My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 307

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

This week’s hometowns include a lighthearted ghost story and inviting strangers to Thanksgiving dinner.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 and welcome to my favorite murder. The mini-soad. We read you your stories and we videotape it and show it to the fan cult. Do you want to be a part of that? That's right. Join the fan cult. Hey, go to myfavoritmurder.com and join the fan cult. There's all kinds of fun shit in there. You should see what we're doing. You should. Do you want to go first? It's mind-boggling. Sure. This email starts. I won't read the subject line because it gives it away,

but the actual email starts. Hey, Paul Holes fans. I love it. By the way, if you haven't heard Buried Bones, it's a hit podcast. Everyone's loving it. Go try it out. Kate Winkler-Dawson, Paul Holes, historical crime. It's a hit. It's a hit. I'll hop right into it. My mom's side of the family, that's the beginning. That's the first sentence. It doesn't sound like something you would say. I'll hop right into it. My mom's side of the family is effing crazy, but that's what it makes them so great. I can relate to that. Almost every 4th of July, our family joins them in floating down the Mako Kita River in Upper Iowa. That sounds right. Or Mako Kita. Growing up, I thought we were the most badass group of people ever. Picture this. Anywhere from 10 to 15 canoes

all tied together like a damn barge with all the six to 16-year-olds floating behind in tubes. Radical. That's the American dream. Anyways, this past year, they were floating on the annual trip, and then in parentheses, it says, my family did not join this year. Thank God in all caps. Probably enjoying too much beer and playing their music way too loud. After a few hours on the river, my cousin notices a nice boot sticking out of the water caught up in a few branches. Mm-hmm. He decides to go check it out and begins to pull on the boot. Now, he's certainly not weak, but it's taking a lot of power to free said boot. He finally pulls it free and looks at his great find only to see a skeletonized human bone sticking out of the boot.

Oh my God. As you can imagine, chaos ensues until my mom's EMT cousin steps in and calls the police. As it turns out, a local man went missing from the campground upstream in November of 2020 during bad weather. He was missing for nearly eight months. We're glad he was finally able to be located and put to rest. Oh my God. That family on their fun times vacation just solved another family's worst problem and nightmare. Oh my God. I am proud to say I've been an avid listener since 2018. You lovely ladies got me through my undergrad in environmental sciences, which can I just say I feel for every young adult trying to traverse adulthood for the first time during a pandemic. You two are the best road trip buddies. My dog Winston loves Elvis's meow at the end of the episode.

He often starts to look around for where he might be hiding. Please tell Steven I love him, stay sexy and stay out of the river, Katie. Oh, that was a good one. Yeah, that was great. Thanks, Katie. But also, it was like a microcosm of our podcast where it's like, oh, that's funny and crazy and what? What? And we've got Paul Holes, we've got Steven, we've got Elvis, we've got all the greats. All the greats. All right. I'm going to tell you the title of this. That's not lemonade. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. And then it just starts. Georgia and Karen, there are no words, just love. I vaguely recall the ask for stories about weird things people have accidentally or unintentionally ingested. So this one falls under that category that I may or may not have made up.

It starts here. I'm a full-fledged Gen Xer born in the late 60s and grew up in the 70s and 80s, which meant that when you went for a checkup, a physical if you're fancy, you had to bring your own pee in a jar for testing. I don't know how widespread this filthy practice was, but it was standard procedure in my house. You always knew it was time for your checkup because mom would clean out a raspberry jam jar for you to capture and carry your pee in. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Where did you live? Because they have those cups at any doctor's office. Not in the 70s and 80s, maybe. No, I was there. I did it. They had them right there. Not in rural, rural, wherever the fuck this person's from, I guess.

Yeah, I guess that's what it is. I was at Kaiser in San Rafael, California. There you go. We were advanced. Oh, it's in New England. It was standard procedure. You always knew. Cut to late August afternoon in 1970s, New England. It's so hot and humid, birds won't fly. It's almost unbearable, but not so unbearable that my father, an army lieutenant, would finally buy the air conditioner we begged for. Air conditioning, we were told, was for sissies. And unless we were sissies, we weren't getting one. Says, now I own a top of the line portable AC unit the size of a Prius, and I still test myself on how long I can go without turning it on, even when the temps go

above 100 because I still need to prove to my now dead father that I'm not a sissy. Back to the story. It's lifelong. It's lifelong. My friends and I were engaged in a full court neighborhood wide game of kick the can. These were epic hours long unsupervised events that left us gleefully hot, sweaty, and thirsty. Hydration and water bottles weren't a thing yet. But so between rounds, I ran into my house to get something to drink. I walked into the kitchen, but you know where this is going and saw what I thought was a glass of lemonade next to the sink. I grabbed the glass and chugged it. I drink so fast I didn't taste it until a second after the last hard swallow when I detected a very bitter taste. I went to complain to my mom who

was sitting in the living room, mom, that's the worst lemonade I've ever tasted. She asked what lemonade I said in the glass by the sink. She replied, that's not lemonade. That's your brother's pee. He's got a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I was horrified and a little amused as she and my little brother chuckled at my mistake. I wasn't sure what to do. Would I get sick from drinking pee? My mom said with a confidence she had no medical training to pull off. Well, I'm not going to kill you. Just drink some water and go back out to play. I shrugged it off, drank half a glass of water and ran back outside to join the game where I promptly confessed the incident to my two best neighborhood pals. From that moment on, yeah, from that moment on until the end of summer,

I proudly wore the slightly threatening title and then it says in a Ramona Quimby kind of way as the girl who drank pee. She's like proud a little. I mean, also as a mother, I love that the mother did it so low-key where it was like that was the upside of that kind of dismissive 70s parenting is that big deals were minimized sometimes in a good way, often in a bad way, often in the bad way. But then sometimes we're just like, you don't, this doesn't have to ruin your life forever. I'm not going to have like a full emergency over this one thing that's actually not an emergency. Sometimes it turns out it's an emergency. Yes. And then your, you know, arm is broken and no one cares. But in this case, I wish that casual mother had the foresight to go,

don't tell anyone. Right. This isn't for public consumption. No, no one needs to be very sad. The pee is not for public consumption and this is not for public telling anyone, is it? Yeah, there's a couple rules. Even today, decades later, when a doctor rarely like almost never asks for a urine sample, I can't help but smile when a nurse innocently hands me a sealed plastic cup and sends me off to the bathroom or I can leave said sample on the shelf in that weird two-way drop off door and not in the jam jar on the side of the sink. Thanks for reading. No name. For a second, when you were talking about like drinking it down and then the bitter aftertaste, I was, I was like, am I going to throw up right now? And then I was positive that the story would

be like the second the news hit, they would just throw up. Wouldn't you just throw up immediately? I think, you know, what would make me throw up is the, is the temperature of it. Yeah. Did you think about that part? The temperature? And then what about when she has to ask the kid to pee again? Hey, your sister drank your pee, so you got to pee again. You, you get a slurpee. And also maybe I was also thinking maybe this person, if they were born in the late sixties, maybe they're young, I mean, sorry, old enough, older than me enough, where I was like the first generation that got the sealed plastic. Maybe already had the Kaiser sticker on it. Yeah. Maybe. Looking for a better cooking routine? With meal planning, shopping and prepping handled,

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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. What makes a person a murderer? Are they born to kill or are they made to kill? I'm Candace DeLong and on my new podcast Killer Psyche Daily, I share a quick 10-minute rundown every weekday on the motivations and behaviors of the criminal masterminds, psychopaths and cold-blooded killers you hear about in the news. 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 lighthearted ghost story. Is it still spooky Halloween season? Probably not. I think it's spooky Thanksgiving season. Ooh, Thanksgiving ghosts, dead turkey ghosts. Dear Karen and Georgia at all, my partner wrote the story in a few years back but brevity is not

his strong suit. Should you want it told artfully, please refer to the original. In the meantime, the Cliff's Notes. I kind of love that the Cliff's Notes got picked and the original did not. Yeah. It must have been long though. Yeah. Many years ago, he worked alone as the night baker in an old East Coast seaport town. It wasn't long before he noticed strange things like the coffee maker turning on by itself as well as figures in old-fashioned clothes that he could only see out of the corner of his eye. Two ladies in one part of the bakery and a man in the other. One afternoon, as he was napping at home before his overnight shift, he felt someone give a sharp tug to his ankles. Assuming one of his housemates was playing a prank, he looked around the house,

but he was completely alone. Of course, the next step was to bring some friends and a Ouija board into the bakery. If memory serves, the man's name was revealed as Augustus, which is a perfect old-fashioned name that you kind of wouldn't think of. When he was asked if he was in my partner's house, the planchette zoomed to yes. When asked if he'd woken my partner, the answer was again, yes. The friends asked him why he'd done it, and the letter slowly spelled the following. You had to work. Oh my God. He woke him up for work. For work. My partner asked him if they could keep their relationship to the bakery and out of his home, and Augustus never woke him up from his nap again. Nice. For me, the kicker comes years later when my partner was talking with a historian

of seafaring who told him that sailors used to share bunks, and when one came off their shift, they would have to trade places with another. They woke the sleeping sailors by tugging on their ankles. Holy shit. I hope you enjoyed this almost heartwarming ghost story. It is borderline. It's the only kind my partner wants to hear because he insists that he's always had good relationships with ghosts, and he wants us to keep it that way. Perhaps sometime I can tell you about how his mother haunted us through music boxes for a while, but this is already way too long. Stay sexy and keep your hands off of people's ankles, even if you're dead. Layla. Cute. I like a friendly ghost story. Also, I love when it's basically like that was proven to be a true

experience by historical knowledge. Yeah. Oh, that's the best part. Yeah. Yeah. That is the kicker. Layla, you were right. This is called SWAT team story. Long time listener, you got me through my fight with breast cancer as I endured chemo, surgery, and radiation. I'm so grateful for your show and the laughter and distraction you provided. I've sent a couple of other short stories, but perhaps this will make the cut. It did. Good news. You asked for SWAT team and FBI stories, and I have one from a while back I think you'd like. Our family, my husband, me, and three kids, age three, six, and eight, lived in the mountains of North Carolina, mere yards from the county line. Once any morning, our youngest came running into the room asking, is the war over?

Grogly, we struggle to understand what war, what do you mean? It was not long after troops had been sent to Afghanistan, but there was no reason for anyone to be on our little mountain. The soldiers are all going home. The oldest two had made their way into our room by this time. Look outside, all the soldiers are passing through our yard. This was a little alarming because we lived on a ridge in an area where most of the houses were summer vacation homes, boarded up for the season, and no one would just, quote, pass through our small semi-vertical yard. Getting out of bed, we looked outside, and sure enough SWAT teams in full camouflage and gear were crawling all over the mountain. Oh my God. Yeah. I thought this was a ghost story. No. I guess you talked about

SWAT in the beginning, but I immediately was like, civil war soldiers? Oh, that's true. That could have been that. While we puzzled up at what this could mean, a knock was heard at the door. My husband told us to stay away from the door and went to answer it. Outside stood a SWAT member asking to look into our unfinished basement and the kid's treehouse. He then told us there was an escaped felon on the run from Florida Correctional Facility that they had been chasing through several states and that had ditched his stolen car at the county line and was now on foot. Whoa. The SWAT member let us know he was dangerous and possibly armed and strongly suggested we evacuate until he could be found. With haste, we grabbed a few items and took

our family to the grandparents' house one town away. At the time, my husband worked at a nearby college, and we lived just minutes from campus, as did most of the other faculty. After we left our house, another faculty member and friend on the next ridge decided he didn't want to evacuate, and some of his friends went to his place to sit and drink on his front porch. Because what else are you going to do with this excitement in town? True. They could see anyone coming for quite a distance. This group of men just happened to be avid Civil War re-enactment members.

That's weird. Therefore, they felt like they could handle any emergency. That'd be like these men were in the local community theater, and that's why they thought they could take down an escaped convict on foot. Well, they weren't wrong. Oh. With muskets in hand, and it says, I kid you not, antique muskets, they kept an eye over the valley and ended up catching this felon at musket point. Holy shit. I can just see the felon back inside, and the ridicule he must have endured due to the weapons

used in his capture still makes me chuckle. I'm so proud of you and how, oh, so sweet, I'm so proud of you and how you went from, we should start a podcast to your incredibly successful careers as Karen and Georgia, creators of MFM and your Exactly Right Network. I love being your quote friend and listening to your voices and laughter. Thanks for making the world a better place. I know. Stay sexy and keep your musket handy, Elizabeth. Elizabeth. I know.

Great email. Yeah. Nice pivot to complimenting us. Yeah, hard. Truly. Congratulations on your amazing cancer survival. Oh my. Holy shit. I mean, this email has it all.

This email has it all. Yeah, that's amazing. When we get those stories of people who are like, you're who I listened to while I beat this fucking nasty disease where it's like, that's an honor. Honored. Honored. A true honor. Also, even though I understand it's embarrassing to get caught by civil war reenactors and a musket,

wouldn't a musket blow a gigantic hole through your guts? Like, or is that just cartoons I'm thinking of? I don't know. I mean, I think old fashioned weapons are incredibly dangerous as well. Maybe. Or bullets were just like pinner back then and didn't do as much damage. Who the fuck knows? Who knows?

Or they were like mini cannonballs. That's true. They could be mini cannonballs. Hey, are you a civil war reenactor that listens to this podcast? Would you write in and tell us all about it? Yeah, tell us about musket balls. Hey, musket balls. And if you do, will nickname you musket balls?

That's right. Sorry. Too bad. Too bad, so sad. I'm not going to read this subject line. It just starts. Here we go. In early 2018, I was performing in an interactive dinner theater show called Murder in a Jerkwater Town.

That's good. It was an original play set during the 1880s in a frontier town where the audience interrogated suspects and ultimately decided who the killer was. It was our opening night and we were doing our fight call for the climax of the play, a scene that involved two rifles, a pistol, and a hostage. The fight call went great and we had some downtime before the house opened. Oh, fight call like fight rehearsal. Oh, OK.

OK. So when several police cars in a police van drove by with their sirens blaring, we joked that they were off to raid a meth lab and didn't think anything else about it. The theater was in an area where meth labs wouldn't have been surprising and police sirens weren't uncommon. But then I saw a police officer carrying a rifle walking past the front of our theater. In my head, I started saying, please don't turn and come in here, just as he turned and came into the theater.

Something you should know about our theater is that it doubled as an art gallery with three huge windows that allow anyone driving or walking by to see everything that's happening in the space. Yeah, apparently someone had driven by during our fight call and called the police to report an active shooter hostage situation at our theater. Well, yeah. Yeah, except it's inside a theater. That's true. That might give it away.

Anything you see through this window, you have to at least check it. Anyway, that's true. Easy for me to say. It was even reported on the Omaha Mean Streets Twitter page. I bet that Twitter page is fucking bumping 24 seven. Fortunately, the officer with the rifle was very understanding as our director explained the situation to him. The six or seven other cops who joined him were all clearly disgusted that the serious standoff

they were anticipating wasn't going to happen. The funniest thing was the Twitter update, which stated that there wasn't a hostage situation. Just a bunch of actors in an old West play. I wish I could say that this was the last time the cops showed up at a play I was in, but that's a story for another day. SSDGM Bridget. He, they, she. Amazing.

Amazing. Oh my God. That's so funny. Okay. This is a good one. This is I have a Thanksgiving one. Okay. This is called my mom was my wingman on Thanksgiving.

Hi friends, love to the pod. Love the animals. Love the producing. Yada yada. Let's get to it. Hannah Crichton. Congratulations on the producing. Alejandra.

Producing shout out. Doesn't happen that often. Doesn't. I was raised by my loving charismatic crazy single mother in Washington state. One Thanksgiving during my senior year of high school in 2003, we were making a three hour drive to my sister's house up north. We were listening to the radio and pretending we knew the words to the songs. When a car drove past my side full of men in army uniforms.

My mom immediately started to match their speed trying to see if anyone was cute. I died of embarrassment and sunk down into my seat, hoping they would not notice that our cars were pacing each other. Mom. But just then they started to wave and honk back at us. Oh. Trying not to make eye contact. I begged my mom to quit it.

But unfortunately our cars had power windows. And my mom proceeded to roll down my window and shout, How's it going fellas? What is she in the 1950s? Yes, apparently. The driver of the car then started having a full on conversation with my mom about the army, all while speeding down the highway. I was fighting to roll the window back out while simultaneously trying to keep my mom's focus on the road.

After a minute of back and forth racing, the army men started to shout, What's your number? To which my mom proceeded to shout my number back to them. Soon after, my phone rang. Yeah. Which I immediately sent to voicemail. My mom started giving me a hard time saying that I needed to live a little. Remember she's a senior in high school.

And so when the phone rang again, I picked it up. The voice on the other line said, So you like the pixies? And I immediately was both shocked and curious. You see, 20 years ago it was cool to have a song playing for incoming callers. I remember that. And my artist of choice was pixies. Wait, sorry.

Will you explain that? I don't know what you're talking about. Like instead of the phone ringing when you call someone, a song plays. I've never heard of that. I swear I remember that. Maybe I'm making it up, but I swear I remember that. Well, you're not if that person knows about it. Yeah, or maybe it was their outgoing voicemail instead.

But something like that. Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I love it. Yeah. And the pixies aren't really well known. So the fact that this person in the army knows about them is pretty cool. Sure. At the time, they were not necessarily a common band that was well known.

So it instantly took me off guard. After getting the guy's name and talking a little bit, where are you headed? Where are you from? Et cetera. My mom interrupted our little chat and started yelling at me to invite them to our family's Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, that's right.

She invited four strangers who we had not even officially met outside of the car back to my family Thanksgiving meal without checking with her sister first. Oh. And they said yes. They followed us the rest of the drive and the whole time I was making calls to cousins and aunts trying to explain that we needed four more seats at the table and cursing my mom saying that it was reckless and stupid. But I was still interested in the guy who knew my favorite band

and had a cute accent from New York. Luckily for us, they all four men were very kind people who were away from their families and training before heading off to Afghanistan for the war. We had plenty of food to share and they all got to spend a dinner with my incredibly welcome and patient family. One of the last holidays, they would spend stateside before their deployment. My aunt ended up not killing my sister instead sharing stories about how their parents used to pick up quote strays on the streets and invite them to dinner to share a meal.

And so this was not that out of character for our family and lucky for me, one of the men in the car was actually an incredibly kind and handsome person who I hit it off with. We ended up dating for a year and a half and still remain in contact with each other. He sends his love to the family, especially my mom, everything's giving. I'm so thankful for my mom. She has made my life full of fun, adventure and love. She doesn't listen to the podcast because it's quote too scary for her.

But I'm sure she'd be very thrilled that this was shared for an audience. Stay sexy and don't invite strangers to Thanksgiving or maybe do Ash. I mean, first of all, that's a great story. And I think inviting soldiers to dinner because almost it's like they're like state sponsored. They're country sponsored, you know what I mean? They'll have background checks done. Yes, they're responsible. They're like in the army, often to pay for college.

Totally. Making the ultimate sacrifice away from home. Like it started as an embarrassing story. Then it's like, oh my God, they're about to get deployed. That's like the most meaningful thing. And then she dated one for a year and a half. That's such a meek you. How meek you does that?

It's very meek you. But I also want to say Alejandra Keck's last name because I couldn't remember it under the pressure of saying it. But if you like the producing on this show, Alejandra Keck and Hannah Creighton are the people you need to talk to. That's right. Now, if you're more about the engineering, you know that's Stephen Ray Morris. You know, take your pick.

What are you interested in on this fire? What are you nerd out about? There's more than just hoes. There's way more than just hoes. Oh yeah, there's all kinds of people making this happen for us. That's right. There's a nager of animals. Kind of your stories, whatever they are, we always ask for meat cutes.

We haven't gotten any of those in a while. So please send those in. Meat cutes are a good idea. Meat cutes and peace. Yeah, peed drinking. This is the story that almost made me throw up. Tua, try to make Karen throw up on the podcast. And also stay sexy.

And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? Ah. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Hannah Kyle Creighton. Our producer is Alejandra Keck.

This episode was airing on the show. This is Hannah Kyle Creighton, our producer is Alejandra Keck. This episode was engineered and mixed by Stephen Ray Morris. Our researchers are Marin McLashen and 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 Podcasts, 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 wondery.com. рев.com slash survey.