My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 267

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

This week’s hometowns include someone talking too much on a plane and a fun little bomb story. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is exactly right. We at Wondery live, breathe, and downright obsess over true crime. And now we're launching the ultimate true crime fan experience, Exhibit C. Join now by following Wondery, Exhibit C, on Facebook and listen to true crime on Wondery and Amazon Music. Exhibit C, it's truly criminal. Hello. Hello.

What? And welcome to my favorite murder. This is the mini so. Hey, that's Karen Kilgarov. You know that. Hey. Hey. What's up?

What's up? You want to go first or you want me to go first? Would you? How do you feel? Let me look at my last one because I would like to end on a banger, you know. Sure. My last one is a children drinking story. What about you?

Then I'm going to go first. Great. Because mine's a heartfelt last one. Great. We want a heartfelt last one always. No, no. Oh. Oh.

I mean it like heartfelt, then a nice. Okay. To end on an up note. It's been six years. Is this what we should have done in the meeting before this record? Like before. You mean six years ago. Figured out what the format was of our fucking podcast.

My instinct and let's debate this out now is to end on comedy. Okay. Because right? Yes. Then it's like heartfelt might get a little teary eyed. But then. Let's just remember the drinking children of America. Right.

So you go first. Glad we finally figured that out. Yeah. Now we know our own style. Right. Let's quit. Let's quit now. Okay.

This start. This title of this is Amish hometown. Okay. Great. Hey, a funny gals who I love to listen to while I drink wine and do whatever the fuck I do. Wonderful. Thank you.

Wonderful. And then there's a comment like that was the hello. I just first wanted to say y'all's podcast makes my day often. I'm an emergency department nurse. Oh, and lately my job has been hell between COVID awaiting room with an eight hour wait. Yeah. This is this is the piece. This is what should this is on the news.

Yeah. If they're if they're going to show you a little protest of people who don't like masks or don't like vaccines, then the next clip should be nurses who work in emergency rooms. Talking to you about how a person with a appendicitis is fucked. Right. Because of your, your freedom. Your stance on something that doesn't actually hold water. That actually is, but you have seven other vaccines.

Right. Every year. Anyway. Anyway, let's get back to this evening. A waiting room with an eight hour wait. And then in parentheses it says, and sometimes I have to be that nurse out there telling you that you're sick as hell, but I have no rooms for you. Out of parentheses, traumas and just all other emergency stuff.

I listened to you after I get off either on my drive home or while I soak in a bath with a glass of wine while my fiance looks at me weirdly for relaxing to murder. Anyways. Amen. Right. Anyways, I just wanted to tell y'all about a story I had while I was a teenager and it still haunts me. One night I was woken up to a man screaming outside my screen window.

And then in parentheses it says, I grew up in Ohio where you fell asleep to your windows open in the summer with the crickets in the background. I sprung up thinking, you're screaming like that. Just the crickets. Night night. Night night. Man screaming. I sprung up thinking it was my stepdad.

I leaned against the window and heard this man begging for his life. And then I heard a muffled gunshot. Everything went silent. I began to have a panic attack in my parents' room yelling someone just got shot outside. So my parents got up and my stepdad went outside with a gun and said it was probably the TV in their room that I heard and to go back to sleep. The next day my sweet mom who believed everything I said, including telling her I heard someone die, drove me around our property, a 10 acre farm, to look for evidence.

We talked to our Amish neighbors and the husband came out. When we said what happened, he said, quote, you leave right now and never ask us about that again. What? And then in parentheses it says, you should also know that our Labrador that loved everyone would growl at him. Three days later they found a body in the ditch about two miles down the road from us. It was a man who used to be Amish and no longer was, who was also in the drug trade. He died from a single gunshot wound to the head.

I swear to this day, I heard that man die. Don't mess with the Amish, drugs, and believe her murdering no kids when they say they heard a gunshot. E. Holy shit. I mean, just right now for fairness, I would like to say that the Amish are almost entirely known for their peace. Well, they're not listening so we can say anything we want to defend them. Have we said that? I feel like in the past we've said that before where it's like it doesn't matter if you talk shit on the Amish. Not that I am or would, I don't know anything about them.

But E. wants to. Amish people, send us your stories about how it was in the Amish community. If you're Amish and you're on Rumsbreak this year, please email us while you can before you go back in. Quick. Okay, this is called old wives tales that traumatized me as a kid. Hi, MFM friends. In Minnesota 262, Georgia asked for bad advice from parents that we trusted and then never trusted again. Well, here goes my top three out of so many.

Number three, when I was around six, my mom invented a clever tale to stop me from biting my nails. She said that it was connected to her health. And every time I did it, I made her sick. Oh, my God. Never really believed it and kept on biting them behind her back until she was sent to the hospital due to gallbladder stones. While recovering, she had the all caps audacity to tell me I told you so. Oh, my God. You did this to me.

You did this to me. To say that I felt guilty as fuck that I sent my mom to the hospital was an understatement. I remember getting a little bit older slash wiser and confronting her about it. All she did was laugh and said, well, it worked, didn't it? Cut to her long luxurious nails. All right, you're welcome. And then it says, and I guess my issues started from there. I mean, for sure.

Number two, the older generations also have an assumption that when items around the house go missing and reappear, this is caused by duendis. That's a, they spelled it out for me. Thank you. Or playful fairies. Well, machetes, these little creatures are believed to be mostly harmless, aside from the type that my grandma made up that takes children from their beds when they become too disobedient and traps them in their kingdom forever.

What the fuck with this family? I guess it's our version of the boogeyman, but seriously, grandma, what the fuck? And my top number one, stay out of the forest, Philippine edition. We have our own version of this where young ladies are often forbidden to go into the woods alone. Was it serial killers or sinkholes? Nope. Legend has it that there's a top half horse, bottom half human like creature, like a centaur, but the opposite.

It's called tic-bing-lang that, I hope I didn't totally screw that up, that lives in the trees and likes to trap females in the woods. No. And that the only way to escape its trance is to, are you ready? Take off your top and turn it inside out, which quote, confuses them and makes them not recognize you anymore. Once you've confused them, you can successfully find your way out of the forest. I was told this as a kid and I fully believed it and I think my relatives truly believed it as well. Now as an adult, I 100% bet you it was a tale made up by a creepy old dude

to convince his town's young girls to flash him. That's right. I obviously love my mom and would do anything for her, but I'm glad I'm old enough to not believe her stories anymore. Shout out to all my fellow Filipino murderinos dealing with supernatural monsters, tall tales, and good versus bad fairies while simultaneously being raised as a Catholic is truly confusing. Yeah. Stay sexy.

Stay sexy and maybe don't traumatize your kid that much. Lots of love, Michelle. Oh, Michelle. What a peek into the Filipino lifestyle. That's fascinating. I know that you have really good desserts. Our old security guard, when I worked at the Gap, his name was Fred and he was Filipino and he would bring in these amazing desserts his wife would make. Oh my God.

We were just like, oh, you're so nice. But the idea of a reverse centaur is like, at first I was like, with the legs, the front legs of a horse are too long for a man's legs. So they stand up on his back human legs and walk around with his horse front hooves. Tottering. It'd be tottering because horses are large and heavy top. Yeah, it would be like. Top heavy.

Sometimes, yeah, exactly like a weight lifter that's way too worked out on top and never does leg day. Yeah. Right. And then he like his front, his legs, he'd always have to be like putting his hooves on his hips just so he could get them. So they're not dangling between his knees. Hey, you meddling kids always. Take your shirt off and turn it inside out. They're all going to get you.

Also, they're in trees. So how is it? Horse hooves, manhooded thing climbing into a tree. Horses can't climb trees. Men can't do it that great, you know. What are we talking about here? If you were raised with a Filipino mom and you have legendary stories on par with this, we want to hear everyone. There's nothing better than that kind of like, I think, that kind of like when you're second, first generation.

Yeah. And your mom is from a different country and she's just like, hey, look, I just did what I had to do to get by. Supernatural stories. Do it. Tell us. My grandfather actually convinced my sister that he grew up like seeing fairies where he grew up in Ireland. That's a big thing, fairies specifically. Yes.

They're like all around and it's basically like kids see them all the time. They bite you? Why do I feel like they bite you? You're thinking of fleas and mosquitoes. Oh, right. I grew up in the suburbs where we only had fleas and mosquitoes. Okay, wait. I won't read you the subject line of this.

It just starts high all. My last pre-pandemic, oh, this is weird. This keeps happening to you and I. Right. My last pre-pandemic international flight was when I was headed back from visiting my fiance's extended family in the Philippines. No. Yes. Wild.

That's, yep. With a layover in Taiwan. The first short flight went off without a hitch, but it was already pretty late by the time I got to Taiwan and I was getting tired. I boarded my second flight, sat in my window seat and waited for my row to fill in. As more and more people boarded the plane, no one came to sit down next to me, score on a long late night flight. However, just when I thought I was in the clear, a mid-40s guy sat down in the aisle seat of my row and clicked his belt. It genuinely gave me that this isn't my assigned seat, but it's open next to this girl sitting alone vibes. He introduced himself and started making small talk.

Immediately upon getting a reply from me, this guy started babbling away. I could tell that he really just wanted someone to talk to you, so I let him give me a spiel. It's very generous. He told me all about this startup he was running and how his life's goal is to cure all disease and prevent aging. Ambitious. God. Ambitious. Our plane took off and they came around to serve us dinner.

Well, he still went on and on about his life's work. Right? Just be like, sir, please give me a break. As we finished our food and he could see that I was ready to get some sleep, he suddenly said, anyway, I'm probably going to get arrested when we land, so just warning you in advance. What? I think you could tell just by the look on my face that this was the story I really wanted to hear all along. He explained that he and his wife were separated.

They had a four-year-old daughter and the wife had primary custody. He was really upset because of how hard it is for men to typically get custody. And he felt that he was a great father who could provide everything that his daughter needed. His wife had agreed he could take their daughter to Vancouver for vacation, but instead of listening to the court and sticking to the mandated visitation, he took things into his own hands and flew with her to Indonesia. Holy shit. He claimed that he went there to meet up with his wife's parents to try and convince them to tell their daughter to change the custody agreement,

but they weren't having it considering he abducted her and flew her to the other side of the world. Yeah, dude. His wife reported their daughter missing and press conferences were held by the police regarding the situation. They urged him to turn himself in at the Canadian Embassy, and eventually he decided it would just be better to fly back to Canada and turn himself in there. I was totally shocked and slightly terrified, so I just replied, Well, sorry to hear about that. Wait, where's his daughter? Where's the kid?

I don't know. Oh my god. This might be like they might have brought her back already, maybe? Or left her with the parents, her parents. So she says. So I replied, well, sorry to hear about that, and immediately pretended to sleep. Just totally sleep. Just that's how you get out of bad conversations.

Sleep. Snore. I did actually fall asleep for a little bit, but really kept pretending until I saw that he was no longer awake so I could watch some movies. We landed, he said goodbye and got off. I didn't see him at the gate or any police, so I figured he was continuing on to Canada on his own and would be arrested there. In the coming days, you better believe that I checked every local Canadian news outlet to see if any articles were written about his arrest, and when bingo, he was in fact arrested upon landing in Canada the next day. Stay sexy and don't abduct your daughter thinking it's going to get you a better custody arrangement, Julie.

How delusional do you have to be to say, I'm a great father, I should have better custody? Why don't men get more custody and then be like, here's the solution? A terrible idea. Illegal thing. Yes, exactly. Illegal, terrible, dangerous. Kind of slightly frightening. Yeah.

Bizarre. Yeah. No. It wasn't good problem-solving, you know. At least. And also, how about just part number two, much smaller, equally important, stop talking to people on planes. They don't want to talk to you. Exactly.

Okay. All right. I'm not going to read you the subject line. Hello, all right. I'm not the greatest writer, but whenever I bring up this story, I get lots of drop jaws and follow-up questions. So I thought you two might want to hear it. Kind of story we want. Yes.

The story begins many moons ago with myself and my best friend at the age of about 10. My family was going beach camping for a week during summer vacation. And of course, she came with me. Our campsite was on the bluff overlooking the beach. My mom reluctantly agreed to let my friend and I go down to the water alone, only if we stayed in front of our campsite so she could see us. We did as we were told, and we're happily running around the beach when we stumbled upon a very large metal canister-looking thing. On the canister was an array of warning labels saying various things like, do not touch, call authorities immediately if found, all caps warning, all caps danger, and even had a skull and crossbones.

Oh, there was also a shit ton of gross muscles growing on the thing, which I'm assuming then it had been in the ocean for a while. My friend and I were going through a big animal lover phase at the time. Truth be told, I still am. And we agreed that with all the warning labels on it, there's no way we can allow it to be in the ocean with the beloved sea creatures. Children. So we had the bright idea to attempt to take the thing back to camp and safely away from all the dolphins and whales. Before we touched it, we were so grossed out by all the muscles that were on it that we grabbed some rocks and started chucking them at the canister, trying to break off as many as we could.

This is children's logic. It's like, yes, we understand skull and crossbones is bad, so let's just knock off some of these muscles with a rock. That's right. Children are dumb. Once we got some off, we tried to lift it up, each of us grabbing one end, but it was super fucking heavy. We decided to roll it onto a beach towel and began the trek across the sand and up the seven or so flights of stairs up the bluffs. Once we made it to the top of the stairs, we had to drag it on pavement back to our campsite. That's when we realized we had ripped a large hole in my grandma's beach towel.

We were more concerned with getting in trouble for ruining a perfectly good beach towel than bringing up this mystery canister with warning labels all over it. So we tried to sneakily throw the beach towel under the RV out of sight. My grandmother saw us acting odd and asked us what we were up to. I'm a horrible liar, so I basically just confessed on the spot. To my surprise, she glossed over the beach towel and asked us to see the canister we were talking about. When we showed her, she just told us to all caps and get away from that thing. And she promptly walked over to the camp host to tell them what we had discovered. She came over and seemed equally as horrified as my grandma.

She moved the canister to an empty campsite and put caution tape all around the site. My friend and I still had no idea what was happening. That's when the bomb squad pulled up. Two men who were dressed in bomb squad attire that resembled astronauts ran down to the beach with a large gray trash can. They filled it with sand and carried it back up. With the utmost care they looked at the canister literally moving in slow motion. They placed it in the trash can and packed even more sand gently on top. Then they loaded it onto a special heavy duty looking van.

Before they left, one of the men asked who had found it and the camp host pointed to my friend and I. He walked over and got down on one knee, I love a Lewis, and sternly said that we were the luckiest little girls ever. Apparently what we had found was actually a military flare, which is basically a bomb that was likely dropped from a helicopter during practice from the marine base nearby. Oh shit. For some reason the flare malfunctioned and didn't detonate when it dropped into the ocean like it was supposed to. He said that if it would have gone off we would have been disintegrated along with anybody nearby and all that would be left of us would have been a cloud of pink dust. Obviously we were horrified and got into huge trouble. By the end of the day my mother and grandmother said they were actually happy that we were the kids who found it instead of my brother and boy cousins.

Because they likely would have been even more dumb than us and pulled the tab on the canister. Oh shit. So yeah, after throwing rocks at it, dragging it up many flights of stairs and across pavement, the thing somehow didn't go off and we lived on to do more dumb shit together. Thanks for reading my fun little bomb story, no name. I fucking love that fun little bomb story. Ten year olds. Ten year olds. I feel like that's roughly the safest age. You're dumb but you still like, it's like they didn't take the canister right off or they didn't pull the tab or whatever.

God damn it. Like the ways you, I mean the stories of almost killing yourself as a kid are just vast and we need you to send more of them in. And they make you believe in the almighty Christ because. That's what I was going to say just now. Right? Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled, Hello Fresh has you covered. Hello Fresh makes home cooking easy and affordable so you can stay on track and on budget in the new year.

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Goodbye. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candice DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily, I share a quick 10-minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. I have decades of experience as a psychiatric nurse, FBI agent and criminal profiler. On Killer Psyche Daily, I'll give you insight into cases like Ryan Grantham and the newly arrested Stockton serial killer. I'll also bring on expert guests to dive deeper into the details, share what it's like to work with a behavioral assessment unit at Quantico, answer some killer trivia and even host virtual Q&As where I'll answer your burning questions. Hey Prime members, listen to the Amazon Music Exclusive Podcast Killer Psyche Daily in the Amazon Music app. Download the app today. The subject line is, my dad was a Black World War II pilot too.

Oh, hi team. I was listening to your episode on Bessie Coleman and when Karen mentioned all of the Black aviators people haven't heard of, I thought I'd share the story of my dad with y'all. Walter Robinson, a Black man, had graduated from the University of Minnesota with honors and was one of the top graduates in his aviation program when World War II broke out. He wanted to fly planes for the Allied forces, but at that time, however, Black men could certainly join the military, but they'd be shooting a gun on the front lines, not flying airplanes. If he wanted to fight for the United States, he'd have to give up his dream of flying. Walter was kind of a badass and really wanted to fly, so he applied for Canadian and British citizenship. Oh, yes, because he's like, I'm doing this. I don't care. Because both of those countries were letting Black aviators serve. Luckily for me, the US government finally opened the Army Air Corps, the precursor to the Air Force, to Black men in 1941, and he didn't need to leave. He fought other Black aviators at the University of Minnesota until the end of the war and was even featured in an issue of the Saturday evening post.

Whoa. Yeah, that's pretty legendary. His career ended when he was given the wrong parachute. He jumped out of a plane and when the parachute didn't hold his weight, he free fell to the ground and broke his hip. Oh my God. But lived. Yeah, thank God. Yeah, thank God. When I was young, he would always remind me to pack my own parachute, which I thought was an amazing metaphor for being prepared in life or something.

But he meant it literally. It is a beautiful saying that he's like, no. He's like, no, seriously. There are other stories I could tell like the time my brother had a seizure while driving through downtown Minneapolis or when I found a poisonous spider in my bedroom. But honestly, this felt more important. Yes, you're correct. Anyway, thanks for your podcast, which got me through a divorce, a career change, my mom's cancer treatments. And then in parentheses, it says she's clear.

Yay. And of course, COVID. Stay sexy and pack your own parachute, Gina. I love that. Isn't that wonderful? Oh my God. Pack your own parachute. Pack your own parachute.

Walter Robinson quote him as saying, pack your own parachute. Literally. All right, let's end it on a drunk kid. Hard-warbing drunk kid. Yeah. This is called teacher children when they're young. After listening to today's hometowns, I decided it's time to share a story from my life as a child of the 60s and 70s. My parents love to drink.

Hell, yes. Love that. Matter of fact, we have a photo of my mom from 1969. She was seven months pregnant with my sister and holding a Manhattan in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Oh, yes. It was all the good old days when doctors recommended that women should smoke to keep their weight down. Yeah. But I digress.

One summer evening when I was 12, my parents were on the patio enjoying their nightly drinks. Their five kids were either running around the yard, sitting on the patio, or for my older sister and me in the house trying to get away from everyone. My mom came inside for a refill and seeing my sister and me in the kitchen decided it was time to teach us how to mix a gin and tonic. It was the seven news after all. She was a great teacher and soon we could mix her drink and serve it to her on the patio in just minutes. My sister Elise was 17 and soon realized that we had time to make a gin and tonic, drink it, and then quickly make another one to bring to our mother. Can I just pause it here to say those early drinking days when you drink stuff like gin because it's just what's available. I'm telling you youngsters.

I'm sorry. Don't do this and don't do that. Really, don't drink gin. Don't drink gin. It is a headache and it tastes like hairspray and it is the worst headache waiting to happen. But you know, don't drink tonic either. It's just sugar so you're going to have even worse headache than that. Right. Also, but it tastes like batteries were soaking in it.

Yeah. Like it's not like a... Every once in a while I'd see tonic in the refrigerator and be like, I'm going to have a glass of that. No. Thinking it was like seven up and it is not. I will say I do like a gin and tonic every once in a while, like on a summer afternoon with nice lime. But like I use good gin. You can't use shitty gin.

Right. That's like... And would you agree that you start with a gin and tonic and then after maybe two you go, I need to transition into something better? Yes. You can't drink more than two. Yeah. And that's been our PSA. About which we're not sure.

But once again, the messages don't live like we have. Yes, that's right. Yeah. We did that almost every time mom needed a refill, which was often. She never caught on and we enjoyed being her bartenders for years. Fast forward to my mom's 80th birthday. While reminiscing with her, Elise and I finally shared how we made her gin and tonics. One for us, one for her.

She was furious. Let me clarify. My mom was mildly upset that we were drinking, but livid that we were drinking her gin. Priorities, right? We smoothed things over and promised that for her 81st birthday, we would give her a bottle of gin. Later that day, we heard mom quietly muse. I wondered why it took you too so long to mix my drink. Thank you for your podcast and for sharing our hometown stories.

Stay sexy and don't teach your child how to mix a gin and tonic. Cheryl. It's so legendary and it is like, yeah, good gin is expensive. Yeah. She was like, God damn it. Well, didn't you mix Manhattan's for your parents? No, because Manhattan's are like, there's a whole thing to it and my parents weren't going to let us screw that up at all. It's adult time is what they would always say.

Like go watch TV. Yeah. They had a thing though. I think I've told you about this called the mother that it was like a silver, you know, canister that they would keep in the freezer. And that was the base of the Manhattan that they would use to mix all Manhattan. So you always kept some in the mother and then you kept mixing it out of there so that I don't know. There's something about that that whatever. But but there's legendary stories of like cousins and older kids that would come over and be like, and my dad would be like, hey, you want a man.

They'd be like, oh, yeah, sure. You know, like this will be fun and they would just get so trashed. Yeah. So so shit face. You will get shit faced on a Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah. And that's our that's our warning to you and our tale to tell.

Yeah. That's the wisdom we have to impart. Ask A.M.A. A.U.A. about liquor. Write us your stories. And then the fan cult. There's an extra mini from each of us if you feel like it. And thank you for being our friends. Yes, we really enjoy being friends with you.

And thank you for sharing your emails with us because they're almost consistently all hilarious like this batch. Yeah. Really a plus work everybody. Yep. Oh, also stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie?

This has been an exactly right production. Our producer is Hannah Kyle Crichton. Associate producer Alejandra Keck. Engineer and mixer Steven. Ray Morris. Researchers J. Elias and Haley Gray. Send us your hometowns and your fucking heres at myfavoritmurderatgmail.com. And follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and Twitter at My Fave Murder.

And for more information about this podcast, our live shows, merch, or to join the fan cult, go to myfavoritmurder.com. And don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.