My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 286 - MFM Guest Host Picks #9: Bridger Winegar

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

This summer, Exactly Right family members will be guest hosting My Favorite Murder! Each week a guest host will pick their favorite stories from Karen and Georgia. Today's episode is hosted by Bridger Winegar, host of I Said No Gifts! on Exactly Right. Bridger covers The Murders of Master Forger Mark Hofmann (Episode 76) and The Sleepwalking Murderer (Episode 160). See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is exactly right. 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. Welcome to My Favorite Murder. I'm Bridger Weineger.

I host the podcast, I Said No Gifts, on Exactly Right, and every week I invite a guest on and then they try to ruin my day by breaking my No Gift rules. So we have a lot of fun, we have some very funny guests, and I get a lot of gifts. So feel free to listen or don't. It's up to you. Now, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, oh, I wish he were Karen and Georgia. And look, I wish I were Karen and Georgia too, but there's really nothing I can do about that.

There's nothing you can do. Just imagine I'm your babysitter, your parents hired after they've already gone through their nine first choices. So I'm very excited to be guest hosting today. I can still remember years ago when Karen told me she was going to be starting a podcast about murder with her friend, Georgia. And I thought, oh, that sounds nice. I'm sure they'll have fun.

And now here we are years later, my favorite murder has at least 11 listeners and I was a fool. Now here's the show. So I had two choices of Karen's stories. The first was the International Dunes Hotel Murders, which growing up in Salt Lake City was legendary, would drive past that hotel all the time and talk about how the swimming pool was haunted. That's not what I'm going to talk about.

I settled on another story from episode 76, and it's very close to my heart because I was the person who suggested it to Karen. And I believe this is still the only murder I've suggested to Karen that she wasn't already aware of. You have to be careful when you bring up murder stories with Karen because she knows all of them. She's the genius. She's the encyclopedia.

So it's a bit of a badge of honor that I knew one murder she wasn't familiar with. It's another story I heard mentioned of growing up in Utah and I don't want to give away too much because it's got twists and Karen tells it so well, she really tells it perfectly better than other people who have tried to tell this story, in my opinion. But I will say it does involve some of my favorite things, things like Radio Shack, Fraud, Deep Financial Trouble, Talking Salamanders, and also someone named Button. Very special. Also Karen says, look at this rat bastard, which I feel like would make a great t-shirt.

Just putting a merch idea out there. And now here is the murders of Master Forger Mark Hoffman. Okay, mine is, it's hard sometimes as we've talked about to get, for me to get my homework done. No, it's, yeah. And especially when I will work on something for a while and then if I have a friend who goes, I've ever heard of this one, I will switch immediately and go do my friend. I switch, I switch, you know, you're halfway done, it's not like you're just reading about

it. No. I switch all the time. Yeah. And so many of these stories because, you know, you guys are just as into true crime, if not more than either of us. So oftentimes you feel like I'm only telling a third of this story. I know there's so much more, I should have read an entire book about this, whatever.

That's what other people do. So sometimes I'll bail just because I know a story has much more to it and I should invest more time. You're not going to give it to a justice. Do it justice. Right, exactly. Someone else already has. But this one was so juicy and I loved it so much.

My friend Bridger is the one who told me about it. He's a hilarious, he's very famous on Twitter and he's a great writer. And he grew up in Utah. So he was like, have you ever heard of this one? And I had never heard anything about it. Turns out there's a forensic files, there's lots of stuff, there's an amazing book. But anyway, I'll just give you, I'll give you what I know. So we're in Salt Lake City.

Okay. What's this? Is it called anything? I'm not going to call it anything because I usually do that and then I end up giving it away. Yes, I totally understand. Okay. So we're in Salt Lake City the morning of October 15th, 1985 and a man named Steve Christensen

who is a businessman, a husband, a father of four and a bishop of the Mormon church. He arrives at his office on the sixth floor of the judge building in downtown Salt Lake City. One time I did a story and it was that horrible one about the woman throwing her kids off the top of the hotel. In Utah. In Salt Lake City even. And in that I threw out the random idea that it was a very, because you know, all of Utah

I assume is very Mormon, that Salt Lake City would be a conservative town. Well, I was, couldn't have been more wrong about that and would like to say now. I now know because of making that mistake that actually Salt Lake City is the like liberal part of Utah and it's a college town and it's the hip place and it's probably best case scenario. And if you're looking for, I don't know, a great shirt or really cool flats. I'm not, I don't know. So Steve Christensen gets to his office.

He sees a brown wrapped box shaped package in front of his office door and his name's written on top of it. He picks it up and then immediately immediately explodes. Oh, fuck. Here. I thought it was something else and this is fucking, let's do this. Yeah. So it was a pipe bomb.

Steve is killed. The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fright. Yeah. It's, it was a pipe bomb that was made with concrete nails or inside and concrete nails are the nails you use to pound in. They're not made of concrete. They're the really strong industrial sized nails that you pound into concrete. So the person that made this pipe bomb wanted the person who picked it up to be killed.

Wow, what a bummer. Yeah. So the ATF officers arrive, they begin to piece the bomb back together to figure out that it's a pipe bomb and that was activated by a mercury switch that would go off when the package was picked up and tilted one way or the other. So the minute the mercury like shifts. Exactly. It's in a little glass circuit.

And if it in it is laying on one side of this little glass thing. And then when you pick it up, if you put it and chip it one way or the other, the circuit connects and that's when the bomb explodes. Wow. So they know from a bomb like that that the person that the bomber dropped that box off because they would have to make sure it stays exactly the way it is. And they couldn't mail it. Yeah.

You can't just give it to somebody else. Okay. So also inside the bomb were Tandy brand batteries, which is as many RC enthusiasts know. Tandy is the Radio Shack brand of batteries. Really? So they start going around to the local Radio Shacks trying to find out who's bought batteries there in the past week or whatever. They also find out that Steve Christensen had recently worked at a financial company

called CFS, which after doing huge business in the 70s and the early 80s had started losing money and wasn't serious trouble. This is the part that I actually found really interesting because so the 80s were like a time of big money. That's when everybody pretended to be rich and preppies and, you know, it was a very eyes-on coke time. And apparently Salt Lake City in that time was a hotbed for financial fraud. Really?

Yeah. So what people would do, conmen would go to Salt Lake City and they would kind of like get into the Mormon church. They would either pretend they were Mormons or they would be friend, hire ups in the Mormon church. And then when they would do business, they would say they were in securities or whatever stocks bond. They like, I got a ground floor fucking thing to get in on.

Exactly. And then the elders or whoever in the church would be like, oh, this guy is trustworthy. And so then all the parishioners or Mormons, I'm not sure what you call the general word for it, but all the people in that church would then trust that person and buy into whatever thing that that person was bringing to the table, whether it was high finance or also very popular pyramid scheme vitamin sales got to be very popular. What the fuck? Back then.

Yeah. So it was kind of an ant, there was lots of amway, low grade amway kind of bullshit going on. Did they get the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins they needed? I don't know. But it was a, it was the kind of thing they call it affinity fraud and it happens in lots

of different different kinds of religions. This is why my money is under my bed, right? And trust no one. It's the same. It's the, the assumption that quote unquote, one of your own is going to look out for your best interest as opposed to an outsider. Oh, I don't trust anyone. Do you?

No, I'm, I'm scared of my fucking cousin isn't financial, whatever the fuck. And I like scared. Sorry. Well, because it's, it's so, um, anyone can tell you anything. And if you don't know exactly what's going on, you, you, it's a hundred percent pure trust. Yeah.

And people are that into money, like they're into money and they want it. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, um, so it's the same thing Bernie Madoff did to, he got $20 billion as you well know, watching that documentary from wealthy Jewish people. A guy named Alan Stanford did it to Southern Baptists. He had a $7 billion empire that fell.

There was even a con man named Monroe L Beachy who became a trusted within the Amish community and he went to prison for orchestrating a scheme that defrauded 2,700 investors. Many of them, his friends and neighbors. What a dick. It's just a very common practice of like this idea that your religion would, would stand for your good morals and that that, therefore the business is trustworthy. It's almost worse con than just, you know, clients because yeah, these people are trusting because they, because if you're in their religion, it's because you believe the same

things they do. You have the same morals. They're, they're, they're going right on the inside, you know, they're not just standing out and like rolling the dice that maybe you'll believe them and maybe not. They're, they're asking you, they're playing on your ultimate faith, which is very ugly. And in the Mormon religion, I believe that a lot, I know lots of Mormons I've grown up. I grew up with Mormons.

One of my good friends that I used to work with Betsy is a Mormon and you know, it's, it's a very moralistic date. The life they live is really the whole idea of it is that you live this life based on your faith. So it's like, my friend just said it the other day, he's like Mormons really walk the walk. So it's not just, and I may, maybe I'm only saying this because of all those like design websites that you see these days. And when you trace them back, it's like a young Mormon family, but it's like the most

beautiful, you know, table setting and the cutest design and it's like, here's a great thing for your baby. I've heard so many bloggers, like famous bloggers or like the big ones that have beautiful websites are Mormon for some reason. Yeah. Because it's kind of like, it's the whole idea of like home building and like putting the best into your home. Right.

And being ambitious and always having something. Anyways. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these are insane generalizations. Obviously, we're not speaking for every single person that's in the religion, but there is just, there's something to that, there's something to that, where there's it, there is, there seems to be an innocence that, that in the seventies and eighties, con men were

like, oh, we can exploit this, this community, this sense of community that they have. Two hours after Steve Christensen's attack, there's another bombing at the home of Gary and Kathy Sheets. Gary Sheets was Steve Christensen's boss at CFS and his wife, Kathy was the one who picked up the package. It exploded in her hands and she was killed. Oh my God. How I never heard of this.

I know. So now the police are thinking that these bombings are related to the failed CFS business dealings and so it could be retaliation from an old employee or even the mafia. Police talked to the Sheets 13 year old next door neighbor who saw a tan minivan pull into the Sheets driveway the night before around midnight and thought it was suspicious. But all he saw was the car. He didn't see anybody, anybody get in or out. But then they also talked to a jeweler who worked on the fifth floor of the judge building,

one floor below Steve Christensen's office. His name is Bruce Passi and he tells the police that the morning, the morning of the bombing, he got into the elevator with his father and there was a man standing in the elevator wearing a Letterman jacket, but with no letter on it. And he was holding a brown, like paper wrapped box that said to Steve Christensen on the top of it. Oh shit. And so he, Bruce Passi describes this man to the police saying he is a white male, five

foot eight, medium brown hair. The next day there's a third bombing. This time it's inside a car and the victim is seriously injured but he's not killed. It's 30 year old Mark Hoffman. He is rushed to the hospital where he's in critical condition but he ends up being able to tell the police that he'd opened his car door and the package was sitting on the driver's seat with the action of opening the door. It fell off and exploded.

Oh good. So he didn't get the full impact. Right. But he had a fingertip blown off. He had a huge wound in his knee where parts of the explosives went into his knee cap, like his knee area. So he was pretty badly injured. But immediately the police are suspicious because if he had his fingers blown off, that

means that the box was in his hands, not on the seat and then tumbling to the ground. Also with the direction, the guy in forensic files explains it really well but it's basically the way they know bombs explode and the directions they go. If the thing was in his knee, then he could not have been standing outside of the car. He must have been inside of the car leaning over and so they basically reconstruct it. I want to watch that. I'm like trying to picture it in my head. Basically they, with the trajectory of the stuff that flew out of the bomb, which hit

him, they realize he must have been leaning over the center console holding the box and basically inside the car. So his story, why would you lie about that? Why wouldn't you just tell him exactly? I love when cops figure that out, like this person killed themselves and it's like, no, the trajectory, like yours last week, the trajectory shows that that person couldn't have killed themselves. And that's the relatively new forensic part.

That's like what forensic files is all celebrating because it's like you would never have known that until forensics comes in and is like, hold up. So the police search Mark Hoffman's house and they find a Letterman jacket just like the one that Bruce Passi said the guy in the elevator was wearing. And they also find, they also see that he has a tan minivan. Oh shit. And there's gunpowder that they find traces of around his house that match the brand used in all three bombings.

There you go. So Mark Hoffman maintains his innocence, says he's the victim and he demands to take a lie detector test. And he does, they give him a lie detector test and he passes with flying colors. Oh shit. Yeah. So the police start looking into who this guy really is. So Mark Hoffman was born in Salt Lake City on December 7th, 1954, raised in a strict

Mormon household. He was a mediocre student. But later he was tested to have an IQ of 169, which is insanely high. That's one point over mine. I feel like in stories I've read people who are like mad geniuses are usually in like the mid 130s to 140s. I was going to say that like, I feel like very, very, very fucking smart is like 130. I think so.

But like then genius is like 160 something. And maybe I like us trying to guess what genius IQ of the dumbest way. Well I know when my brother was a kid with fucking attention issues, they tested him and he had like one very high up there because it's like, well, he's just fucking bored. Yes. That's why. So yeah. And I never, I was not that smart.

And I was never bored. No, I was always bored. You're like, this is fascinating. I was just bored. I'm not smart and bored. Okay, so he collected coins as a teenager and when he was young, that's a weird cut and paste. He collected coins as a teenager and at some point he forged a rare mint mark on a dime

that was verified by an organization of coin collectors to be genuine. And when he was a kid, he tricked the shit out of fucking professional coin people. Exactly. And he got the taste early of like, you know, it's impressive. I think so too. This don't kill people next. I mean, so in seven in 1973, he volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary. When he came back from his mission, which was in England, he enrolled as a pre-med

major at Utah State University. He married Dora Lee old in 1979. They eventually have four children together and she filed for divorce in 1987. So in 1980, Hoffman claims to have found a 17th century King James Bible with a document inside that he claimed to be the transcript that Joseph Smiths, who was the founder of the Latter-day Saints Church, he had a scribe named Martin Harris and was supposed to be a transcript that Martin Harris brought to a Columbia classics professor in 1828 that was originally copied by Joseph Smith from the golden plates from which he translated

the Book of Mormon. So I'm going to say this probably incorrectly, but the general idea of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ, the Latter-day Saints is Joseph Smith found golden tablets that he dug up and from those tablets, he wrote down the tenants of the religion. And an angel appeared to him as he dug up those tablets to help him. So basically, he presents this document. They freak out because they're like, they'd never, it's a historical document from their church they'd never seen before.

And the the church ends up buying it from Hoffman for $20,000. So this not only sets him financially, but it also sets his reputation as a historical documents dealer. I wonder where he said he found it inside a King James Bible. So he okay, so he was already trying to become like a historical book, okay, dealer one of the book. Okay, one of them makes sense. It was a really old.

It was a 17th century King James Bible. So then it was like inside that I got it. So basically, he then starts for the next several years, selling forged, quote unquote lost LDS documents to the church, the most notorious notorious of which was the salamander letter in 1984. So he basically starts forging pieces of historical text and bringing them to the church. And as as a church member himself going, I found this, I found this. Now the church is part of it is like a little bit like, oh, yeah, we need to we need to be

owning these papers. Right. And sometimes he would donate them and sometimes they would buy them from him. But essentially, it was it was text that they that was relevant to them knowing about their own religion and the founder of their own religion. So the one that is the most infamous is the salamander letter, which basically said that when Joseph Smith dug up those tablets, it wasn't an angel that appeared to him but a white salamander.

So so that was such a change of the historical record and they had never heard that before. It was super freaky and it was kind of like they didn't know if they should announce it and put them in a really weird position because suddenly it's it's it's a very non-religious sounding and almost like a magical witchy sounding version of the story of how their church is founded. Right. That's a sound salamander is kind of like not as cool as a snake. No.

Well, but snakes are in in like Christian religion are evil, right? So there's there's just something weird about it's an albino salamander, like as opposed to an angel. Man, I think he could have done better. Well, bear, an albino bear, a blue bear, a blue, um, well, it turned out he was actually forging all of these documents and he had lost his faith in when he was a teenager. Like he went on his mission basically, he felt a lot of pressure from his family because he was raised in such a strict Mormon household, but he was trying to embarrass the church.

So he was writing these documents and changing these stories and basically adding in little inconsistencies and mistakes so that the church would kind of be scrambling and not knowing what their official approach should be. And he in and he was like a master forger because he had already sold, let's see this. Here's the list. He'd forged unpublished poems by Emily Dickinson signatures of Mark Twain, a full handwritten letter supposedly written by Betsy Ross. No.

He tricked the Library of Congress. He tricked Sotheby's. He sold signatures by George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Hale, John Hancox, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton. Like, wow, this guy is so lucky. He just finds all this shit. Yeah.

And makes a shit ton of money off of it. There was somebody named Button Gwinnett, who's signature was the rarest and therefore the most valuable of any sire, signer of the Declaration of Independence. The guy named Button signed the Declaration of Independence. Or girl. Oh, sure. No way. But little Button Gwinnett got up there.

He also said he he claimed to have discovered a famous document called the Oath of the Free Man, which is believed to be or, you know, some say the precursor to the Declaration of Independence. It's from the 1600s and it was worth over a million dollars. Oh my god. But this they never knew it existed until he came. They knew it existed, but they were no copies of it in in America. So he had claimed he found one and he was trying to sell that.

But it was the sale of that was kind of held up because they were questioning its authenticity. Finally. Yeah. You know what we should do? Well, in this, it's funny because I think in the forensic files, they start talking about how they because it's within the church and the way he did it. He was a master manipulator, super smart. So he knew how to do it where they would not.

They didn't question the documents because of who he was and what he had already sold. So it was like, well, if he sold something to the Library of Congress and Sotheby's and all these places, what are we going to we're going to question him? Yeah. This guy's an expert. Andy's a Mormon. So get him all the way in on the inside. But he also would buy really expensive things.

So he was always broke, even though he would make big money on selling these forgeries. He would then buy like rare books and he was buying things so that he could then forge other things later. Right. I mean, it's very complicated. And there's a there's a book called The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrell. And that is tells the story of Mark Hoffman, but specifically from the view of him pretending to have discovered poems by Emily Dickinson and the Public Library in Amherst, Massachusetts,

which is where she was from, collects money to buy these here to for unpublished lost Emily Dickinson poems that were fake. Yeah. What a farmer. So he's he's like a he he was like one of the greatest forgers or the, you know, most infamous forgers anyone had ever seen working it. He's doing it. So essentially what happened was he was trying to sell some new set of documents to the church

and Steve Christensen knew a little bit about antiquities and old documents. And so he was questioning. He was like, I heard this guy is being questioned about the Oath of the Freeman. They're not even sure like he's under investigation. We need to look closer at these papers calling him out. Yeah. So what he did was he plants a bomb at Steve Christensen's office to kill him. Then he planted the other one at Gary Sheets House to make it look like it had something

to do with CFS instead of anything to do with him. Shit. That's fucking tricky. Yeah. I mean, this guy is, you know, yeah, tricky. He's a trickster. He was eventually arrested in January of 1986, charged with a total of 27 counts, including murder, forgery, possession of an unregistered machine gun and Jesus Christ.

Yeah. That's literally Jesus Christ and a salamander. So he, albino salamander, albino, you can't forget the albino part. I mean, that all of their beliefs for hundreds of years are one thing. And then he gives them paper that's like, it turns out an albino salamander. How to say, they're like, you know, an angel sounds cooler, so we're just going to stick with that. They're like, we, now we need to have a really big meeting.

Then what if we have to start fucking praying to an albino salamander? I mean, would that ever even have been a choice? No. But they say also, so he had like 600 forgeries that got sold and are in the market where they're still finding them. Yeah. I was going to ask. Yeah.

So they're apparently, and he wrote a letter from jail explaining which things that he did were forgeries. Because some things, obviously when he started out, he kind of, there were valid ones, so, but they're saying that they're like, there's some Daniel Boone signatures out there that are fake, that like, there's, because there were hardly any in the first place, but then Mark Hoffman comes along and suddenly there's four that are in the marketplace, which brings the value down. And it turns out, you know, three of them aren't real.

Do you think that his forgeries are now worth money, a lot of money? To murdering types? Yeah. Or like, is there a forgeries museum? I'd go to that. I would too. I mean, I think overall, the historical signatures are going to be worth the most. Of course.

Because they're like the, you know. But I feel like there's got to be like Smithsonian or some kind of thing that's just like, you know, it's history. Look at this rap bastard. Yeah, look in that department. Look what happened. Yeah. Yeah.

I just think it's funny that he did it so much. And when you see the paper, like he would bake the paper in the oven. Yeah, he's going to ask. Burn the edges. Yeah, exactly. Blank. Like an old Western. All that they found all this, you know, they found ink that he specifically mixed to match.

But then the when the guy who finally started investigating it forensically, he was like the new ones all glow blue underneath a microscope because they're new. And so he was just really easily able to once they knew, start investigating all of them and just be like, none of this is real. Yeah. He would add this letter from Betsy Ross. That's crazy. I bet he'd be good at the lettering challenge.

He might be. He's got to have good handwriting. He would add in. He'd be like, I believe that this is a real, I don't know what I was going back, anyhow, he initially maintained his innocence, but at a preliminary hearing, the prosecutors showed so much evidence of his forgeries and his debts and all of the evidence linking him to the bombs that instead of risking the death penalty, he pled guilty to two counts of second degree murder, a count of theft by deception for the salamander letter and

account of fraud for the sale of the McClellan collection was, which was that last collection he was trying to sell. Right. When Steve Christensen stepped in, he confessed all of his forgeries in open court. He was in January, 1988. He was sentenced to five years to life in prison. He's spending life in prison. Five.

Wow. And he's still there. We can. Still there. Wow. Yeah. That's Mark Hoffman, everybody. I first thought you were going like towards the Ted Kaczynski route when I heard about

a bomb. Oh, to be killed by a bomb. Do you ever open on the lobes and you're like, I don't know what this is going to be? Yes. Well, that's my moths thing. I never think it's a mom, a bomb though, or a mom, just a mom coming to tell me to sweep up the kitchen. Honey, do those dishes.

Oh, what is that fear? They're just sitting there. You let him soak for too long. Yeah. You can't just let things soak in cold water, Karen. It's true. But also this was the 80s when like this was back when you could walk into an office building with a plain package.

I feel like, you know, as worrisome as it all sounds, we don't live in that world anymore. It's like, that was definitely a very pre-911 era. Yeah, except I, yeah, yeah, but maybe not, you know what I mean? Well, I'm scared. I know. I know. You can be. Well, that's fucked up.

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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. Today, Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast, Killer Psyche Daily, in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. Wow. Now, isn't that a... Well, I don't want to say wonderful story, but it is an incredible

tale and you don't get a lot of murder and talking salamanders combined, so I love it. I absolutely love it and I still feel like there's room in the world for religion started with a talking salamander. Somebody should think about it. Now, I want to get into George's story, which is also fascinating. It's the Sleepwalking Murderer from Episode 160. This one is truly a wild story and as someone in a relationship with a man who sleepwalks, a little bit personal for me, it's... I live in terror because of this story.

All I'm saying is that if my boyfriend ends up killing me in his sleep, I want this guest hosting episode of My Favorite Murder to be played in court. Now, this story involves murder, there's gambling, marital trouble, someone waking up covered in blood. It's got it all. I really... Speaking of waking up covered in blood, I feel like if you wake up covered in anything, you're probably in trouble. It's just the beginning of a great story.

Let's hear Georgia tell the story now, should we? This is mine. I was originally going to do three different topics on this, three different murders on this subject, but then reading the most famous one, I was like, this is a fucking story in itself. Okay. This is the case of Kenneth Parks, a.k.a. the Sleepwalking Murderer. Remember?

Yes. I remember. Yes, but remember? Remember? I feel like this is a combination of several different investigation discovery shows that I've watched. But I feel... Okay. Go ahead.

Yeah. No, I kind of remember it. You first hear it. It kind of reminds me of the woman who spilled McDonald's coffee on her lap, and you're like, oh, that's this legend, that crazy woman. Yes. Then you see the documentary about it. I can't remember what it's called.

You're like, oh, this is legitimate. Yes. I kind of... You'll have to tell me what you think. All right. I got a lot of information from Psychology Today. There's an article by a woman named Barrett Brugard. She's a PhD, obviously, and a bunch of other letters. Is there an M in there somewhere?

I'm sure there is. A little C, a big C. And little dots and stuff. Yeah. She's very smart. Yeah. And then also, there's a paper called the Homicidal Synambulism, a case report in the Sleep Research Society.

It's like crazy. Okay. Hey. Hey, Karen. Hey. Sleepwalking is relatively common in childhood. Did you know that? I did not.

Have you ever sleptwalked? Not that I know of. Yeah. There's a good chance that I did, I woke up, was traumatized, and then just went back to sleep by myself. Lots of stuff happened in the middle of the night where my parents wouldn't get up because I was very high maintenance in the nighttime. So my mom was always like, go to bed, go back to sleep.

So about 15, 20% of all children's sleepwalk, only about 2% of children, mostly boys, weirdly, go on to be adult sleepwalkers. So it's not a huge fucking thing in adults. Don't try to say it as it is. Exactly. So I'm at us with sleepwalking. There have been about 68 cases of homicidal sleepwalking. 68.

Uh-huh. And like throughout history, and that only goes until 2005 because that's what Wikipedia told me. Got it. Wikipedia's, I don't know if there's been one since then. Is that the year everybody stopped doing Wikipedia? That's when everyone stopped, to homicidal, sambanillism, and sleepwalk, and Wikipediaing. Okay.

Okay. But this is arguably the most famous one. In 1987, we're outside Toronto, Canada, and here's Kenneth Parks. He's a 23-year-old married man. He's married to a woman named Karen, who she played by in the 1997 TV movie, The Sleepwalker Killing. 97. Uh-huh.

Um, uh, Justine Bateman, Hilary Swank, close, same vibe, yeah. They had a five-month-old daughter together, and at the time, Ken is under extreme stress. So the previous summer, Ken, played by in 1997 TV movie, The Sleepwalker Killing. Chad Lowe. Charles Easton, which I think is weird. He's the dude from Nashville. Oh. The show Nashville.

Yeah, you know. He's like the hot country guy. Sure. Him. Okay. Okay. Um, so Ken had developed a gambling problem. His friends had like taken him gambling to the horse races.

He was like, whatever, and then he won some money, and then he was like, oh, shit, it's on and couldn't stop fucking. He got the fucking fever. He got the horse race fever. Okay. And so he quickly fell into deep fucking debt. But however these debts, he starts taking money from him, his and Karen's savings. I think he forges a couple checks as well.

I'm getting a debt stomach ache. Are you okay? It's just, I know the feeling. It's just, I know the feeling. And he's like, you're in debt, and then you're, you're doing something pretending it's going to solve it. When you know deep down, it will not help. But there's no other way to fix it as quickly as if you did when?

Yes. I actually, there was one month where I did not have my rent. And I honestly considered, there was somebody that I knew like very tangentially and through comedy whose father was a professional gambler. And I almost called him to say, can I please give you $200 just to see if your dad could turn it into something? I mean, his dad, if he were any good, I wouldn't say no. I would.

That's insane. But also the guy would be like, hey, since you never talked to me, go fuck yourself. Right. That's probably what would have happened. Wow. Yeah. Scary feeling. Sad solution.

My solution was never get a job. Isn't that interesting? Well, Karen's solution is that he began to steal from his employer, he, where he worked in electronics. So he's just fucking trying to, you know, win back the money constantly, but he keeps losing it all. And by the time his employer finds out about the fact that he's been stealing and he finds out, they find out in March, 1987, he's stolen $32,000 from them.

Shit. That's too much money. Also, that means he's stealing and betting and stealing and betting. Right. That means he's in debt probably triple that. Yeah. That's just how much he's taken. Yes.

He's just fired and he's charged with fraud and, but he's awaiting trial. So he's out. Ugh. This is real stress. Here we go. This isn't just like, oh, I'm, I'm slightly nervous. And he has a five month old daughter too at the same time. So before getting into this debt though, Ken had a good marriage to Karen and he had a

really good relationship with her parents, 42 year old mother-in-law Barbara and who knows how old he is, Dennis Woods, the father-in-law. He was interestingly 18. Isn't that neat? It's kind of, it's a sexy little, we can do it ladies. Yeah. In our 40s. Happy Gallantines Day.

Marsha. Let's see. Okay. Part of the reason why, and her parents fucking adore him, part of that reason is because they had gotten married really young and when Karen and Ken first met, she was a runaway and Ken convinced her to return home. So they were like, Ken, thank you so much for getting us our baby back and we're so grateful for it.

We love you. Everything. And by all accounts, he was a super sweet dude. She, Barbara and the mother-in-law called him her gentle giant and it kind of seemed like they were this like replacement for his parents because his parent, he wasn't close to his parents ever and they, they kind of weren't involved in his life. So he, you know, he had this lovely in-law set of parents, you know, and they said that he was closer with Karen's parents than his own.

Okay. But after losing his job because of all that fucking money, remember, Ken is unshamed. That's not true. He's proud. He's the opposite of unshamed. He's deeply shamed. Completely shamed and he can't find a new job. And so he stops visiting Karen's parents because he's so embarrassed and doesn't want to like

talk to them about it. And he does also continue to gamble, which of course makes his and Karen's marriage fucked up. So it is an addiction. It is an addiction. It is an addiction. 100%. It's so horrible.

I just, the idea of that where it like defies logic and you're like, look, I'm super broke. Let me just gamble this money. It feels like you have hope when you're doing it. Like I've been to Vegas a few times. I feel like that could be, I shouldn't live near anywhere near a place where you can gamble because it's so fun. And you have this like maybe me feeling and that feeling for like somebody that's always wanted to be a performer or an actor gets real kicked up when you're like, is this when

I become special? Like how many times the first time I went to Vegas with friends when I moved to LA, we drove out there, we got there within, I would say two hours, I had lost $300. And that I was like, I did not have money. So I was just like, Oh no, I can't do this. And then you realize how boring it is there when you don't have money because all there is it gamble and drink. That's all.

All at one time in like fucking 2001, I won $300. So now it's been what the hundred years and I still like, but I could maybe win even though I won. I won. Right. The amount of money I've actually lost there is much more. Is a lot more. Can I just add one more stories?

Because I won once on one of those oversized machines and I, it was very odd. It was like the last day we're going to leave whatever stuck in $10. I won $400. Wow. So you would have thought it's classic me that I won $4 million. I was just like, thank you everyone and like reaching out to touch people and stuff. You grab someone's flowers that she's walking by and throw them at yourself. She's like, those are mine.

Those are mine. Anniversary. It was the most. And then taking the coins from that oversized thing over to the cashier. Those dirty fucking disgusting ass coins. I was just scared. Like every single one of them. I was scared to death.

Yeah. I was positive that was when the heist was going to take course. They want your $400. My $400 precious dollars. Ridiculous. I still play the lottery though. Okay. It's fun.

It's so fun. So yeah. So that's very stressful. So much fucking money. He continues to gamble though and she's like, dude, bro, what the fuck. And since he had started gambling the summer before, his personality had completely changed, obviously. He stopped socializing.

He starts to suffer from pressure headaches and he gained 70 pounds. Oh no. Yeah. He's just like addiction central. Dude. I relate. Yeah. Yeah.

He suffers from insomnia and he would only sleep for four to six hours a night, which sounds like a lot of sleep. I know. That's not bad. But he slept on the couch a lot and he'd go to, you know, he'd sometimes go entire nights without sleeping at all. And then he had the fucking baby. So that's like double time, non-sleepy times, you know.

He eventually agrees to go to gambler's anonymous and in that May, he agreed to stop gambling and he agreed to tell both his grandmother about what was going on and Karen's parents who was super close to him. He was like, all right, we'll go over there on a Sunday and I'll confront, you know, confront them. No. No. I shouldn't be like that.

No. Listen you. Motherfucker. I have a fucking gambling problem. You're making me bet on horses. So he agreed to do it and he agrees to tell him about the upcoming trial for fucking fraud that he has going on. So like shit is fucking bad right now.

So the day, so it's one of those things where it's early in the morning of the day. So 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, the day he was supposed to be later that day, obviously go tell his grandmother and his beloved in-laws about what was going on. So it's May 24th, 1987, the night before he falls asleep on the couch watching SNL at about four in the morning. He gets up from the couch where he'd been sleeping, puts on his shoes and jacket, walks out the front door, which he left unlocked, which he never fucking did. And he drove the 14 miles to the house of his in-laws in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

He drove. He's sleep dove. Yeah. Fuck. I don't believe this. Oh, okay. The other thing too is like some people are like bullshit, right, right. So when Ken arrives at their house, he takes a tire iron from the car trunk and he uses

his key that he has to their house to open the house, goes to the bedroom of his in-laws. He first strangles his father-in-law, Dennis, until he is unconscious. Then he proceeds to beat his 42-year-old mother-in-law, Barbara Ann, 42 years old, 42. He beats her with the tire iron and stabs her repeatedly with a kitchen knife. Oh my God. He then stabs his father-in-law. Barbara is found in a room five to six feet away from the bedroom and she sustained six stab wounds through her chest, one through her shoulder blade and a fatal wound through

her heart. Oh my God. I know it's fucking awful. I'm sorry. No. Barbara dies, but Dennis survives, barely. Oh my God. And there were other kids in the house.

I think teenager, I don't know who else, because they were young. They were young. They had other kids who were under in their teenage years and they woke up from the noise. They start yelling, but Ken left them alone and he walked out of the house. So the kids saw him. I don't know if they saw, I feel like, or they just heard the noise. They heard. Maybe they saw something.

They all locked themselves in their room. Oh yeah. So that would make sense. But he goes to the door and just leaves. He doesn't try to come towards them or anything like that. Right. Very weird. And this is the mission.

Yeah. The end. Yeah. Okay. So from their house, he drives straight to the police station. He gets there at 445 a.m. He's covered in blood. The police say he seems distressed and he was shaking.

He kept repeating and it's fucking many times that he says this, I just killed someone with my bare hands. Oh my God. I've just killed two people. I stabbed them and beat them to death. It's all my fault. He says it's the police. Oh my God.

Isn't that insane? Yes. He also said that he seemed completely oblivious and not in pain of the fact that he severed tendons in both his hands with the knives. Oh. He wasn't even fucking aware of it. Ew. I know.

Stephen is gripping his hands so tight right now. He was hiding his hands. If you hear skin on skin, it's a secret. That's crazy. Isn't that fucking... You can't fake that. No. Tendons.

Not being in pain. I guess you could say something about like, um, adrenaline maybe. Maybe. But tendons, that's a bloody mess. And also you would still have to be conscious in some ways. Right. I don't know. I don't buy that.

Right. I don't know. No, it's bananas. I just don't want to. I don't. I don't. I don't want to. I know.

I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't. I don't want to. I don't. I don't want to. I don't.

I didn't at first. I was like, well, bullshit, I don't really buy it. But after reading that and all the details and stuff, and like that particular thing, bananas. Also, I will just throw this in really quick. To me, it seems like if you're faking it, you would go home and get back into sleep and be like, what do you mean? I was like, you would be playing the part of someone who slept walked.

Because usually the picture you have of sleepwalkers is they go out, they do something and then they come back. I'm bleeding so badly that he could have been like, oh, I need to get to the hospital. How do I make it seem like that? You know what I mean? True. True. So that's just an argument.

But turning yourself in. Right. As indicated. You would have just gone to the hospital. Holy fuck. Because what if you woke up covered in blood? I mean, it's like, there's that amazing movie, Farrah Fawcett, it's basically the same thing. She wakes up covered in blood and doesn't know what happened because she's a blackout

drunk. Oh, shit. That's how she got set up. Oh fuck. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert.

Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. Okay. So they didn't tell you the name in the movie, so they didn't spoil it for you. No one will ever watch it. So you can't spoil something. We're not going to watch it.

Okay. Ken is arrested and he goes to trial to face charges of first degree murder of his mother in law and attempted murder of his father in law. And his defense, they have to say it in a certain way. It's basically temporary insanity due to sleepwalking. It's way more fucking involved than that legally, but we don't need to do that right now. Right.

You get it. That's all I get. That's right. While in prison, Ken undergoes all these sleep tests and psychological tests. There's an EEG scan while he's sleeping that shows that he had some abnormal brain activity during sleep. So he did legitimately have a sleep thing and periods of partial awakenings, indicative of parasomnia.

And it's fucking, I mean, I read a lot about this shit and like sleepwalking and sleep talking and people actually committing crimes. And you know, a lot of them seem like, I don't know about that, but this one seemed legit. He was studied for months by team of psychologists and they determined that he was in an acute state of emotional turmoil leading up to the attack. And that's what caused him to lash out and kill these people that he loved and really had nothing to gain by killing them, right? And there was no anger or anything like that involved.

It was just extreme stress. Well, and they, he hadn't told them yet. They didn't know. Right. His wife is the one that knew. So right. It seems like if you were going to do something to try to remove the fact, yeah, just go upstairs and kill your wife.

I mean, that to me, that would be a, that's a really good point. Thanks. Welcome. And like, yeah, that's a good point. It's almost like the thing he was so stressed about, which is telling this parent in laws is the thing he acted out on. Yes. Because that was what was in his brain.

His brain wasn't functioning properly and it was like, neuron to neuron, go do this thing. It's like the fixation of if you get rid of them, you don't have to tell them. Right. Right. You can see where like the fucked up brain thing messaging would be there. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so let's see, since there's allegedly no way to fake an EEG result and since Ken had appeared to feel no pain when he arrived at the police station, it is determined that he was sleepwalking when he attacked his in-laws. So, but there's like kind of some weird shit. Like Karen said she had never seen Ken sleepwalk, which I feel like she would have. Right. She did say he was a really deep sleeper and sometimes he, she would talk to him, to her in his sleep.

His mother said she remembered only one incident of Ken sleepwalking as a child when his brother grabbed his legs as he like crawled out of a window. Oh, shit. I know. So like there was something going on there and Ken's grandfather and a lot of his family members sleptwalked and had some sleep issues, which it is hereditary, which I found interesting. And children whose parents are sleepwalkers are two to three times more likely to become sleepwalkers.

Okay. Bananas. And my brother sleptwalked a little bit in his youth and yeah, I don't know. I did a thing one time and it was purely out of stress, but I wasn't, I was trying to go to sleep and the stress built up and then I just jumped up and ran and it was one of the weirdest things I've ever done because I couldn't really, it was when I was still married and my, it was like, what are you doing? I was like, no, no, no, I have to get out.

I have to get out. Your body was like, clean slate, clean slate. Get out of here. You get out. Get out. And you get out. Yeah. It was super weird.

Holy shit. And it was, it was just from like, I can't deal with this pressure anymore. Yeah. I think stress will do that to you. Yeah. At trial, Ken says he didn't remember any of the details of the attack. He said he remembered falling asleep on the couch, sometimes after, sometimes after midnight, his fucking next recollection is his next thing you remember seeing is opening

his eyes and seeing his mother-in-law's brightened face and her eyes and mouth are open. And in while he's in prison, he is distraught and devastated and he's mourning this and he's just feels horrible. Karen's with him during the trial. Oh. Ken says that after seeing his mother-in-law's face, he just sat there. He didn't, he just like almost like woke up then. And then he heard the kids yelling and he says, he thought the kids were in trouble.

So he said, he yelled, kids, kids, kids. But the kids said they only heard like grunting animal noises. So he thinks like he's in a dream. He's talking and saying these words, but they, but that's almost like, that's what he thought, you know? It's the way somebody would if they were sleeping and thinking that they're saying something. Totally. Yeah.

But for some reason, Ken picked up the phone at the house and left it off the hook and also walked up to the bedroom of the kids, but didn't go in or try to at all. So that's just a weird little, I don't know, sorry, like as he was leaving. I don't know if it was before or after. Okay. I think before he left, he went to the kids room. I don't know what the phone. Yeah.

Yeah. On Ontario Supreme Court, jury deliberated for nine hours before finding Kenneth Parks not guilty. Wow. The judge upheld the ruling saying that the state had failed to establish beyond the reason. We'll doubt that Parks was aware of his actions, which fucking upset a lot of people, a lot of people call bullshit on it.

I mean, there's really no way to tell, but based on what I read, I feel like it's true, but am I just like being foolish? Jesus Christ. I just saw some mail at the corner. Is someone walking by a ghost? Oh, well, you know, it's funny to me, this seems like, like you're saying that the McDonald's lady that at first pass, of course you say that because that sounds like the ultimate excuse.

The best excuse. It sounds like the beginning of a date line. Totally. He was sleepwalking. And there are a bunch. There are a few of those that are there. I mean, it's almost like, to me, it kind of reminds me of the staircase where it's like, he says that she fell down this, you know, and it's like, of course he said that he fucking

killed her. But, you know, but then that's almost the, this one's almost worse that a fucking that he was sleepwalking. It's like, bullshit. But then like, what if it's true, right? What if it's true? And what are the, what could actually support that? Like, and those people took all that evidence and for nine hours, we're through it and went,

yeah, he didn't do it. But at the same time, it's like, but he did still do it. Are you not culpable at all in your sleep? Like, he, is there some kind of like a manslaughter or something, you know, like, he just gets to leave. He's done. Well, but he did go to jail. You said, right?

Well, just trying to try it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, that's horrible. And yeah. Yeah. What do you say?

Yeah. Only he knows. I mean, like, only he knows. Totally. Um, I do know that they didn't stay married only because of murdering a fucking email to us and said that she was friends with this girl when she was younger and went over to her mom and stepdad's house before and she told her about it. So they weren't married anymore.

Well, how could you be though? No, totally. Yeah. Even if it was the love of your life, you absolutely believed he was innocent. Yeah. That's just so hard. Well, he's not innocent. He still killed your parents.

Yeah. But I mean, like, that it wasn't an intentional plan. Right. Can you imagine sleeping next to him? I mean, Jesus. Well, that alone. Yeah. That alone.

Or just like, yeah, that's, it's. I've punched Vince in my sleep before. Yeah. Have you? Yeah. Like having a dream about a fight. I went and punched him. So bad.

And I'll sometimes talk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he did end up. I, there's so hard to find any information.

The most recent thing I found was that he was running for a spot on the district school board in 2006, which mentioned that he had six kids ages four to 19 in 2006. So he was in another relationship at some point. Right. Yeah. And like, you can't find anything else. He probably just wants to live his life. And if he fucking didn't do it on purpose, great, but also like, can you imagine like

knowing in your past, you, it's crazy. It's horrifying. It's crazy. It's horrifying. And that is the case of Kenneth Parks, a.k.a. the sleepwalking murderer. Wow. The fuck. Yeah.

That's, I mean, because there's ones we do where it's like, they, they, you describe their childhood and it's the worst thing you've ever. Right. So then when they become killers, then you're like, well, I, it doesn't justify it, but I see how A plus B equals C. Right. But so this is a version of that. It is because you're like, you can imagine being so under under so much stress brought

on by yourself. That's the other thing too, is like the stress he brought on was by himself. Yes. So it's also still like, well, you're culpable for that. Yeah. Are you culpable for the murder? I mean, for the things that happened because of your choices and actions. Yes.

I mean, it is, I mean, this is a real like conundrum in that way to be, can you imagine being on that jury? Oh fuck. No. And probably that you, I bet there was a sleepwalk right out of that fucking jury. I'd just be like, sorry, I don't believe in sleepwalking. Goodbye. Don't believe in it.

Oh my God. I think it's an urban myth. I mean, I can't imagine staying married to the person after that. No, you couldn't. You couldn't. That's too much to ask. Yeah. Oh my God.

Fuck man. Horrible. That was heavy. Sorry. No. Sorry. I just told you a horrible murder story. Oh, you mean like the theme of this podcast we've been doing for three years?

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That is a rough story to hear, I know. But I think it's very interesting and also very comforting to hear someone else have difficulty pronouncing some nambulant.

That is a word I will never be able to say correctly and it's nice that I can hear other people struggle with it as well. So this is the end of me guest hosting. I hope you've had a wonderful time. I hope you enjoyed these stories as much as I did. And if you want to find me, again, I'm Bridger Weinerger. I host I Said No Gifts here on Exactly Right every Thursday. And now I'm going to say a phrase that I just thought of and that I plan to trademark.

Stay sexy and don't get murdered. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Yeah.