My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 203

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

This week’s hometowns include family secrets and a neighborhood predator. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We at Wondery live, breathe and downright obsess over true crime and now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music, Exhibit C. It's truly criminal. Welcome to my favorite murder. This is the mini-soad. Speaking of which, actually, we're going to do it live this Friday, right? Next episode, yeah, on the fan cult. It is this Friday. Yeah. Live, streaming, first time ever. Right. No editing. Right. Our secrets are revealed. That's right. This Friday, the fourth. Yeah, in the fan cult. Yes. Join the fan cult if you want. I think this is going to be like a test run and then maybe see how it goes and go from there.

Yeah, we'll see if we like it and if it works for us personally and how much we just humiliate ourselves without editing. And then if it works, we'll both start playing Halo on the fan cult. Come watch us. Game. Well, do you want to go first? Sure. The subject line of this is old school hometown. Classic. It says, you asked for more hometowns in the classical style. So here, period, you, period, go. Period. Most Minnesotans probably point to Jacob Wetterling as their true crime awakening, which Georgia told beautifully a while back. But for me, it's always been the abduction and murder of Katie Poyrer. In spring of 1999, 19-year-old Katie was working late night at a gas station in her hometown of Moose Lake. A man in Yankees Jersey in a ball cap was

seen on surveillance coming in and speaking to Katie at the counter, then leading her out of the store by the neck. Never to be seen again. Yeah. My family had to drive through Moose Lake on the way to my grandparents and the highway was full of billboards asking for any information on Katie's whereabouts. The one I remember the clearest was Katie in a silver satiny button up with hair pulled back in a scrunchie. Literally could have been any girl in the late 90s. It's been 21 years and I still haven't forgotten it. Luckily, an employee at the subway next door had seen a Ford truck pull up to the station and took notice of the license plate. Oh, thank you. Brilliant. Starting with 557 and ending with a Y. As sketches of the captor and the surveillance video, which got sent

to NASA for detail refinement, went to the 1999 version of Minnesota viral. A coworker of Donald Hutchinson noticed some similarities and remembered him being weird the week of the abduction and called the police less than a month later. Turns out Hutchinson was actually Donald Blom, who had been working under a pseudonym and had a history of abducting women, which at one point landed him on the sex offender registry. He had taken his third wife's last name when they married as a way to escape his background. Red flag. Right. His truck's license plate was 557 HDY and he had property near the gas station. After a thorough investigation, police found bone and tooth fragments in his fire pit. They were Katie's. Blom was convicted of first degree murder in the summer

of 2000. He is appealed, but his wife who originally had provided an alibi in the trial recanted her statement to legislators saying that he was not home the night of the abduction and she believed him to be the killer as he had been abusing her for the majority of their marriage and would often be missing for days. Police have since tried to attack him to other cases of abducted and murdered women in the Minnesota, Wisconsin area. In the early nineties, he was a key suspect in one disappearance under the name Donald Pints, but they have not been able to make anything stick. At least he is forever behind bars. Katie's billboards changed from calls for help to memorials, and that's when my love of true crime began. SSDGM. No name. Wow. What a tragic story.

Yeah. I mean, that unfolding as you're a child and seeing it in billboards and hearing your parents talk about it and teachers and stuff, it's just like it'll sear into your memory for the rest of your life. Yeah. And also, I think that when they said the nineties way of going viral, that thing where you would see something like that, and it would be so shocking and striking because that was the only way they could get word out that this girl was missing and that people, they needed help and they needed people to participate. And God bless that that person who worked at Subway was paying attention and cared enough to write down what they saw and remembered. That person saved so many lives because that guy would have obviously, I believe,

I'm sure he did it before. I'm sure he would have kept doing it. It's incredible. Yeah. It's so good. Yeah. That's a good one. That was a great one. Good job. Good job. Nameless, wonderful email writer. Good job. Good job. This one is called My Uncle Was Arrested For Murder. And I picked these out like a week ago, so I don't remember what they say and it's going to be a surprise to me too. So this is... That's what makes it fun and exciting. Exactly. Hello, all. As soon as I was introduced to your podcast, I knew that I needed to write in to share my story and I'm finally getting around to it. Hashtag quarantine. The story is a bit long, so sorry, but this is something that completely rocked my whole world. Family secrets always sound super cool until they happen

to you slash involve murder. I'm 22 years old and only recently found out about my family's deep and dark secret. Let's rewind to how I found out. Last winter, my older sister and my father were sitting in the living room having a discussion. When I walked into the room, they immediately got quiet and after a few seconds, my sister said, yeah, she definitely doesn't know. Obviously intrigued. I asked who didn't know what and my dad looked at my sister and then back at me and asked if I knew how my aunt, my mom's sister-in-law had died. When I answered saying she was in an accident, my dad nodded and proceeded to ask if I knew what kind of accident. My apparently naive and stupid self-replied car? Because when you grew up being told your aunt died in an accident,

I feel like it's normal to presume it was a car accident. Or am I wrong? Question mark, question mark. No. My dad shook his head no and said that he didn't think I wanted to know how it happened because it was sad. Therefore, my first thought was suicide. When I suggested that option, my dad shook his head no again and said, she was murdered. Your uncle strangled her. This was the first and last time that anyone in my family would talk about the murder with me because I was obviously not going to leave it at that. I did some digging on my own and after a lot of research, I found out that my uncle, all caps, my mother's brother and my aunt were having an argument about leaving him for another man when my uncle got so angry that he beat and strangled her with his

hands. When he, when he, quote, snapped back to reality, he saw my aunt lying on the ground. My uncle was the one who called 911, which is why it was ruled first degree manslaughter instead of murder. He was sentenced to eight to 25 years and was released after eight, which happened to be a few months before I was born. My family retends nothing happened and if I hadn't walked into my dad and sister's conversation that day, then I would have known nothing about this. To this day, my mom does not know that I know and it was implied that I should never bring it up again. I understand wanting to put the past behind you, but I also think that I deserve to know that the same hand that shakes my boyfriend's hand on the holidays and the ones that helped raise me when I

was little were also the sole weapons in a murder. I hope that your family secrets aren't as dark and twisted as mine. Stay sexy and don't get murdered, especially by your uncle. Here's what surprises me or like what I didn't see coming. Yeah. Is that they're still a part of the, they're still in the family. Yeah. And look, we don't know the details. We don't know the context. No judgment. Right. But I was like, oh, that it's like it happened and then, and then move on there. Yeah. They're just, I mean, who knows who knows what the context was. But oh my God, it's that thing you like you can never imagine how a family deals with something like that until you're that family. And I'm sure it's like you have all these, we have all these like, I would never do this and I would always

do this and I would do that. And it's like, okay, well, then that's your brother too that you grew up with. So right. What the fuck. And I feel like when we started this podcast, it was easy to do that because we were so far on the outside. Totally. And the longer we do this and the more people we meet and the more emails we read, it is not that simple. Obviously. Right. That's like such a, that's our learning curve is that kind of thing where this, I think it happens more than people think it does. And I think that those, the complexity of anything like that is like, you just can't say and you, you know, from the outside, we, you can say whatever you want about what you think you would do. You have no clue what we, what you would do if someone, if it,

it was that close to you. It's beyond comprehension until you have to fucking deal with it. And then you have no idea. I also think it's interesting that, uh, I wonder if that person was the youngest or like, did they say? No, but I'm guessing why they would be kind of left out to find out. Because that was, that happened to me in our family all the time, obviously, not to that extent, but to the extent of like, my cousin got divorced and everyone forgot to tell me. And I was in the wedding. Like it wasn't like I didn't know my cousin. It was like very close to me. And then I saw after they broke up, we all, we all saw him. And then I asked him where she was because I, I thought they were still married. And then he, his whole face dropped. It was this dramatic thing.

And I turned to my mom and my aunt, she and I was like, you never tell me anything. Like I had it like almost temper tantrum because I was so embarrassed. And because they would do that all the time. That's permanent information. If you're going to see that person ever again. Yes. Like, but I, maybe they just didn't expect, they didn't expect it, but it is that kind of thing where I think, you know, sometimes that is the coping mechanism, which is just, we don't, we're not going to just, we're not going to talk about it and we keep it a secret as long as we can. Totally. That makes sense. It's also just like hard and awful. Yeah. All right. It wants more hard and awful stuff. I've got one right here for you. My relatives was very similar. My relatives,

and then parentheses, yes, that's plural, are in prison for murder. Hi Karen, Georgia, Steven, and pets. I love your podcast and I wanted to share my family story. I live in a small town of about a thousand people in Alberta, Canada. In 2011, a relative of mine, Miles Nazland, went missing. His wife, Helen suggested to police that he may have died by suicide. Miles was an abuse of alcoholic and they were having financial issues as well. Helen also struggled with depression and had attempted suicide. Things were not going well for Miles and Helen. So the police did consider Miles a missing person. And most people believed that it was suicide. Six years later, an underwater recovery team from the RCMP searched the slough near their farm in the water. They found a large

toolbox and I bet you can guess what was in it. In 2011, Miles and Helen were fixing farm equipment that broke down while Helen was operating it and Miles was very angry. He told Helen that she would quote, pay dearly for damaging the equipment. Miles anger continued that evening when he knocked everything off the kitchen table during dinner, telling Helen quote, this meal was not fit for a dog. That night, Helen decided that she had had enough while he was sleeping. She shot him twice in the back of the head. The next day, Helen and one of their three sons put his body in a toolbox along with some added weights. They welded the box shut and threw it in the water near their house. They threw the guns in the water and burned the mattress and bedding. Helen reported to

police the next day that he was missing. And for six years, Helen and her son got away with it until her son revealed the secret to a friend. Soon after that, Miles's body was found. In October of 2020, Helen pled guilty to manslaughter and her son pled guilty to offering indignity to human remains. She's now serving 18 years in prison while her son is serving three. And that's the story of my criminal relatives. Thanks for reading. Stay sexy and don't tell your friends where you hid the box. Wow, that's fresh. That's some lesson a month ago. Right. Holy crap. That's right. It did. They just, they just went to jail. Yeah. It's more heavy family. Yeah. That's a family. That's a six year family secret. I would imagine. Wow. Six in years that could have continued on. Yeah. If that guy

hadn't gotten high and who told his friends a secret. I mean, I, that would make sense. Like after that amount of time, that first of all, I think that would feel like so much longer than six years. Yeah. And then you're just like, yeah, he's gonna, or it's like, I've known this person for fucking 15 years. They would never tell anyone. And then it's like, you underestimate how freaked out people are going to be by you saying that to them, you know? Oh my God. Like I don't. Yeah. I love my friends. I don't think there's a single one of them. I wouldn't fucking rat on if I found out about that. Oh, I'd rat both of you out. No heartbeat. Just immediately. You're told on us even though we didn't do anything. Just like, have you looked at Stephen Ray Morris for

this? I just think, I really think you should dig up his backyard. Okay. Oh man. Yeah. Okay. This just keeps coming. I mean, truly. This one's called found a box of murder victim remains at work. I just started a new job at a small history museum. The other day, as I was putting some things away in the collections room, I decided to just snoop around a little because I am not yet familiar with the collection. I saw a box on a low shelf simply labeled postmortem miscellaneous. Obviously, this sparked my interest. Having come from working at a 19th century medical history museum, fucking amazing, probably, right? Yeah. God, I expected this box to contain postmortem bisection kits that doctors use to dissect cat cadavers. I lifted up the lid and was immediately

shocked to see some foot bones inside of a decaying sock and shoe, a skull, and some mysterious wet specimens in little jars. I was equally freaked out and intrigued, but not wanting to welcome any bad juju into my life. I shut the lid on the box and went back upstairs to the office to inquire about the body parts I had casually encountered on a Wednesday morning at work. Turns out that my boss is a retired homicide detective and had used these homicide victims' remains as educational tools when he taught forensics to new detectives in the 70s and 80s. Some of these are remains that he literally found on the job. I assume he is authorized to have them now, but honestly, who knows? It was the 70s. Yeah, really? Apparently, he now uses these

remains to increase the scare factor at Halloween-themed events at the museum and local historic cemetery as if the 18th and 19th century cemetery at night isn't creepy enough on its own. Yeah, he is a character. Stay sexy and beware when opening boxes labeled post-mortem miscellaneous, Catherine. Sorry for needing the clarity. Go ahead. Yes. Were the remains from the 1800s? The remains were from pre-70s and 80s, it looks like, and then the cemetery in town is from the 18th and 19th century. Okay. We're just gonna hope, we're just gonna assume and hope that those, that they've been ID'd. Yes. Cases have been cleared. Right. Protocol has been met and shook hands with. These are just John Doe remains and not. Right. Because,

yeah, it makes me think of that story. Remember the story I did where the TV show was shooting at the like carnival and they thought it was a stuffed. Yes, that skeleton had been like throughout the ages had been through different things. Yeah, it was an actual person's body. I mean, one would hope. Yeah. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, HelloFresh has you covered. HelloFresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in the new year. HelloFresh meals are convenient, seasonal and delicious. Stay cozy all winter long with classic comfort foods available weekly. Why stop with just dinner? Now you can enjoy HelloFresh's expanded menu of quick

lunch solutions, weekend brunch, simple side dishes and amazing desserts. Karen, January is gonna be my month for HelloFresh. I am so sick of takeout. I miss cooking so much. I haven't lifted a knife or a pan since like early fall. So I can't wait to get back in the kitchen and HelloFresh makes it so easy and also makes it so that my food tastes good, which is hard to do on my own. It gives you everything, everything you need. So get up to 20 free meals with purchase plus free shipping on your first box at hellofresh.ca slash murder20 with code murder20. That's up to 20 free meals plus free shipping on your first box when you go to hellofresh.ca slash murder20 and use code murder20. Goodbye. Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wunderies

podcast against the odds. In our next season, three masked men hijack a school bus full of children in the sleepy farm town of Chowchilla, California. They bury the children and their bus driver deep underground, planning to hold them for ransom. Local police and the FBI marshal a search effort, but the trail quickly runs dry. As the air supply for the trapped children dwindles, a pair of unlikely heroes emerges. Follow against the odds wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. This, I love this one. I'm not going to read you the subject line. Okay, little racket. Dear MFM, I was nine years old in 1984 when Stranger Danger was at an all time high in my

small Canadian suburb. Have all mine been Canadians? Yeah. Nice. Canada. Okay. It wasn't just paranoia. The local paper had multiple stories of young girls being approached by a creepy teenager trying to lure them off the playground and nearby schools. Despite many descriptions given to the police, they couldn't find the guy. One day, my friend Natalie and I were walking home for lunch because, yes, in 1984, even a roaming neighborhood predator wasn't enough motivation for our parents to pick us up from school. Oh, that is just classic. It's classic. Very much the truth. I mean, they talk about how the Stranger Danger thing said in this paranoia and stuff, but I think it was needed. Yeah. I don't know if it was an overreaction.

It's almost like Stranger Danger because we're still going to let you run free. So make sure you don't talk to strangers because you're not going to have any protection otherwise. Yeah, because there will be no adult around. So you're on your own kind of negotiating this situation. The only weapon you have is to not talk to that person you don't know. That's it. Oh, and I'm surprised there weren't posters that just said, run, run, run away. Don't forget to run. It's okay to run away. Okay, so that was one long sentence. So basically, I'll read the beginning without that funny parenthetical. One day, my friend Natalie and I were walking home for lunch when we saw a teenage boy approaching us through a heavily

treed path up ahead. Immediately, Natalie grabbed my arm and pointed. This guy's zipper was down and his penis was sticking right out. Frozen with shock, we stopped in our tracks on the path. He walked straight up to us and said, you like this? You want to touch it? 36, and this is in parentheses, 36 years later, and I will never forget those creepy words. With all the courage I could muster, I quietly said, no, that's gross. He stared down at us for a second and then just walked away. My heart was pounding. I couldn't believe I'd come face to face with a guy who had been eluding local police for weeks. But here's the thing. This dick had flashed the wrong girls. Turns out, he lived directly across the street from Natalie. Holy shit. She knew his name

and his address. We both ran home to our moms and the cops were at the pervs house before we finished eating lunch. Yes. We even got driven back to school in a police car. Because yes, in 1984, even an attempted sexual assault wasn't an excuse to stay home. The best part was reading about his arrest in the local paper where the police thanked, quote, two brave fourth grade girls for his capture, which made us feel extra badass. Stay sexy and keep it in your pants, Jay. Amazing. Amazing. Great job. Finally, something uplifting from Canada. Oh, for once. Jesus, Canada. Two brave fourth grade girls. I remember when I was in like kindergarten, I was super like around that age and I was walking home from school alone as you do

when you're five because I was a latchkey kid. God, was I that young? Okay. And there was five or six. Yeah. Yeah. There were some teenage, what looked like to me, teenage boys hanging out in our little cul-de-sac, you know, parking lot. And I'm sure they weren't teenagers, but I'm sure they were just fucking with this little five-year-old and they go, hey, little girl wants some candy, you know, like the classic. And I yelled no and ran to my house, which where they could see where I lived, but then I was alone all day, whatever. But I was so proud of myself because I was, I had, you know, dare was a big thing. So proud of myself. You said no to their candy and their drugs. No. Yeah, that's right. Now I'm going to be alone in this house if you need anything else.

Oh, knock right on this door over here. I'll be watching cartoons. All right. Badass war grandma and a spy question mark. Howdy. I've been a big fan for a while, and you two have really been getting me through Zoom lectures and accompanying grievances. Very sexy of you. This is a badass grandma story. I know you love those. My grandma Elsa was born in 1933 in Manila, Philippines. She grew up in a small village outside of the city during World War II with her younger siblings and lots of cousins. When Japan invaded, Elsa and her family had to go into hiding to avoid being arrested by Japanese soldiers. She told me about how she at eight years old had to do all sorts of insane things to not get caught. She and her brothers hid in the mangroves using a read as

a snorkel for over six hours. Oh, shit. Pretended to be dead on the side of the road. Illegally bred tilapia in a well. And then front of the suit says a gross white fish. A gross white fish. And even had to climb over a wall of dead bodies on more than one occasion. At fucking eight years old. Oh my God. Everyone she was hiding with had nicknames too, so as not to alert the Japanese to their identities or location. This would explain my aunt named Ding Dong and her husband Ping Ping. Isn't that amazing? Like you just call them that your whole lives and then you realize that they're fucking war heroes. Yeah. The most unsettling thing she ever told me was that she quote could kill and eat a horse if the moment ever arose. Can you imagine your grandma telling

you that like night night? Night night, Emma. Her name's Emma. Just like an eight year old girl snapping a horse's neck. Oh my God. And then like and then yeah. Jesus. First of all, that goes against everything that's in a little girl. Totally. To kill a horse. I love horses. Oh really? Because I and your grandma and I can fucking kill and eat a horse if I wanted to. I used to eat, I used to eat horses just for fun on the weekends. That's how, that's what a badass I was. Oh my God. Elsa also told me about the horrible things she saw during the war, including watching her neighbors get taken by the baton death march to be killed. Oh, that's B-A-T-A-A-N. If anyone's into the baton death march, yeah. If this wasn't a crazy enough experience for everyone in the

Philippines at the time, apparently Elsa's uncle was a spy. Then it says, of course he was. This crazy bastard hit a radio in the wall of a nunnery that the family was hiding in to send secret codes to Portugal and England in hopes of stopping the Japanese invasion. I wasn't told a lot about this, but I guess he had a pretty big role because not soon after my grandma and her siblings found the radio, the war was over. Whoa. Besides her horrible time growing up during a war and seeing some pretty gruesome things, Elsa turned out to be a total badass, which is like, what else are you going to fucking be? Yeah, hell yeah, she was. She eventually got married and fled to England with her six kids, including my dad. She taught them all of her war secrets and some less than lethal

habits like how to line a suitcase so TSA can't see what you have hidden in your suitcase. Gather around kids. Mom's got secrets. Is it for strange soils or plants that you want to take to Hawaii? Get over here. I'll show you how to get. Oh, you want to bring a lizard to your friends that you're going to visit and here you go. Next to Ireland? Do it. Some of her other escapades include building a plane with her husband, establishing a nightclub in Beijing under my family's name, founding an art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila and visiting every continent. Yes, all of them. Whoa. She lives a quieter life now in southern England, working on a book about her time in the war. We'll see if she ever publishes it. Can we start a fucking exactly right publishing

company right now? Yes, this is it. The imprint begins today. Stay sexy and don't eat a horse in wartime, Emma, from Massachusetts. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I'm obsessed with using a reed as a snorkel. That's cartoon level shit. Oh my God. That's just like holy shit. And they, yeah, they just had to. They had to do what they had to do. Totally. They had to wring that horse's neck. They had to. They had to survive a fucking war in their hometown and they fucking did it. It's just, oh my God. As a kid. As children. It's crazy. Elsa. Elsa. Massive high five. What's funny is that Emma says that she's 20. She just gave her age and so that means that Elsa could be like 60. She could be like, we could be like drinking buddies with her probably. Wait. Sorry.

I don't think so because what war? I assumed it was World War II. Right. No, that doesn't make any sense. Oh, 1933. No, you're right. They're right. Mathematically, that doesn't work. It wouldn't work. But we can still have a drink with her. I mean, we can still have fun. Obviously. The idea too that she went through such horrible things and then went on to be like, oh, now I'm going to live the most nuts life. Like, I really want to talk about the nightclub. Yeah. The night club and like basically a whole building a plane. They built a plane. Did they fly the plane? I don't know. And was it just for Instagram selfies? They just rented it out to fucking influencers. Oh, you want to look rich? Come over to Elsa's. She'll let you, she'll let you sit back there

pretend you're a Kardashian. Oh my God. So many questions. Emma, write us more about Elsa or send a picture or something. Tell Elsa to write that book. Get someone, get a, get a stenographer in their ASAP. Get all those good stories down. What's that thing we do ads for? Story worth? Fucking sign your, from a good murder. Ever been a story worth integration needed to happen. Let us know. We probably get everyone. That would be it. Yes. Get the president of story worth to Elsa's house yesterday. We need to know Christ's sake. Oh my God. Send us your fucking amazing stories. We can't wait. Stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want to cookie?