My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - 373 - Do Your Honk

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

This week, Karen tells the story of notorious Bay Area killer Iva Kroeger and Georgia covers the inspiration behind Nike's "Just Do It" slogan, murderer Gary Gilmore. For our sources and show notes, visit www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This Is Actually Happening is a podcast that features extraordinary true stories of life-changing events told by the people who live them. In a special five-part series called Point Blank, This Is Actually Happening sheds a light on the forgotten spree killings of Rancho Tejama. Follow This Is Actually Happening wherever you get your podcasts. Music Hello. And welcome to my favorite murder. That's short to hard start. That's Karen Gilgaras.

You were doing your kind of conducting gesture, but what is really funny to me is there's no, sometimes you'll do it and then it ends here and then it starts over here. And it's like you're just kind of trying to give some indicator of like we could start now or we could start now. Yeah, I'll do it. And then like, yeah, I still don't know when to fucking start. Like that's just how it's been for seven years. It's not like you're starting on your one. Yeah, I'm kind of looking at you. This moment could be this moment right here is when we both start talking.

You'll just never know. You'll never know. I'll never know. We can't know. We can't know. And that's the point right now. That's the joy of this present moment. Yeah.

Are you in this season of your life in a present moment of joy and terror? Or are you pretending not to be when actually you are either way? Yeah. You should know that you can go through your entire day just screaming if you want. It's up to you. It's okay. But if you do it on the bus, you're going to get mad. Yeah.

So take a juice. But I thought a couple of people would scream along with you, right? I mean, it's that kind of world we're living in. I mean, entirely. I had somebody, I was going to tell you a story of how I went to the mall today. Although there's there's no story that that's the whole thing in one sense. You left the hat. I mean, that's a huge fucking update.

Right. It's pretty big. But on the way, you know, in LA they have, I don't, I'm sure they have these everywhere now, but to get on the freeway, there's a little stoplight and you pull up and it's red and then it pretty much immediately turns green. Yeah. Unless in LA it's starting to get traffic. Right.

So I pulled up to one and it turned, it was red when I pulled up and it remained red for like 10 seconds. And I'm just staring at it. So it was not like I looked away or anything. Yeah. And then someone just rams on their horn. No. And then I was like, and then I just went, even though it was still red where I was like,

that's to me, that's the energy outside right now. Yeah. Just a honk and a red. Honk and a red. Someone. I don't care. Go. It's not.

It's up to you, Mr. Whoever you are behind us. Robinson. Mr. Robinson, you know, you do your fucking, you do your honk. Do it. Get it out through a horn, through your mouth. It just seems like it's, it's needed. There's, it's a bill. It's a real build.

Yeah. Right now. Yeah. It's a crescendo. The mall's pretty chill. Oh yeah. How was the mall? Yeah, nothing happened.

It was just like, I went, I knew I couldn't start actually like wander shopping because then I'd be like, oh my God, it's 530 and I was supposed to start recording. So I literally was like, you can go to this store, this store and Sephora. Did you get a snack? No, I didn't. Oh, what would you get? Like what's your go to mall snack if you could, I think I just want a pretzel right now is what I'm saying.

Literally. That's what I was going to say. I walked by the Wetzel stand that's on the way back to the, where I was parked in the garage from Sephora and I was like, looking at it and looking at it, but I was just like, there cannot be anything but like trans fats in Wetzel's pretzels. Right. Cause how good they are. Oils and, and you have to get cheese with it or you're a monster.

Yeah. So like, what are you supposed to do? It was one of those kind of things where I was like, I wasn't hungry and if I did it, it felt like that's all I ever do. If I never change, nothing will ever change. It's a smell. It's that kind of vibe. It's a smell.

But the smell was pretty good. Do you know there's now a Dunkin Donuts in my local mall that makes life hard. That place smells good. Yeah, it does. It seems weird though, donuts in a mall, like it doesn't really translate, you know. I think in malls these days, they're just trying to give people what they want. They're like, what, we know, we know it's not like a really a sunglass hut anymore. What do you want?

Yeah. We're just like, we need a place that's going to stay here. My jam is there's a McDonald's there too, so to get a vanilla cone and just wander them all. I haven't done that in so long. Yeah. Maybe I need to do that. That's a very summer, you know, that's a summertime thing, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's getting there. Enjoy some AC. I saw someone say the mall these days is Facebook. When you were a teen, it was a cool place to hang out. And now you go back once in a while to see old people yelling. Yeah. Something like that.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That makes sense. That's a mall. No one yelled at the mall, but I realized I was listening to podcasts as I walked around. So I was like, oh, this is the way to do it. Because you're out in the world feeling aggression is around you, you just, yeah.

What were you listening to? I was listening to, I said, no gifts. Oh, lovely. Timothy Simons was on it. He's so funny. It was really, it's a really good episode. It was great. I'm reading a book.

Can I suggest a book, please, that I've like fallen in love with? It's a during and post apocalyptic-y book, but not like End of the World, more like COVID times 10. Okay. It's in the not too distant future. There's another global pandemic and each chapter is someone's story during and it takes you through the whole like 10 years, 100 years after. Yeah.

It's like, did you read World War Z? That was really good in that way too. I watched the movie. I was a big fan of the movie. I didn't read it. The book's great. I listened to that too. So this book is really beautiful.

It's like everything's falling apart, but it's just this beautiful book about grief and individuals and how they deal with it and what they've lost and that we're all kind of together. It's just really, really lovely. It's called How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamastu. N-A-G-A-M-A-S-M-A-T-S-U, Nagamatsu. And it's just, it's just like, it's one of those books I don't want to keep listening because I don't want to finish it, you know?

Yeah. Wow. I'm just really in love with it. That's a good endorsement. Yeah. My endorsement would be that the fourth season of Succession started. I haven't watched the new episode yet. Don't tell me anything.

I am so excited. I won't say word. It's just like, it was one of those feelings where it started and I was just like, thank God it started. It's the same feeling I had. I happened upon the first episode of the new season of Perry Mason where I was like, wait, what? Is this real?

Oh, thank God. I needed you. So excited. This season, Logan Roy is making me laugh so hard. I just was going to spoiler something. It's just, his Logan Roy's vibe is hilarious to me. Okay. Is he like, I don't give a fuck.

This is the last season and I'm in a Logan Roy hell out of all of you. I'll generalize it so there's no spoiler risk because that is really irritating when someone's like, I'll just indicate a theme and then they're fucking it up for your whole enjoyment. But when you're older, you do not have to worry about the same things you worry about when you're younger. You're free. You're free to behave however you want and everyone's like, oh yeah, that's them. It's not a drama point.

It's just you get to. Yeah. You're not changing at this point. This is like what you've become. And you don't give a shit. You're not taking notes from people at this point in your life. Not in the weeks. Yeah.

No notes. No notes. No notes, please. Oh, I have a corrections corner that's, I don't know, ironic. I was actually corrected that I was mispronouncing how I say the Ku Klux Klan. Someone told me and I was like, I didn't realize. Apparently it's Ku Klux Klan. What if we got canceled because you mispronounced the Ku Klux Klan?

It's like, how about we just call them all Nazis? How about we just group them all together and then not really worry about it? This is the SS, so let's just fucking go with that instead. That's easy to remember. Simple, reductive. Yeah. Exactly. I have a good corrections corner.

Last week in episode 372 when I covered the disappearance of the Indigenous girl, Antoinette Kayadito, I also gave an update on some Indigenous women who went missing. And one of them, Keanna Klomp, I covered her in episode 296 and in the update I said she hadn't been found, but she actually was found alive in 2021. So that's great. Amazing. Great. Yeah.

Oh, well, since we're on this, we'll go into the mailbag because this is really delightful and this was because I'm at this point now, I'm not sure how many weeks ago it was, but I did the story about the fight for justice for the murders of Henry D. and Charles Moore. We got this DM on Instagram. It's from letwillunderscore2 and it says, listening to the episode now, my dad was childhood friends with Charles and Henry. The place, like the piece of land where the clan snatched them belongs to my grandmother. There's a marker on it now in their memory.

My dad has told me that they were always together and my aunt, Charles and Henry took a few classes at Alcorn State too. Had my dad not made a different decision that day, he wouldn't be here today. Oh my God. Yeah. What an incredible story. Wow. The personalization is so important.

Amazing. Yeah. All right. Should we do some exactly right updates? Let's do it. Get into it. This week over on adulting comedian Marie Fawsten is Michelle and Jordan's guest and Michelle and Jordan have live shows coming up in April and May at the Bell House in Brooklyn.

I believe it's Gwanis if you want to be specific about it. So check their Instagram to get some tickets for adulting live. That's a fun show. And on That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast, Kara and Lisa discuss episode 18 from season 17 and have a conversation with Robert John Burke. He has played four different characters in the Law and Order universe, which is so freaking cool. Over the years, most notably Olivia Benson's longtime love interest, Ed Tucker.

That's going to be a rad conversation. Check out That's Messed Up. I have a picture in my mind of who that actor is because there is a guy that I personally have noticed that's played multiple characters in different seasons on that show. I love it so much. If you haven't joined the fan cult yet, or if you're thinking of renewing instead of like the gift we usually get. So sometimes it's a pin, sometimes it's like a hat or whatever.

This season, you're going to get a promo code that gives you $20 towards any purchase in the merch store, and then you also, of course, get weekly videos. You get your own dedicated mini mini access to the fan cult forum and much more. So cool. Go to myfavoritmurder.com. And lastly, we're really excited to launch a new t-shirt design and sweatshirt created by a murder Reno Kelly Wills of Brain Flower Designs. We found her online, loved her work, and so she's made us something really special.

Go to myfavoritmurder.com or our social media to check it out now. It's very goth. It's very goth. Teenage Karen approved. Teenage Karen would love it. This is one thing I just saw on Twitter really quick. On April 8th, Molly Shannon is hosting SNL. I saw it.

I love her. And I swear that's, I feel like a real nerd because that's not, that's not for me anymore. I don't, you know what I mean? It's not like I'm some SNL booster or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I absolutely adore Molly Shannon. She's as cool in real life as she is, as you think she is.

She's a lovely human being. I've, imagining her hosting that thing, like, makes me so happy. So special. I'm so excited. I heard her memoir was great. I've got to, I think I downloaded it. I got to listen to it. Yeah.

She's like a authentically, an authentically beautiful human being, like, so kind and loving and like, funny. I don't know. I just, that made me happy. I was just like, what a satisfying thing because I don't think she's gone back unless I'm wrong. I think she's hosted it since she left because that's very cool. That's very awesome.

Yay. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wanderers Against the Odds. In our next season, three friends, backcountry skiing in Alaska, disturb a hibernating bear and she attacks. The skiers must wait for help to arrive before one of them succumbs to his injuries. Listen to Against the Odds on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Is Karen first? Karen goes first.

She is. All right. Today, I'm going to tell you a story, Georgia, that Dave Anthony sent me, sometimes Dave Anthony of the dollop podcast. If you like a weird history, you might like the dollop podcast to go over there and try it out. Did you see Gareth got both his ears pierced on the road as a dare or, you know, he lost a bet with Dave Anthony and so Gareth, the other host of the dollop, got both his ears

pierced, these huge blingy diamonds in his ear. I watched the video on Instagram and it was very funny. That is truly genius. So funny. So sometimes Dave sends me articles when a story is too like on the side of true crime and because it's not that historical, but he's like, this would be good for you guys and I take it and I never tell you and it's mine and not yours. So this one was from Dave and he was like, you're not going to believe this article.

And the craziest thing is it takes place in San Francisco. It also takes place in Santa Rosa, which is the town just north of Palo Alto, where the mall is. And so this is a true hometown for me, even though I'd never heard of it before. It's a story about a woman who journalist Katie Dowd referred to as the most dangerous woman in San Francisco. It's Nor Cal's own Iva Kroger. All right.

Okay. So the main sources used for this story are an SF Gate article by writer Katie Dowd called the most dangerous woman in San Francisco and that article is heavily cited throughout this story. Katie Dowd is the journalist that did the majority of the research on this story. Also Marin pulled the Supreme Court of California's 1964 opinion on the people versus Kroger and also multiple articles from California newspapers that ran in the 60s that were covering this as the story broke.

And then if you want to look at any of those or the rest of the sources for this story, they're in our show notes. So we'll take you back now to January 1962 to a little town I know very well called Santa Rosa, California. It's 10 minutes up the 101 from Petaluma, again, where the mall is, so it's a big deal. And in the beginning of 1962, a police officer is pulling into the parking lot of the Rose City Motor Court on the 1300 block of Santa Rosa Boulevard, which is across the street from where the boot barn is today and up the road from Applebee's.

The boot barn. So in Santa Rosa, there's like the center of town, but then like in most towns, as you kind of go out of town, it's like, it gets a little seedier and then there's like motels as you, you know, that kind of vibe. Motels. It doesn't look like that anymore. Yeah. But it did then.

So you can vouch for that. I've seen it myself. That's what I'm trying to say. Got it. I put my, I put my eyes on it. So this motel is owned by a 58 year old Mildred Arneson and her 70 year old husband, Jay. Jay is suffering from advanced stage Parkinson's. And the police have been called by Mildred's sister, Beatrice Brun.

She lives in Washington state and she's asking them to do a welfare check on the couple because she hasn't heard from her sister. The last correspondence Beatrice got from Mildred was a letter from the month before where Mildred detailed an extravagant upcoming trip to Brazil with a new friend. Beatrice and Mildred's mother Odella had also gotten a letter telling her the same news. She said while she was away, her husband Jay would be well cared for and that this friend she was traveling with had recently come into some money and was kindly fronting her the $10,000 to cover the trip's cost.

That's nearly $100,000 in today's money. No, vacations don't cost that. Should they? No. I mean, in a perfect world. Are you taking a private jet in 1962? Like what's happening? Buying a private jet and fucking taking it there.

Going around when you have to stay home and take care of the Rose City Motel. So apparently all Mildred had to do to get fronted that money was sign over the motel as collateral. So that specific detail sounds like a bad idea, but Beatrice trusts her sister's intuition and if anyone deserves a lavish vacation, it's her sister Mildred. But then after they get this letter, they don't hear anything else. So Christmas comes and goes, not a word from Mildred, which of course is very odd. So Beatrice decides to call her sister on New Year's Day.

And when Jay, her husband, answers the phone, all he says is, hello, B, I don't think I'll ever see Mildred again. And then the woman caring for him takes the phone from him and hangs it up. So Beatrice is not able to reach Jay again, so she calls the police. So this is when the officer is pulling in to the Rose City Motor Court. He parks his patrol car outside. He knows all this backstory, but he isn't that concerned. Mildred made it clear that she did go on vacation.

It's natural. It would make sense that Jay is having a hard time contacting his sister-in-law without assistance. So maybe someone working at the motel, you know, he's like, yeah, there's probably easily, this is easily explained. He opens the door to the office and he's greeted by a friendly middle-aged woman who's stationed behind the front desk. The officer introduces himself and asks if anyone is heard from the motel owners lately

because their family is worried and is calling about them. And he's there to make sure that they're OK. So the woman behind the counter explains that there's no reason to worry about the harnesses, Jay's in good hands, and Mildred is off enjoying herself in Brazil. And there's probably a simple explanation for the lack of correspondence, like maybe she's so swept up in the excitement that she just forgot to write home. And then this woman behind the counter offers one correction to what the officer said. She explains the motel has a new name now.

It's called the El Sembrero, and the harnesses don't own it anymore, she does. And then she shows him the deed with her name on it. So the officer looks at the document, checks it out. The woman's name is right there. And he basically is maybe theorizing that Mildred basically escaped her life here, working at this motel with a husband who was sick, was getting too much, and she just bailed. It's just a theory, but it's plausible. He still has Mildred's worried family to answer to.

So the officer gives Beatrice Brun's name and phone number, and he misspells her last name as Brown when it's actually Brun, B-R-U-N-N. And he gives that information to the woman behind the desk and asks her to give Beatrice a call and basically says, like, tell her what you told me. And then he leaves. Okay. And the officer has no idea. He's just handed Beatrice Brun's phone number to the woman who's stolen her sister's business

and murdered her. And that woman's name is Iva Kroger. Okay. Born Lucille Hooper in Kentucky, 1922, to working-class parents, Iva Kroger is not her real name and it isn't even close to her real name. And we don't know much about her childhood, but by the early 40s, she has a husband and two sons in Louisville, but it seems like Lucille doesn't enjoy domestic life. Within a couple of years, she leaves her family and sets out on her own.

So it's unclear exactly where Lucille was planning to go or what her plans are. All we know about this part of her life is everything that we can surmise from the trouble she gets into with the law. So almost immediately, she's arrested in Chicago in 1945. She's 23 years old and the charges for illegally wearing the uniform of a military nurse. Yeah, more specifically, Lucille's telling people that she's a Navy nurse who survived a POW camp in Japan. So it's just straight up stolen valor in like post-war America.

Interesting. She pleads guilty to this crime. We can't tell whether or not she did any time for it, but what we do know is she is given probation and she immediately skips town. So now Lucille heads west. She cycles through fake names and invented identities as she goes. And by the early fifties, she settled in San Francisco with her new name, Iva. In 1954, she's 32 years old and she marries again.

And this time, to a man named Ralph Kroger, he's a laborer who's 17 years her senior. And they eventually move into a small home in the city's Outer Mission neighborhood, which is where my mom's from. So we don't really know that much about Iva and Ralph's relationship. It does seem like they're happy together, but at some point, Iva is injured after being hit by a jitney and she's left with a limp. What is a jitney? I looked it up because I didn't know either.

And it was like basically a smaller bus. They look like old Model T's kind of with no top where you could fit like what looked like maybe eight people onto it so that you wouldn't have to get on the bus and do all the stops. If you were downtown, you could get over to Fisherman's Wharf. It was like a one-stop kind of bus. So it's a bummer to get hit by one. Yes.

And it leaves her with a limp and she winds up suing the company that owns the jitney for damages. It's unclear if she ever receives that money, but it seems unlikely since it's also reported that the couple is struggling financially. They're hounded by lenders who want payments and by insurance agents who monitor Iva during her recovery, which implies that insurance fraud may have been suspected in that situation. And by the end of the story, you're going to be like, yeah, it probably was insurance fraud.

But we'll see. By November 1961, the Kroger's have had enough with what they consider harassment, but other people would be like, it's just us asking you to pay your bills. So they head north across the Golden Gate Bridge up 50 miles and they land at a budget motel called the Blue Bonnet in Santa Rosa. And they check in under the fake names Iva and Ralph Long. And this is where Iva Kroger spots an opportunity. Across the street from the Blue Bonnet is the Rose City Motor Court Motel.

And for some reason, Iva comes to believe this motel will be her ticket to financial stability. She walks across the street into the front office and asks if the property is for sale. It's unclear what her plan was since we just said she didn't really have any money. So badly that she had to skip town because of it. But it's a moot point because Mildred Arneson tells Iva she's not interested in selling. But it doesn't keep Iva away. Instead, she starts hanging around the motel and becomes quote unquote good friends with

Mildred. And she even starts helping out with Jay's care. We don't know exactly what Iva's personality was like or how she managed to ingratiate herself with a stranger so quickly. But what we do know is within a few weeks, she has Mildred's full trust. So it kind of seems like if Iva is like a true sociopath, then she probably saw a husband and wife who own that motel and the husband is physically impaired, right? So there's kind of like a weakness that she might be able to go in and exploit.

Yeah, she sounds like a scammer. Yeah. So then that December, Iva announces that she's just earned around $150,000 on an accident claim, which would be over a million dollars in today's money. And given what we know about Iva's financial state, this is very likely a lie. But Mildred believes her. So when Iva tells her that she's going to use that money to go on the vacation of a lifetime in Brazil, she invites Mildred to come along and Mildred is all in.

So she immediately begins planning for this trip. She takes out travelers checks at the bank, organizes care for her husband, and then she sends two letters, one to her mother and another to her sister Beatrice, telling them of her exciting vacation plans. And that is the last anyone will hear of Mildred Arneson. So now we're back at the start of the story. A police officer's just left the contact information for Mildred's sister Beatrice with Iva at the rebranded El Sombrero motel, and not long after that Beatrice receives a phone

call from an unknown woman who introduces herself as Mrs. Long and claims to be running the motel while Mildred is away. And Mrs. Long is insistent that Beatrice has no reason to worry Mildred's having the time of her life abroad. In fact, she's just sent a postcard to the motel from Mexico suggesting that she's moved on from Brazil, which doesn't geographically make a ton of sense, like she went south first in this coming up. So Mrs. Long also confirms that Jay is doing well.

And then she shares the news that the Rose City Motor Court has been sold, which would have come as a shock to Beatrice. And when she asks who bought it, Mrs. Long says she doesn't know. But the phone call strikes Beatrice is very weird, because as much as she really wants to believe that her sister is off enjoying herself somewhere while Jay is safe and sound in Santa Rosa, she needs to hear it from Mildred directly. But then on February 12th, she does. Beatrice gets a telegram that's supposedly from her sister, except there are two huge

red flags. The telegram is signed Mildred and not Mill, which is how her sister always signs her letters. But an even bigger one, the telegram is addressed to Beatrice Brown, not Beatrice Brunn, which means Mildred got her sister's last name wrong. So now Beatrice knows for a fact there's no way this telegram came from her sister. So she calls the police again and she explains what happened. And she tells them now that she and her family are even more worried that something very bad has happened to Mildred.

But still, unfortunately, the police are not too worried about the harnesses. And the reason that sucks so bad is because if they'd done the slightest amount of investigating, they would have discovered all kinds of shady activity going on at the Rose City Motor Court. Because not only had the harnesses' belongings been removed from their room and burned, but Iva immediately starts taking out loans in the harnesses' names. She even used Mildred's traveler's checks that she got for her trip to Brazil to pay off debts at local department stores. So she's kind of, she's making no secret about basically replacing this woman.

It's so creepy. So around the same time Beatrice receives the suspicious telegram, a Red Cross worker stops by the motel and asks Iva where Mr. Arneson is. And it makes sense that this worker would ask Iva because Iva's been telling people that Mildred left Jay in her care. But on this day, Iva decides to play dumb. She tells the man that she doesn't know where Jay is because Mildred had recently come to pick him up.

And she will repeat that story over and over in the coming weeks. And as she does, adding flourish to it every time, which to me is another sign that you're dealing with a crazy person. In one version, she actually claims that Mildred came to the motel one night at two in the morning in a white Cadillac, accompanied by two sinister looking men, picked up her husband Jay and drove off into the night. As one does. I mean, yeah.

Now it's the last week of February, 1962, Iva's only been in charge at the Rose City Motor Court for two months, but the motel is already falling behind on both utility and loan payments. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the house that the Kroger's had moved out of very quickly and abandoned to move up to Santa Rosa to basically get out of town, they've gone back up there and now they seem to be doing construction work at the house. They've hired a contractor named Walter Hughes, who they met over at the Blue Bonnet Motel in Santa Rosa, and they've asked him to come and dig out a section of their garage that

basically it's four feet long, four feet wide, four feet deep. Perfect. Iva explains that it's for some plumbing work that they need to get done. But it's such a weird request that Walter actually ends up talking about the details of this job to people that he knows. And then within a few days of him being done, like digging that hole, the Kroger's fill it with cement that's a stark white color and it completely clashes with the original garage floor, which is a greenish cement.

Then in April, the Kroger start another home improvement project. This time they hire a contractor named Francis Kennison to add another layer of cement to their garage floor. So when Francis comes to start the job, the first step involves taking a sledgehammer to the awkwardly patched white sections of cement and ripping it all up. So it's like he has to get rid of what's there first to do the job and make the floor even. But when Iva hears him busting up the floor, she rushes into the garage screaming about how that part is not to be messed with.

Francis insists the entire floor has to be pulled up so it can be correctly repaired before cement can be poured. But Iva doesn't budge. So despite the uneven and patched flooring, Francis ends up begrudgingly pouring the next layer of cement and then laying additional wooden flooring on top of that. So by the next month, which is May, Iva seems to have had enough with the Rose City Motor Court. She's only been at the helm for about six months, and she puts it up for sale for $72,000,

which is $700,000 in today's money. And as she waits for an offer, those bills keep piling up. And by the summertime, the motel hasn't sold, lenders and utility companies still want their money. When the water company sends out a worker to collect payment from Iva, she pulls a handgun on him and threatens to shoot him to death. That's not how you do it. That's not how you do that.

No, you just, you got to pay it. Even $5. Have you ever been like trying to work out bills when you don't have any money? And they're like, even $5, just give them $5 a month. They're like, we don't want to take you to court, please. No, no, just do something. The worker escapes unharmed, but immediately calls the police, of course. So Iva knowing she's in big trouble, skips town.

We don't know if Ralph isn't on these plans. I'm sure it was kind of last minute, sounds like. Either way, she leaves him in San Francisco. So within hours, an arrest warrant is issued for Iva. But when police get to the motel to arrest her, she's long gone and months pass with no sign of her. And then in August, contractor Walter Hughes' story about the big hole that he was hired to dig in the Kroger's garage, finally makes it back to the police and investigators start

connecting the dots. They get a search warrant for the Kroger home in San Francisco where Ralph is still living, but they don't find much until they get to the garage. The investigators immediately notice the garage floor has unusual bumps and they decide to pull it up. The wooden flooring goes. And then when they get through multiple layers of cement, they make a horrifying discovery. The bodies of Mildred and Jay Arneson.

They've both been strangled to death. Mildred has been stuffed into a trunk. Jay still has the belt that was used to strangle him wrapped around his neck. My God. Ralph swears he has no idea that these bodies were buried in his garage, but he's immediately arrested and now the hunt for Iva is on. After eight long months, the Arneson family finally hears about Mildred and Jay and it's of course horrible news.

The story sweeps newspapers across the country and Beatrice Brun and her friends and family are left to mourn Jay and Mildred. All while knowing their suspected killer is on the loose. And they keep seeing her face and her name in the paper. And while this onslaught of reporting leads to a huge number of tips from the public, most of them don't lead anywhere. So with each day that passes without Iva Kroger being captured, fear continues to build around the Bay Area.

Altogether Iva's been missing for three months, but just days after the actual manhunt for her begins, a very strange and disturbing development takes place. So now it's late August, we're in Oakland, California, which if you don't know is right across the Bay from San Francisco. And two very young boys age three and four are found wandering around alone in Oakland. And when the police are called to the scene, they learn from the children that they're from Florida. These boys tell the police that their estranged grandmother had randomly showed up at their

house and taken them away. So on a hunch, one of the officers talking to the boys pulls out a newspaper and shows them a picture of Iva Kroger. And one of the boys says, that's grandma. What a hunch. Geez. I know, right? Seriously.

But I think it's like that idea, it's like, what grandmother would leave? And like, those are little kids that probably shouldn't be out of a stroller. Tiny. Much less like walking around. Oh, it's horrifying. So these boys are reunited with their very worried parents. This is one of the more confusing chapters of the Iva Kroger saga. Investigators can only theorize that Iva kidnapped and then abandoned her grandsons to confused

detectives. Or maybe distract them. But the boys mother Joyce, whose Iva's daughter-in-law thinks it's more than that. She believes it was a pointed attack on her husband, Iva's abandoned son who had cut ties with his mother after she left Louisville when he was a child. Oh my God. So she went all the way back to the family she abandoned to kidnap her estranged grandsons and bring them to the Bay Area.

It's so spiteful when it's like, you're the problem, lady. It's crazy. It's like, was she hiding out or was like, I would love to know what her, what any kind of thinking was. Yeah. It's just, it's so wild. This story prompts even more news coverage on the Iva Kroger manhunt. According to journalist Katie Dowd, the newspapers take the that's grandma line and run with

it. And they dub Iva the ghostly grandma, the glib grandmother, and the ultimate insult, dumpy grandma. Oh, come on now. Come on. Now of course, the more it's in the news, the more there's like tips. She's being spotted everywhere. According to the press Democrat, which is the Santa Rosa newspaper, we subscribe.

Big supporters of the press Democrat. People were spotting Iva knocking on the door of a farmer near Healdsburg, which is up above Santa Rosa. Another time riding in a car on Petaluma Hill Road. And another time walking on the street in Eureka, which is like way the hell up north. It's unclear how many of these sightings really are Iva Kroger, but each tip is treated seriously on September 9th, officers rushed to the scene after Iva is seen at a church all the way down in San Diego, but by the time they arrive, she's gone.

And this sighting is particularly unsettling because Jay Arnes and son live in that part of San Diego. Oh no. So the murderer of their father has been spotted near their house basically. So later that same day in San Diego, a man named Joseph Bonamo sees an old woman crying on the street near his home and he feels so sorry for her. He invites her in and asks her to have dinner with him and his wife, but that feeling changes as Joseph and his wife Christine sit across the dinner table from this old woman who refuses

to take off her sunglasses. Chill. That's not chill. Just so weird where it's like, we think you're sad, but we kind of can't tell what's going on with you. Are you famous? So they basically finished dinner, send her on her way, but the next afternoon, Christine's reading the newspaper and she sees a news story featuring a photo of that same woman.

She grabs a marker and draws sunglasses over the eyes of the photo and shows it to her husband and they realize that the woman they took in is Iva Kroger, a fugitive accused of murder. Where Joseph calls the police, and incredibly, or maybe not so incredibly, they tell him they're wrapping up for the evening and he should call back tomorrow. Oh my God, we're wrapping up policing for the night. This isn't 7-Eleven. You can't be expected to help you.

Even 7-Eleven's open all fucking night, man. So Joseph calls the FBI. He doesn't drop it. Thank God. If he cares enough, he calls the FBI. The FBI is open all night and they immediately get on it and they track Iva down to an apartment not far from the Bonomo's house. And she had been living there under the name Julia Schmidt and she's arrested without

incident. So Iva's capture comes, of course, as a huge relief to the public, much more so to the Arneson family. Jay, Arneson's son, Jack, tells reporters that, quote, now I can take the shells out of the 38 I've had in my possession for two weeks and I'm sure my brother will do the same. When Iva speaks to the press, she maintains her innocence and tells reporters that, quote, I sleep good and I'm just a happy person. Congratulations.

How much more of a, like a complete sociopath do you have to be like, oh, you're asking me about being arrested for murder, but don't worry about me. I sleep great. So the Kroger's joint trial kicks off in January of 1963. So even though many people suspect Ralph did play a role in this crime, everyone believes Iva is the mastermind behind these murders and the circumstantial evidence against her, which includes her takeover of the motel, hiring the contractors, and the fact that she was with both victims shortly before their disappearances is all extremely damning.

But Iva refuses to go down without a fight while both Kroger's plead not guilty to the murder charges, Iva decides to add not guilty by reason of insanity to her plea. And then she just goes all in on this insanity defense. She sings songs in the courtroom. She claims she's the mother of God. She pretends to forget why she's being tried during jury selection. She reportedly glares at a prospective juror so intensely that the woman is dismissed from jury duty.

In another instance, Iva interrupts witness testimony by removing her shoes and banging them on the table in front of her. At one point, she even runs over to the DA's table, throws his papers in the air while screaming and she has to be forcibly removed from the courtroom. And that's just a couple examples of what she did. One legal filing says that she interrupts the proceedings hundreds of times. She sounds exhausting. Just the worst.

Yeah. Just like that's, A, not how you prove that you're mentally unstable for trial. No. B, like, put your fucking shoes on, lady. Lady, get the shoes off the table. And then of course, Iva's attorney makes the questionable decision of putting his unruly client on the stand. And of course, it's a disaster.

According to Katie Dowd, Iva screamed for 15 minutes straight while the judge begged her to calm down. Oh my God. So she's just screaming. Oh my God. But her diehard efforts to validate her insanity plea ultimately come to naught. Prosecutors eventually put multiple psychiatrists on the stand and they all testify that Iva seems to be faking insanity to secure a lighter punishment.

So this trial lasts about two months. It wraps up in March of 1963. And after five hours of deliberating, the jurors come back with matching verdicts for Iva and Ralph Kroger. They're both guilty of first degree murder. According to Katie Dowd, quote, neither made much of a fuss with Iva feebly declaring that the jury was paid off and Ralph, ever the sad sack of a man murmuring, I didn't expect it.

Aw. Horrible. Are you sure about that when your wife is fucking losing it? I know. Next year? Yeah, for real. You do know that you put those bodies in your own garage. I mean, that's, that kind of thing is so, it's so cold, like they kept, they kept the

bodies of their victims and put them in their garage. Oh no, it's so awful. It's horrifying. So just a few years after being sent to Folsom Prison, Ralph Kroger dies of cancer in 1966 at the age of 63. Meanwhile, Iva continues serving out her sentence, but her behavior is noticeably impeccable. And on top of that, she's experiencing severe vision loss, it's left her almost completely blind.

This convinces officials that she's at low risk of reoffending. So in 1975, after serving about 13 years of a life sentence, Iva is released from prison on parole. So from here, her trail gets a little spotty again. It's reported that she moves to Riverside, where she starts attending services at the local church of Scientology. She works in nursing homes. She expresses interest in taking nursing courses, which is a nice callback to her first criminal

charge of impersonating a Navy nurse. She also around this time drops her alias and reverts to her legal name Lucille. But what doesn't seem to change is Iva's undeniably difficult personality. Katie Dowd writes, quote, she apparently liked to ride the bus around White Canaan hand and complained to strangers about serving 13 years for a crime she didn't commit. Keep it to yourself, lady. It's like you did it and you're going to make everyone listen to you, Blab. Okay.

So then Iva drops off the map for a while. In 1987, she resurfaces 25 years after her arrest for the murders of Mildred and J. Arneson. She's now in her mid sixties and the police in Cape Coral, Florida are trying to track her down for threatening a man's life. Apparently Lucille blamed him for the fatal drowning of her niece. It's unclear why she came to believe this or what if any role this man played in the tragedy. All we know is that the reports describe him simply as a grocer.

He was never charged criminally in relation to the drowning and he seemed genuinely terrified of Iva. In any case, she had, quote, repeatedly made violent calls to his home before showing up to kill him. Yikes. Yeah. This man also escaped from her like the water company employee years before, go straight to police.

Iva heads out of town and when investigators do a deeper dive into her background, they're shocked to discover that this Lucille, that everyone knows her as in Florida, is yet another alias for the infamous Bay Area murderer Iva Kroger, except for this one important detail. Lucille, unlike Iva Kroger, has no noticeable issues with her vision. Yeah, man, you can't let someone out of prison on a suggestion that they gave you that things are. Only she can verify. This is a true scammer liar, like a terrible person with no moral ethical center.

So it's like, oh, it's so sad. She's going blind. It's like, yeah, she picked a thing that would make you think she would just be ineffectual out in the world for crime. Right. Katie Dowd writes, quote, the police wondered if she'd faked blindness in order to secure an early release and having achieved her goal could then apply for state aid for the blind. So then she's committing fraud, taking money.

Iva remains at large for the rest of her life because of her habit of taking on fake names. We don't know where she went or what she did. Every once in a while, I have a story would pop up in newspapers or magazines describing her as like a boogeyman that's laying low, waiting to strike at any moment. But the reality is that she likely died in Boston in the year 2000 at the age of 78. She lived in public housing. She was diagnosed with cancer and she died alone. So alone that the name on the next of kin on her death certificate is a social worker

that she was not related to. Oh my God. Here's the perfect button for this story that's from Katie Dowd. And if you want to read that, her article, it's in SF Gate, it's really good. And she says this, for nearly 200 years, San Francisco has been the last stop of petty thieves, con artists and killers. Iva Kroger was all three. And that's the story of the notorious Bay Area killer, Iva Kroger.

I think that someone can just like get like go off in fucking obscurity and no one knows like there's someone's neighbor, there's someone's fucking friend. If she's gotten a nursing, she's taking care of people, you know, it's like. Vulnerable people. Vulnerable. Old people. Yeah. It's crazy.

She's the worst. And she is really good at it. She clearly, she has no shame. She doesn't, she just is going to get what she wants and like, and she's going to lie. She's going to do whatever it takes to do that. Like, and they're looking at her as like, oh, she's just this old lady. She let the old lady, like she's not dangerous. That's going to be a real surprise to some Gen Z or who does their fucking DNA, you know,

ancestry tree. Oh, who's my great, great grandma? Whatever the fuck. She just, oh, she let my grandfather wander free in a city streets. Oh my God. All right. Good job. Thank you.

For my story today, this is a really interesting story with a lot of little pop culture bits and pieces in it. This is the story of murderer Gary Gilmore and Nike's Just Do It slogan. Uh-oh. Do you know how they're related? I mean, I can guess, but. Don't do it. I will.

I will. Okay. The sources I used in today's episodes are an A&E article by CM Frankie, an archived article from The Guardian, accredited to Christopher Reed, an NPR article by Manuel Lopez Restrepo, a Washington Post article by Natalie Melman-Petrasella, and another Washington Post article by Timothy Bella. And the rest can be found in our show notes. We're going to start with your favorite workout, Jazzercise.

Oh, yay. Hold on. Let me, let me put my leg warmers on. Would you please? Okay. So, all right. We're going to start in 1988. Ronald fucking Reagan is in his second term as president at the U.S. Cool Ranch Doritos

and pasta salad, let's say, or all the rage. I'm a senior. You're a senior. I'm drinking a lot of sun-kissed orange soda. Probably. Nice. People, especially women, are obsessed with aerobics. This new way of working out with its comfortable footwear and bright-colored high-cut leotards

is easier on the body, widely available across the country, and is created by women for women. You know this. It's a huge fucking... It was a true cultural phenomenon at the time. Definitely. There's that show now on... Physical. The show, Physical on Apple with friend of the family, Rory Scoville.

He's great in that. He's so good. It's a good show. And it'll show you about that. And in the 80s, aerobics and jazzercise and all that becomes a massive industry. There's VHS tapes, classes, and, of course, clothing and footwear. Some companies jump on the aerobics trend sooner than others, like Reebok. They hit the market with the successful new sneaker design, especially for women who

do aerobics, and they're a huge success. But Nike has underestimated the power, the lasting power of this new form of exercise, and they initially dismiss the aerobics craze. And by the late 1980s, when aerobics is at its height of popularity, the company is not doing well. Nike? Yeah. Nike was not doing well.

That's crazy. Okay. So Nike, to do better, hires an outside advertising firm called Wyden and Kennedy out of Portland, Oregon to help dig them out of their hole. The firm is hired to design a brand new campaign for television, for print, and merchandise just to totally overhaul the company's image and put them back into competition with Reebok. They want to widen their audience, and Nike doesn't want to just focus on women and aerobics, but wants to appeal to all Americans, regardless of age and gender and activity level, all

of that. Really, what I'm hearing there is let's focus back on the boys. Yeah. They were like, they didn't want to do it the first time, they're not going to do it this time. Yeah, right. So Dan Wyden is one of the namesakes of this firm. He's a true out-of-the-box thinker and reportedly seeks inspiration wherever he can find it.

When he's working on this new Nike campaign, he feels like something is missing from it. They have some good content, but there's nothing tying the advertisements into one cohesive box. But then Dan has an idea. It's a dark and kind of morbid idea, but Dan wholeheartedly believes it's going to be just what this campaign needs. So we got to think of it as a 1980s Don Draper, I feel like. You know what I mean?

Okay, sure. All that stuff. Yeah. Okay. So Dan pitches a slogan to the Nike people. It's a short, but pointed phrase to tie the advertising campaign together. Just do it. At first, everyone hates it.

So just remember that when you're pitching stuff or when you're doing things in life. Sometimes everyone hates it at first. For real. And so it says, trust me, Nike does, obviously the rest is history. The just do it campaign is wildly successful. It's like everyone knows what it is just by the sound of it these days, right? It's like probably one of the most successful campaigns in history, I'm guessing. I would say.

Yeah. But what isn't revealed until decades later is that the inspiration for this slogan come from the last words of a convicted murderer named Gary Gilmore. Oh, wow. Not only that, but his execution in the late 1970s was at the heart of a nationwide political battle over the death penalty. So we're going to rewind to 1940, which is the year Gary Gilmore is born. He's raised in Portland, Oregon.

He's a gifted artist and a particularly bright kid, but he is the constant target of his father's horrific abuse. According to his younger siblings, this abuse just completely shapes who Gary becomes, sadly. From a young age, Gary begins to show dramatic signs of being violent and impulsive. And by the time he's 15, he's sent to reform school. And according to his brother becomes, quote, fully committed to living a criminal's destiny. His brother happens to be a guy named Michael Gilmore from Portland, Oregon, who's a writer and music journalist and he had written for Rolling Stone and that sort of thing.

And he actually wrote a memoir that included his story of his brother in it as well. So we got a lot of information from that. He spends his adult life in and out of prison for armed robbery and assault. And at some point, a prison psychiatrist describes Gary as having anti-social personality disorder with psychotic features and prescribes him massive doses of anti-psychotic medications to control his behavior. While conditionally on parole in 1976, he leaves town and moves to Provo, Utah, which by the way, I looked this story up in our Gmail to see if anyone had written in about

it. And Provo, Utah could have a really good murdering meetup because so many people were like, my grandfather worked at the prison and my dad worked at the shoe store that he tried to get a job at. Like there's just so many emails. It's wild. That's amazing. I couldn't include everything.

Our Salt Lake show was amazing. Yes. That's so true. So long ago. We had a good one there. Gary, he's 36 years old at this time, he falls in love in Provo, Utah with a 19-year-old woman named Nicole. And Nicole has seemingly had it rough already up until this point before meeting this fucking

Gary. She'd been married twice and had two kids and was seemingly unlucky in love. Their relationship is rocky and dangerous. He's drinking heavily. He's extremely violent and eventually Nicole leaves him due to the abuse and this sends him into a murderous rage. On the night of July 19th, 1976, Gary Gilmore walks into a gas station in Orem, Utah. There's one gas station attendant, a young Mormon and student at Brigham Young University

named Max Jensen. He wasn't supposed to be working that night, but he'd lost a coin flip with a coworker and had to cover the shift. Gary tells him to lay on the floor and Max, who's terrified, he completely cooperates. He totally complies. But without warning or motive, Gary shoots him in the head at close range, killing him on the spot. The next night, Gary walks into a motel in Provo, Utah just a few miles down the road

from the gas station. He demands the cash box from the motel manager, Benny Bushnell, who also is a Mormon and student at Brigham Young University and the same fucking thing happens. Gary tells him to get on the ground. He does exactly as he's told, but Gary shoots him, killing him instantly. This time there's a witness, a motel guest that's seen the whole thing. Gary flees and he attempts to get rid of his gun and accidentally shoots himself in the hand while doing so.

So because of this, he leaves a trail of blood as he travels around town that night and there's a mechanic who had been working on his car and he also saw blood on Gary's hand and had also heard about the shooting that was really close by, so he was easily caught. Police catch him quickly. He doesn't resist arrest. It's not clear why he's surrendered so easily to the authorities, but it's likely he knew he'd eventually get caught. And later on, when he's asked why he went on this murder spree, Gary responds, I don't

know. I don't have a reason. And then also someone wrote in and said that Ted Bundy was at the prison at the same time as him, the prison he was taken to after getting arrested. Just crazy. So the trial of Gary Gilmore is relatively open and shut in the words of Gary's defense attorney, Michael Esplan, quote, he was not a very good criminal. He shot himself with his own gun and left a trail of blood and he did it in front of

a star witness. So Gary didn't even want a trial. He just wanted to plead guilty and be done with it. He seems like a real fucking onerary dick, you know? Or he just knows there's no point. He's not going to like pretend. Yeah, it's almost like he went on this spree because he wanted to go to prison or something like that.

It seems like. But once the trial starts, Gary seems to like the attention. He thinks this will somehow win back Nicole, his girlfriend. He blows her kisses in the courtroom. He's not only unsympathetic in the eyes of the jury, he's totally repulsive to them. He has killed two members of a close knit faith community without motive or explanation and both victims, Max and Benny, left behind wives and very young children. So it feels like everyone in Utah hates Gary Gilmore.

He's convicted on October 7th, 1976. What is unusual about this case, that's kind of an obvious conviction, but what is unusual is that Gary Gilmore is sentenced to death. This is the first time in almost 10 years that anyone in the United States has faced the death penalty. Back in 1972, the Supreme Court rules that the death penalty falls into the umbrella of cruel and unusual punishment and is unconstitutional. So the death penalty had been taken off the table completely in the entire United States,

which I think is a really rare thing to do for years, even though 66% of Americans supported the death penalty. And so in a landmark decision in 1976, the Supreme Court overrides its previous ruling and the death penalty is now legal again. So Gary Gilmore is going to be the first person put to death since it had become unconstitutional. But Gary Gilmore doesn't seem to care. When given the choice to die by hanging or fire squad, he's reportedly unemotional when he replies, quote, I'd rather be shot.

So his execution is scheduled for November 15th, 1976 and 8am. But against his wishes, anti-death penalty groups from all over the country start to get involved, including the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, due to their advocacy work. His execution gets pushed back again and again until it's finally scheduled for two months later on January 17th, 1977. So Gary Gilmore becomes the center of this death penalty discussion in America for both sides.

He seemed to want to die, which I think was a weird little caveat in this argument. It's not like he was hoping to get out of the death penalty. He attempts to take his own life twice while on death row and publicly asked the anti-death penalty advocates to quote, butt out. Wow. It's like, it's not about you, dude. Yeah, it's not for you. It's about what's right for humanity and it involves humanity.

Exactly. Funny, you mentioned SNL earlier. During that Christmas season in 1977, he's even parodied on Saturday Night Live. Oh, shit. This show is only in its second season. And that night, the musical guest is Frank Zappa and the host is Candace Bergen. Candace Bergen along with some of the show's biggest stars like Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi and Gilda Radner, they sing a fake Christmas carol as fake snow is coming down.

They're all in Christmas sweaters and they sing a song about like, let's kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas. Let's hang him from atop the Christmas tree. Let's give him the only gift that money can't buy. Put poison in his eggnog, let him drink it, watch him die. So this is like, everyone is fucking talking about this. Do you think they were being ironic? I think everyone hated Gary Gilmore.

But yeah, I don't know if it was like, let's actually kill him or like, this is what people are just like talking about a lot. But I think everyone wanted, hated him. And like maybe there was a lot of people who were maybe not on the fence about the death penalty to begin with, but then because of this guy and what he had done were pro in a way, like kind of divided the country. Right. That's intense.

It's dark. I had no idea. That's really dark. Yeah. The day comes. It's total chaos. The morning of January 17th, 1977 at the Utah State Prison where Gary Gilmore is scheduled to be executed.

Journalists, film crews and protesters, both for and against the death penalty and reportedly a pro death penalty advocate throws an egg at the head of a bishop who is holding a prayer circle for Gary Gilmore outside the prison. Sir. Yeah. Jeez, screw it. Leave the bishop out of this. I mean, that's a whole different argument.

Yeah. Leave the chickens out of this. So many layers. Good God. It's so oversimplified. Yes. Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah. There's helicopters with cameramen flying around like it's just a whole scene. It sounds similar to when Ted Bundy got put to death too, you know, where there was just this whole, this crazy mob. Yeah. Then Gary Gilmore is somehow given permission to call a country Western radio station, a local one and request his favorite songs that night. It's just fucking pandemonium.

What? Yeah. No. Yeah. But that's not, that's the 70s. That's, uh-huh. Wow. That's fucked up.

So fucked up. So no one's really sure what's going to happen at sunrise when Gary is scheduled to be executed. Like is it going to be postponed again? A Washington Post journalist writes quote, we at least found all of it profoundly distressing having been spared for a decade the ordeal of reading about how a civilized nation puts a convicted prisoner to death. We had almost forgotten how awful it is. So it is like a carnival scene when someone's life is on the line.

And yeah, it's a really bad person's life, but it's just really crazy. Right. But the, but kind of boiling it down to like he did bad, so he dies, which we, you know, we've talked about this on the show. This is, this is one of those things where it's like, you can read a big long story of some horrible, horrible crimes and horrible things. And when you get to the end of it, it's like, yes, I think that person should not be on this planet anymore.

But then, you know, there's always the turn of Gary Gilmore never had a chance because his father beat the living shit out of him and he had mental illness and this and that. So like, obviously, all of those discussions are so much more complex than I pick this side, I pick that side. Totally. It's just 50 shades of gray, essentially. Well, you're talking about your favorite book all of a sudden. I mean, you know who put it perfectly is 50 shades of gray.

Okay. So a last minute request to delay the execution goes into effect the night of, so a judge has to fly over 500 miles to Utah in the middle of the night just to deny the request in person. So it's 745 a.m. just a few minutes before sunrise when Gary Gilmore and the rest of the nation are told that his execution is moving forward. Oh, wow. He's set up in front of a firing squad and strapped into an oak chair.

The grandfather of the murderino who strapped him into the chair, he emailed us to let us know about it. It's like, seriously, everyone is involved in this fucking story. It's wild. There's five men hidden behind a curtain and there's five small holes for their rifle butts to stick out of the curtain. And their guns are aimed, and this is obviously so, you know, they won't have to see themselves shooting someone.

And they say they put four bullets in the five guns so no one knows who actually killed him. But later his brother says he saw five bullet holes, so they don't really know if there actually was only four bullets. Sorry, I'm confused about the four bullets. I guess when there's five people in a firing squad, let's say, they only put bullets in four of the guns and they don't tell you which gun doesn't have one so that you can always feel like, well, maybe I didn't shoot him.

I think it's for the people killing him. Oh, got it. You know what I mean? Got you. Yes, completely. Which is like such an argument where it's like, it's so traumatic for people whose job it is to kill someone that they don't make it, you know. Right.

Like, what are the, we're bending ourselves all around to make this an okay thing. Exactly. Exactly. So to ask for Gary's last words, he simply replies, quote, let's do it. He doesn't flinch when the guns are fired. And so pop culture, just like a little tidbit, there's a punk band called the Adverts and their hit 1977 single is called Gary Gilmore's Eyes because Gary Gilmore requested that some of his organs be donated for transplant purposes and two people received his corneas.

Wow. Yeah. So I think everyone was a little disturbed by that. And so they wrote, looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes by the adverts, check it out. The eyes weren't connected to the brain though anymore. So it's okay. They're just corneas. You can't tell a punk band anything really.

I mean, they're going to say the thing. You're like, you can't say that. You're like, we don't care. We're Jodie Foster's army. We don't care. We're jerks and we're in a circle. Punk's not dead. We're jerks and we're in a circle.

Okay. So it isn't until 10 years later that Dan Wyden, the mad men guy, is working for Nike. He's trying to figure out something to tie everything together and he remembers this mostly forgotten bit of American pop culture about Gary Gilmore. Because Dan is from Portland, Oregon, it's like Gary was, it's likely he followed the murders and the trials and the execution somewhat closely. He remembers reading about those last words, let's do it. And being really impacted by them.

And in a 2015 interview, Dan shares that quote, I remember when I read that, I was like, this is amazing. I mean, how in the face of that much uncertainty do you push through that? So I didn't like the let's thing. And so I just changed that because otherwise I'd have to give him credit. So he totally like made it clear that that's where he got this huge marketing campaign slogan. Wow.

Yeah. So going to American fitness culture scholar Natalie Melman Petra Zella, Dan then borrows from First Lady Nancy Reagan, who had made her mission as First Lady in the Reagan era to continue this fucked up war on drugs. And this is when she comes up with her now infamous, just say no campaign, though I must say it's later realized that this campaign does very little to reduce drug use and might have actually definitely just increased stigma against drug addiction and addicts. It is catchy.

So Dan basically mashes up Gary Gilmour's let's do it with Nancy Reagan's just say no. Wow. And creates just do it. The introduction of the slogan increases Nike brand sales by 1000% over the next 10 years. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So it fucking worked.

Well, I remember when that commercial came out, it is very kind of the vibe is very aggro Jim Bro, it's like, don't be a lazy pig, essentially, but it was the first time anyone had seen anything like that. It was like get up from where you are right this second and just do it. It was like chills inducing like, yeah, I gotta just, there's no excuses. Just do it. Yeah. It's really good.

I as a what eight year old was like, yes, I must just do it and sing. So Nike doesn't really, of course, ever publicly acknowledged the inspiration behind their best known slogan. They're like, yeah, I'm not talking about it. According to company insiders, the origin story is generally not known. Or if it is, it's not really discussed within the company. Yeah. For some, it's just a bit of a grizzly inside joke, but the lasting power of just do it

is undeniable. The slogan helped to open the door to Nike reaching more diverse demographics to sell athletic wear, the popularity and universality, universality, universality, universality, universatility, it's universality, the popularity and universality of just do it leads Nike to create future ad campaigns in the nineties and beyond. You can leave me trying to pronounce that in Stephen and keeping in mind the company's recent experience of missing the mark when the aerobics craze swept the industry. Nike starts putting new effort into highlighting women in sports and encouraging girls to participate

in athletics from a young age. So they do get the fucking memo that women can make them money to. Yeah. Smart. Capitalism. The origin story and legacy of just do it is very complex. Obviously, this phrase has inspired millions of people and has also likely sold millions of Nike products.

Just do it seemingly helped Nike move away from a culture of sexism towards a marketing strategy that is more inclusive and political. But it's hard to ignore that the slogan itself is rooted in the murders of two innocent people and the death of their murderer who died at the hands of the state while the nation was at a fever pitch regarding its attitudes towards the death penalty. And that is a complicated and bizarre story of the execution of Gary Gilmore and the inspiration for just do it, the advertising campaign that helped make Nike what it is today. Wild.

Oh, and there was a book by Norman Mailer about it called The Executioner Song, which in 1982 was made into a made for TV movie or movie, I don't know, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gary Gilmore. And he does look like that. Here, I'm going to have Alejandra send you a pic on the chat. He looks like that, and then if Tom Kenny of SpongeBob SquarePants fame had a baby. What? So look at him, just like slightly, just like a little, little bit, but Tommy Lee Jones

and Rosanna Arquettes in it as well. Oh, early Tommy Lee Jones, man, man, oh man. Oh, I think he won the Emmy or he won whatever this was the award for it for the executioner song. Yeah, yeah. It was a little. And I'm so I'm sure like the death penalty as a topic on the news was definitely like in my consciousness.

But this level of it and this kind of like this rage about it, yeah, fervor, but it also makes me think of like, I remember hearing my parents talk about it in, in very simplistic ways, which it was almost like Bible based of like, if you kill a person, then that's it for you. Like you don't get to live if you're going to kill another person. That's what I was raised around. Yeah. And I think like this is the kind of thing people don't, young people these days don't

understand that it truly was even, you know, 40 years ago. So much of a simpler time in that way where like, if people didn't want to know stuff, they didn't have to know it. Yeah. It's not like they had a phone in their hand or the internet or anything. Totally. So if you saw it on the news of like, you know, death penalty, good or bad, are you pro or con, you picked aside the end and if you had some sort of like a religious background

to say, here's how I make my decisions. Or you were, you went to law school and you saw some super fucked up, like wrongful convictions where you're like, no, no, no, this can't happen. Like, but that wasn't part of the conversation back then either. There were no wrong, no one ever got wrongfully convicted in their minds. You know what I mean? It was like the bad guys are the bad guys and they did bad things and that is the end of the story.

There's no nuance. There's no nuance to it at all. There was never nuance and it was like when you heard stories of like wardens at jails who were like, everyone has to wear pink and it's so humiliating to them or whatever. And you're like, haha, good cause you're bad cause you went to jail. And then it's like slowly over the years, stories start to come out where it's just like, I never did anything and I was in jail for 40 years and all these kinds of things that like the complexity grows as we all evolve.

I just, it blows me away. I mean, it's like, it's the same experience we've had on the show where it's just like, here's the things I think cause I don't know any different until people tell me different. And then the conversation doesn't even start with people being rehabilitated. Like that doesn't even come close to being part of the conversation. It's like, before we even get there, it's like there's 10 fucking opinions and thoughts about the whole matter before rehabilitation ever comes into mind. People and like the idea that what if we took some money out of the yearly police budget,

which, you know, which basically is that line on the graph goes way the fuck out off the page. There's too much. And if you took that and put it into what, what kind of programs are working are helpful is actually affecting people who grew up and were constantly had the shit beaten out of them by their father and also had mental illness and this and that. Yeah. Didn't have the resources that we had of education and safety and food and just the basics to

keep you, keep you safe and keep you, you know, away from, from trouble. Like, you know, like you're doing petty theft as a young kid and it's like, let's look into the reasons this person feels necessary to commit these crimes rather than just punish them and say they're a bad person and take them off the streets. There's a need. There's a need. It's like that. Yeah.

It's just, it's wild. It's like, that is such a, that was amazing, by the way. And it's like the comprehensiveness of like coming out, coming out of like, here's what's going on, aerobics, you know, even then it's like, well, actually here's what we got it from 10 years ago or five years ago. Here's this crazy thing that was happening where it's just like, yeah, I'm, I'm blown out. Everything's interconnected.

There's an interconnectedness and it all comes back to true crime. It all does come back to true crime. Everybody's reading those books of like, what, what are human beings capable of and why? Yeah. It's like, why? What's the why? Is there a why? Simplicity.

Everyone wants to, all these fucking, all these fucking politicians want it to be simple and there to be a fucking, let's ban drag and things, and bad things won't happen to children anymore and let's, you know, arm teachers and everything will be fine. And it's just so fucking idiotic. One of my favorite things, and this is happening on all social media that I'm on now, so Twitter and TikTok, just story after story, every time someone gets arrested for like child molestation and it's a church pastor and people are keeping track where they're like, this is the 30th church pastor that has been arrested for this.

And so far we have zero drag queens who have been arrested. Like that whole thing, I guess so many children have been killed by drag queens with reading them a book. None. Zero. And guess how many fucking children have been killed by the fact that we have zero fucking gun laws in this country, a fucking shit ton. And yet another, another, and yet another, and yet another, hey, let's, let's donate

some money. Shall we? Good idea. ACLU. Yeah. ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, $10,000. Give what you can, support them how you can, whatever that may be. And I don't know, hug someone that needs a hug.

Yeah. How about just like educate yourself? You know what I mean? If you don't have five bucks to spare, we understand. There's sometimes the creditors want that $5 and it doesn't, it can't go anywhere else. We get it. Very true. Yeah.

So just looking, educate yourself. That's a really great way to be a, to be a fighter. Yeah. Very true. You know? And don't forget to watch important videos on TikTok. That's a great way to educate yourself. That's right.

It's just, it is such an advantage that we just, having lived half of my life without it, it's so much better with it, which also is like that TikTok ban is complete bullshit. It's complete bullshit. And there are people on TikTok who are showing people what, what stocks those senators who were at that hearing, what stocks they're dumping and what stocks they're buying so everyone else can do exactly what those senators are doing because that's why they're doing it. They're not afraid of data being sold because if they were, they would have shut down Facebook after Cambridge Analytica.

What they're afraid of is the fact that people can talk directly to each other and educate each other and tell the real news. And actually that it's so effective for young people to have that level of information in their hand. That's amazing. There are stocks in this podcast. That's where you get your news. No, not from this podcast.

No, no, no, no, no. Thanks for listening, you guys. Thanks for being with us and fucking fighting the good fight. Yeah. It's good that we all care so much. Yeah. Let's take that into the future. Stay sexy.

And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? No. Elvis, do you want a cookie? No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. Bye. Listen, follow, leave us a review on Amazon Music,

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