My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 288

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

This week’s hometowns include a spy at a Chippendales show and a snakebite. 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 and welcome to my favorite murder. The mini-soad.

That's being recorded for the fan cult, if you feel like looking at us right now. If you're visually oriented in terms of storytelling, you might want to sign up for the fan cult because you can see how this actually went down. Right. It's like TV. It's like podcasting with TV. It's like the worst produced TV you've ever seen in your life. Should I go first this time?

Sure. Okay. This is called, Finally, a Story from Wales. True. Hi, Mustache Man and or email reader, please give this to K&G for me to finally represent the people of Wales. Long time listener, but very lazy email writer, even though I have many you should probably hear including a family curse.

How my grandma was the Beatles backup dancer. Yes. How I grew up next to an abandoned World War II army camp that is now an overgrown forest. Oh, and also Ryan Reynolds just bought our hometown football and then it says soccer club for some reason, question mark. Anyway, here's the hometown village, question mark again, I don't know my story of the Graceford mining disaster. Yeah.

My home village of Graceford, Graceford, it's Graceford, I'm going to say, Graceford is between two large towns and then it says Wrexham and then in parenthesis it says say Wreck Sam, which I appreciate Wrexham, Wales and Chester, England and has very little to it but two pubs, a corner shop and gorgeous countryside walks. What we do have though is a grim history. From 1908 to 1934, our small village was a hugely successful mining hub. You know the story? I think so.

You're nodding. It could be something else, but it may have just go. It's bad. That's supplied most of Wales with its coal. The mine employed 1850 men working in the underground tunnels and 350 working on the surface to process what was brought up. This was very prosperous for the local Welsh town of Wrexham and a huge source of work. Until 1934, when an underground explosion and resulting fire of the coal igniting claimed

the lives of 266 of the underground workers. The cause of the explosion was investigated but never released to the public as the records were sealed to protect the local mining industry businesses. Coal and slate mining were the two largest industries in Wales at the time and any further information being released was deemed that it would harm the industry too much. Due to the records being blocked and sealed, no efforts were ever made to recover the bodies. Only 11 bodies of the 266 deaths were ever recovered from the site and this is only because they're the men that tried to dig themselves closer to the surface to escape the flames.

I know, getting dark on this one, sorry. In the investigation to determine the cause, they found multiple safety breaches, terrible management practices and dangerously long shifts and the company that owned the mine was only ever fined six pounds in total for the disaster and continued to run other Welsh mines long after. Then it says, hey Georgia, six pounds is the equivalent of 634 pounds now, which is still a huge spit in the face of the uncompensated families. I hope this makes it through and if it does, maybe I'll even write in about how Rexham

Lard Lager was the beer of choice on a very famous ship that sank because it hit a bit of ice and then Leo got really cold in some water. Toodles, and be thankful I wasn't cruel trying to get you to say more Welsh words, love Ben. Yeah, Welsh words are the hardest. It's rather ancient. I actually was thinking of a different mining accident that happened around the same time, which was the one that was featured in this series, The Crown, that was so awful that it was just like, oh my God, but this one is equally awful.

It's yeah, horrifying. And also, so it's like a small village and this is again, I constantly referencing that TV show God List that was so amazing, but the same thing in that where there's a mining accident and all of the men of the town are killed. That's right. That's right. They all must live there. Yeah.

It's like this town that suddenly has 250 less men and it's not London, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, that's like a big fucking amount of it. I'm writing down God List because I keep forgetting to... Merritt Weaver, our girl. Oh, so good. She's the Clint Eastwood of that show.

Okay. My first email, the subject line is, Bank Worker Crazy Happenings. Hello, everyone. I'm answering your call for bank teller stories. I went to school for broadcasting, so that means all of my adult life, I've had two jobs and a couple of times that means I was a bank teller. Side note, back in the day, it was the best job to have as a single woman. I'd get asked out daily and knew how successful they were and if I wanted to say yes.

Oh my God, that's kind of brilliant. Also, be like, what does he spend his money on? Let's see. Oh, I mean. The illegal as fuck, but brilliant. But also kind of just like you must, as a person who's the customer of the bank, you must have known you were pretty exposed. Right.

Oh, the next sentence is, yes, I know shallow, but I was in my early 20s. That's all. Now on to the craziness. Fair enough. I love that. Yeah, don't apologize for it. Just say that's all. That's all.

Yep, that's all. When I worked in a small town bank, a local lawyer brought in a hand-drawn check on a lined piece of paper and wanted to cash it. I very much thought that was a joke, but the bank manager cashed it because that was how the inmate was paying his lawyer and apparently he did have the funds to cover it. So who would have thought? What? So apparently it's like, if you basically say, this is my bank account.

I know the number and I want this much money to go to this person. You can draw your own check. Oh my God, like this is a representation of a check and it's, oh my God, that doesn't seem okay, but that is fascinating. But the bank manager's looking at it like, well, he signed it, all the information's there, right? It's my area. Yeah.

For sure. Genius. Don't wait six weeks to get those Simpson checks like I did. Okay. When I moved to the Metro Detroit area, I got a job at a bank and I didn't realize the sketchy neighborhood that it was in. Once a lady came in to cash a check, not knowing that her picture was posted at every teller window for stealing checks from her former boss, the teller she went to freaked out and

came to me behind the wall by the drive-through. I let her call the cops while I went out to stall the nervous woman. I told her that the money machine wasn't working right and that her teller would be right back. What's a money machine? It literally says that with a bunch of exclamation points and question marks. Ain't it cool. Anyway, I then chatted with her for about five minutes before she saw the cops coming in the door and she bolted to this side employee door.

I just pointed and the cops took her out into the parking lot. I was just thankful that she didn't hop the counter and come for me for setting her up. Yeah. Good. Kind of getting involved there. Yeah. I missed the Friday that the branch was robbed, but the last straw for me came when I showed up to work one Monday.

Our branch was under construction, so nothing stopped me from walking through the door to go behind the teller counter only to come up short when someone was already working my usual window. I looked around and realized that I knew no one. At first, I was really confused, wondering if I was in the right place, but how could I not be? I asked one of the people working there where Christina, my manager was, and she said she didn't know who that was and went back to working like having a stranger in her teller

window was no big deal. Finally, someone that I recognized came out of an office and told me that all of our other coworkers were fired on Friday for stealing. What? The whole bank was fired. Oh my God. I was young and super surprised that people I knew and went to lunch with could do something like that.

I had someone count out my drawer with me so that they couldn't pin any theft on me and I left before I was wrangled into any other craziness. Stay sexy and don't take what isn't yours, Heather. Stealing from a bank seems like such a place of work that you steal from, the worst place to steal from. A place that professionally tracks money isn't going to somehow look aside a scance at your $2,500 you're taking home, like what are you doing? Oh my God.

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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. 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. Let's see, this one's called Museum Blood Trail Story. Hi, all. In Minnesota 268, you asked for museum stories, and boy, do I have one for you.

This is the story of a blood-spatter trail in a historic house museum. I worked for a few years for my state's historical society as a tour guide at a few different historic sites, lots of answering the same questions, telling people not to touch, sit on, or lick the historic furniture. It says, yes, that happened. I could go on and on about all the antics of museum guests. Bottom line, don't touch stuff. I'm keeping the name of the site private, even though I no longer work there, but it's

a gilded age mansion with five floors, beautiful woodwork, and lots of gorgeous furniture, art, and stained glass. I'm going to go tour a fucking house. Is it the Winchester Mystery House? Ooh, the Aft Store house. I was wrapping up my tour one afternoon, the last tour of the day, and was ushering the guests out of the massive double front doors when I noticed my supervisor and several guides gathered at the front desk.

Not so unusual. We all got along really well and often hung out at the front desk to stop, to swap stories and gossip about our guests. Yes, we talk about you behind your back if you're a weirdo. Something seemed off, so I asked my supervisor, what's going on? We've been robbed, she said. Turns out, someone on the tour ahead of mine had split from their group and searched parts of the house for valuables.

They had first ransacked a collections closet, then the bedrooms, where they broke a photo frame to steal the picture. Then they hid in the servants' quarters where we don't take guests. It's used for storage or a teeny tiny nap. They went into the attic, also storage, then down around the second floor, then out the front door on the first floor. Here's the creepiest thing, we guides would go back into the third floor servants' quarters mid-tour while the guests were in a different room watching a short video.

I had done that on my tour. I was hanging out back there for 10 minutes while the thief was rummaging around back there, leading bloody handprints on historic rugs and opening all the doors searching for treasure. How do we know this? The blood trail. We figured out later that they must have sliced their hand on the broken frame. As a result, there were contact smears of blood and droplets all over three different floors of the house, and even a thumbprint on a door in the attic.

It was so extensive that we found drops of blood on radiators in the bathroom, inside the stalls, on every door handle, all over the floors, the railings, you name it. It's as if this person sliced their hand open and then flailed it around on purpose like one of those car dealership inflatable air dancers. So awful. Fully blossomed murdering that I am. I took pictures and made notes of the blood spatter for the police report. The house is old enough that it doesn't have a security camera system set up so the thief

was never caught. To this day, I look back at the pictures of the blood spatter and wonder what would have happened if I had come across this person while in the servants' quarters. Anyway, sorry for the long email, but thanks for the chance to tell my favorite museum story. I'm really sexy and support museums, Sophie She-Her. Don't you think what would have happened is that they would have come around the corner and an emo goth stoner child of divorce would be standing there rebelling and with their

hand cut not knowing what to do? Yeah, it's really amateur hour over here, for sure. It doesn't feel like a true burglar. It feels like rebellion at the mansion tour. Grandma made me come here. That's right. I had to stay with my divorce dad this week, so he's making me come here. I'm bored out of my mind.

I'm a total goth. Right? I think that you're completely right about all that. It's like you weren't really in danger. Also, blood spatter is a junk science. Now that we know that, let's keep it in mind. Okay. The subject line of this email is, I was a spy and the Chip and Dale's were my target.

Hello to all y'all. Back in the mid-90s, I was a grad student putting myself through school by being a teacher's assistant and bartending. After a while, I also had the most fabulous job ever that was passed along from grad student to grad student, being a spy for ASCAP, i.e., the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers. This is the licensing service for musical artists that ensures that they get their royalties. If the business plays music, they need to have a music license, and if the places tried

to get around this, well, that's where we spies would come in. Interesting. Mind-blowing. Yes. What a cool job. I know. I know. A secret shopper for music.

Exactly. Okay. I think they may say this here. Okay. We would be assigned in pairs to go to an establishment and be a fake customer, dining and drinking and keeping a surreptitious list of the songs played along with the times. Wow. The targets would usually be restaurants or bars, with restaurants being the especially

exciting assignments because we were reimbursed for our meals and drinks. Yes. And remember, this was back in the mid-90s before cell phones. There was no Shazam. You had to be well-versed in pop music and able to identify songs. My mind is blown right now. This is like the people who could get this job. Yeah.

And like, ugh. I also didn't know like a restaurant can't just play fucking, you know, Wham or Billy Joel or whatever, and then like have to pay for it. Yeah. I guess they have to license it somehow. They have to pay, whether they pay a service to send them like tapes or something. Okay. Got it.

Because if it's a franchise doing it. Sure. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I don't know. We should write and ask. Honestly, though, they had me at Free Food and Drink. One night, my partner and I were assigned to go to the club in Lake Hoppet, Kong in the

middle of New Jersey. Our target was a Chippendale show with the most fantastic time, ironically, and as well as really and truly enjoying our time amidst a screaming throng of women watching slick men dancing. They're slightly damp men dancing. Oh, no. I had a ridiculous amount of fun writing up my report afterwards, describing what song was playing when the dancer with the mole on his right cheek was dancing and expensing

my dollar bills stuffed into Speedos. You better believe it's raining men was played that evening. The gig was also really far from our home base, so we made a lot of mileage money. I got to eat and drink and watch the Chippendales all on Ascap's time. It was pretty much a perfect evening. I can't end without telling you how incredibly valuable your support and normalization of mental health struggles has been for me and so many others. XOXO, Harriet the spy, and then in parentheses, not my real name.

I love that story. What a wrap job. What an amazing job. What an amazing job. Good job, Harriet. Yeah. Okay, my last one is called Snake Bite. Okay.

Hi, all. I have an unrequested Snake Bite story. In 1998, my ex-husband and I moved to Southern California for his job. After I unpacked the house, we took a weekend getaway with our dogs, a husky named Jake. It was spring, the weather was nice, so we went to Joshua Tree National Park. Being from the Northeast, we didn't think about snakes coming out to sun themselves in the warm spring air. We wore shorts and sandals and took our dogs off the leash.

Then all caps, it says morons. I was squatting down to pee in a small ravine when I heard a rattling. Since I was younger, I was able to stop urinating midstream and immediately stood up to see where the rattling was coming from. That is just an added break. Such a detail, but that is so funny. As you get older, you're not going to be able to do that anymore. My husky was nose to nose with a rattlesnake.

I screamed for my ex-husband to go check on our dog, but I made it over there before he did. When I got to the dog, I saw two bloody fang marks on his nose. Not knowing where I got this idea, probably the movies, I started sucking poison out of his nose and spitting it out. It was bitter. I did this several times. We got in the car.

We drove very fast to an emergency vet clinic. Jake was in respiratory distress. His head was swelling. He was dying in my arms. We finally made it to the vet and I explained that I had sucked the poison out of his nose to the doctor. She became alarmed and asked me how I was feeling. She asked me what color the snake was.

I said, tan. She kept asking me every few minutes if I was okay. And again, are you sure the snake was tan? Not green. I said I felt fine and I was positive it was tan. She told me if the snake would have been green, a very poisonous rattler, I would have been dead. Yeah, because you're sucking poison into your mouth.

Yes, it's poison. Right. Either way, snake poison, venom, as some people like to call it. The vet gave Jake anti-venom. Back then, at $250 per vial, it was an overall expensive vet visit. She saved his life, but the poor guy looked miserable. His head was huge for a few days after, but Jake ended up living a long life. The moral of the story is stay sexy and don't suck on snake bites, be it on your dog or

another person, Kathy. Kathy learned the hard way. She did. That reminds me of, have you seen the photos of dogs who had eaten or had gotten stung, like bit down on a bee, got stung in their mouths and their little muscles are all swollen. It's so sad. Well, that happened to George one time when I took her up to the Hollywood sign dog park, and she would go run up into the hills, and so we were driving home, and all of a sudden

it looked like she had a tennis ball under her lip, but she walked up to me and her tail was wagging or whatever, and then I was like, oh my God, and I was positive she got bit by a rattlesnake, and I started crying, and I panicked, and I took her to the emergency vet, and then they were like, well, we have to do this panel and that panel and whatever, and I was like, I have no money. I go, you can do whatever you want. I have no money, and I won't pay you, and I can't pay you. You can tell me bills, I can't pay you, and I go, so please just save my dog's life and

remember that I have no money at all. And I just wouldn't stop saying it, and they finally gave her the equivalent of a Benadryl. Is it Benadryl? Yeah. Yeah. And I went away because it was not a snake bite, it was a beasting. Oh my God. And my sister's like, yeah, you could have saved yourself $300 and just given our Benadryl

yourself. Right. It's so scary though. It's so scary. Yeah. They can't tell you what's wrong. Yeah. And then you're immediately like, my dog got bit by a snake.

Yeah. It's over. I mean, I think as crazy as it is to like try to suck venom out of a bite, it's like, we all would do that for our pets. Well, but then you're saying now we're both going to die because if it was the green snake, they both would have died. I mean, you had to. She didn't know the death.

Yeah. Just don't go, you don't have to be the one that does the thing. How about that every once in a while? It doesn't have to be you. Let the emergency vet text do that if that was what was supposed to happen. Right. All right. Just looking out.

Okay. Subject line of this email is my trash dad, which everybody in fan cults chronologically for me in Georgia, it's Father's Day. Oh yeah. Literally today is Father's Day that we're recording. It's not going to air Father's Day probably in chances are you won't watch it on Father's Day, but this is kind of fun for us. I like it.

And it starts, hey bitches, considering you gals don't even remember what you've asked for anymore. I thought I'd try and slide this random one in. I mean, at this, yes, definitely. Yeah. A good way to slide things in is just to start real sassy. My dad passed when I was 11 and being the eldest of three, I have the most memories of him.

He was the only, the designated storyteller, whenever someone younger than me, especially my siblings, want to feel closer to him. Now while this man was wonderful and an extraordinary dad, he was a straight up larracan, which I don't know what that means, and would take any opportunity to stir shit. Like the time my mom called him while she was out shopping and asked him to take a washing off the line and hang another load out. This man got up, went outside, hosed down the washing line and off the backyard and fences. When she got home, he said it rained.

Oh my God, like brilliant, but I don't want to admit that. Brilliant sidestep of a chore and actually you're making about three other chores. It honestly blows my mind, the effort he put into being lazy. When it would have been easier to just do what she asked, not to mention the fact that it was the middle of a 40 degree, oh, at 104 degrees, our time, Australian summer day, and then in all caps. He got away with it. I wasn't saying shit because I got bribed with chocolate.

Or the time he got home from work and found a red-bellied black snake in the gutter out in the front. Speaking of snakes, my brother and I were having a cold bath in our swimmers, and then in parentheses it says poor person's pool. Cold bath in your swimmers. I love it. Are you hot? You want to go swimming?

Go up to the bath. Yeah. A cold one. He came in and pretended like the snake was alive and he was wrestling it. Ew, what? Ew. Dad. Because it was trying to get in the bath with us.

So he's fighting to keep the snake. Right. No, no. Oh my God. I love it. I could have put it up for my mom that he wanted to come in and just chuck it in the bath with us, but she talked him down a level because they couldn't afford the therapy that would come after those actions.

Or the time we drove past the circus and I asked if we could go, and he said no, because that's the Mardi Gras and he would tell me about it when I got older. Two days later I was in the car with my friend, and her dad was going past the same circus. She had the same idea as me and asked her dad if we could go. I then piped up saying, that's the Mardi Gras, not the circus, and kids can't go there. I didn't understand why her dad laughed the entire drive home and got out of the car to shake my dad's hand to drop off.

I know this is long, but I have so many of these stories. It was hard to narrow down. He's been gone 22 years now, and I can't remember his voice. Oh, oh, shit, she got me. God damn it. God damn it, Kim. I did not see that line when I skimmed this the first time. Oh, no. But these funny slash traumatizing memories will stay with me forever.

If this gets read out, I just want to say thanks for helping me immortalize some of these stories for long after I'm gone, because we all know the internet is forever. Yes, I love it. Keep on being bad bitches, stay sexy, and just take the kids to the damn circus. Kim, a little trash dad email for Father's Day. That's right, I love it.

So good. Oh, my God, so good. I think that's it. Write us your trash dad stories, guys, please. Or trash mom, trash parent, whatever you got. Trash whatever. Yeah. No breaking the law.

You can go right up till the edge, but, you know. Yes. Why do you have to go to therapy is essentially what we're asking. Yes, exactly. What is the first story you tell when you hit that big, cushy chair? Well, 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. This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris. Our researcher is Gemma Harris. Email your hometowns and fucking hurrays to myfavoritmurder at gmail.com. Follow the show on Instagram and Facebook

at myfavoritmurder and Twitter at myfavemurder. Goodbye. Listen, follow, leave us a review on Amazon Music, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Prime members, did you know that you can listen to my favorite murder early and ad-free on Amazon Music? Download the Amazon Music app today. You can support my favorite murder by filling out a survey at wendery.com.