My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - Celebrity Hometowns with Nick Offerman

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

For a special treat, Karen and Georgia sit down with celebrity guests to hear their stories, from hometown murders to personal accounts of mayhem to legendary family lore. Today's guest is Nick Offerman.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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To my favorite murder. The Celebrity Hometown Edition. That's right. It's all in the name right there. There's no mystery to this. It's easy. It goes down easy. That's right.

There's no heavy lifting on the listener's end. The way we do with all those other podcasts. Not this one. We said no more of the lifting. Our backs can't take it. Our souls can't take it. That's right. Guys, you're going to be very excited about our celebrity today.

Kind of, I'd say, a five-star celebrity. Absolutely. Wouldn't you? You know him from Parks and Rec. You know him from the Great North. You may have seen him on his recent limited Netflix series, Colin and Black and White. You love him. He plays clubs and colleges all over this country.

It's Mr. Nick Offerman. Hello. Hello. Nick. Hi. Thank you for being here. I'm so grateful to be here. I love your podcast.

I feel weird because I was thinking about it this morning. Can a grizzled middle-aged guy be called a murderino? Hell yeah. Yeah. That spans genres and ages. I aspire to murderino. It's a comfort. And for that reason, it's really a comfort to hear your voices like you are podcast hosts

that I know and love. Oh, that means the world to us. Thank you. Right back at you. Fish. Fish. Fish is sharp. Nick, can I just bring up really quick your book, which I have, I've been reading like

almost like, just to kind of really relax me like a couple pages right before I go to sleep. And if you haven't heard of it, Nick's written a book called where the deer and the antelope play the pastoral observations of one eager American who loves to walk outside. just kind of a nice clean, crisp title, right? Will you tell the people about that book a little bit? Cause it's really good. Yeah, I totally will. Thank you so much.

And I just want to say it's my fifth book and my publisher, I always want, I always pitch my titles to stand alone, paddle your own canoe, gumption and fun. And they're a corporation. And so they're like, eh, we need to spoon feed the people. Like who's going to buy a book called gumption or where the deer and the antelope play?

So it's become this game that I try to enjoy where I try to make myself laugh with the subtitle. I've been, yeah, the pastoral observations of one ignorant American who loves it. And that's basically what it is. It is my sort of musings on our relationship with nature or lack thereof and by our, I mean us humans. And, you know, the awareness I have through being inspired

by agrarian writers like Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan and Aldo Leopold and their ilk, Robin Wall Kimmerer, reading their stuff and coming to understand how dumb we are when it comes to like knowing who makes our food, for example, and just, I mean, and I'm somebody who's interested in it and I can barely discern this information. Who, where did this beef come from?

Where did these turnips come from? And how are we as a species treating our planet vis-a-vis like creating our food and basically using the resources. So with a sense of humor, the book Chronicles in three parts travels that I've taken to national parks with my friends, Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders. I go visit my shepherd family friends in England,

James Rebanks and his family. And then the last third of the book, my wife, Megan Mullally and myself, travel a bunch of the United States in an airstream that we bought. That's amazing. Yeah, there's a lot of hijinks, but also it's like asking myself

and my readers questions like, do we still wanna be eating corn in 40 years and how can we make that happen? Yeah, I mean, starting that book, I was like, I wrote down the phrase agrarian writers because you were talking about, I was like, now I have to do research on reading this book, but it is that kind of thing.

I didn't realize there was actually this kind of history of people who have been recording these kind of states of the state and what nature means to man type of things. I guess I just never thought about it before, but like from like page three, I was like, ooh, that's very true. I need to look further into that. That's, yeah, that's the hook.

That's what got me in the first place is realizing, oh, that's right, we have been coddled into the great luxury of not having to think about where all of our shit comes from as consumers. And the corporations love that. They love to keep us completely in our dark bubbles where they're like, just press this button and we'll send you the new version of the thing.

And now it comes in seven colors. And now we want you to buy silverware for every season of the year. I have a question about nature. Do you have any advice for someone who say, like myself was traumatized as a kid because her dad took her camping constantly and now nature makes her nervous

and seems like a lot of work. Is there something bigger than me that you can, or are for people who don't really love camping, outdoorsy stuff? Oh, totally. I mean, the cool thing is nature is actually, everything is actually nature. Like this Zoom meeting that we're having right now

is a molecular version of nature. And so... That's insane. The other thing is like in the genre of like getting out into nature as it were, you know, like, and achieving to your degree of comfort or not a sort of wilderness excursion, whether that means walking through your neighborhood park

or going backpacking and like pooping in the woods and stuff. That's just one genre. There's all these other genres of like communing with animals that could be at your local shelter, could be at a local farm. The farmer's market is lousy with nature. It could be like, who makes the best strawberries? Or maybe I should start cultivating the best strawberries

in my neighborhood or whatever that means. I mean, that's the thing is reminding ourselves or like who makes cloth or clothing or leather goods in your area, reminding ourselves. And for me, it comes hand in hand with my woodworking shop quite a bit, understanding just our materials and where they come from. And, you know, looking at like the way our species

rapaciously cuts down forests day in and day out and how terrible that is for the whole ecosystem. So that's the, you know, that's the hilarious hijinks the book is full of stories. No, I love it. But I think that's really good advice because that's the feeling I had. Like reading this book is, oh, I am not this way enough.

And I have to like now drive myself like five miles into the forest to blub up whatever, where it's like, oh no, I can actually just do half steps or beginner steps. You don't have to make that crazy adjustment to still appreciate and get connected to locally sourced, you know, family grown or like farm grown things or just a little,

being a little bit more maybe choosy and active in that like supporting nature idea. It's like when I buy the, do you ever buy those eggs that are like so free range that they come with a little slip where it tells you what the names of the chickens were that laid the eggs? Totally. I love that.

It's like, it's not, you know, I mean, hope to God that it's not, you know, as opposed to the horrible things you've seen with factory farming, it's like, oh, there's just a couple of nice chickens. It is. That's a good product. There's actually a bit in my book about that very thing because the USDA has the list of words

that you can legally put on your eggs. It's all part of the bullshit industrial complex where it's like among the adjectives you can put on your eggs are organic and also 100% organic. Those are two different categories. Oh man. But I mean, yeah, that's the idea. And you make a great point, Karen,

is that I urge us all to enter into these conversations with a sense of nuance because when I myself think of these things, I'm like, oh, conservation is so hard. Like do I have to join Greenpeace and go attack whale boats or something? And I even make fun of myself at the end of the book where Megan and I are driving around in a Ford expedition pulling a 30 foot airstream, just guzzling gas

like there's no tomorrow. Well, I'm having these like pastoral musings about our relationship with our natural resources. And the point is we all are complicit. We all exist in this incredible matrix of electricity and fossil fuels and so forth that doesn't prohibit us from saying, okay, but let's wrap our heads around what we need to fix, what mistakes we're making.

And yes, absolutely. When we are able to travel the country without burning tons of gas, I will happily sign up for that. But I think the answers lie less in our individual consumption and more in having our heads in the right place so that we can vote for the right legislation so that we can, as a country, make decisions that are good for the planet,

rather than allow our corporations to make those decisions. Yeah, although corporations are people. That's true, that's where it gets confusing. Yeah, they blurred the line there a couple of years ago and now it's just so baffling. I haven't found a corporation that was brought up well, is the problem. Never found a corporation that picks up the check.

Yeah, that's right, no manners. So what you're saying is that climate change is real. Yes or no? This is the bad news. That is what I'm positing. Got it, got it. Breaking news, yeah, call Wolf Blitzer. Yeah, all right.

Well, I'm definitely getting a beehive now based on this conversation alone, so. It is, I mean, it's funny because I'm very passionate about the subject matter, but I think it is a very enjoyable book. People have described it as like sitting on the porch with me while I describe running into people on the trail. I love it.

Well, also I think your voice is so distinctive and your manner of speaking is so distinctive that the second you begin to read your writing, you can hear your speaking voice and your word choice and your, it all is very, it's borderline audio book even though I'm reading the hard copy book. I appreciate that, thank you.

Comforting. Comforting style, yeah. Very much so. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. What, anything else? Let's go, I mean, I saw some of the pictures

of you guys on the road. I mean, did anything crazy happen to you guys when you were driving around the country? Not super crazy. I mean, it was very pandemic style and we're also private to begin with. And so we were actually sort of helped by our pensions to wear masks

whenever we were around people. Yeah, sure. That's one thing that's a little weird about hiking with Jeff Tweedy and George Saunders who's less recognizable because he's an author. It's funny, I, because I'm an actor, people would recognize me the most

and then sometimes they'd recognize Jeff and we would always be like, but. But this guy. And this is the full wizard that you wish you knew. Like afterwards they Google him and then like, oh my God, I met him. That's why you gotta look at the picture on the book flap. You every time, it's your job as the reader.

It's true. And so I mean, it was, you know, for us, it was our first time we're new to the Airstream life or streaming as they say. And so it was an exciting adventure, but pretty banal, you know, like I had some real struggles hitching the trailer to my expedition the first time

that I do relay with a lot of self-deprecation in part three. Was there a city, because all I care about when I travel is food, that's mine and my husband's thing. Was there a city that you, or like a town, state that you think has the best, best food? Well, the things that spring to mind are, there's a couple of things in Santa Fe, New Mexico,

we stumbled onto this coffee shop and I wasn't super familiar. These are especially around New Mexico. It's sort of a Mexican and even South American, Central and South American related coffee chocolate tradition. These elixirs that are consumed like a coffee shop, but they're different recipes of chocolate. And it was called cacaoa chocolate house, with the spell of the day.

And it was, it blew our minds so hard that we went hours out of our way on this road trip. We went back like three times. Oh my God. We'd be cold in the mountains and say, what if, you know, I'd go down pretty good right now. One of the Santa Fe chocolate drinks. Was it spicy a little bit?

Yeah, that's the best version, combo of chocolate and like different chili peppers. That's good for you, it's healthy. It was really great. And I loved it, especially when I then had to drive for some hours because, oh, are you wired? After a big mug of hot pepper and chili and chocolate. Yes, that sounds amazing.

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What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candace DeLong and on my new podcast, Killer Psyche Daily, I share a quick 10 minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news.

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with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey, Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music exclusive podcast, Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today.

Well, Nick, do you want to tell us about your hometown? I will. You know, I grew up in a small town called Manuka, Illinois that is very conservative. Just a couple of few thousand people when I was growing up, it's grown. I feel like it's up to maybe 12,000, which we recently found out

because my dad is actually the mayor. He was just... What? The mayor of Manuka. That's amazing. It is. It's unsurprising. I mean, I think most people meeting my dad

would be surprised that he wasn't the mayor for the preceding 20 years. But he was like everybody's favorite school teacher. He taught junior high and he was a basketball coach and he drove the school bus. He's just... He is Manuka. He is.

He is Manuka. And his dad actually was the mayor for a while too, my grandparent when I was a kid. So it's... And my mom is like she and dad do meals on wheels. They just live these wonderful lives of service. We have a big family and everybody in the family is either a farmer, a nurse, paramedic,

three librarians, a school teacher. And then my brother works in craft beer. So he's kind of... Nice. He's the king of the family. He's everyone's favorite. So he is. And so we got into this.

I have three siblings and I said to you guys, are there any murders or crimes? And everybody's like, ah, wasn't there some guy? And there was really nothing very local. There was like a couple of stories in the nearby small city of Joliet, Illinois. But I've never felt comfortable identifying with Joliet

because we're a very rural family and Joliet's the big city. They make steel in Joliet. And they have a famous prison, right? Yeah, the Stateville prison. So I have a couple of true crime options. But then I also was talking to my best friend in Los Angeles, his daughter Lola, who was a showgirl.

She is a huge passionate murderer. And she flipped out to hear that I was doing this and there's a pretty crazy story that happened across the street from them. The interesting perspective of this Hollywood murder story is that it came through the perspective, it came through the eyes and ears of my godson. So my best friend lives in this east side neighborhood.

And across the street, this older woman named Kathy Davis, who was 81 at the time of this event. She had, I think worked, she had done a little acting maybe when she was younger. I think she also perhaps was the widow of somebody in the entertainment industry. And so she had this big nice house and was alone.

So she would rent rooms out to actors and musicians and people in the arts. And so one of them was this actor named Johnny Lewis who had been on Sons of Anarchy and the OC and some other things and had been dating Katy Perry. And it's a sad story. I did some homework on him and he had substance abuse problems.

The year leading up to this event, he had been in and out of jail. He had custody battles over a daughter, I think, and domestic abuse charges. So nobody was terribly surprised that he got into the kind of trouble that he did. But so my best friend is a wonderful Mr. Mom. His wife has a great job in the film industry.

And so he's an artist and just a wonderful dad of a son and daughter. And his son, his older child, let's call him Willis. Willis was in fifth grade. And it was the first time that dad was leaving him home alone to run downtown and take care of some art business. And he was pretty nervous and was like, okay, you're good, you got everything you need.

Call me if you have any trouble. And thankfully Willis loved his video games. They think he was playing a game probably called Spore. I don't know anything about video games, but Spore was the first guest. Civilization was the second guest. And World of Warcraft was the third guest. So he's playing one of these games

and his room is closest to the street on the second story. So he's playing a game and is super into it and starts hearing screaming and thinks, oh, hang on, pause the game. This is not in the game, this is across the street. And this screaming is going on, which turns out to be the actor got into some sort of altercation with his landlady,

his 81 year old landlady, and beat her to death. Then Willis called his dad and was like, hey, something really bad's going on. And he said, okay, of course. Like the first time I leave you alone, just stay inside, stay inside, don't answer the door. I'll be there as soon as I can. Meanwhile, I'm speculating a little bit here.

The next thing that happened was the guy, Johnny, got into it with the neighbor. I'm speculating there was a painter up on a ladder at the neighbor's house. And so I'm guessing maybe he saw the painter and was like, oh shoot, that guy saw me. Or somehow he then proceeded to get into it with this painter and was messing with the painter's ladder.

The painter's up on the ladder. The homeowners, which they're calling Alice and Mike to maintain privacy, came out and were like, hey man, back off our painter. And he started getting violent with all three of them. And there was kind of a scuffle. And they managed to shove him off. And the painter and the homeowners got into a door

and the Alice homeowner slammed the door on the guy's arm. And he sort of fell off, which gave them time to like batten the hatches and get inside. Now, I'm not sure if this may have even happened up inside their home. Because then crazily, the next thing that happens is he gets to the roof.

And I'm unclear on whose roof he got to. But there's a few houses in this neighborhood that using far core, I'm sorry, it's a cool terminology, but he got to the roof and at this point, a few houses down another friendly neighbor heard the screaming, opened her window and said, hey, I'm calling 911.

And that's when he began to try to escape via the roof and jumped from house to house. And I'm not sure if it was two or three houses that he cleared, houses in the hills are often crazily close to each other. But near the house that he rented a room in, he tried to leap to the next house and missed and fell three stories through his death in the driveway. Now, fortunately, Willis, the fifth grader,

didn't really take it. All he could do was hear. He was frightened and my friend got home. And of course, the streets full of police and ambulance. And it was just absolutely bananas. It's like worst case scenario for a parent leaving a child home for the first time. It's like beyond.

It was really crazy. And thankfully, nobody got hurt more than the couple victims, the old lady and her cat, otherwise people were generally in pretty good shape. But that was a pretty insane thing to have happen and have reported by your 10 or 11-year-old. Totally. And in a quiet neighborhood where I'm sure not much happens,

I mean, it's any neighborhood that would be terrifying and awful. But thinking you're leaving your kid home in a safe neighborhood, you know? It is. Also, him being on the move is so freaky. It's like because I was going to say, like, wait, which house is Willis's?

Like, if this guy's jumping roof to roof, which direction? Like, the idea that suddenly he's like kind of pseudo on the lamb, ugh, God, it's awful. It's quite upsetting. And one final detail is that the police investigation intimated that he or alleged that he was, quote, high on bath salts. Oh.

Unquote. And definitely, obviously, just a tortured guy who had substance abuse problems. But I did some digging. And the autopsy revealed that he was not under the influence of any substances. Oh, wow. This went down.

And so, you know, it's such a charming neighborhood. And it just goes to show, like, and something that I've learned from listening to your podcast is there's nothing wrong with keeping your eyes and ears open. And if something or someone seems weird or sketchy, in a neighborhood, it's good to just talk to each other about it and maintain, like, hey,

did you see that guy doing that? Or does he seem OK, et cetera? Yeah, keep an eye out. And also, keep those doors and windows locked. That's right. There's no reason. Like, that's all I could think of, too, is, like, if this kid's on the second floor near the front,

what if, like, there's a back kitchen door? But, you know, like, that kind of thing where, especially in LA, too, it's like city living, city living. You don't know. And it doesn't matter where you live, kind of, you know? Yeah. Obviously. And there's, yeah, there's a couple sort of sprees going on

right now of people coming up. Generally, people's houses in the hills, your lot is rarely level. And so the side of your house that faces the street is either the uphill side of your lot, which means it slopes away from the street or it's the downhill side, which means your house is on a hill going up from the street.

And so there's kind of a rash of crimes going on where people are figuring out how to sort of hike or scramble in, not from the street side, but from the backyard side. And often, places are protected by fences and stuff in a way that people do get really lax and leave the doors facing their yard unlocked and stuff. You're literally describing my house right now. It's really giving me out.

But it's true. Like, we never go in our backyard because it's just down at the bottom. And but it's pretty fortified, thankfully. It is. And it's a good reason. LA and, I don't know, modern life, I kind of even get into this in my book.

Like corporations, consumerism wants us to be isolated. They want to keep us away from each other. So for all these reasons that we don't ask questions like, wait a second, who made these Nikes? Where are they? And what are they getting paid, et cetera. And so it's just another great reason to know your neighbors and understand that we can't exist on islands.

We have to maintain a community. Obviously, it's important to have some alone time. But it's also important to know who's on the other side of the fence, especially if some shit's going to go down. Definitely. For real. Once we started having garage beers with our garage open,

we know all our neighbors now and their dogs. So it's, and they know us, which is nice. It is. It's a nice thing. We one time had a neighbor. We were out of town for Thanksgiving in the Hollywood Hills. And a neighbor went into the yard downhill from our yard

and trimmed the shit out of a bunch of their trees without permission because they were also out of town. It was Thanksgiving week. And everybody came home and was like, what? What the hell are you thinking? And it turns out I thankfully hadn't had to learn this previously. But the laws in Los Angeles are very stringent

when it comes to a couple of the trees they basically cut down were old growth, like centerpiece trees. And this thing ended up costing this person six figures, like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to replace these trees. Wow. And I mean, I just was so baffled to say, is your sense of neighborliness so eroded?

You just thought that would be OK? Because I mean, the reason was they have a small deck. And if they trimmed the tops off of the neighbor's trees, they could see a corner of the mountain view. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When people behave like that, I don't

understand how you can take a decision like that without just being aware of how it's going to affect the other person in the geographical marriage you've entered in. Well, we got in a fight with our next door neighbor because our gardener had a gas blower. And our neighbor got really upset about that. I guess you're not supposed to have them in LA,

which I didn't know. But he took his hose and sprayed our gardener in our backyard with it. Wow. I know. So we went out there. And my husband almost got in a fight. I mean, it was the closest I've ever

seen him get into a fist fight before. And then the wife and I made amends. But it was the most pretentious like, what's the word? Disgusting. Disgusting. I mean, who the fuck do you think you are? Like, I'm knocking on our door. Like, I should have gotten punched.

Yeah. Seriously. Isn't that awful? That's really crazy. Yeah. But I think too, I mean, this is that kind of thing where who knows what's going on with people in the privacy of their own homes.

And that idea that if you're maybe whatever, you could be a drinker. You could have a certain kind of mental state that you're in, where if you're kind of spinning and you're like, those trees. And I told them, you can feel that justification build. And then it's just suddenly everyone's out of town. So I'm going to cut these trees down.

I mean, it's so aggressive and so invasive. And kind of like, as if they're saying, people aren't here now so I can get it done. And then I get to go home safe and just write, everything's fine. It's so crazy. I really don't get it. It's the weird, I believe it was a very rich person's

like second home. Oh, yeah. And so I think that also leans into the disposability of like, they don't have to worry about the neighbors because they don't really live there kind of thing, which is all shameful. I mean, fences and gardening and dawns, these are all things that can quickly escalate

into like bloodthirsty. Totally. Yeah, totally. They say good fences make good neighbors. And that's because they're agreed upon by both sides. OK, let's be friendly. And here's our boundary. And let's respect that boundary.

Totally. I mean, that's why I was filled with fear when I moved into the house that I live in now. And I think about eight days after moving in, my dog, Frank, who is kind of like Jack Russell size, I went down and my neighbor has a big kind of downhill field behind their house. And I was standing outside like, where's Frank?

And I look and I can see him in the distance, just taking huge circle laps in the neighbor's backyard. And I was like, Frank, I'm trying to whisper a scream. Frank, get over here. What are you doing? And he was like, he was barking. And he was running in circles. And then he was barking.

And then I was like, OK, well, this is already like all I can hope for. And luckily it turned out to be true. My neighbor, Gail, is a dream neighbor. She is like the loveliest person. She is so kind and considerate and whatever. And she thought it was really funny. Thank God, because it was like, I just kicked off.

Like, I moved it like, we're here now. My dogs are taking over like, what am I doing? Meet Frank. He's now in your living room. It was so embarrassing. Thank goodness, though, because anywhere in this country, again and again, you could just as easily live next to somebody who would get their shotgun out.

Yeah, oh, yeah. And not think twice about it, because Frank was on their property. Horror. Yeah, horror. Yeah, exactly. But here's the thing about Frank. He's so meaty and muscly that I think any bullet

would repel off of his body. And then he would start to chew it, because he eats anything. He's a very strong individual. Will you cap this off with one Nick Offerman, Teen Nick Offerman crime story for us? Yeah, gosh, which one it has? There's a wonderful community theater in Urbana, Illinois, where the University of Illinois is in Champaign, Urbana.

And my friends and I in the theater department were very involved in working at this community theater. It's called the Station Theater, the Celebration Company at the Station Theater is what it's called. And we loved it. It was a really high quality little theater company in an old little train station into which they had built like a black box theater.

So I'm guessing there couldn't have been more than 100 seats in this place. And we would do like assassins, or there was just mount cats, tiny little plays. And it was really fun. And really groovy central Illinois, like hippies doing theater. And so one night, I usually built the sets

for the plays I was in. And so I would always have the keys. Be sort of like the janitorial guy, where late at night everybody would be gone, and I'd be in charge of sweeping or whatever, locking up. So me and a couple friends out behind the train station is a creek called the Boneyard Creek. And we're sitting out by the creek

smoking one hitters of marijuana and cigarettes and just hanging out. And we hear some noises down the creek a little bit, some power tools. And it's maybe, I don't know, I think it was only midnightish. It didn't occur to us, like, why are we hearing a circular saw at midnight? But we were just kind of hanging out.

And a little bit later, I don't know, 15 minutes later, some flashlights were coming along the other side of the creek. And what we're sitting on is a big drainage pipe, maybe three feet in diameter, that crosses the creek like a bridge. So it was just a cool little footbridgey thing to sit on. So that's where we would sit and smoke.

And the flashlights are coming. And my buddy says, oh, it's police. It's cops. And we are paranoid 19-year-olds. And we're like, oh, shit. And this is 1989. So it's a little more serious to get caught, at least in our heads, smoking one hitters.

So we kind of get up and begin to tiptoe away back towards the theater, at which point, of course, the police notice us and say, hey, stop. And we, of course, run, take off running. And we got past the train station, across the empty lot, into the parking lot, at which point, I got tackled by a tiny, incredibly tough woman that might as well have been Holly Hunter.

And she tackled me, sprang to her feet, put her boot on my head, and put her gun on my face. Jesus. And my buddy also had the same thing happen to him, basically. And there was two of them. Everybody got tackled and cuffed and thrown into the cars, taken to the station, which was like half a block.

And at that point, basically, when that shit went down, I was like, hey, hang on a second. We definitely didn't do whatever you think we did. This is not adding up. And they were like, OK, buddy, tell it to the judge. And so they take us to jail. They keep us separate, and they interview us each. And by now, it's 1, 2 in the morning,

and we're pretty freaked out. And we all basically said, no, we're just hanging out smoking cigarettes. None of us even admitted that we were smoking pot. We just were just cool theater kids. Like, I don't know, whatever happened. And so I think eventually, we all gave the same story separately.

And so they decided we were OK. And they told us that a restaurant down the creek had been broken into. And for some reason, they kept an inordinate amount of cash on hand. So the power tools was somebody had broken into this restaurant and stolen like $20,000 in cash. So a major felony had been committed.

And suddenly, here's these three young guys running from the police. And so thankfully, nobody got shot. We all kind of were put back together. And the sun was coming up as we were released into the early Urbana morning. And as we walked down the front walk of the Sheriff's Station, my friend, who goes by Gregor Mortis,

pulled his one-hitter box out of his crotch that he had crotched, kept all the way through the police station. And we were like, are you insane? Because us soft white teenagers, that was like it might as well have been a grenade or something. Yeah. And he was like, man, I just bought this like four days ago.

I'm not going to throw it into the creek. And so we stood and got high in front of the police again to celebrate our victories as young privileged assholes. I mean, easy for me to say, 2020 vision. But I would say that that would have to have been an inside job. Someone at that restaurant knew that they didn't do cash drops or whatever. I mean, just in terms of, that's not

random as someone's driving around with the circular saw going, which restaurant will I roll the dice with? Yeah, exactly. I mean, even knowing what tools to bring and how to work in. This could have been some my cousin Vinny shit. You could have been. I mean, and I still think that, OK, like, yes, the felony was committed.

But the gun thing is still a little much. It's not. It wasn't a violent crime that this person committed. Yeah, it was crazy. I mean, thankfully, I mean, we literally were three theater students. But in my side, I'm very grateful that we weren't. I was pretty scary looking at that age.

Like, you know, I aspired to like a world of black leather jacket from the alley in Chicago and like shaved my head. So maybe that's why the gun was drawn on me, because I looked scary. And I was like, no, I love Oscar Wilde, please. Wow, that is terrific. I'm currently starring in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Please don't do this to me.

Not now. You start doing a monologue just to prove. What is this kid doing? Oh, hey. That's so good. Wow. I mean, what an amazing performance delivery you gave us. Yes.

You gave and gave and then gave even more. Five stars. Five stars. Yeah. That was that. And the other the other sort of longer saga of spending a night in jail, actually, for shoplifting, a Ronnie Millsap cassettes.

Those those taught me my lesson. And that that pretty much, you know, and any consideration I had been giving to a life of crime pretty much ended in Urbana, thankfully. Yeah, good for you. Learned your lesson. Yeah, those cops taught you well, didn't they? They did.

Yeah. Well, if anything ever happens again and you need bail, the murdering out is we've got your back. Yeah, because you are one, Nick. Are you really? Yeah. Especially after that performance. Truly.

It's just wonderful. It was on that night, I might as well have said to that female officer that I would love if she would allow me to both stay sexy and not get murdered. Oh, that was smooth. That was smooth and self. You want to plug anything? I mean, you're a Nick Offerman, you know, like.

I mean, I'm thrilled that my book is going over very well. And I would also just plug, because it's a big show, I feel I'm like, oh, it's out there. But I'm so grateful to be on The Great North. Yeah, The Great North truly is a great show. It's so fun and such good characters. Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, I'm so grateful to be part.

Like the people on it are so funny. And but they are just the coolest, most benevolent hearts, the sort of amount of human rights that they package into a flagrantly like shitting, farting, like last party. But meanwhile, it's actually really progressive. I just, I really admire them. And I'm so grateful that because I sound a certain way,

they're like, no, you're of great value to us. Imagine that. You have to think of everything. And I just sound like a fucking lumberjack. You sound like beef, Tobin, the lumberjack, absolutely. You're that guy. I'll make this thing every time. So there's my plugs.

Love it. Oh, that's very good. Anything you want. Nick Offerman, thank you so much for being a guest, a five star freaking double story, awesome guest. Yes, we appreciate you taking the time out of your intensely packed schedule. We really, it was a big favor.

And I really, really appreciate that you actually did it. I remain an ardent fan. Thank you for having me. Did oh, thank you. Yay. Yay. Nick Offerman, ladies and gentlemen. That's right.

Bye. Bye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? This has been an exactly right production. Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Our associate producer is Alejandra Keck, engineered and mixed by Andrew Epin. Send us your hometowns at myfavoritmurder at gmail.com.

Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at myfavoritmurder and Twitter at myfavoritmurder. For more information about the podcast, live shows, merch, or to join the fan cult, go to myfavoritmurder.com. And please rate, review, and subscribe. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.