My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 324 - Hit That Mute Button

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

On today's episode, Georgia and Karen cover the tragic disappearance of Kelsey Collins and the miraculous survival of Captain Tim Lancaster on British Airways Flight 5390.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. Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. That's Georgia Hartstark.

Hey, that's Karen Kilgariff. Hi. Hi. We're back with you again this week. Look at us now. Look at us here. Keep coming back. Look at us often.

Yeah. You keep showing up in your ears. Yeah, why not? We're putting out some fucking magic products and your fucking ears are picking it up. And we appreciate it. He is vision. Oh, man. Do you want to talk about your holiday weekend?

No. Should we say what just happened? Yeah. Okay. I don't want to talk about my holiday weekend because we just had a 10 minute, I mean, beautiful classic conversation about all the things, all the things. I told a great Charlie Chaplin story, I think. There was, you know, I mean, there's so much going on.

And then I realized I wasn't recording. Classic podcast gaffe. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more often to us. You know, and you know why? Because the birthday boy Steven, he always checks and literally asks us repeatedly, are you recording? Is everyone recording? David.

And we're always so offended. Like, yes, I'm recording. And then tell we're not recording. Until the one moment. That's a thing about like, you have to be a checky, checky, checky because the one time. Yeah. We've lost some, some, this is like a back catalog, my favorite murder. Binal record of back stuff that didn't get recorded.

But yeah, that doesn't, that doesn't work. Nevermind. Equations there don't add up. We'll go into the booth and we'll start talking about all the stuff that we think didn't get recorded. All those, the lost conversations, really solid stuff about very local restaurants. Yeah. And you know what I say, Georgia?

What? Local jokes. Get local work. Get local laughs. You've always said that, Karen. Hey, since we're on a Karen corner, can I do a Karen suggestion was totally right corner? I'd love to hear it. Okay.

And I might cry talking about this. Do it. The TV show, Our Flag Means Death is one of the most beautiful fucking things I've ever witnessed in my entire life. I love it so much. Yeah. That if I could, I would cry. It's so funny, but so subtle.

Touching and touching. Wait, are you caught up? Cause I tried, I went to watch it last night and then ended up watching something else. I'm not caught up, but I heard the last like two episodes are fucking epic. So I can't wait. It's one of those shows where like, I don't want to catch up because I don't want it to be over, you know? Yes.

It's also so beautifully shot. Oh, it's, yeah. It looks like an old fashioned movie or something. Yeah. It's so good. It does. It's like simple, but beautifully done. And the characters are so, oh my God.

Tycho Watiti, I'll watch him fucking read a menu. Like I just, anything he does. We went to see JoJo Rabbit at the Arclight and there was a panel and he spoke on it. The woman who interviewed him was so in love with him. I remember sitting there watching going, I wouldn't want that job. No. It would be so difficult. And he's just so tall and good looking and he's kind of got the world by the balls.

Yeah. And so him appearing in this show and the character, I don't want to talk about it, but it's just, to me, it feels like an amalgamation or like the lead up to this moment in his actual life. Right. That's how we see you in real life. I was in an elevator with him once. Vince and I were. He is tall.

He is Vince's height, if not taller. And we were looking like we were in pajamas, essentially. And he was like at a gala that was happening on the ground floor. So he was like in a fucking tux and just like cleaned up real nice looking. And I had to avert my eyes. Otherwise my husband probably would have been not pleased. But I think he, Vince was looking at him too. Like, wow, I think they're all just wowed by him.

He's got a sparkly quality to him, which I have to say the one time I was lucky enough to meet Jemaine Clement, he had like charisma that came through the door before he got there where I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like easy. Yeah. It was crazy. So those boys, you know, I think they're all in the same club together. So if you don't know what we're talking about, go watch Flight of the Concords, go binge that and then go watch what we do in the shadows, the TV show, the first, the movie.

It was a movie first. Yes. Movie first on the TV show. Yeah. And then go watch all of the things that all of those people have been in because it's. But also let's not forget the star of the show and truly one of the most charming human beings, perhaps on the planet, Rhys Darby, who is in this part. I believe this man exists.

Yeah. He's like a puppy. He's so perfect. He's so good. It's so good. Like when he says, there's, I'm going to spoil her when he goes, you don't, you don't belong in dog heaven, that one part. I fucking lost it.

Oh my God, it's so good. I lost it in reverse when they opened his closet and showed all his outfits. Oh, he's perfect. He's so good. Yeah. What an enjoyable, lovely. Also the kind of thing where I often find myself trying to find a lighter fare. Oh yeah.

After I watch, after I binge watch the entire series of worst roommate ever, which I know I recommended it already, but I finished it. Oh, did you watch Bad Vegan? Yes. Dude. Oh, who's side are you on? I feel for her. She did not want to be in a hotel and celebrate where the fuck they were celebration floor.

I don't know. I, I feel for her. Right. Like she got manipulated. Hmm. She made some very terrible choices that she is responsible for a hundred percent. Well, if I'm being totally honest, I didn't feel very much for her, but knew that she is probably one of the least sympathetic people there are like a vegan who kind of holds

that up as like a standard that you can reach, you know, and with the celebrity and the did it so about celebrity connections and start fucking and all that stuff. Yeah. And yeah. And then just like everybody gets left high and dry. Yeah. So vegan sustainability, like, you know, this is how people should live their lives and listen to me, you know, like prophesizing and then you don't pay the people at your

work who need the money to literally survive and have a roof over their head is unacceptable for sure. Here's what I like about it. We're so immersed in the contents constantly. And it's like, well, I don't feel this and I hate this because I, it's like, hey, guess what? I was brought a topic I didn't know existed. So immediately I was just like, I don't, her affect the whole combo.

I'm like, oh, she, you can't, it's so hard to be on her side. Yeah. But what if people like this have bad things happen to them? They're not empathetic, small town girl, person that you know, person that you grew up with, it's like a person who has the same bad thing happen. But suddenly I'm like, well, why would you fall for that? Like the judgment and the shittiness and the kind of mercilessness that you just, it reminds me all of this content that we take in and process, we're always putting it through our

own lens and then justifying our judgments as like we know the facts, their facts. Exactly. And like we have been given them all this one piece of media, this documentary has told us everything we need to know the end goodbye. And it's like, well, maybe not. Well, and kind of like this is what we've all, so much of everything, especially taking in media has gone unanalyzed for a really long time. It's like, not, it's like since the internet, when everyone started getting paid to write

their very smart articles about why this was good or why this was bad. Before that, you just kind of watched it. You were shown a thing and you took it in the way it was intended for you to take it in the end. Right. And then in this kind of analysis phase of things where it's like, I can suddenly start thinking like, what would the article about this be? What's the hot take?

Right. Well, it'll be a vanity fair. Yeah. And then I want my own hot take. And then I'm with that one truly, I was just like, I don't know what's going on. I don't either. I don't either. At the end, I was very unsatisfied, but it was, it was fascinating.

It was. I just kept going. Where's her dog? Is her dog okay today? Like, I want to see the dog. Just make sure. Yeah. Was it all worth it for the dog?

I kept looking at Frank going, I never would I do this for you. Don't worry, Frank. Frank's like, please, please don't clone me. Please don't make me live forever. Please. So I don't want to live forever. That part is wild. And I think it wasn't touched on enough about like how you could believe that it's, there's

a lot of like the vow mixed in with this a little bit. What'd you think? Which one's the vow? The vow is, the vow is fucking Keith Ranieri, baby. She had, she had a one man cult on her all the time. So she, yes. So there's lots to it that there's lots to break apart and kind of go, it's so easy to just go, I hate her or I'm jealous of her or how dare she blank, blank, blank.

Like that's the, I don't know. It's fascinating. I love the connotation that if only she had accepted a date from Alec Baldwin, everything would have been fine, which I fucking bet it would have been, I bet it would have been great. I mean, sure. But also what's that standard of like anything. I mean, like my friends, especially my friends who I know from Twitter, like in real life

because of Twitter or just like, oh no, like you start dating a guy because he talks to a certain celebrity on Twitter. That's right. The standards are low. Right. You got to ask questions. Ask a lot of questions. Ask an awkward amount of questions on your first date that just to make sure.

What's a good, what's a good couple of questions to ask on a first date? Have you overworked in the service industry? Yes. Hello. Here we go. Who was your childhood bully? And if they say I wasn't bullied, that means they were the bully and hey, what should we tip at the end and then see what they, God, I don't know where I'm fucking professional.

Okay. You go. Yeah. What's yours? Well, the first one I would do is why did I agree to do this? And then I would just kind of see how it went from there. What kind of fucking place is this that you took me to? A. I said to myself, I'm saying this to myself.

No, I know. It's the things that we say to ourselves that are helpful. I have one book and then that's pretty much it for me, this audio book that I am literally 28 minutes away from finishing, but I can guarantee you there's not going to be any crazy twists. So I'm still going to like it in 28 minutes when I finish it. Have you read it before? It's about the family surviving the Holocaust.

So there's not going to be any twist or ru with the whole thing at the end of it. It's just like, how do you know what's going to happen? I promise you. It's historical fiction. It's called We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter, which is such a powerful title because it's like, if you didn't die in the Holocaust, if you were one of the six million Jews that died in the Holocaust, you were the lucky ones. So my thing about it that I love is that we know about the Holocaust.

We know about, you know, Treblinka and Auschwitz and the numbers, but this book is historical fiction and it follows a family and each of their journeys to survive the Holocaust, which is so much more impersonal and it's a way to look at what really happened and each one has such an interesting story of how they escaped and how they hid and how they fought alongside. So it's just, it's a beautiful fucking book and it really moved me and, you know, this last weekend was Passover and it really made me realize, like, what it took to, like, the people who had to be brave and survive in my family line to let me be here and on a

Zoom-themed satyr is unbelievable and it kind of made me appreciate life a little bit more and how lucky I am. Oh, that's good. Yeah. So it's called We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter and the audiobook's great. I highly recommend it. Yeah, that's really amazing. But in less than the 28 minutes that I've left, it, you know, turns.

They're like, we were the ones that liberated Auschwitz. We did it personally. That just made me think of Judy Bloom had a book called starring Sally J. Friedman as herself. Did you ever read that book? Okay, so it's about a young Jewish girl and she has family that survived World War II that are coming over from Europe. They're emigrating to come and live with them.

Like they have two, like a cousin or so, I can't remember, but I read this book when I was like 10 years old and Sally J. Friedman, the lead character, is this young American, a Jewish American girl who wants to be an actress. So she keeps acting out these dramatic things that she thinks these relatives have been through and she's doing it, whatever, and then she actually meets them. And it was really powerful, a really powerful book to read as a kid and also an amazing way to get introduced to the Holocaust of like, this is what people went through. And this is, this was how a kid went through being on the like family side of this is what's

happening to our family. Right. I mean, it's such a personal, that's what I was thinking about is those big numbers and the big words and the big places that you hear about. And then like, like the book, Mouse by Art Spiegelman, it's, it's a personal story that encompasses the, that it makes you understand what really happened in a much broader sense by focusing on these people that you, you care about. Yes.

Everyone has such a specific story. Like there's, you know, there were babies born, there were, there were marriages happening in secret. They were falling in love. They were trying to survive. They were trying to help their families survive. And then the ways out and I mean, it's just, it encompasses so much and it's just, I mean, I think that everyone should read it to kind of get an understanding more so than just

like the chapter in the fucking history book at high school. Right. I mean, if you haven't read Mouse by Art Spiegelman, it's a graphic novel and it's MAUS. So look that up. Yeah. If you haven't read that yet, you absolutely should and have to, it's, it's quite a work of art, but it's also true story.

It's Art Spiegelman's parents story. And so it's really worth it. It's really, it's really eye-opening and it's really amazing. Yeah. Especially because people are trying to fucking ban it and. Because we're going right back in. The fascist pendulum is swinging wildly once again. It's terrifying.

It's terrifying. Insanity. Yeah. Every week, every week there's a different thing to donate to. What do you got? Well let's see. I have been listening to lots of podcasts recently and there's a really good one called sent away and really like it because it's by APM reports, KUER and the Salt Lake Tribune.

So it's basically public television, but it's public reporting, public podcasting. Yeah. So you donate to them directly. They're all just these independent reporters. And so it turns out Utah is the state with the most like troubled teen schools, you know, the teens, the schools that teens get sent away to. There's like a lot of wilderness, right? And they get sent to these.

Because there's a lot of wilderness and because people think with the, like the Mormon family centric, that religion is really based on like family values and shit. Thank you. Family, I was like family qualities, that's not right. It's a family value kind of oriented culture there entirely. So the assumption is the schools that are there are going to treat your child well while teaching them how to be good, quote, unquote, and you got to listen to it. It's just, it's pretty eye opening.

And the details in that part, which is that this business just keeps growing, but there's no oversight. So you have private companies and private organizations running schools for troubled kids, which automatically when something comes up and there's a problem at that school, who are they going to believe? The person in charge or the drug addict teen that whose parents had to send them away. Like it's such a setup. And it's really amazing. They do such a good job on this podcast.

Sent away. Okay. Sent away. It's just them, Salt Lake Tribune, getting out there, jumping into the podcast game. I love it. APM reports and Salt Lake Tribune. Salt Lake public media. And KUER.

Yeah. That one's great. And then I have to say I've been dipping back into this is actually happening lately. Oh, yeah. I really just love when people tell their own story. I mean, obviously with my eyes survived and whatever, but with Miss Holdine is just still killing it. And I don't know how he picks these people, I would love to know the process because the

stories. Yeah. Or how does he find them? I don't know. I mean, that's just it. It's like, how are you getting people who have such good, fascinating, but varied stories? It's not the same type of story every time. It's different every time.

It's amazing. Oh, and then I just had a bunch of people, not a bunch, I would say a handful of people. Let me know that I was wrong, and in fact, the hound does make it to the end of Game of Thrones. He comes back? Yes, he does, apparently. Okay. I'd say that's the one thing that would get me back on the fucking train.

Well, get back in there because you only have a couple, you have like a season left and it really does pick up steam. Okay. Maybe I'll go back and maybe I need to break from all the clanging of the fucking swords and all that shit. And so I'll go back. I'll go back. I'll go back to the fucking starting right at the beginning of the sword fight.

Fucking skeletons and sword fights is like one of the dumbest fucking, I'm sorry. But like that, it's like, you know, excuse me, have you heard of Pirates of the Caribbean? Yeah, that is the stupidest. It's like the worst CGI. And then they're like, they have clanging swords, you know, they couldn't even hold up because there's fucking skeletons and like that. And then they're just clanging. It's just, and like, how do you kill a fucking skeleton?

You know, like it's just. You stab them in their non meaty arm, like you have to get to the spirit that's holding up that sword. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'll try it again.

I don't actually know how you kill a skeleton. Because it's not a thing. It's a really valid question. Because it's not a fucking thing. All right. I'll try it again. But it could become a thing. So we should figure this out.

That would be terrible. Yeah. Sorry, but did you hear how they found a lead line sarcophagus 65 feet underneath Notre Dame? Because you know how Notre Dame burned the famous, and they're restoring it. They're restoring it. They found a sarcophagus way with buried way down underneath it lined and led that they're going to open.

No, no, no. Don't open the lead line sarcophagus hidden and fucking Notre Dame like they're doing it. Oh, sorry. Great. This was breaking news that we talked a little bit about last week, but and the only reason I know this from basically the beginning is because the reporter Jasmine Kanek, when she first started reporting on Ed Buck was basically doing it alone and was getting the

story so that all of them, the local and then national news could get the story. But she basically tweeted all the way through it and Ed Buck was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Amazing. And she, if you don't follow Jasmine, J-A-S-M-Y-N-E Kanek on Twitter, she has kind of the latest and she follows these really amazing stories about people of color that don't get reported on in the mainstream news and especially that Ed Buck one that like truly, I think it would have gone, she didn't dedicate herself to that story the way she did.

We wouldn't be here now saying Ed Buck got sentenced to 30 years in prison. And the man's in his late seventies. He's old. Yeah. Goodbye. Yeah. That's fucking awesome. Yeah.

It's really great. Cool. I'm on an episode of my friend's podcast couples therapy podcast. That's really great. It's hosted by the hilarious comedian Naomi Ekperigan and Andy Beckerman and they're a couple and it's just, it's a really fun podcast with a lot of cool guests and I'm on it and I recommend it. Oh, she's the funniest.

Oh my God. She's so funny. Truly one of the best stand-ups doing it right now and she has a half hour on Netflix as a joke that if you haven't seen it yet, you absolutely have to watch it. She will become your favorite person. She's such a hilarious stand-up comic, such an amazing, fresh, like truly unique voice in stand-up. Yeah.

Yeah. She's a joy. Yeah. She's the best. So that's couples therapy. Okay. Exactly right corner. All right.

Let's talk about what's going on on the exactly right network this week. Over on That's Messed Up, Lisa and Kara are joined by actor-comedian, mad TV alum, Will Sasso and they're talking about his episode of SVU that he was on from season 19. That's going to be a delight. And then stand-up comedian Irene too is the guest this week on Lady Delady. Her new comedy album, We're Done Now, is out now. And amazingly, it's already season six of Tenfold More Wicked. This season is the Echo of Murder and it's available wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, where do you get your podcasts? On exactly right media. Yeah. Also in our merch store, there's a bunch of new and classic stickers. So if you have a trapper keeper that you really want to cover and stickers, go check that out. So today I'm going to talk about the disappearance of Kelsey Collins. The sources used today are the Charlie Project and Newsbreak article, two Seattle Times articles,

one by Susan Kelleher and one by Charles Brown, a presentation by Sarah Collins for North Seattle Friends Church, a Herald Nutt article by Eric Stevik, an Oregon Live article by Brian Denson, a CNN article by Patrick Oppmann, the website areblackgirls.com, an article by Erica Marie, the blog Justice for Native Women, and a bunch of Reddit pages that I found about her as well. Kelsey, Emily Collins is born on April 30th, 1991 and has a rough start to her life. From birth, she's diagnosed with something called her sprungs disease, which is a condition affecting the large intestine.

And so during the first 13 months of her life, Kelsey is constantly going to doctors and is hospitalized seven times, has two surgeries where she almost dies due to a reaction to the anesthetic. Kelsey also has a challenging time at school due to some learning issues which cause her to struggle with reading and math, and she also has speech and hearing impairments. But despite these setbacks, Kelsey's two older sisters say that she was a sweet, polite kid who's helpful. She actually loves going to school.

So despite all these setbacks that she had in her early life, she has a big smile in all of these photos. Kelsey's parents divorce when she's almost three as Kelsey's father struggles with alcohol. A year later, her mother remarries, but Kelsey's new stepfather is violent towards her mom, Sarah, and the kids. So in 1998, Sarah flees her abusive husband with her now four children. And for almost a year, the family hides out in shelters and transitional housing. They end up moving to Everett, Washington.

So Everett is the largest city in Snohomish County, Washington. It's 25 miles north of Seattle. And it's only once that Sarah and her kids have left the Midwest that she learns that her estranged husband had sexually abused Kelsey's sisters in front of Kelsey. He goes to prison serving a 20-year sentence. Sarah works hard at her job as a genetic researcher to provide the best life she can for her kids. But of course, it's a struggle as a single mom of four. When Kelsey is 11 years old, she alleges being molested by an older boy and no charges are

brought against him. So when she's 12 years old, she starts acting out. She starts running away from home, skipping school, becomes sexually active and starts both using and selling drugs. According to CNN, Sarah called the police after Kelsey stole a car. And Sarah, the mom was hoping the intervention by law enforcement would get her daughter back on the straight and narrow, but it doesn't work that way. When she's still in her early teens, Kelsey falls madly in love with an older boy.

She's like totally flattered by his attention. She thinks he treats her really well by buying her all kinds of things and, you know, paying lots of attention to her. Kelsey later wrote in her diary, quote, he swept me off my feet. I gave him whatever he wanted. So she's young. She's extremely vulnerable. And Kelsey's only with her boyfriend for a few months when he suggests she could earn

a lot of money if she goes into sex work. Kelsey's initial response is a flat out no. In fact, in her diary, she basically said that she said hell no. But Kelsey's boyfriend is able to manipulate and coerce her into working the streets of Seattle and Portland, luring her with the promise of more money than Kelsey had ever dreamed of. On her first day in Portland, Kelsey makes $1,500 and she becomes known on the streets as Lady Dollars and is just like shuttled around between several pimps and sex traffickers

of minors in the area. They exploit her. They exploit others like her transporting them up and down the I-5 corridor, which I guess is a big hub for that sex trafficking. The pimps enforce compliance using violence on their victims and they threaten to out them to their family and friends as well as sex workers, even though they're being forced into this. So this dynamic where older boyfriends and pimps manipulate victims into doing sex work is

a psychological phenomenon known as trauma bonding. So victims of exploitation and violence whose only desire is to survive become bonded to their abuser over the very fact that the abuser hasn't killed them. So knowing that if they do as they're told, they'll be, they'll actually be protected from the pimp and from other people. Of course they're also isolated from anyone who could help them and any like family or support system. So they're entirely reliant on the perpetrator.

Kelsey's pimps subject her to vicious beatings and one even slices her fingers with a box cutter. Meanwhile, her mother, Sarah, has no clue that Kelsey's being trafficked. She comes home every night or like in checks and all the time she's still living at home. She's just kind of living this double life at this point. Yeah. That's crazy. I know.

She's so young too. So young. She's like, you know, 13, 14, it's bananas. And then in late 2007, Kelsey is picked up several times by Seattle police for quote prostitution and they treat her as if she is in charge of what she's doing as an adult. Kelsey's put in juvenile detention because in Washington at the time, it's common practice to do this to children under 18 who were quote selling sex. Washington law enforcement feels that at least if the kids are locked up, they're off the

streets and away from the violent pimps. But of course, as we know, it's really just punishing children for being manipulated by adults. When Kelsey returns home to her mother's, there's occasions where she won't leave the house or even answer her phone like she's hiding from someone. And around this time, Kelsey's boyfriend introduces her to a man named Donaco. He's a pimp in his thirties and he becomes yet another abuser exploiting Kelsey for his own financial gain.

When Sarah sees bruises on her daughter's body, she confronts her about the people that Kelsey's associating with, but Kelsey denies being abused saying, you know, her bruises are from an accident or a fight at school, but of course, her family doesn't believe her, but there's really not much that they can do. So in January of 2008, Kelsey now 16 is picked up by Portland police for quote prostitution, but the response by the authorities is different than in Washington. In Oregon, minors who work in the sex trade are appropriately treated, not as criminals, but as victims of sexual assault.

So Oregon police treat Kelsey this way and want to talk to her to find out how she came to be in the situation and see if they can help her out of it. So Sergeant Doug Justice, literally his last name is Justice, just spelled differently. He's the head of the Portland police bureau's vice squad and he interviews Kelsey at her home about how she came to be trafficked. Sergeant Justice is a different kind of cop than the ones before who treated juveniles like as if they were doing this willingly. And he believes in the emerging idea that police should target the men who are forcing

young girls to sell sex instead of punishing the girls themselves. And he calls sex trafficking quote domestic abuse on steroids. Ernest Allen, the president's CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said quote, in the US, these are runaway, throwaway or homeless kids. They feel a misplaced loyalty and fear for their safety. This is organized crime. When Sergeant Justice empathizes with Kelsey and she understands that he views her as a victim, not a criminal, which is the first time she's experienced this, Kelsey opens

up to him about Donaco and how he had been faring her between Seattle and Portland in order to pimp her out. The police realize what a powerful potential witness Kelsey is in their investigation into trafficking of minors, but so not just domestically, but because she had been taken across state lines from Oregon to Washington, it becomes a federal case. And so if convicted on federal charges, Donaco will face a much longer prison sentence. So investigators ask Kelsey to provide them with information that will get the DA conviction in court.

But Kelsey knows that she's, of course, placing herself at extreme risk if anyone on the scene discovers she's helping the police. Kelsey ultimately agrees to testify before a federal grand jury against Donaco. She's fucking 16. I mean, it's wild. Sarah is extremely proud of her daughter's bravery and courage, but Kelsey, of course, is utterly terrified of what will happen to her if she testifies. And the DA doesn't do anything to expedite the case, which would have kept her safer

and kept her out of harm's way. So for 13 months, no effort is made by authorities to offer Kelsey protection as she waits to testify. So over a year, she's on the streets with everyone knowing that she is going to be the star witness. But as part of her probation, she goes into court ordered drug rehab, where she writes about wanting to escape life on the streets. And according to Seattle Times, unbeknownst to Kelsey and her family, she's also eligible

for intensive counseling at a rehabilitation center. But no one had informed the Collins's that this was available to Kelsey. By the time she's aware that she's eligible for these services, she is almost 18. So they say that she's too old to access these services. So despite the violence that Kelsey had suffered in the past, including past beatings, the slashing with a box cutter, no one at the U.S. Attorney's Office offers or even discusses witness protection with her at all, even though it's 13 months that she has to wait. I mean, how much more do you have to qualify for witness protection?

Speaking out against a pimp in a sex trafficking case, like that's so dangerous. Yeah. And a federal one that'll put you away for longer. I mean, it's obvious like dangerous to anyone, obviously. Despite the fact that all this Kelsey is going through all of this, she continues sporadically to attend high school. Then in April 2009, although absolutely petrified, Kelsey testifies to a grand jury. About a month later on May 9th, 2009, now 18-year-old Kelsey leaves her house in Everett

around 5.30 p.m. to meet up with her boyfriend in Seattle. She hasn't been dating him for long. She doesn't bring a lot of stuff, like, you know, no indication that she's going to be gone for more than an evening. Kelsey's cell phone has switched off around 8 p.m. the day she leaves home. The next day is Mother's Day. And so when Sarah wakes up and Kelsey still isn't home, she starts to worry. Sarah knows something is very wrong and feels sick to her stomach because even though Kelsey's

living this chaotic lifestyle, it's really out of character for her not to, you know, be in contact with her family, especially her mom on Mother's Day. Like she would have called and said, I'm not coming home tonight, not just, you know, no word. Right. And then Sarah calls to Kelsey, go to voicemail, and Kelsey's boyfriend tells her family that she never arrived in Seattle. And there's no proof if she got on the train or not.

So after waiting a couple days and realizing something is very wrong, Sarah reports the disappearance of her daughter to the Everett police. But as Kelsey has only just legally become an adult and is now 18, and despite Sarah's pleas, police aren't really that interested in locating her, especially when they discover she's been involved in the sex trade, which has happened so often. Even though she's testifying against somebody and actually doing them a huge favor. Right. Yep.

So Sarah takes matters into her own hands. She drives from Everett to Portland where she puts up missing persons flyers. And instead of the authorities offering assistance, the assistant US attorney, Kemp Strickland, who's prosecuting the case against Donaco, calls this mother who's just stressed about her daughter missing and tells her to take the posters down. He explains to Sarah that any publicity around Kelsey's disappearance could jeopardize the state's case against Donaco, given Kelsey's role in the upcoming court case. So take the fucking flyers of your missing daughter that you're desperate to find down.

You're going to ruin our case. They could have prevented their case being ruined by treating the people that were helping them with the case like they were actually involved in very serious crimes that need to be prosecuted. Exactly. I mean, that's just unbelievably sloppy, half-ass insanity. I mean, to call the mother, the grieving mother of a missing girl and tell her that is just, in June 2009, the grand jury indicts Donaco on transporting and trafficking charges after

Kelsey had testified against him. If convicted, he faced a mandatory minimum 10-year sentence to a maximum of life imprisonment. The prosecutors read a statement to the court written by Sarah that says, quote, I am speaking to the court as the mother of a vulnerable child who was exploited and victimized. She is and always will be my child. I'm angry at predators like Donaco who exploit children at one of the hardest times in their lives, their teens. I am extremely proud of my daughter for her bravery and standing up to these cowards.

I would ask that the court protect our children and communities by denying bail and remanding them into custody and tell trial. And she says as well, her daughter is missing. Weeks pass and Sarah hears nothing about the status of the police investigation into Kelsey's disappearance when Sergeant Doug Justice, the Portland officer who originally interviewed Kelsey, calls Everett police to check up and find out what's happening in the missing person's investigation. A detective tells him straight out, quote, she's 18.

She's a prostitute. So what? Now desperate, Sarah realizes that if she wants her daughter's disappearance to be taken seriously, she'll have to do the investigative work herself. She persistently contacts both the US attorney and the FBI. And then she makes the discovery that despite Kelsey having been missing now for five months, she still isn't listed on the national missing person's database. When law enforcement finally put a trace on Kelsey's cell phone in response to Sarah's

many requests, they find that for two weeks after Kelsey's disappearance, her phone continued to emit signals from around Seattle. This could have been an invaluable investigative tool if the trace had been done when Kelsey disappeared, but now it's impossible to know where she is or what happened during that two week period. With the prosecution's key witness now missing, the case against Donaco quickly falls apart. This is why witness protection is so important is because it works to disappear a witness. In March 2010, the charges are dropped based on lack of evidence and the case is dismissed

against him. But only three months later in June, Donaco pleads guilty to trafficking a 14-year-old minor in a separate case. He sentenced to 15 years in prison. He also must repay the victim over $21,000, and the amount is calculated based on the victim having nine customers per day at $80 per customer for 30 days that she was being trafficked. Oh, God.

It's so dark. The reality of that life, no one understands, or I mean, I've never, I've always heard how bad it is, but I didn't understand it was like that, and that it's just the kind of thing I think people don't want to look at it at all. People don't know what to do or how to deal with it, and they don't want to look at it. Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think a big issue is that the term sex trafficking, people think of people being kept in bondage and enslaved, and the coercion that seems like the sex worker, like

the minor, is willing, that is what sex trafficking is here. If they see something like that, they don't think of it as sex trafficking, which it is. And I have some resources at the end of it, I'll read off. So unlike Kelsey, the victim, in this case, I was just talking about is offered protection, thankfully. So Kelsey's family strongly believes her disappearance is directly related to her court testimony. However, DA Kemp Strickland rejects that theory, the guy in Everett, and doesn't think it has anything to do with that, telling the Seattle Times, quote, unless we knew someone had found

out that she had testified, or knew of a danger or threat, we believe she was safe, and she was doing well. You can't say her disappearance is a result of the prosecution, or you could. Yes, you can. Absolutely. Like, clearly and logically, you can't. Yeah. Yes.

Kelsey's sister, Dominique, responds, telling the same newspaper, quote, the police had a moral and ethical responsibility to my sister when they asked her to come into court and testify against a pimp. That's what hurt so much, that they used her and used her in a way that probably cost her her life. How can you ask these girls to do what they do and then send them on their way? For real. In 2011, Sergeant Doug Justice tells CNN that he thinks Kelsey is a victim of foul play

directly related to her testifying against Donaco, saying, quote, the federal government didn't do their job, they didn't protect her. As there is technically no evidence that a crime has occurred in Kelsey's case, her family is ineligible for victim's compensation. Sarah eventually makes the heartbreaking decision to pack up Kelsey's belongings. Today, Sarah continues to raise awareness of her daughter's story and fights for justice by speaking to community organization in the hopes that her daughter's tragic story can be used to help others.

About the young girls who are victims of sex trafficking, she says, quote, remember these girls were someone's baby, someone's little girl, they are deeply loved. If she's alive today, Kelsey would be 30 years old. So if you or someone you know is a victim of sex trafficking and needs help, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 888-373-7888, and that is the tragic disappearance of Kelsey Collins. Wow. God, that's so clear.

That's so clearly. It's like textbook case of how not to treat victims and witnesses of the domestic violence of sexual abuse, of assault. It's just textbook, and it's heartbreaking. It's really hard to talk about stuff like this because I don't know enough about it, and we don't know enough about it because it feels like it is now this kind of thing that the discussion is about how we're treating the discussion. And this story is about a person, a real person who went through a lot of shit in her life

and dealt with some of that shit and was coping and trying to deal with stuff and then fell into this life that was horrible, abusive, exploitive, and that she ultimately became a victim of. And it's not a PSA, and it's not a Jeffrey Epstein story, which is almost disgusting in how it's glamorized. Instead, this is the day to day. These are the stories of the people who are actually going through it. Definitely.

So with that, we also wanted to announce that we're going to donate 10 grand to the Polaris Project. They've operated the National Human Trafficking Hotline since 2007, which connects thousands of victims and survivors of sex trafficking and labor trafficking with support and help. And again, that website is PolarisProject.org. Okay. Well, I'm going to change gears, and I'm going to change gears into a survival story. Here we go.

But I was very excited about this story because I've brought it up on this show before, and I think we've talked about it on this show before. Remember when we looked at that picture? It was the flight where the windshield blew out of the plane, and then the pilot got sucked up onto the kind of like the roof, and he was half in and half out of the plane, and we looked at the picture. Do you have any held on? Yep.

And it's a true story, but then that picture went around the internet. Everyone was talking about it. Then of course, all the geniuses weighed in and said, hey, where do you think, what's this picture from? Who took a picture? Right. Oh, this thing was happening, and then we all went, oh, it's the photo from the reenactment, but the story is true.

That makes sense. So this story keeps kind of coming back onto the internet. It's almost like every eight months people go, but remember, but remember this air disaster where the pilot got halfway sucked out of the windshield. And so finally, I'm going to tell everyone the entire true story and the shocking story, which if you think the pilot being sucked out of the windshield is a problem, you won't believe the problems that happen in this story. No.

How are any of us ever going to get on a flight again after somebody's story is too joking? I mean, truly, if you're planning to travel for the rest of this year, you're going to want to go ahead and skip ahead two hours because this ain't for you. This is the story of British Airways Flight 5390, the most amazing averted air disaster story to date, as declared by me, a non-expert. Okay. So this still that I was just talking about, a pilot basically laid up on top of the roof

of a plane, they call it the fuselage, like kind of like he's sunbathing out the front of an airplane. This is actually, it's a still from a TV show called Mayday Air Disaster. So you know, your favorite show, Mayday Air Disaster, so full credit to that reenactor and for that director, executive producer, all the writers who made that reenactment happen to the point where the internet talks about it all the time, just brings it up constantly. It's a compelling picture. It's not a real picture, but it is a reenactment of a real thing.

It's so funny, like it just shows you, like don't believe what you see all the time, because the minute you're like, how did they get that photo, it's like, oh yeah, how would that photo have been taken? The flight that flew above them while this was happening did not take a picture of them. But it looks so real. I mean. Think it through. Well, you're looking at it happening, so you're like, wow, that happened.

But you know, this is why this country is in the state that it is, because people don't understand fake things are on the internet and they're made to look real. But this will be one thing that we know immediately when we see it going here on forward. Oh, we know. So this, it all starts on June 10th, 1990. British Airways Flight 5390, I keep looking at that number because I'm positive I wrote it wrong, 5390 is flying from Birmingham, England to Malaga, Spain. Okay, so this route serves Spain's very popular coastal vacation areas that the British people

love to go to. I wish we could do that. It's kind of, it's not this, obviously not in the same country, but it's like British Hawaii, way closer. And if you've ever seen the show, Benadorm, it's a British show about Brits going to Spain for vacation and it's really hilarious. So watch that if you want a little taste of what this is all about. So it's popular and people, it's that kind of thing like when you're flying to Hawaii

where everyone on planes into your mood because we're all just going to one spot for a reason. So the cruise day starts like any other, they all meet up, they all know each other. Everybody that flies out of Birmingham, they're not just on like a first name basis, they're like friendly and most of them are like friends in real life. So it's a small crew, they're close. And on today's flight, there are 81 passengers and six crew members on board. The max capacity of the plane is 119 people. So this is a pretty full flight.

And it's one of the planes that has the center row is five seats across. So it's a big plane. And the flight down to Milaga is just over two hours long. So on the flight deck is 42 year old captain Tim Lancaster, who's been flying for over 21 years at this point. And 39 year old first officer Alistair Atchison. So Atchison is actually the only person that's new to the team. All the rest of them are friends and know each other well.

But the first officer has driven down from Manchester. He's never worked with this team before. So it's like his first day with them. So flight 5390 takes off from Birmingham at 8.20 in the morning local time. This takeoffs uneventful and it's under the control of first officer Atchison. As they begin their climb to the flight's cruising altitude of 20,000 feet, all is well. It's all going great. Two minutes into that climb, they turn on autopilot and both pilots release their shoulder

harnesses and captain Lancaster loosens his lap belt. The cabin crew are preparing the breakfast meal service. Of course, I tried to look up what delicious things they might be serving for breakfast on a British Airways flight in 1990. I only want to know a photo of that. They only did first class stuff. There was stuff from other airlines, but I couldn't find it. There are a lot of like those stacked up cheese sandwiches and cups of tea, but I couldn't

have anything specific. Thank you for trying. That's the kind of thing that like then I go down that rabbit hole and two hours later, I'm like, oh, no, I don't have an I'm now I'm running late. That's the joy of research. So at one point, Stuart Nigel Ogden, and I just want to say this, oh, shit, let me read my sources because in this episode of Mayday Air Disasters, they're called air stewards and stewardesses.

Now, I understand that now here in America, they call people flight attendants. But in this TV show, which could be from a while ago, they just kept using the term steward over and over again. So whatever reason that's not used anymore. And maybe it's because of the like the feminization of stewardess or whatever. I'm not sure. And flight attendant is more like covers everything. But in Mayday Air Disasters season two, episode one entitled blowout, they call them air stewards.

So that was the main source because that's where you got all the people telling their own story firsthand, which was mind boggling. They have the crew. They have both pilots. They have the air traffic control. I mean, they have everybody that had to deal with this. They have people who were on the plane telling how it was. I mean, it's truly mind boggling.

There was a BT article by Chaz early from 2018. There's a website called Simple Flying. And on there, there was an article about this by a writer named Jake Hardiman from 2021. And of course, the British Airways Flight 5390 Wikipedia page. Those were my sources. All right. So now that we know Nigel Ogden is a flight attendant, all these people, I won't use steward or stewardess or anything like that.

I'll just call them by their names, but these are the jobs they have. So Nigel Ogden enters the cockpit and he takes the pilot's drink orders and lets them know that their breakfast is on the way. So it's basically business as usual. And then 13 minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 17,300 feet, there is a loud, body-shaking explosion as the windshield on Captain Lancaster's side of the cockpit explodes and blows out into the air. And Captain Lancaster himself describes seeing this firsthand, where he said it shot away

like a bullet into the air. And then- So it wasn't like a thing that, you know, a bomb or like a gun that caused it. It was just like, oops, there goes the windshield. Yes. It was like, there was a little bit of a noise, this is how they did it in the reenactment, kind of like, oh, wait, what's this? And then, worst case scenario, right?

That whole idea of like, there's a huge hole in the front of the plane. So the windshield shoots off and the Captain watches it happen and then immediately gets sucked out of the plane. But as he goes out of that hole, his legs catch on the flight controls in front of him. So he's holding himself in from basically the knees down by the flight controls. So that's just kind of miraculously he was able to catch that. And it's probably because he got sucked out of his lap belt, there was, if he had his the shoulder strap on, then he would have been in that, you know, really crazy strong

suction. But because the top part was off, he got kind of like sucked out, like a second later. So he was able to like hold on by basically his knees and like the lower part of his legs. And that then was pushing the controls forward all the way. So it forces the plane to go into a nosedive and then the suction. So all of this, I'm going to be telling you this and it's going to seem like it's happening over a long period of time. But all of these things happened almost simultaneously.

So that happens, there's now an open window on a plane that's at 17,000 feet. So the wind that was now in the cockpit was going 350 miles an hour. So let me just tell you super quick. And I looked it up, we judge tornadoes on the Fujita scale F1 to F5, F1 being the calmest kind of tornado and F5 is what they call an incredible tornado. And that is measured to get to an F5, the wind has to be going 261 to 318 miles an hour. So what was happening in the cockpit was stronger than the strongest tornado. So immediately a fog appears in the cabin because of the decompression and everything

that's happening. Everything from everything in the cabin being sucked forward out that hole. So papers, anything that could be was sucked forward. There was just debris flying through the air. It was just like suddenly in the plane there was a tornado. Have you ever been in a tornado? No. Me neither.

People email us your hometowns about being in a tornado. I'm so curious. Even being slightly near a tornado. What was like the tornado that you remember the most like, tell us. Tell us stories for sure. And this is whatever story they tell, this is worse and it's in an airplane. It's in an airplane. So not only that, but this explosion causes the cockpit door to collapse inwards and basically

it gets sucked forward, the door gets sucked forward and jams onto that control panel that's between the pilot and the co-pilot. So the co-pilot, Alistair Atchison, I mean everyone's name is the most British name in the story by the way. When the cockpit door hits the control panel, it jams the throttle. So the plane isn't just in a nosedive, it's speeding up as it's going down at the rate of nearly 400 miles an hour that's going down 80 feet a second and it's all happening simultaneously. So first officer Atchison has to a, recover from the shock of a sudden explosion two feet

away from him like right there and then realizing that the pilot who's supposed to fly this plane is halfway outside of this window and then he realizes now we're nosediving and increasing speed and don't forget there's a tornado which is also making it freezing cold because they're so high up, it's freezing cold and it's so loud no one can hear, it's like beyond loud so no one can hear anything and he can't hear, he immediately starts calling Mayday to air traffic control but he can't hear if they can hear him so he just keeps calling Mayday. So don't forget there's a fog in the cabin which imagine if you already have like, oh

the plane is crashing but then all of a sudden you just kind of can't see because there's so much condensation in the air, how fucking freezing, I hate it, I hate it all. So Nigel Ogden, he basically is up doing the breakfast service, he's up close in the front of the plane, he looks into the cockpit and sees the captain is half out the window. This is his quote from Mayday Air Disaster, he says quote, so I looked in and the flight deck door was resting on the controls and all I could see was Tim out the window. I jumped over, I put one foot in the captain's foot well and the other was down on the side of his seat and I grabbed him before he went out completely.

Oh my god. So Nigel basically jumps forward and has to grab the captain by his belt and pull him backwards to keep him inside. Bad ass. While it's freezing in a tornado, he went into the tornado. And also the suction force that's pulling him out is stronger, it's not just him pulling the weight of a human body. It's almost like couldn't have had time to think about it or he wouldn't have done it.

And that's why it worked is he just fucking acted. And I actually, it's so funny because this week I saw like a video montage of the flight attendant training and it is so intense and so like the things you have to do to pass like flight attendant school are so crazy, so that makes complete sense that he's just like went for it. Yeah. You have to be the kind of person that is a first responder mentality that isn't going to sit there and go, what about me?

You have to do the thing that's going to save people, help people solve the problem. Right. Yeah. And clearly he had that like times 20. Oh, so as they're in their nosedive, Atchison also realizes that they are now crossing over some of the busiest airlines in the world. So they are having flown south from Birmingham. They're now down, they're still north of London, but they're coming down close, they're northwest

of London. So Heathrow is one of the busiest airports in the world, which means there's flights coming in and out from everywhere, coming there. And they're crossing over all those lanes. So he's like, this could be the problem, all of these horrible things happening simultaneously, or we could just get into a midair collision because air traffic control doesn't know what we're doing. And they're out of contact because Atchison can't hear anything and can't explain anything.

So now who they call the lead steward, but he's basically the head flight attendant of the flight. His name is John Heward. He gets up to the cockpit. He sees the chaos inside the cockpit. He sees his friend Nigel, who is now basically pulled across the captain's seat. So whereas he started at this anchored position, holding him back, at this point now his full body is extended and he's laid out trying to keep the captain inside with all his strength.

And that's when John sees the cockpit door jammed against the control panels. So he goes forward and stamps on it twice and basically breaks it into three parts, picks it up and throws it out of the cockpit. So now all those controls that the door was basically pressing on and fucking with, now that's stopped. Thank God, right? Then he loops an arm. And he sees there's the jump seat, right, that's there in the cockpit.

So he knows he has to anchor himself. So he puts one arm under the seat belt that's in the jump seat. And then he grabs on to Nigel and Captain Lancaster. Only minutes have passed, but the error around them is minus 17 degrees Celsius, which is one degree Fahrenheit. So it's one degree in the cockpit right now. And the suction force pulling on Captain Lancaster's body is the equivalent of 500 pounds. What the fuck?

Nigel is literally freezing and physically exhausted, only having to hold him there for several minutes. But luckily they, with having another person there helping him, they're able to disentangle the captain's legs from the throttle. So they come out of the nosedive and that enables first officer Atchison to re-employ autopilot. So all those settings go away and autopilot takes over and starts flying again. But what Atchison realizes is that he should not slow the plane down.

So the speed that they're going, he realizes, first of all, it better to pass through all of these air lanes quickly and not slow it down, because who knows what's out there. But also, he knows that this plane is old and it doesn't have enough oxygen for every single individual to have a mask, that it's not equipped for that. And so he needs to get them down to a lower altitude as soon as possible so that they don't get what's called oxygen starvation, because then they're all screwed. And that's when people can die. So basically he's like, OK, we're going to continue in this nosedive for a little while

longer just to get out. Hang on tight, everyone. Yeah. Plane has dived to 11,000 feet in two and a half minutes. No. That's too quick. So the rest of the cabin crew, the woman in the cabin crew's name was listed as Sue Gibbons and as Sue Prince.

So I'm going to call her Sue Gibbons Prince because I don't know if one was like her unmarried name and then she got married after, I don't know. So Sue Gibbons Prince and Simon Rodgers are a cabin crew that are still in with the passengers, trying to calm everybody down in the fog, telling people to assume crash positions. And they don't even know what's happening yet. So they have to be like, everything's fine and they have no fucking clue if that's true. Well, they can't say everything's fine because literally everything's flying through the air. Because it's clearly not.

And it's foggy. So they can't say bad, but they're just like, they are saying shit like, keep calm, which is like, sorry, it's not going to work. No, thank you. So when they get down to 11,000 feet, first officer Atchison realizes that they can slow down now a little bit, which is great because then everything kind of levels out and the people who are like assuming crash positions, they realize now everything's okay. It's settling down, it doesn't feel like the plane is immediately going to crash.

The only problem is in the cockpit with the plane slowing down, the pilot's body goes from being pinned against the top of the fuselage, which is essentially the roof of the plane. It now flops down to the side and he's facing inward so they can see him out the captain's window. And his body is just hitting the side of the plane, his eyes are open. Is he conscious? Well, they all think he's dead. Right.

That's creepy. Awful. Yet they're holding onto his body so hard, pulling so hard, a 500 pound weight and trying to keep it inside. Yeah. But at one point, those two crew members, Nigel and John, that are holding the body in, look over at Atchison and they all silently are just like, if he's dead, should we let him go?

Yeah. There's almost this kind of like, should we keep doing this? Right. And Atchison immediately out loud says, hold on, you guys have to hold on, because he knows that nobody wants the weight of if they let him go and what if they were wrong or whatever. But also, he realizes that letting that body go, it could get sucked back into an engine, which would then immediately make them crash or hit or damage a stabilizer. Letting that body go would mean disaster for everybody on board or at least yet another

risk of disaster. So at this point, Nigel has to let go because he has been there like kind of right there on the front lines for too long. He's exhausted. He's also got frostbite on his face because he's been up there so long and he's got a big cut on his arm. So John and Simon re-anchor themselves and basically take over and they're holding the captain by his ankles now because he's been slipping out like inch by inch as they're

trying to hold on. After seven minutes of being out of contact with anybody with air traffic control, once basically, they get autopilot back on and everything slightly stabilizes and they slightly slow down. He radios air traffic control again and tries to plan his emergency landing. The air traffic controller, Chris Rundle, tells Atchison that he needs to land at the South Hampton Airport. Atchison asks if he can land in Gatwick, which is on the other side of London.

So Heathrow is down there and Gatwick is on the other side, which would mean that plane is flying over London and through all of those airlines. So they knew that they just had to keep going the direction they were going and head towards South Hampton. So they say it's closer. That's the one you want to land in. Atchison says, you know, I'm familiar with Gatwick because at this point, don't forget when the fucking windshield blew out, all of the charts and maps and information and everything

pilots use to land planes is gone. There's also no other pilot to help him and he's never landed at this airport before. So he literally has to land this plane blind. He's like, except for the narration of the air traffic controller. He has no familiarity with the area at all. Holy shit. So basically, and in the TV show, Chris Rundle, the air traffic controller says, it doesn't actually happen.

It's one of those things that you see in films that only happen in films. It doesn't happen in real life. And this guy's an air traffic controller, like he's calm. So Rundle contacts emergency services to meet this plane on the tarmac. And then he tells Atchison that he will talk him through landing at South Hampton. And Atchison says back, as long as I have 2,500 meters, I'm happy. And Rundle says, you have 1,800 meters. So this is not the standardized runway size.

And Atchison was kind of trying to be like, I can do this. And so then, but he's like the consummate pilot and there's a steal. When he hears that it's only 1,800 meters, he says, I'll make it work. Amazing. Now, this is not like anybody needed any more bad news about this plane, but it just took off 20 minutes before. So it's full of fuel. So this landing has to be perfect, overshoot.

He can't basically, this plane will explode if he lands it incorrectly. So basically he gets talked into being able to get lined up. So once he sees the runway, he's like, OK, I got this. So air traffic control says, do you want us to talk you all the way through the landing? And he's like, no. And so everything goes quiet. And now it's just all on Atchison to land this plane and he does it. He lands the plane, he lands it safely, nothing else happens.

All of the emergency vehicles are waiting on the tarmac. There's ambulances, there's everything. Everyone is waiting there. They pull the captain's body back inside. They get him onto a gurney. They get him into an ambulance. At that point, Captain Lancaster was pinned outside the airplane for 20 minutes. Holy shit.

He had frostbite bruising. He was in shock. He had fractures to his right arm, his left thumb and his right wrist. And that's it. Oh. He survived. My God. He survived.

I bet he has no memory of it, right? He's probably unconscious the whole time. Actually, I can tell you, because he talks about it in Mayday air disasters, season two, episode one. Nigel Ogden dislocated his shoulder and he had frostbite on his face and an injury to his eye. And other than that, there were no injuries for anyone on this flight. The fuck?

Which is mind boggling. Yes. The window was open during the flight. Someone rolled the window down on a fucking mid-flight. They weren't just shit flying around. No one got hit in the head and got a concussion. That was it. No one got burnt by tea, the tea they were serving.

Right. I mean, the basics of British risk. In Mayday air disaster, Captain Lancaster talks about hearing a weird noise, hearing a loud explosion, watching the windshield fly away in front of him as fast as a bullet, and then getting, the sensation of getting sucked out, the sensation of being outside. And then he, which he says, I didn't mind that much, which is so fucking British. It's insane. He didn't mind?

He didn't mind that much, but he did mind was the fact that he couldn't breathe because he was facing into the air flow, like coming at him. So he was able to turn his body so that he was looking back at the back of the plane, so he could catch, and that's when he was able to breathe. So he basically was doing that for a while and then eventually lost consciousness. So he was conscious as he was outside of the plane for a while. Fuck that. I mean, it's, I don't envy him whatsoever.

And he basically, he became conscious again, seeing red and white, like red lights and bright lights. And then he was in the ambulance when the emergency crew loaded him into the ambulance. They assumed he was dead. They just thought they were kind of going through the motions. And he basically came to in the ambulance and they're all just like, I mean, I don't actually know what they were saying. I'm just saw the reenactment, but he's just like, are you awake?

What the fuck is going on? So this is from the website, simple flying. I just pulled a whole quote because this is about the investigation. And this is from Jake Hardiman's article from simple flying quote. It says upon examination, investigators found that the bolts used to hold the windscreen in place were fractions of a centimeter too narrow and too short. They'd been installed the night before the incident when engineers changed the windscreen panel during maintenance.

While seemingly marginal, this difference meant that they couldn't withstand the air pressure difference between the cabin and the outside at altitude. This difference has caused the decompression, the investigation highlighted malpractice at British Airways Maintenance Facility in Birmingham, finding that workers had taken shortcuts to expedite procedures. So it basically like the tiniest difference screw length basically was all it took. Now apparently they don't do windshields. They don't apply them like that anymore.

Now they're the plug system where the air pressure keeps everything, it keeps it in place and it's basically designed so that adds to it instead of having screws on hoping the suction won't get to it. I mean, that's the shit that scares me so much about flying. And any of that stuff is like one person working there cuts corners, not because they're lazy, but because someone at the corporation wants to save some money so they buy these new screws or these different O-rings and then, you know, then this happens. It's just so, it's so little, these little moments that change everything freak me out

so much. Yeah. Well, and also they don't have to happen on an airplane. That's the thing I always tell my sister where it's like, if you're worried about that, why don't you worry about it when you drive to work every day? Because you don't. You don't even think about it. You're flying the plane so you think you have more control.

Yeah. That's right. And you, because you put that windshield on the, on the car so you know everything about it. Oh, and just so you know, the simple flying website, they have a podcast. So if you're interested and it's described as a roundup of the latest aviation news, and they literally talk about airlines and the different stuff airlines are doing. So if you're like obsessed with flying, yeah, and you're really into it, you might want

to listen to the simple flying podcast with Tom and Joe. And that's Joe J.O. It's a girl. Cool. Also, oh, I just, I just put this at the end. This has happened twice before. No. No way.

Yep. It's on the Wikipedia page. If you want to know about the two other times and one of them was on Southwest, you can go ahead and look those ones up yourself. No. Here's the good news. The crew of British Airways Flight 5390 was highly decorated after this insane air disaster was averted.

I would hope so. The craziest thing about that picture, like people freak out that that picture, you assume that guy died. Yeah. You assume the worst. You assume the plane crash. You assume all those things. None of those things happened.

Right. That's what makes this story so crazy. It's wild. It was worst case scenario in every possible way and none of those things happened. All I could think is, like, what do those passengers do after that the next day? Do they continue on to their vacation or were they like, I'm going home? They had seven more days off of work. Like, what do you do after that?

I think it just depends on what you're like. Like, if you're one of those kind of people, you can either go, I'm never flying again, or you can go, there's no way that's going to happen twice. There's some people that would get on a second flight and be like, I've never felt safe because I just, I'm so lucky that I now walk in a bubble of charmed air as opposed to you could also then go, I will never risk going anywhere near that potential experience. So let's talk about how the flight crew was celebrated after this for their amazing accomplishment. First Officer Atchison and the flight crew, specifically Susan Gibbons, the way it's cited

is Susan Gibbons and Nigel Ogden, they're awarded the Queen's Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air. First Officer Atchison was also given the Polaris Award, isn't that weird? Which is given by the International Federation of Airline Pilots for Exceptional Airmanship Heroic Action, or both. And Nigel Ogden went back to his job working on the flight crew for a little while, but then he did get bad PTSD and he ended up not working there anymore, which is so understandable. First Officer Atchison goes back to flying almost immediately, flies for 25 more years,

and then retires on his 65th birthday. And more amazing is that Captain Lancaster takes about five months to recover from his injuries and I'm sure trauma. And then he also returns to flying, continues being a pilot for eight more years and retires at the age of 50. And that is the truly unbelievable story of the survival of Captain Tim Lancaster and the unprecedented flying of First Officer Alistair Atchison and Flight 5390 British Airways. Right?

Oh my God, my heart is beating very fast right now. I was going to get on a plane tonight and I'm canceling my flight. Liar. I know. I'm in my fucking pajamas right now. That was amazing. I just love that that story, you think you know the story when you see the picture and like that ain't half of it.

It's just like a dense fog appeared in the cabin. I can't even picture that. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's wild. It's wild. It's beyond chaos. We've done it again. We've given people four times the amount of podcasts most people give them. Yeah.

We should definitely say happy fucking birthday, Stephen. Happy birthday, Stephen Ray Morris. Thank you. You're a gift to us all. Your presence is our present. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, thanks for listening, you guys. As always, we appreciate it. Thanks for being here. You're the best. And stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Our producer is Alejandra Keck. This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris. Our researchers are Gemma Harris and Haley Gray. Email your hometowns and fucking hurrays to myfavoritmurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritmurder and Twitter at myfavoritmurder.

Listen, follow, and leave us a review on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget you can listen to new episodes one week early on Amazon Music or early and ad free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondery's podcast against the odds. In our next season, three masked men hijack a school bus full of children in the sleepy farm town of Chautchilla, California.

They bury the children and their bus driver deep underground, planning to hold them for ransom. Local police and the FBI marshal a search effort, but the trail quickly runs dry. As the air supply for the trapped children dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges. Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.