My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 284

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

This week’s hometowns include a mom named Lorraine and baby teeth.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. Hello. Hello. And welcome to my favorite murder, The Mini-Sode. The Mini-Sode, that's being videoed for the fan cult. If you are part of the fan cult, you can see what we're doing. You can see why the staccato style of speaking makes perfect sense right now. It does. This is how we always talk. You've just never known it because you don't get to normally see it. We're doing kind of like 80s music video hand gestures. A lot of us,

almost cheerleader-ish. It's definitely like a Vogue-y type of thing. Oh yeah. Want me to start? Sure. Okay. I'm not going to read you the title. What's good, MFM crew? You're young. You asked for found drug stories a few Mini-Sodes ago and I've got a good one for you. Oh, awesome. I'm 26 and still living with my parents as I pursue my master's in illustration. I worked from home over the course of the pandemic and rarely left the house. Hmm. So when my mom asked if I'd like to get groceries with her, I don't hesitate at the chance to have a change in scenery. We live in a small town in Georgia where your grocery store options are Walmart and the other Walmart. I follow her into the bread aisle and my mom starts

reaching for a loaf when she kicks something with her foot. Ooh, what's this? She exclaims as she reaches for the object on the floor. As she stands up straight, I see that she is holding a small, tightly sealed baggie full of a white substance in her hands. Oh, now I am the most vanilla way for looking bitch on the street and I have never seen Coke in my whole life. But as I saw what my dear sweet mother was holding, my inner murdering took over as my brain screamed, cocaine. Before I could say anything, I slapped the bag out of her hand and kicked it under the shelf. My mom looked a little hurt with me, but I grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her out of the aisle as people started to stare at us. But what was that? Why are you being that way? She said loudly.

Mom, that was straight up an eight ball of cocaine. Hush, I hissed at her. We finished our shopping and headed home for my mom to proudly tell my dad she had seen cocaine for the first time as she put the groceries away. The cops never came knocking, so I guess slapping my mom's hand was the right move. Stay sexy and don't let your mom pick up drugs at Walmart, Kara. Cocaine. Cocaine. Hush. Hush, it's cocaine. See, that's kind of genius because that's the best possible thing you could

have done. It's just like, do not get involved. Yeah. I'd say on the way out, tell a worker where it was so that a kid isn't the next person to find it otherwise, and then keep walking. Y'all just stick around. Like, it's someone else's problem at this point. You could also walk around and finally chill us looking cashier and then just be like, we're pretty sure we found a bag of coke and a bread aisle. Hey, man, you look cool. Hey, man, you seem chill, but also that you have experience with white drugs. Okay, my subject line is, in memoriam, murdering a grandma.

My beloved and badass grandma, Eleanor, recently died and my mom won't let me tell the story at her memorial service, so I'm telling it here. This is the place to tell inappropriate fucking memorial stories, guys. And these are the people. We will sit in black clothing with, you know, nets across our face and our hands crossed in our laps and listen politely while you spill it. Oh, that kind of makes me feel proud is like this is totally, we have created a safe space to tell inappropriate memorial stories that would be told at people's memorials. Yes.

That's lovely. That the rest of the family is like, let's not talk about that. Say that for your podcast friends. That's right. Hush. Hush. Members of your family that secretly already like the podcast you like and they will hear it too. That's right.

That's how you'll know they're cool. Yeah. When my mom was 14, her family lived on a large lot with a second smaller house that they rented out. In between tenants, my grandpa placed a classified ad in the paper and a family, husband, Jerry, wife, two kids moved in. Jerry was pretty friendly with the neighbors dropping by to talk at the front door. Parentheses, which grandma found annoying, hanging out at the house of the local police officer and going out of his way to make friends with the officer's dog.

He paid my mom 25 cents an hour to babysit his kids on several occasions and would walk her home afterwards. Grandma put a stop to the babysitting eventually as she thought my mom was being underpaid. The family moved out suddenly a few months later and grandma thinks they may have even skipped out on their last month's rent. Grandma and her friend June were tasked with cleaning up the house for the next renters and found some odd things. Women's dresses and shoes too big for the wife, various household goods and pictures in a kitchen drawer. June found these first and said, Eleanor, these are dirty pictures. They were flustered and worried that their kids would see them so they quickly threw the pictures into the trash.

I think they assumed they were run-of-the-mill porn, but grandma later remembered seeing a naked girl with her arms behind her back in one picture. Six months later, the FBI came knocking on grandma's front door. Turns out grandma's tenant was Jerry fucking Brutus, the serial killer you covered in episode 79. Which one is he? He's the one that had the women's shoes and he had the bodies like his family was in the house and he had women's bodies downstairs in the freezer. Like they weren't allowed to go downstairs and he was obsessed with feet and shoes.

They're going to tell us a little bit about it right here. Okay, great. Oh my God. Other awful things. He dressed up in women's clothes to lure women into his car, took pictures of his captives and kept body parts of souvenirs. The FBI dragged the pawn behind the house. Grandma always felt guilty that she let her kids watch that process. Luckily they didn't find anything.

And gave grandma a stern talking to about laws requiring landlords to keep tenant property for at least six months after they moved out. Guess they weren't happy that all that evidence wound up in the trash. Yeah, grandma. Grandma was pregnant with my youngest aunt at the time all this happened. So when we reconstructed the timeline, it appears Brutus lived on their property in between the last known person he killed and when he was finally caught. Not sure if this was when grandma's interest in true crime started, but I remember spending my teen summers at her house reading her true crime books and making my own mental list of ways to evade killers. She was a huge part of my life and inspired me to live my best life and create my own best family as a badass single mom. Stay sexy and give your grandma's an extra hug.

Tam, she, her. Wow. That's too close for comfort. I mean, a serial killer is your tenant. Yeah. Horrifying. Oh, now he's trying to make friends with the police dog. Yeah, right.

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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 Arisha. And I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about the incomparable diva, Whitney Houston. Whitney's voice defined a generation and even after her death, her talent remains unmatched, but her incredible success hit a deeply private pain.

In our series, Whitney Houston, Destiny of a diva will tell you how she hid her true self to make everyone around her happy and how the pressure to be all things to all people let her down a dark path. Follow Even the Rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. This is called They Are Watching Us. Hello everyone who makes this podcast animals included. Being an adult with ADHD, I'm going to do my best to make this short and direct. You don't have to. They don't, by the way.

It's okay. Around 2015, I was living in an apartment in Pittsburgh. I rented an apartment on the bottom floor of a three apartment building. There were exactly three parking spots for each tenant. So after a couple months of living there, I was keen to the vehicles of the other tenants. One day after returning from work, I noticed a random car in one of the tenants parking spots. I didn't think much of it and went to get ready to meet my boyfriend at the bar. After a couple hours of drinking shitty beer and Jameson shots, I decided it was time to go home.

My boyfriend decided to stay, so I ubered home and put myself to bed. At around 3am, I woke up to a man about six feet tall who I'd never seen before standing at the end of my bed yelling, We have to go. They're watching us. I was completely disoriented and thought he was telling me there was a fire. I, for some reason, trusted him and followed him into the laundry room. When we got there, he started pointing at different parts of the room saying, There's a camera there, a camera there, a camera there. They're watching us. Realizing there were no cameras, I suddenly snapped out of my fog and realized the man was either on drugs or mentally ill. I ran to my apartment, slammed the door and realized the deadbolt was actually not working.

I sat in front of the door and called the cops and my boyfriend while the man knocked on my door yelling, They're going to get you. I was so terrified I just sat there in shock. Of course, my boyfriend got there before the cops and saw the man and told him the cops were coming. The man got into the random car I saw, meaning he had been in the building for hours and took off. When the cops got there, the only thing they did was let my dog out, which ran away due to all the drama. So, after all of it, I ended up running through the streets with no shoes on to rescue my pup while the cops proceeded to tell my boyfriend they couldn't really do anything except write up a report. Thanks.

Anyway, stay sexy and always check to make sure your locks actually work, Erin. God, that's so scary. It's so scary to think she went with him because she thought he was trying to help her kind of understandably. And also, how did he get in there? Just because the deadbolt didn't work or did he open it and break it? I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Scary. Scary, scary.

Yeah, I'm glad that turned out the way it did. Totally. And then you could go back to your apartment and shut the door and it's just a person who's clearly... Yeah. ...mentally ill. Right. That's...ugh. Okay, subject line of this one is a sinkhole story.

Yeah. Again, just starts. I used to work for a haunted theater and then in parentheses it says plays and musicals. Okay. Haunted plays and musicals. Got it. But that's not the craziest story the building has. The building is over 100 years old.

In the 80s and 90s, it became a comedy club. A lot of now famous comedians performed there. The entire theater was painted and filled with homemade gadgets, almost like a Chuck E. Cheese. The former owner would be the opening act for every comedian who performed. Of course. It's very common. Very common. Unfortunately, what that entailed was him performing a 15-minute hip-hop break dance in the room.

Ooh. Yeah. Yeah. Local jokes get local work. Apparently, he had won a dance competition in the 80s and decided to ride that for everything that was worth. Sure. He eventually got to the point where he was not running the club properly and the business dwindled. So he returned to the only logical solution, heroin.

At one point, he decided to burn the theater down for the insurance money. Logic. Logical thoughts. Logical heroin brings logical thoughts. That's right. He set the fire, it burned a hole through the wall, and then caught the building next door on fire and burned that down instead. Oh. By this point, the business was obviously dead.

He eventually disappeared and was never heard from again. Soon after, a delivery semi-truck pulled into the parking lot behind the building, and then the entire parking lot collapsed and turned into a fucking sinkhole. It turns out the old owner had lost his house, but not the club, so he decided to dig tunnels and rooms under where the parking lot was. What? And was living there for a while, and no one had any idea. Holy shit. The city eventually came to fill the hole. Their solution was to fill it with sand and then put a piece of plywood over the hole he used as the entryway in the theater's basement.

So if you ever move the piece of plywood, which was not looking very stable even when I worked there, goodbye parking lot. And then it's just signed R. Wow. I mean, I didn't even need a sinkhole. That was a really interesting story. And then sinkhole was like the big, the ending number of the song. Yes, it was. It was kind of like if somebody was telling me that story in a bar, I'd be like, when they got to the sinkhole part, I'd be like, really?

Come on. That's ridiculous. Are you just enjoying telling this story and just having attention? I wonder where he is now. Crazy. Wild. Heroin. He's in a side tunnel that no one noticed.

Still waiting. Yeah. Waiting for his big break to come back. Dancing his ass off. Yeah. Okay, this one, my last one's called, nine-year-old saves neighborhood from local kidnapper. And then it says under three-minute read. In the subject line to let whoever knows.

Perfect. It's very smart. Okay. Then it says, y'all are great. This is long, but worth it. It's 1992. I'm around nine years old. We're in a suburb of Houston.

Think large trees, small starter homes built in the 70s, the sound of cicadas, and humidity so dense, you can taste it. I rule the neighborhood with my turquoise 10-speed huff-eat, moss-a-mo shirt, and being so thick, I'm practically sporting a mullet. One evening, as summer was slipping into that false fall, Houstonians get fooled by every year. I found myself at Aaron's house, a friend who lived across the street and about a dozen or so homes down from mine. My parents had called and said it was time for me to come home. I begrudgingly said my goodbyes headed outside and hopped, helmetless, onto my trusty huffy and rode off. It was just past dusk. Street lights had been on for a while, my usual cue to come back home, so I picked up the pace a little.

As I contemplated whether or not I needed glasses, I did. The street lights hazy and most objects ill-defined. I noticed in the distance the unmistakable, however fuzzy, outline of a man approaching from the other side of the street. As he got closer, I could see he was wearing a hoodie, carrying a flashlight and a small jacket. A budding murderino, I immediately thought, he's out looking for kids to kidnap and he's going to use that jacket to disguise them. Which makes sense. Put another jacket on them. They're looking for a kid with a different outfit on.

It's like, nope, just sweaty kids wearing two jackets. At this point, he was still about ten yards ahead of me, but was now making his way to the middle of the street as if to cross to the other side and, of course, intercept me. No sooner had this thought popped into my head did he look up, lock eyes with me, lift his flashlight under his face like he was going to tell me a ghost story, and whisper slash holler in a sickly sweet dripping with honey voice, come here, little girl. I screeched that hafi to a stop, whipped it around and started pedaling as fast as I could back to my friend's house screaming at the top of my lungs. Kidnapper, kidnapper, kidnapper, like I was Paul fucking revere. As I got to Aaron's front yard, I flew off my bike. I recall it continuing to roll after my dismount and smashing into her garage.

I ran up to the front door and started banging wildly while screaming, tears of fear welling up in my eyes. Let me in, he's going to take me. The door swung open, I ran inside and went straight to the phone because not only did everyone have a landline in the 90s, we all knew where our friend's landlines were located. Ignoring Aaron's mother's questions, I confidently dialed 911. I wasn't about to waste any time telling Lorraine any details. I had my body an entire neighborhood to protect. As the operator answered, I heard rapid forceful knocking on Aaron's front door. He's here, I shouted while clutching the phone with both hands.

The receiver pressed against my face like I was in a poorly written horror film. He's here. I repeated through sob's. The 911 operator on the other end of the line asking for information I was emotionally unavailable to give. So much for saving the neighborhood. I don't recall exactly what happened next, only that in a matter of seconds my father was hugging me and repeating his apology over and over and over again. Apparently he realized I would be writing home a little later than was normal and with the false fall chill in the air, he thought I might need another layer as well as some company. What a prince.

Not realizing the frenzy of his horribly ill-conceived prank, come here little girl, would set off. He figured it would be funny too. I don't know, pretend to be a mapper of kids. Maybe subconsciously he was testing me to see how I would react. Who knows, my parents were three kids deep, only in their late 20s at this point and flying by the seat of their goddamn pants. SSGGM and don't assume kidnappers are too dumb to follow you to her friend's home and knock on their front door. Natalie. Oh, Natalie.

I hope you bring that up all the time at family dinners. It's so funny, because also it's like if you think about it for one second, like a kidnapper's not going to be like, it's almost like it's so beyond creepy that you should have gotten it real time. Come here little girl. I was assuming you can see his face. Right. I'm sure she went to the ophthalmologist after this and it was like, yeah, she needs glasses. She needs glasses. And therapy, actually.

Therapy now too. And that to the bill. That's really funny. I love it. Okay, here's my last one. The subject line is baby teeth, short and haunting. And then it just starts, I talk to the same five people almost every day. This isn't necessarily conversations, but just the furious exchange of kooky things found on Instagram.

One of these people is my mom. The content of these messages will usually range from a picture of a mushroom slash plant I think that she might like, in which she may return a video of an ostracized dolphin with scoliosis that finds acceptance amongst a pod of whales. You know mom stuff. This is like describing social media to a T. That's completely how my sister and I communicate. It's just her sending me TikTok videos. One day I sent a video of a couple who sprinkle wildflower seeds indigenous to the environment, of course, around town to help save bees and restore beauty to the land. Aw.

My mom's response. Last year I was cleaning out the drawers of y'all's old rooms and I found multiple containers of y'all's baby teeth. I didn't want to throw them in the landfill. I decided to sprinkle them around the neighborhood on one of my walks. Sprinkle? Okay. Go on. And then it just says, all caps, not the same thing mom.

Well, it's nice to have a mom who finds my routing baby teeth to be too precious to be put in a landfill. I do have sympathy for the people who may stumble upon three kids worth of baby teeth. Oh my God. That's so true. I keep finding baby teeth in my neighborhood. That'd be so scary. What's going on? It's so out of the blue.

Or what if someone was looking out their window and saw her, this like older woman's been sprinkling baby teeth. Do I call the cops? It's also so many teeth. It's almost a hundred teeth. That's a lot of teeth. Say sexy and save the bees, not your kid's baby teeth, Shannon. Wow. Epic.

Oh wow. What's the weirdest thing you found that like didn't belong in your neighborhood or like somewhere? Like you went to pick something up and you thought it was a this and it actually was a that. And then now something nefarious is going on. Send us your stories. People are like, I saw a red balloon come out of the sewer. And so I clumped down there. And there's a big spider alien.

Life's been real rough since then. Send us any story you want at my favorite murder at Gmail. And thanks for writing and just listening. Even if you don't send stories, we still like you. We'll just hold for the rest of your life and we'll still love you the same as Shannon and everybody else that sent in emails. But only as long as you stay sexy. And don't get murdered. Goodbye.

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

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