And immediately she's like, this is my chance. She doesn't hesitate. So without making much noise, she is able to reach the D ring and bring it to her mouth and uses her teeth and her tongue to unscrew it, the carabiner. And then I remember watching an episode of some show where she talked about how because the handcuffs were fuzzy, it made it easier to slip her hand out of. Yes, they're not fucking real handcuffs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So she does that. She takes off her

ankle restraint. She slides out of bed without waking him up. But she she has to go through the apartment at the front door, which is messy. She's like walks into a, you know, a vacuum. She's so scared. She's going to wake him up. And the door, the front door, that apartment is heavy. And she knows that once it opens, he's going to hear it and he's going to wake up. So as soon as she walks out the door, she fucking books it and she runs through the apartment complex as fast as she can and bare feet. She makes it to the parking lot. She flags down a car that's passing and she tells what I'm sure are the two completely shocked dudes in the car that she had just been kidnapped and needs a ride to the police station. She still has the fucking handcuffs on one hand, you know.

And the men, of course, let her in and drive her to the police station. Thank God. Yeah. When she arrives at the Richland County Sheriff's Substation, still with the fucking fuzzy handcuffs on one of her wrists, the deputy there does not believe her story. Because remember, they thought she was a runaway. Yeah. But when she's there fucking in person, being like, not only did I not run away, but I was just raped multiple times and you need to go. Yeah. And this is not how you treat a fucking victim of violent crime. Let alone a fucking 15 year old. Let's get some training going. How about it? Well, you'll hear this guy. Okay. Okay. Okay. When she insists she's not making it up, he calls her mom to like check

and says, we have your missing daughter. And like Kara could hear her mom and the other end of the line. And she's like, that's the first time I really got emotional. So they fucking finally believe her. Okay. So they're going to take her to the hospital. But before they do that, and this is kind of unreal as well, they drive her back to the apartment complex because they wanted her to point out which apartment she had spent the last 18 hours being assaulted and raped in. So it almost seems like a retraumatization, right? Yeah. I think. Sorry. Will you tell me again what year this is? This is 2002. Okay. So she's not able to identify exactly what apartment it is. You know, of course, her mind had so much other stuff going on that

she doesn't remember. But she and it's a huge apartment complex. And she also got dragged in in a plastic bin. Exactly. And she didn't walk in. No. And she ran the fuck out too. Yeah. And you know, this apartment complexes that are so complicated and yes. But she is able to remember one specific detail from the apartment of all the things she had been memorizing that she thought might help. And so she told them that there had been a hairbrush in the apartment that had long red hair in it. So when the deputies give this little bit of info to the property manager of the apartment, the manager is immediately like, Oh, I know who that is. She has long red hair and she lives there with her husband. So they're able to fucking figure out what apartment it is based

on a little teeny tiny bit of info that Kara was able to gather. Yeah, her observations. That's right. So yeah, it turns out that the red hair belonged to Kara's captor's wife. So by the time the cops arrived, of course, the man is long gone. But investigators learn his identity. He's 38 year old Richard Mark Evanets. They get a search warrant. They go through every inch of his apartment. They find tons of porn. And they also find a metal footlocker that's kind of like hidden away and locked. And they're able to pry the lock off. And inside the metal footlocker, they find newspaper articles that come from Spotsylvania, Virginia. And the headline is about the bodies of two sisters that had been found in a river in the area almost six years prior. So they're like,

uh-oh. And that's when police realized that Kara isn't this piece of shit's first victim. And they call on the FBI and a manhunt for serial killer Richard Mark Evanets is launched. Whoa. All right, so let's go back to his first known murder victim. Just about six years prior on September 9th, 1996, and over 400 miles away in sleepy rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia. It's about 60 miles south of DC. And then, so I checked, of course, my favorite murder email, and there was just tons of people talking about these cases and how much they affected the town and their lives and their, you know, childhoods. So Christy said, I grew up in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which isn't exactly a happen in place unless you're a civil war buff, in which case it's the shit.

It's usually a very safe place to be, but that changed pretty suddenly in the mid 90s. And then a listener named Ali said, in the 90s, it was nothing but woods, civil war battlefields, and a small shopping mall. So tiny town. You know, we're the kind of, we don't lock our doors, nothing bad ever happens here. Sure. So 16 year old Sophia Silva was a junior at Cortland High. She loved anything that was purple and she wanted to go to cosmetology school when she graduated. On that day, Sophia comes home from school. She sits down on her front porch with a grape soda and her homework and starts doing her homework. And her older sister is inside and doesn't hear or notice anything out of the ordinary. But when she comes out to check on Sophia, all that's left

is the unfinished can of grape soda and Sophia's homework. And seemingly without a struggle, her sister is vanished. So this really incredible listener named Remy wrote us, here's what she said. In September 1996, my friend Sophia Silva was abducted from her front porch while doing her homework. Sophia and I were friends since I moved to Virginia in sixth grade. She was a sweet, bubbly, and kind soul. Five long weeks of agony, wanting to know what happened to her, looking for answers, hoping the nightmare would end and praying for her to come home. We waited. One day in October, I came home from school and noticed Sophia's missing posters from my car windows were gone. I walked in my house angry that they weren't there. I stormed upstairs and as soon as I saw my mom's

face, I knew Sophia was never coming home. To this day, I count her disappearance and murder as the worst time in my life. It permanently changed who I was. In a small way, I hold on to guilt about not pushing her to be a part of the color guard that year. If she would have joined, she would have been at practice that day and not at home. And then it says a 16 year old's guilt. Yeah. Which obviously, she must know in her heart that that's not possible, but it's so hard to convince yourself of those things. And it's part of grieving, I think. It's what people do to kind of run what could I have done, what should I have done. And it's almost easier to compartmentalize it like that instead of deal with the wave of grief, especially when you're a teenager. It's

awful. Like the loss of control. You're almost searching for one little thing that you could have controlled, right? Despite the best efforts of police, they weren't able to locate her until her body was found by farmers in a marsh six weeks later and 20 miles away. She'd been wrapped in a white cover and law enforcement lets the public know that her pubic hair had been shaved off, which of course just horrifies everyone. And she's recognizable only by the purple nail polish on her fingers. The water in her lungs matches the water in the marsh, which just shows that she had been drowned where she was found. And since there had been zero signs of a struggle, police, of course, figured Sophia must have known her killer. Otherwise,

she wouldn't have gone willingly, which means now, no, that's not the case. Yeah, there's just, there's never a struggle when someone pulls a gun on you or there's rarely a struggle. I know that seems clear, but right easy for me to say. Right. So they questioned family and neighbors and it leads them to a man named Carl, who had been painting houses, like a couple houses down from Sophia. And he had previously been charged with indecent exposure and quote, visiting a body place, which I don't fully understand. It sounds like an old law, you know, like this in 1862, you couldn't visit a body place. What's a fucks a body place? I don't want body place around here in 25 years. Like body, B, I, W, D, Y. Oh, I thought you like meant like

the morgue or something. Oh, no, body as in like, naughty. Yeah, yeah. That's from the 20s. That's ridiculous. Right. After obtaining a warrant, police searched Carl's van and they find hair fragments and quote, purple flakes. They believe to be from Sophia's nail polish. And so after comparing the evidence found in the van to evidence found on Sophia's body, the Virginia Commonwealth forensic lab in Richmond announces that the results are a match and connects Carl to the murder of Sophia Silva. So Carl's charged. He's held in jail as they build a case against him. And the prosecutors are like, this is a fucking easy win. Right. Wrong. Because seven months later, on May 1, 1997, while Carl is still in jail, two more local girls sisters vanish in similar

circumstances. On May 1, 1997, 15 year old Kristen Liske and her 12 year old sister, Katie, get dropped off by their school buses outside their house as normal. Kristen, who was a high school freshman, played soccer, loved ladybugs. And Katie, who played clarinet and hoped to be a cartoonist one day. I mean, she's this little, little girl. They're new latchkey kids and they have the rule that as soon as they got home, they needed to call their dad to let them know, you know. Yeah. So when that call didn't come, Mr. Liske automatically knew something was wrong. He heads home immediately from work and he got as far as the front yard where he finds his daughter's discarded book bag. And knowing this is definitely not a runaway case, thankfully.

Law enforcement and over 1500 volunteers from the community search for the Liske sisters. So sadly, their bodies are found five days and over 40 miles away in the South Anna River in Hanover County. So like Sophia, the girls had been shaved and they both had water in their lungs, although the water is shown to be bathwater, which means they were killed at another location. At the time, it was obvious that the two cases were the work of the same man. All three girls had been brazenly abducted during the day outside of their homes after school without any struggle. And the other MOs were similar. So it came as no surprise when DNA samples from both those crimes matched each other. So Carl, who's hanging out in prison, he's released after the original findings

from his van are retested and shown to be incorrect due to several mistakes in lab work. Which is that thing we always talk about where it's like, you can't completely trust DNA sometimes, right? It's not things are given. Yeah. Yeah. Everything's fallible because humans are fallible. Right. But despite the DNA evidence, authorities are unable to match it to a killer. And the town, of course, this little town is in a fricking panic wondering when what they call the spotsylvania killer would strike again. And of course, it changed everything about the way kids were parented. You know, it's the late 90s. So there's still some of that. The stranger danger, but also the freedom that we had without helicopter parents. And it just changes everything. So much so that the movie

Kiss the Girls was put out then and they refused to put it in this local theaters because it just was so triggering. Ashley from our email wrote, as a brunette middle of school or just like the victims, I spent several years wondering if today would be the day I was snatched. I stepped I studied the faces of lone men. I memorized license plates. The local parents organized to ensure an adult was always with the kids at each bus stop before and after school. I literally thought about this killer every day for years. She says, I learned early on that the worst people hide in plain sight. So she, she wrote about how she had wanted to be an FBI profiler when she was little. And she said, instead of that, I pursued a path that led me to my current

job doing forensic interviews of children who have been sexually, physically, or otherwise abused. Wow. I hope that by working to stop these perpetrators earlier in their trajectories and getting abused kids the help they need while they're young, we can prevent the next serial killer from taking more innocent lives. So the murders were featured on America's Most Wanted and $150,000 reward is offered for information, but no one comes forward to like tell them anything useful. So for nearly six years, the Liske Silva Task Force followed more than 11,000 leads, checked the DNA against more than 400,000 convicted felons, obtained dozens of search warrants and looked into countless suspects. The case never goes cold because the task force never

stops working on it. And I know incredible, right? Each week investigators from the FBI, the Virginia State Police, and at least two local sheriff offices meet at the FBI office in Fredericksburg to strategize. Wow. So as I said, nearly six years pass without answers until Kara Robinson runs out that fucker's door into the night and escapes her captor. Law enforcement goes through his metal footlocker. As I said, they find evidence that links him to murders in Spotsylvania, Virginia. And so that's when they realize Richard Mark Evanets is a serial killer. So I'm not going to go too deep into his fucking life because there's no rhyme or reason, as we always say, he had a fucked up childhood. Some people become neurosurgeons and some people

become serial killers and there's no answer in his life. And I don't want to focus on him. So I'll just say, essentially, he seemed like an ordinary guy to some people, except for the women who worked with him who thought he was a controlling creep. He was a Navy veteran. He had a high IQ. He was honorably discharged. He had a job. He had friends, son of an alcoholic, you know, all the details that were used to. His mother had left his father and Mary a convicted rapist and murderer. And he had several sexual harassment claims filed against him by female coworkers. In 1987, he had been arrested for the first time for exposing himself to a 15 year old girl. And both of his wives were teenagers when he much older married them.

In fact, his current wife, the redhead had been 17 and he was 36 when they started dating. So desperate now to find evidence. Investigators tracked down his wife and mom, who I said, were a Disney world. And of course, are shocked this is happening. When questioned, evidence, his sister tells detectives that he had contacted her and had told her everything and that he was in a motel about 30 to 40 miles away. So she gives him up. And they immediately dispatch a team to the motel. When they get there, he's gone and another relative had let him know the police were coming. And throughout this whole manhunt that like two day manhunt, his family, who know that he is a rapist and murderer cover

for him. And they put on an APB and ping his phone, which is now in Jacksonville, Florida. So they know he's heading south. And his car is eventually spotted and a high speed chase ensues. He eventually stops near the waterfront in Sarasota, Florida. Police, he kind of like sticks one arm out, like he's surrendering. They tried to get him out of his car to surrender peacefully that he's not getting out of his car. So they sick a police dog on him. And after being bitten multiple times by this dog, he puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger, killing himself. So police are able to forensically link avanets to the disappearance and murder of the Liske sisters and 16 year old Sophia Silva. Fibers from Ivana Vitz's furry fucking handcuffs used on

Cara are also found on the three other girls. Amazingly, Kristen Liske's palm print is found on the inside of his trunk five years after her abduction. And investigators say that in the metal footlocker along with the newspaper headlines, they find detailed notes that he wrote himself while carefully planning the abductions. He take copious notes on the girls he was stalking and carefully planned each abduction. And the pressed white button down shirt he wore during his attacks was in there. He suspected of other rapes and murders. And supposedly the FBI like all over the country, anywhere he's been, he is suspected. And supposedly the FBI was trying to link him to other cases, but it seemed like that's kind of stalled out or maybe it didn't match.

I didn't say anything about if they put him in his his DNA and CODIS or not, but it seems like something that would be obvious to do. His wife tells deputies she had always wondered what was inside that footlocker, but he had forbade her from ever opening it. And she says that she still loves him. Wow. I know. Okay. So remember that $150,000 reward that was offered in the Lisk and Silva murders? Mm hmm. Well, the families of those girls happily presented Kara with the reward money. I know. Uh huh. Saying she was a hero. Mr. Lisk said, Patty and I were robbed of our children and all of you in our community were robbed of your trust in our fellow man. And then Remy from earlier said, Kara is a survivor. Without her, we wouldn't have the answers to my friend Sophia's

murder or Kristen and Katie's murder, which he was conclusively linked to after his death. To her, we will be eternally grateful. Following her escape, Kara and her family become close with the Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who himself has daughters. And he kind of takes her under his wing. He said, quote, she was a survivor and she was a fighter and she was a warrior and she wasn't going to be a victim. In the summer of 2003, Sheriff Lott offers Kara, who's looking for a high school job, an administrative job in the Richland County Sheriff's Department. So she works there through college while she studies to become a teacher, but she loved working at the Sheriff's Department and decides that she's going to combine her passions and become a school resource officer.

And so she joins the police academy. And at this point, she was only known as Kara because she was a minor when this all happened. And so during her time at the academy, her case is actually taught in one of the classes, where the professor doesn't know that she is the Kara from the case. At the end of that class, Kara goes up to the professor and says that she's the Kara from that story. And it seems like it's the first time she really comes forward and, you know, claims, claims it. And Kara ends up receiving an award for courage and bravery. And at her graduation from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy, where she's the only woman in her class, she gets a standing ovation from her peers. So during her career as a school resource officer, Kara investigates sexual assault

and child abuse cases and also goes into victim services. Today, Kara Robinson Chamberlain is married and has taken time off work to raise her two young sons. But she also wants to pursue a career in motivational speaking to share her stories and inspire others. So then wanting to make a documentary to share her stories, she recently started a TikTok account to see if she could build a following on social media. And she started making videos and sharing her story and answering questions from viewers. And it went fucking viral. That's how I saw it. Yeah, it's incredible. And she is, she is so inspiring. And it's so powerful. And she always has this big, bright smile on her face. I mean, yeah, she's an incredible woman. She's very candid about addressing like what are

normally taboo topics, like how to support trauma survivors, her views on law enforcement and how to deal with your own stress and trauma. And she's also answered messages from sexual assault nurses and law enforcement as well about how to best support trauma victims instead of re-triggering them. So although she now understands that her captor, having killed himself, was probably a good thing. When he originally killed himself, she was actually pissed off and disappointed. When she was on America's Most Wanted, she said, quote, I wanted to go to trial and let him see me again and know I was his downfall. And she said, I wanted him to know that choosing me was the biggest mistake he ever made. Hell, yes, I was. And he fucking knew it. I'm sure he fucking knew it. And that is

the survivor story of Cara Robinson Chamberlain. Fucking congratulations, Cara Robinson Chamberlain. I mean, nothing better than a survivor story, nothing better than when those survivor stories turn like the subject of those survivor stories turn around and then take all of that strength, all of that wisdom, all of that hard one experience and help other people that need the help so badly. It's beautiful. And it's very easy to argue that she saved the lives of so many girls after her. You know, just by escaping, she stopped him in his tracks. He had it down. He would have putting her into that container. That's it's bone chilling the level of planning of how he wasn't going to get caught. And clearly, he had been studying it. And he it had worked before like

that is you're exactly right. She saved so many lives. Yeah. It's in the brazenness of broad fucking daylight in front of their houses. You know, it's just unthinkable. And she was able to escape. And it's unbelievable. Her TikTok name is Cara Robinson Chamberlain. And she's also on Instagram. And yeah, she's I can't wait to see what she does next. She's really she's an inspiration. Yeah, great. Great story. Yeah, that was really good. Thank you. So I got information from a bunch of great sources, True Crime Daily, an article by none other than Elizabeth Smart, a medium article by Lisa Marie Fuqua, a New York Daily news article by Mara Bobson, a Buzzfeed news article by Stephanie McNeil, Washington Post. There's a bunch of great articles in The Freelance Star, which is at

Fredericksburg.com. And then there's a podcast called Vile Virginia that I listen to that is super delightful. The host of that is I want to hang out with her. She's great. And then there's a whole book about this case called Into the Water by Diane Fanning. Wow. As you were telling the story and especially when you got to the part about the long red hair, I have seen Cara tell this story on a TV show. I was assuming it was I Survived. But it is she's on I Survived. She's on forensic files. She's I mean, she's on all of them. And I yeah. And the way she you're right, the way she speaks and the self possession and the kind of like power she's it's powerful. It's self possessed. It's in that kind of like that presence where it's like, it's almost like I

guess what happened to me. It's not this kind of like it's like it really is. It's her story to tell for other people. There's this intense strength and positivity in it. She's a very impressive person. It's so exciting to hear to hear it like that because I didn't it wasn't familiar until it got into yeah, into that part. So interesting that she like took this took some time before she came public with it. Like until she was ready to be inspirational for other people, which I think is so interesting. It's I can't remember who said it, but it's show your scars, not your wounds. And so she dealt with it the way she knew how which was to become law enforcement, which is so incredible and inspiring. And I mean, yeah, it's it's incredible. Yeah, she did it.

She really did it right. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. So this story, you might remember, we do we dabbed into it for one moment in the mini so this week. So we I read an email from a listener who was telling us about a different story, but then went into because they're from Huntsville, Alabama. And they were like, this is the only crime my town is known for. But then she went in and told us I think a grandma story. I can't remember. So the next day on Twitter, a listener named Nicole and I C H O L E. me. She tweeted at me. Her handles at mad underscore ethnic. And she said, on the mini so today, you said you hadn't heard of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting in 2010. I'd

love to hear you cover the story. The lady had such a strange backstory. Oh my God. Huntsville, Huntsville is my hometown and UAH is my alma mater. And it's something we will never forget. Wow. So okay, that's that's what we're doing this week. It's the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting and sources. W A F F Huntsville, the Huntsville Times, a New York Times article by Shayla Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima. NBC News, ABC News, Murderpedia and Wikipedia. And then of course, our friend, Nicole, who was like, do it. Don't just don't just skim over it. And Nicole was so right. So here you go. I mean, yeah. So it's a little before three o'clock on February 12, 2010. Okay. And 55 year old biochemistry professor Deborah Moriarty is on her way to a

biology department meeting at the University of Alabama Huntsville. Okay, so she heads into the Shelby Center for Science and Technology, which is the, which is the building they're in. And she goes up to a conference room on the third floor where that department meetings being held. There are 13 people in this meeting. So there's the chairman of the biology department, Gopi Padilla. There's associate professor of biology, Maria Raglan Davis. There's associate professor of biology, Adriel D. Johnson, senior. There's biology professor, Luis Rogelio Cruz Vera. There's biology professor, Joseph G. Leahy. There's staff assistant, Stephanie Monticello. There's associate professor of biology, Joseph Ng. And there's assistant professor of biology, Amy

Bishop Anderson. So much IQ in that room. This is a huge group of very smart people. Yeah. Or actually a small group of hugely smart people is what I should say. There you go. So it's a very standard, like staff meeting, the group discusses upcoming events, scheduling classes, budgets. Deborah Moriarty later describes it as quote, a really laid back mundane kind of faculty meeting, one of the easiest faculty meetings we've ever had. But about 30 to 40 minutes into this meeting, the calm is broken as 44 year old assistant professor, Amy Bishop Anderson rises to her feet, pulls out a nine millimeter handgun and begins to shoot her colleagues. And it isn't just random firing around the room. She starts with the person closest to her and moves down the row,

shooting her colleagues in the head execution style. Oh my God. So Deborah Moriarty immediately drops to the ground, like instinctually drops to the ground and goes under the table. But then she later explained, she actually, then once she's under the table begins to crawl toward the shooter and grabs at her legs. Like she, she said it was just, she saw that she knew shooting, she knew she had to stop her. So she just crawled under the table back out and grabbed at Amy Bishop's legs. Amy steps aside, she pulls her leg free. Now Deborah's just exposed. They're both standing, Amy's standing in the doorway, Deborah's on the ground. Amy turns the gun on Deborah and Deborah starts begging for her life. She asks Amy to think of her family, to think of all the time

she's helped her. She offers to help her again. She begs her and begs her not to shoot. But Amy is unmoved. She points the gun at Deborah's head and pulls the trigger. Deborah hears two clicks. The gun doesn't go off. Oh my God. Either, either it jammed or Amy ran out of bullets, but either way, the group saw that Deborah had moved toward Amy in this way. So they came up behind her and in that moment where the gun stopped working, they push Amy out of the conference room, slam the door, lock it, and then barricade the door with the table and with the refrigerator that's in there while someone else calls 911 from inside. So that's how we start. Now we go back. This is Amy Bishop Anderson. She's born April 24th, 1965 in the middle class Boston suburb

of Braintree. She grows up like in a Victorian house. Her father's an art professor at North Eastern. Her mother is active in local politics and she has one younger brother. She's really smart and after high school, she gets into North Eastern. There, she meets a fellow student named James Anderson. He's studying computer engineering. They graduate in 1988 and then they get married. So then Amy, after getting her undergrad degree, goes on to get her PhD in genetics at Harvard in 1993. Her academic work sounds impressive and very complicated. Her dissertation at Harvard was titled, The Role of Methosatin in the Respiratory Burst of Phagocytes. Sounds very fancy, but actually an anonymous source at Harvard, several actually biology professors looked at it

and said that the work sounds much more impressive than it actually is. And many feel that based on that work, she shouldn't have been given her doctorate at all. The people who knew her socially said she seemed extroverted and fun, but when you first met her, that she was prone to random, huge, angry outbursts. All of that doesn't seem too damning on the surface until you learn about her past, which no one knew about until this shooting. On December 6, 1986, when Amy's 21 years old, she and her father get into an argument. So Amy's mom is out horseback riding her brother's washing his car in the driveway. When the argument's over, her father heads out to the mall to do some Christmas shopping and Amy goes up in her room. But she doesn't calm down. She

gets angry and she gets more and more angry. And then she decides to go into her parents' bedroom where her father's unloaded shotgun is sitting in its case. He bought it a year earlier before joining the local brain tree rifle club with his son. And Amy's never used the gun before, but she does know that her father keeps the shells to the shotgun in his bureau. So she grabs the shells and the shotgun, takes it all into her room and loads the gun. She doesn't know how to work it specifically. And once she loads it, she accidentally fires a shot inside her own bedroom and blasts two holes in the wall. So she covers up those holes like with a book cover and a bandaid tin. And then she goes downstairs into the kitchen and she finds her mom and her brother standing by the

sink and the stove. And they're kind of confused. Amy's holding a shotgun. She tells them that she has a shell in the gun, but she doesn't know how to unload it. Her mother tells Amy not to point the gun at anybody. But as she does, Amy turns toward her brother and the gun goes off. She shoots her brother in the chest and kills him on the spot and then runs out of the house still holding the gun and heads over into basically toward town. So she ends up in the parking lot of a Ford dealership and a mechanic who's working there in the body shop named Tom Pettigrew notices Amy wandering around with a shotgun. He approaches, asks her what she's doing. She points the gun at him and tells him to put his hands up. As he does, she says, I need a car. I just got into a fight with my

husband. He's looking for me and he's going to kill me. So when the police arrive, they find Amy wandering with the gun in a newspaper distribution agency's parking lot. So basically just some weird spot nearby. At the Four Seasons landscaping. Total landscaping. Don't forget. It's total. All kinds of landscaping. They report her as being frightened, disoriented and confused. One officer tries to get her to drop the gun. She won't listen until a second officer approaches her from behind and she realizes, you know, she basically she's surrounded. She's taken into custody and questioned. She tells the police about the argument that she had with her dad. But before they can get any more answers from her, Amy's mother arrives and tells her not to answer any more

questions. Yeah, her mother then tells authorities what happened in the kitchen. And ultimately, Amy's brother's death is ruled an accident. Amy walks free and no charges are ever filed against her. So obviously, had they charged Amy with weapons or assault felonies, she would have had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, which maybe could have led to mental health diagnosis and treatment. And maybe further violence could have been prevented. But none of that happens. And there is further violence. In December of 1993, just after Amy earns her PhD, Harvard Medical School professor and physician, Dr. Paul Rosenberg gets a package in the mail. And when he opens it, he finds two pipe bombs inside. Somehow miraculously, those bombs do not detonate when he opens this

package. When the postal inspectors dig into the investigation, they discover that Rosenberg has recently dealt with a disgruntled employee at the Children's Hospital Boston, where he works. And that employee was Amy Bishop Anderson. Dr. Rosenberg was Amy's supervisor in the neurology lab. And during a review, he let her know that he felt that she, quote, could not meet the standards required for the work. She's enraged. And reportedly, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown after being told this. And she basically resigns from her position. So she's not open for criticism. She won't be told anything about what she's doing wrong. She basically can't handle kind of real adult life. Yeah, which is so crazy. Because you think someone with that level of education has some kind

of handle on, you know, on themselves, but, you know, mental illness doesn't discriminate against smart people, you know, right? Exactly. It's not it. No, it's not about that at all. Right. It's, it has nothing to do with that. And also, it's just so interesting that something so intensely tragic happens in her family. And that family doesn't put her anywhere for her own good, doesn't. Yeah. I don't know. That's that part's very interesting to me. So the Bureau of Alcohol, I mean, I will say this, though, it's incredibly tragic. And I think if you were in that family, you would have to tell yourself that was an accident. Right. Right. And maybe it was. Maybe it was in the in the beginning. Who knows. So the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive

conducts a joint investigation with the postal inspectors, and they get word that Amy's husband James, after hearing about Rosenberg's negative review of her work, tells an unnamed witness that he would like to shoot, stab or strangle Rosenberg. So the investigators question Amy and James at length about these pipe bombs, but they insist, but the couple insists they're innocent. James says he did not threaten Rosenberg and that he, quote, wouldn't know the guy if you walked into a bar. So the investigators, they get search warrants and they go to look through Amy and James's home, where they discover a book Amy's been working on, one of the three novels that she will end up writing, but never publishing.

And this one is about a woman who killed her brother and hopes to redeem herself by becoming a great scientist. Okay. James says, quote, it's just a novel, a medical thriller is the best way to describe it. But it turns out Amy's second cousin is the author, John Irving. Shut the fuck up. Right. He's one of my favorite authors. He's great. He's really talented. So she basically believes because she's related to him, she also possesses talent, which could be true. But so basically she goes to writing workshops and basically believes that writing is going to be her ticket out of academia. So clearly there's a lot of pressure for her to be something that maybe she didn't want to be or wasn't comfortable doing. And then she kind of went into writing,

like this will be, this will be my escape. She's not delusional because she actually did get a degree, you know, but it's also a little like fanciful. Well, it's, I feel like it's a thing, a lot of people deal with these days where everybody wants to be the very best. So it's not good enough that you're, it's not good enough that you need to be given notes and people tell you there's ways you need to improve. It's like the second someone says, yeah, you're not doing great and you need to improve this, people are just like, oh, goodbye, because I was supposed to be the best. And in my mind, I'm the best, which just you can do that. But it isn't the best way to live because everybody fucking needs to take some notes. Everybody does. Yeah.

Except me. So later, investigators come back to search the house again. But Amy and James refuse to let them in. And essentially, basically, they have to break in through a window to get in, to get into the house to go through it, even though they have a warrant. But aside from her book, they don't find any incriminating evidence inside the home in regards to these pipe bombs. And when they're asked to take a polygraph test, the couple refuses. Their lack of cooperation adds to the suspicion, but without any hard evidence against them. After years of searching, this case goes cold and no charges are ever filed. So in 2002, and this is a bit of a left turn, but she goes with her husband and their four children. What? Yeah, four children. They go to

IHOP in Peabody, Massachusetts, which I'm sure will have listeners that are like, it's Peabody or some fucking, Massachusetts loves to not pronounce anything the way it looks. It's just its body. And how dare you not know it? When another woman, okay, so they're in IHOP, she goes to get a booster seat for one of her kids. Another woman's already there getting the last booster seat. So when that happens, Amy loses it, she starts screaming and swearing at this woman demanding that she give Amy the booster seat. And when the woman is like, I fuck you, I'm sure, Amy attacks her, she starts punching repeatedly punching this woman in the head and screaming, I am Dr. Amy Bishop. Oh my God, you just never know who you're

who you're dealing with. Yes, you never know who you're dealing with. And also the idea that four children watched her do that breaks my heart. It's so traumatic and horrifying. So Amy's arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. She pleads guilty, she's given probation, the judge recommends that she attend anger management classes. But for some reason, the case is quickly adjudicated, which means the charges are dismissed. None of it ends up on her record. She never attends any anger management classes. Yeah, it just goes away. So this then brings us up to 2003. So Amy applies for a job at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. And she lies on her resume, she says that she worked at Harvard for

two years longer than she actually did. But her resume is still impressive enough to land her a tenure track biology professor job. And at first, of course, everything's fine. Yeah. Amy seems to be well liked by her colleagues and students, she's described as funny and extroverted and knowledgeable and enthusiastic. But it doesn't take long for that to change. Soon, the university begins receiving complaints from students that Amy's an unresponsive teacher. And these are the two complaints, she's unresponsive. And then she includes questions on the exams that have nothing to do with what they've been taught in class. Oh my God. Which is just very specific and very hilarious where it's kind of like she's fucking with all of us. Right. What could it be?

She won't, her office hours suck. Yeah. Name the four syrups that are served at IHOP. Yeah. Exactly. And you're just like, I'm a biology major. So of course, Amy, as she usually is, is defiant in the face of these criticisms, because God forbid anyone tell her to fucking tighten up her game. So by 2006, grad students are leaving her lab in droves. No one wants to deal with her. That may, she ends up actually kicking a student out of the lab. And when that student tells her that they're going to return their keys and the notebooks the next day, by the way, and I think everyone knows this, but none of this makes sense to me. I've know all of these things I'm talking about. I just heard other people talk about office hours. Yeah. What do you share notebooks? What

are you talking about? Why do they have keys to their office? I guess you get to the lab. You get to go to the lab anytime you want and fucking test shit. Congratulations, Smarty. But anyway, that student's like, all right, well, I'll bring my keys in and my notebook in tomorrow. Amy calls campus police to force the student to return them these items immediately. So meanwhile, Amy's fighting an uphill battle to earn her tenure. One of the requirements is publishing a certain amount of academic papers. Amy is more focused on inventions and patents rather than publishing. Right? I mean, and she actually does earn some brief fame in 2008 because she develops a mechanism that essentially keeps nerve cells alive longer so that researchers have more time

to conduct experiments on them. Imagine getting famous for that. Ultimately though, in March of 2009, because she didn't publish any papers, she's denied tenure at the school. This is going to shock you, Georgia. She doesn't take it well. Rather than absorbing constructive criticism, she lashes out. She believes she's been robbed. She lobbies for a revote. She tries convincing everyone to change their minds. It's such a shame journey. It's so like, and kind of controlling in that way where a panel of people have decided you aren't good at this thing. But you're going to go around and tell them how, but they're wrong. Everyone's wrong but you. The rules don't apply to you. They apply to everyone else. You're a narcissist, megalomaniac, and you cannot handle

the idea of being less than, even though you actively almost try to prove that you're less than. Well, yeah, you're just demonstrating. Or just that you didn't get to the booster seat in time. You didn't have your hand on it first. You didn't win. Fair is fair. You didn't win. So when no one changes their minds, Amy hires a lawyer and files a discrimination complaint against the university claiming that they're denying her tenure because of her gender. So take us all fucking down with you, Amy. Way to go. This is unfounded. Of course, she loses again. Jesus. Driving the final nail into the coffin of her career. She has no evidence. There's no real evidence, probably. Well, it's that gives all of these people a chance to come forward and go,

oh, actually, here's the real reason. Yeah. And here's what actually happened. Many of those people are women who are saying it. So it's like, I'm a doctor. It worked out fine for me. Here's the difference. Yeah. Okay. So, so basically, this is she's just sued for tenure and lost that. Jesus. So she still has to finish out the school year. Cool. Right. So she knows come spring, she's out of a job. She's failed. She's gone into rage denial. She's doubled down. She's tried to sue and she failed again. Sounds familiar. These are the events that took place directly before that faculty meeting on February 10, 2010, where she opened fire on her colleagues. Okay, so we're going back now to the day of the shooting after basically the group of colleagues have pushed her out. So

she's now barricaded outside of the third floor conference room. So she calls her husband to come pick her up. Shut up. And then heads downstairs, not realizing, of course, the police have already been called. A few minutes later, Amy's arrested right outside the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. So police enter the building, they search it, they find her nine millimeter gun in the second floor bathroom. So she was present. Stashed it. Yeah. Yeah. She dumped it and the medics on the scene treat the victims. And three of those, Louise Rogelio Cruz Vera, Joseph Leahy and Stephanie Monticello are critically injured and taken to the hospital. Another three, Gopi Podilla, Maria Raglan Davis and Adriel D. Johnson Sr. are dead at the scene. When news cameras catch

Amy as she's taken from the police precinct to the jail later that night, the reporters ask her about the killings and her response is, quote, it didn't happen. There's no way they're still alive. So she's denying it to the very end. Like this is a person who's like, it's my reality or nothing to the detriment and death of people around her. Just unbelievable. On February 15th, 2010, Amy Bishop Anderson is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. She pleads guilty and her legal team starts building their insanity defense. The news of the shooting in Huntsville prompts officials in Braintree to reopen the 1986 cold case of the shooting death of Amy's brother. The statute of limitations has passed on some of the lesser

potential charges. But on June 16th, 2010, Amy is indicted with first degree murder for the death of her brother. And two days later, on June 18th, Amy attempts suicide, but she survives. So then in 2012, one of the victim's spouses writes a letter to the presiding judge of this case saying that while they have suffered greatly, they don't see a benefit in ending Amy's life. So Amy's lawyers use that letter to convince the judge not to seek the death penalty. So in September of 2012, Amy Bishop Anderson pleads guilty to all charges. And later that month, she's sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Today, she's 55 years old and resides in an open dorm style prison cell under medium security. So after all of this,

associate professor Joseph Eng, who is one of the shooting survivors, credits Deborah Moriarty for ending the shooting attack. He says, quote, Moriarty was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush. But Deborah Moriarty, however, rejects any credit saying that Amy's gun jamming was the ultimate saving grace. And she says, quote, that's not being a hero. That's just God looking out for you. Yeah. Days after the attack, Dr. Moriarty goes back to working at the university. Yeah. When asked by CNN if she thinks the university should ramp up its security efforts, she says this, there is evil in the world. It is unfortunate that good people are hurt by that. But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas

and to search out new knowledge. And you don't want to put anything in place that dampens that. Wow. So five years into her sentence, Amy Bishop files a 50 page court document requesting to change her guilty plea. This is the quote from an article on NBC News that cites WAFF Huntsville and the Huntsville Times. It says, quote, Bishop has since reconsidered her guilty plea filing numerous court documents complaining about her lawyers, saying that she was mentally ill at the time she entered the plea, blaming schizophrenia, allergies, and steroids. What? And then in one of these documents, she, she included a handwritten note referring to the shootings as quote, a terrible crime and saying that she was quote, terribly sorry for the victims

and their families and my family. So that actually came out as this article that said, Huntsville shooter apologizes for crime. So Joseph Leahy, who was one of the survivors, and he actually was shot in the head. He lost vision in his eye and he had neurological problems, but he survived when he heard about that or was told about it. He rejected Bishop's apology. And he said this quote, Dr Bishop has ceased to exist in my world. She just doesn't exist anymore. Do I think she's truly sorry? I think she truly wants to get out of prison. That's what I think. Joseph Leahy's survivor of this horrible attack passed away from a heart attack on October 15th, 2017. Dr. Deborah Moriarty recently retired from the university, but she occasionally returns to

the lab for voluntary research. So she just loves, she loves that science. She keeps going back. Wow. And then this past February 12th of 2020, UAH paid tribute to the victims and survivors with a 10 year anniversary day of remembrance at the school. And they honored the victims. Dr. Gopi Padilla, Dr. Maria Raglan Davis, Dr. Adriel Johnson, senior and survivors, Dr. Joseph Leahy, survivors of the shooting, Dr. Joseph Leahy, Stephanie Monticello, Dr. Luis Regelio Cruz Vera, Dr. Deborah Moriarty, and Joseph Ng. And that is the horrible story of the University of Alabama at Huntsville shooting. Wow. Wow. Great job. That is bananas. I just had never heard of that at all. Didn't even cross my mind to do it. Yeah. And thank you, Nicole, because I will say

that tweet Nicole sent, it was the sentence of that lady has a weird backstory that got me, because sometimes in these, like I don't, I don't feel drawn to like the mass shooters. It's such a, you know, it's just so dark. It's almost like one explosion of this narcissism of like, I deserve revenge. I deserve to even the score. The whole thing is so, is so dark. But this was fascinating that this is a person who had a very distinct history of violence that just kept getting out of it or lying that then built to this. Well, great job. Thank you. Should we just do one big fucking hooray, because today we're recording on Veterans Day. Yeah. And I think our, our fucking hooray today should be thanking people who have served in the military, who are currently serving

in the military, all the, all the brave men and women who either are veterans or are currently serving because their work is invaluable. And I feel like they never, they rarely get the credit unless it's Veterans Day or Memorial Day. Right. You put your lives on the line for us and we appreciate you. We do. So fucking hooray. Thank you so much. Love that. And thank you everybody for listening and for, um, you know, hanging out to what's now turning into our true crime comedy podcast with 45 minutes of therapy discussion at the top. It's true crime comedy therapy. What, let's add something else while we're at it. Let's add beverage, true crime comedy, uh, therapy beverages, quarantine recipes show. Yes. Let's do it. Mocktails and recipes.

Yeah. I love it. Yeah. Can I just shout out a non-alcoholic beer right now and what a fucking please saving grace. That thing is love it. Try it. It's the best. It really works. It does. It fucking totally does because half the time in this, I, uh, learned this basically when Starbucks began to get popular, what I realized was I just wanted a drink in my hand as a thing to do. Totally. So it's like, it isn't necessarily, sometimes the habit, the action of the habit, you can just do that and it satisfies you. You don't have to actually do the thing. It completely works. It's so true. Yeah. Thank you guys for listening and for hanging out during our therapy session. Thanks Stephen Ray Morris for audio engineering this. Thanks to Jay and Lily

for their research. Yeah. Great research this week. Yeah. You know what? You know what? Everybody stay sexy and don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?