Small Town Murder - #583 - Charming Serial Killer - Kirkland, Washington

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

This week, in Kirkland, Washington, what first appears to be a simple, yet horrifying murder, turns into a serial killer, stalking the area, and leaving women posed in terrible & suggestive positions. This posing makes everyone sure that they're dealing with one killer. This killer is known as "charming & likable", with many friends, and even connections to the police. But he's also a ruthless murderer, who would never stop, unless he was caught!!Along the way, we find out that Costco's signature brand comes from an actual place, that charm, and likability can only go so far when you turn into a serial killer, and that you definitely never want to be labeled as a "sadistic necrophile"!!New episodes every Thursday!Donate at: patreon.com/crimeinsports or go to paypal.com and use our email: [e-mail] to shutupandgivememurder.com for all things Small Town Murder & Crime In Sports!Follow us on...twitter.com/@murdersmallfacebook.com/smalltownpodinstagram.com/smalltownmurderAlso, check out James & Jimmie's other show, Crime In Sports! On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Wondery, Wondery+, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to small town murder early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. When Luigi Mangione was arrested for allegedly shooting the CEO of United Healthcare, he didn't just spark outrage. He ignited a cultural firestorm. Is the system working or is it time for a reckoning? I'm Jesse Weber. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. When a young woman named Desiree vanishes without a trace, the trail leads to Cat Taurus, a charismatic influencer with millions of followers. But behind the glamorous posts and inspirational quotes, a sinister truth unravels.

Binge all episodes of Don't Cross Cat early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. This week in Kirkland, Washington, what seems like one horrifying but simple murder quickly turns into a serial killer stalking the area and escalating his horrible acts to a Ted Bundy level of brutality. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petragallo. I'm here with my co-host.

I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another absolutely insane, brutal, and awful, and hilarious episode of Small Town Murder. We have a crazy episode for you today. Another serial killer in our midst and a really strange one too. Just an odd guy and lucky he was caught when he did put it that way we'll get into all of that and more but first head over to shut up and give me murder.com get your tickets not only for regular live

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So I mean that's pretty impressive. Good job guys. And then for Small Town Murder we're going to talk about American Nightmare. It's a documentary on Netflix and I read the whole book that goes with it too. Long book and it's the craziest story I've ever heard in my life, honestly. It's insane edge of your seat You think it's a Sherry Papini fake kidnapping situation, then you don't and then you do again It's the craziest thing you ever want to hear

It's so wild man We'll get into all that patreon.com slash crime in sports and you get a shout out at the end of the regular show as well That said disclaimer time out at the end of the regular show as well. That said, disclaimer time is a comedy show, everybody. We are comedians. Now, that doesn't mean anything in this show is not real. Every last little detail is real. Nothing's embellished for comic effect or any garbage like that. This is meticulously researched stuff, and we're going to find places for some humor. Now, Michael, how does that happen? Very easily. There's a lot of dumb things to make fun of in this. Here's what we don't do though. We don't make fun of the victims or the victims' families because we're assholes, but we're not scumbags. See how that goes?

That's how it works. But otherwise there's plenty to make fun of. First of all, someone goes, I think I can get away with murder. This seems pretty easy. When you have no experience doing that, probably a bad idea. That right right there is gonna make fun of and whole lot of other things Like that, but if you think that true crime and comedy should never ever go together then maybe we're not for you But maybe we are you should check it out. I think we're for everybody We're for the children damn it small-town murders for the children. No, it's not it's one thing. It's not for is the children, but All town murders for the children. No, it's not. It's one thing it's not for is the children, but.

It's to protect the children. It's to protect the children. Yeah, there you go. But for the rest of you though, that wanna hear a crazy story and wanna hear some wild stuff, I think it's time to sit back, clear the lungs here and let's all shout.

Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we. Let's do this everybody. Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's do it. We are going all the way to Washington State this week. Heading out to the West Coast. We're going to Kirkland, Washington,

which is a little bigger town than we usually cover, but still a burb, you know what I mean? It's a suburb, so. Well, we'll talk about that actually. Oh shit. It's, it's in, I. So well, we'll talk about that actually It's It's in yeah, I was gonna say I was wondering if you're gonna bring that up or not I was one thing I was like, I'll probably bring up the Walmart brand or I'm not Walmart Costco Costco Costco's Kirkland. Yeah. No, we'll talk about this is in

Western Washington and It's about 20 minutes to Seattle. So suburb outside of Seattle about an hour and 40 minutes to Everson, Washington Which was our last episode there. It was an express episode called ghost hunter where a Woman said that she thought her boyfriend was a ghost. So she shot him which is you know Likely excuse obviously because I shoot at ghosts when I see them. That's what I would do right away This is in King County area code 425. The motto here, really sucking on Seattle's teat here, the gateway to Seattle. So sure come through here. Now there's got to be a door there somewhere. Has to be. History, a little bit of history. In 1886 a guy named Peter Kirk, where Kirkland came from, was a British-born businessman who wanted

to expand his company's or his family's steel production company and wanted to go to Washington and do that because he heard iron deposits had been discovered in the Cascade Mountains. So under this Kirkland Land and Development Company, he purchased thousands of acres of land in what's now downtown Kirkland. But this was in 1888 when it was just nothing. So they started the construction of a new steel mill and he was saying, telling everyone that this was going to be the quote Pittsburgh of the West.

Yeah. Yeah, didn't quite happen. And the company ended up amounting to nothing and another steel company opened up and took all what they wanted so totally over but he did get the town named after him so there is that now Costco previously had its headquarters in Kirkland headquarters are in a different place but they kept the namesake of the Kirkland. Oh. Headquarters are in a different place, but they kept the namesake of the Kirkland Signature store brand,

that's because that's where they were based out of. That's the only reason why. Yeah, well, you gotta keep the name, because otherwise people won't know that it's the same shop. What the hell is that? Yeah, Walmart's got great value stuff. Kirkland, yeah. Is it great value?

Yeah, great value. We've done several on your stupid opinions, like the great value pizza. Oh, right, right, right. So reviews of this town, we've never been there. Let's find out what the people think. Here's five stars, and there's a lot of good reviews of this town, too.

There's tons of good ones. You're not a Costco shopper, are you? No. I'm not a, I'm not a. I don't have seven kids. What the fuck do I need? Why would I need to buy things in that volume? I don't need, no.

I don't need three cases of fucking chicken nuggets. I just don't need that to come in one box That's crazy a pallet of cheese. It's a yeah, it's what I'm saying Yeah, I don't want I don't want to you know like a dresser full of Raisin bran that's too much raisin bran for me. I can't eat all that so Let's get to reviews here five stars Kirkland is a beautiful small city on the East Lake of East side of Lake, Washington Downtown Kirkland is a lively seaside area often populated by swift walking locals, and they're adorable dogs Well even the dogs are cuter in Kirkland.

With summers, there's a weekly farmers market that brings new trinkets and delicious food options to the area, so my personal experience in Kirkland has been nothing short of wonderful. Wow, this is crazy. Here's 5 stars. I've lived in Kirkland ever since I was born in 1997 of May That's how he writes it. I don't know Of May I've grown to love the beautiful atmosphere of nature and friendly neighbors The local food is amazing and the parks are always clean

It's a quiet place to raise a family but not great if you like to go out to clubs, as most suburbs aren't real big on nightlife. The rent is incredibly inflated as well. This is a very expensive area, by the way. Is that right? Yeah, this is like an upscale suburb of an expensive city. Seattle's already an expensive city, and the burbs are expensive, too. Here's three stars.

Properties on the water are expensive but very nice. Mostly apartment housing, very few abandoned properties. Places where there's high real estate values, you're not going to get a lot of abandoned houses. Someone's going to get in there and sell it. Then two stars, street lights are not great for nighttime driving. That's it. That's the whole thing. That's the only thing they're good for.

Whole review of the town is that. That's like saying that this Taco Bell isn't good for 2 a.m. drunk eating. What else is it there for? It's its job, yeah. Yeah. So people of this town, population's 91,656. That's now.

When this all happened, there was less people there. The exactly 50-50 male and female here, which we never see for some reason. Median age is like exactly the national average too. 37.8, like exactly what it is. Family here, 55% married. Way less people have children and are single, everybody's like married with children, expensive suburb, that kind of thing. Race of this town,

72.6% white, 1.1% black, 14% Asian, and 7% Hispanic. So spread around there religious it's about 38% religious and the highest group here is going to be Catholics with 15.5 percent which isn't that high yeah as we know the Catholics are the Baptists of the Pacific Northwest Obviously we all know that of the entire the Cascade Mountain region so the unemployment rate here is about the national average. It's pretty low. And median household income here is very high.

National average is $69,021. Here it is $121,998. Almost double. That is a healthy income they got going on there. They're doing fantastic. The problem is the cost of living is equally as high. That's the issue here. 100 is regular in the United States for cost of living.

Here it is 158. So, high. Yeah, two and a half, that's expensive, yeah. The housing is the high one. That's the big one here. The housing is a 329 out of 100. So. Holy.

The median home cost here. For what? One million, 555,900. Median. Median. That is rough man. That's what I mean. This is yeah. Your average house is a million dollars. That's your pricing out the riff-raff I guess. I guess so. And wait till we tell you about these houses. I mean these start with our matter of fact Let's get to it right now with the Kirkland Washington real estate report The average two-bedroom rental here goes for $2,680 which is

Almost like Manhattan prices. That's a lot. That's crazy. It's over twice what the average is. Wow. Yeah, that's insane. Here is a six-bedroom, three-bath. Sounds like they made a couple of big bedrooms into two smaller bedrooms type of thing. Or they, somebody had some extra kids and just added some bedrooms. That's possible here. I can't get to shit anyway. Get out in the hallway. Line up out in the hallway. As long as there's a master bath, we don't care what you two do out there.

You kids do. 3,059 square feet. It just looks like a basic house. It's like a raised ranch looking house. It's not like anything spectacular. Nothing wonderful. You can't even really tell what the inside looks like because it's all photoshopped to like be staged basically so that's weird it is one million

seven hundred seventy five thousand dollars bottom rung home no no land either this is on a like a little lot of a house i mean there's no like you know know acre of woods or some none of that shit Next up four bedroom for bath tea. Oh t-ball tea. Bo tea. Oh tea bowl for each and every Behold 3520 square feet this is on point three two acres so a Third of an acre it is a it's a fancy log cabin. Yeah. It's you know got nice windows and it's three thousand square feet of this fucking window. Yeah a rich person's log cabin is what it is a rich person pretending to be a woodsman over here. Yeah yeah you're a real Abe Lincoln look at you over there.

Two million eight hundred thousand dollars for this. It's fucking crazy. You got no land. I don't even know what to do here. Next up, three-bedroom five-bath, so T-Ball for everybody's beehull. 3,990 square feet. It's almost 4,000 on.69 acres. This is on the water. Okay, another kind of... .69. Not a lot. It's on Lake Washington.

It says spectacular Kirkland Gold Coast waterfront on coveted Lake Ave West. It looks like a small hunting lodge that's fancy. Like a fancy lodge. $12,950,000. $13 million. Like a fancy lodge twelve million nine hundred fifty thousand dollars Thirteen million dollars Your ass thirteen million dollars. I gotta be out of your fucking mind. That's crazy things to do here Let's do this Kirkland uncorked. Let's get into it wine time. Yeah where wine meets street fair fun fuck Yeah, we're drinking in the streets happens. That's what that is

Fascinating that Costco uses Kirkland as like this as their bread and it's like, you know, it's store-bred So it's like the lower rung, but they are treating Kirkland like it's oh 13 million dollars for house there. It's Tell me Kirkland wine in the street. I'm like, I know the people that are going that. Yeah, no. You would think so. But I know it's crazy. It's what's wild about it.

Yeah, you would imagine it would be like this is not, you know, it'd be guys in like cut off sweatpants with six kids traveling behind them, just standing in the TV section while they're while their wife shops for fucking clothes that are for some reason In the middle of the store next to dry goods I don't know why Calvin Klein's that wouldn't sell elsewhere and yeah dragging that fucking cart that wagon that foldable They have they have Adidas sweat suit. See you Or do you want the matching sand? It's only $38 for both.

Costco's fine. I mean, I've gotten there in Arizona. It's like a weird number too. In Arizona we went there at some point. I have a problem with Costco because of the receipt checking thing that I've ranted and raved about the whole time so they can go fuck their mothers all together. So this festival is split into two parts, a 21 plus tasting garden and an all ages street fair. All ages so you can wander out drunk from the garden into where the kids are.

The tasting garden, this seems like where the fun is, features wine tasting, live music and a saturday food truck feast. The street fair features art in booths and crafts. So nothing. Just walking around, digging off. A band called the Chancellors will be there. That sounds okay. And then as soon as they wrap up, they clean up all their instruments, get the drum set

off the stage and then there's a dog model contest which is yeah Which is awesome. I'll stay away Yeah, I'm gonna stay away. I don't want him to just you know I don't want Oscar to make them all feel bad so Bunch of male dogs walking around with their dicks out with the dicks out Balls clipped whores are just trot. Oh look at them. These bitches are everywhere So there's also a harvest festival And says save the date for Kirkland's fourth annual harvest festival and it takes place at a beach it features food trucks We got live music

by Roman R. O E M E N Roman and music by Roman, R-O-E-M-E-N, Row Men. And yeah, they're really in favor of Row vs. Wade. They're just, they're really, the Row Men, yeah. And the Whereabouts, the Row Men and the Whereabouts, that's a band, and also a band called 24 Madison. All right. Don't get your dress out, guys.

That's where we'll be practicing if you need to find us later. And activities for children at the Kids Corral. Yeah. With two Ks. That's a kid and then corral with a K. Luckily, it's not like the, you know, could have been a lot with the Kirkland Kids Corral,

could have gotten real ugly real fast, so I'm glad there. There's also a cornhole tournament, of course. Sure. Register your team at, you go to kirklandparks.net and you search cornhole, it says. Just pop cornhole in your query search there and see what happens, everybody. Throw a cornhole in your search engine.

Eee. I love that so much. Do it with your pants off, you're gonna need it. You are gonna need it for sure. Holy shit, crime rate in this town, we're interested in here, property crime. Now this is a very expensive area, so I would assume zero.

It should be low, but that's kind of where the riffraff goes to steal shit too. I would assume in a neighborhood like that, remember when we went to do some shit in LA and we went and found O.J.'s house and we were driving around Brentwood? Every turn we made, you just expected three cops to pull up on us and tell us to get the fuck out of there because we're scumbags and don't belong here, right? That's what I picture this area would be like, hey scum, you don't belong here. You're not wealthy. Get out of here. In a 2012 Honda Civic that screeches when you shift gears.

This is in your jeep. This is in your jeep. Was it in my jeep? It was in your jeep, which kind of made us look worse. It made us look like somehow it made us look worse. I don't know how. That was after you upgraded to the juicer. That's right. But yeah, just about average on property crime. So that's odd. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course assault, the amount Rushmore

of crime, that's low. So that is one third of the national average. So two thirds under it. Very, very low there that said let's talk about some horrible murder shall we all right we're gonna jump right in and jump in hot here let's go to June 23rd 1990 yeah and let's meet Jimmy let's meet Jimmy neither of us Jimmy he's a Mickey D's employee who's at work at five o'clock in the morning, so

Jimmy's not having a great run in life here at this point in time We look up early for this shit. Oh man imagine getting up at four to make the fries like that sounds Our eyes James you're making hash browns and shitty eggs Bad eggs, so here's Jimmy here here he is, he's coming out, he's got a heavy, you know, he's going out to the dumpster, taking out I guess last night's trash or whatever, which, god, fucking overnight McDonald's trash this guy's, you know, it's leaking everywhere.

Yeah. Nasty. Oh, those dumpsters smell so bad. Oh, they're so disgusting, they're so disgusting. There's soup in there, yeah. Nothing smells worse for some reason than a Chinese food place dumpster. Yeah? Yeah, I worked downtown in Phoenix and there was a dumpster that was for this Chinese place and it was, it's the most, this is an alley full of dumpsters and this one stood out

as particularly fucking rank. I used to have to take the trash out of the pizza joint and that yeast and milk. Oh, that'll do it too. That bad shit soaking in there forever And then people just throw the bag into the back room And then once a day somebody has to go back there to take the tree You're throwing like 13 bags of giant amounts of trash that are leaking. It's so cruel. We could have that's the thing here I'm picturing lots of like yeah diet coke and orange high-sea leaking out of this fucking thing

It's gonna to be nasty. Sour juice. So he gets over the gets to the back door and he is gets out of the back door. He's got like a gurney thing that he's taken it out on like multiple garbage things and he's heading out toward the dumpster, which those dumpsters are kind of the middle of the parking lot because they share a little dumpster Bay with the black Angus restaurant. That's also right there. So that's what's going on here. So he's walking and it's very early in the morning and doesn't really can't really see

very much going on. And he does see something kind of laying in the in the parking lot between him and the dumpster. So he sees that he's like, what's that? It looked like it looked like a long white and long and twisted like a tree branches the way he thought it looked like. So he's like, what's that? It looked like a long, white and long and twisted like a tree branch is the way he thought it looked like. So he's like, what the hell is that there? Not a lot of white tree branches

unless it's like a kind of birch tree or something. So they were like, what is this? They didn't know if it was like, he said he didn't know if it was something from like that fell out of Black Angus' trash cans or I don't know what Black Angus does over there. I don't know what the hell is the kind of shit they throw out. So it's very odd. So he does over there I don't know what the hell kind of shit they throw out so it's very odd so he's looking he's like what

the fuck he stops for a minute and then he thought oh no is this some kind of animal or some shit I don't want to get close to it if it's a wounded animal it's gonna bite me my life sucks already I'm taking McDonald's garbage out at 5 o'clock in the morning I don't need to get bitten by a rabid raccoon now too on the way to do it. So he goes a little bit closer and he thinks it's a mannequin. Thinks it's a-

They always say that. God damn it. It's never been a mannequin ever. In one of our Facebook groups there, I noticed somebody put, I know I hear that it's never a mannequin, but, and then posted a picture and put, I was walking one day, it actually was a mannequinquin she had a whole story about how she was walking thought

It was assumed it was a dead body because she listens to this show right and it was a mannequin so Side and walked closer Yeah, cuz he was like what is it? He's got to go to the dumpster. It's McDonald's man Yeah, you want that you want that bigday, you gotta go to the dumpster. The person on Facebook group, you saw a mannequin, thought it was a mannequin, then you're like, well, it's never a mannequin. I'm gonna go look. Are you out of your fucking mind?

I'm gonna investigate closer and then look closer. That's one of the other things we said is keep walking. You think you see a mannequin, you didn't. I'd call 911 and say, it's never a mannequin. Don't get it. Just, I don't know. It could be a mannequin. Clean it up.

But he's looking and he goes It's just it looks real. It just looks really really real and like, you know, no clothes on this mannequin Just looks like it's laying there. Yeah, then it's got to be a person. It can't be a mannequin He's like, you know processing all this is going what the fuck is it? Some kind of some drunk over here felt like a homeless person fell down what's going on? but the way the But the way this form was twisted. Unnatural, yeah. Was very unnatural. So he looked closer and then said,

took off, ran back in the McDonald's. And so he, later on a police officer would say, he sees something really strange and it's the body of a woman. And so he rushed in, called 911, police arrive at the scene and they find a young woman dead and they're looking at her, she's got no visible gunshot wounds or stab wounds or anything like that. So that's interesting.

It's a naked dead lady. Naked dead lady in the McDonald's Black Angus parking lot there. And the odd thing is her body has been posed twisted up like that. Clearly posed. This is not an accidental an accidental deal here. Just a dumping in the body rusted like that. They put it like that. Absolutely. She was found partially inside the dumpster corral area. You know, those dumpsters with the little gate that opens up in the parking lot there. And it's definitely posed this.

The way they say it is the she's nude, wearing nothing but small articles of jewelry and bent into shapes that are, you know, human doesn't bend into. The cops said it looked like complete degradation is what it looked like somebody was trying to do. This is from Dr. Robert Keppel, who is John Douglas's partner in the profiling and all that. Yeah, the guy wrote a million books and all that kind of thing from the FBI.

Yeah, he says the victim was left lying on her back with her left foot crossed over the instep of her right ankle. Her head was turned to the left and a Frito-Lay dip container, you know those little fucking cans basically, rested on top of her right eye. Weird. Real weird. And in one hand they find a Douglas Fir pinecone. She's holding a pinecone so there's a there's a

Frito-lay dip can on her eye and a pinecone in her hand And there's no like this isn't like a big pine trees above and they fall over. There's no bother pine cones around So what the shit shit that's very interesting that it's what I'm saying she's wearing two pieces of jewelry arms are folded over her stomach legs extended crossed at the ankles and had a pine cone in her in her hand like we said a detective said somebody had taken quite some time staging the body I had noticed there was a large size coffee cup lid covering her right eye, which it's not,

it's a Frito-Lay dip lid, that's what it is. One foot was crossed over the other, her hands were folded over her stomach and they were holding a pine cone. The post-mortem injuries and spending a lot of time with the body really isn't that common. It's not, it's really, yeah, especially in a public place like this,

because you, it's one thing to pose someone in a private place, it's another thing to kill someone and then just dump them, but to take somebody to a public place where there's, you're fully exposed in a no cover in a fucking, in a parking lot, and take a dead dead body a dead naked Betty and and and be posing it you got to have some nerves of steel to do that like I couldn't fucking do that I'd be shitting my pants wouldn't you oh my god

Jesus Christ I don't like running red lights you know what I mean oh fuck it wasn't you got damn it I'm looking all around this is crazy I want to be around dead people so they find out that the young lady who they have discovered is Mary Ann Polryk. She is 27 years old. And that's who it is. So in the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant starts firing at him.

And the suspect. He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione. Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. I was meant to sow terror. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi, exclusively on Wondery+.

You can join Wondery+, the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world. And the suspect.

He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas mangioni became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history was targeted premeditated in Minnesota terror. I'm Jesse Weber host of Luigi produced by law on crime and twist this is more than a true crime investigation we explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoking the people to a true issue. Hey, we're here to save you!

Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi, exclusively on Wondery+. You can join Wondery+, in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple podcasts. They're gonna have to investigate all all of this and it's really, clearly somebody is a sick fuck and they know it. So this is a dangerous person out there and they don't know if it's personal. They don't know anything about it. That said, let's talk about a man here.

Let's talk about, let's start over here. We'll talk about George Waterfield Russell Jr. Waterfield Russell, yeah. George Waterfield is middle name, which I'm sure that somebody's maiden name or something. Russell Jr. He's born in April of 1958. He's born down in Florida,

and he'll spend his first few years in Florida here. Goes from Florida, he'll end up in Washington, so can't get any farther away than from Florida here. Goes from Florida, he'll end up in Washington. So can't get any farther away than from Florida really. So he's the oldest of three children that we'll find out, step brothers and sisters that come much later. His parents are separated when he's about six months old. So his mom has a lot of ambition. His mom, Joyce here, and his dad, George Waterfield Russell, Sr. So they had him. They looked fine, but apparently the family wasn't doing very well.

And Joyce decided when, you know, young George is about six months old, that she's had enough and she wants out of this whole thing. She wants a different, not just a different situation, you know, romantically or whatever. She wants a different life completely She's like I'm done with all this shit. Yeah, so she left her husband and Also leaves George Behind with her mother. Oh She wants out of everything. Yeah, that's she wants a different life So I for a mom nothing so leaves the George with the mother and she went off to college

She said fuck that I had had the kid too early got married too early going back to college Now she said she'd be back. She's like I'm gonna I'm gonna go to college and I'll come back I'm gonna have a degree and I'll be able to take care of my son better so and she does come back actually really in 1964 and She got in her diploma. She'll end up being a college professor. Wow. She's a pretty smart lady.

And not only does she come back with a diploma, she comes back with a new husband. Oh, okay. I got this paper and I brought you a new dad. Here you go. Terrific, yeah. I don't hear, by the way, anything about George Sr. for the rest of the story. He just might as well have disintegrated. Just vanished into thin air here.

So the this guy that she has, this new husband, is a very successful dental surgeon that does very well for himself. He's like he's the dental. He does all the dental work for the University of Washington sports teams and all that kind of shit. Yeah, he's a real, really successful guy. And she comes back saying, I'm picking George up

and we're moving to Washington State. We're moving to somewhere very, very wealthy also and ritzy here and not Kirkland, somewhere much ritzier than that. So yeah, the problem here is and wealthy also and ritzy here, and not Kirkland, somewhere much ritzier than that. What? So yeah, the problem here is, George is never ever gonna feel like he's a part of this family ever.

Which, from somebody who has done that, I get it, but a lot of that, looking back on it as an adult now, is part you too. Because you feel like you're not welcome, doesn't mean you're not welcome. You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm saying.

They could have been very welcoming and very conciliatory to him and everything else, but still he could have felt like that just because that's how people feel. You know what I'm saying? That's how I felt and it wasn't anybody's fault really. So I don't know. So but he never really feels like he's like as close to his mom as he should be because

she has the new husband and you know he feels like an add-on just to tack on you know like a responsibility. I had to go get my son, so. Oh, good. So they move out to this area here. By the way, the dentist's name is Wanzel Mobley. Dr. Wanzel Mobley, that's the dentist here. Now, they end up, this guy makes a lot of money,

and they end up going to Mercer Island, that's where they move, which is an extremely wealthy little enclave up there. I mean, it's its own little planet, really. It's the best way to put it. There's all kinds of little islands up there that are just dominated with incredibly wealthy people in their homes.

And they have their own goddamn, it's their own ecosystem on these little islands. I mean, there's not, the outside world really doesn't matter, because it's all about the looks of this and how your house is, and do you have the right clothes and the right cars, and one thing is described as, they said, on Mercer Island,

poverty is driving last year's Mercedes. That was a quote that somebody had. I was like, wow, that gives you a pretty good idea. Now George is with his mother and his stepfather here. By the way, they're the only black family in the neighborhood. Is that right? Yeah, they're the only black family in this neighborhood.

There's a couple other black people, I guess, on Mercer Island, but right where they are, they're the only ones there. So they don't seem to mind. I mean, like the doctor doesn't mind. The mother doesn't mind. George doesn't mind either because it's it's a pretty nice area. And he's got so he doesn't feel left out or anything like that with that at all.

That doesn't really come up for him. But he does feel like an an afterthought in the family, though. He feels like they don't care about him About 1970 issues in about seventh grade And he meets a kid named Boris Brockett, which is a tough name for an American kid to grow up with that's just Boris Brockett Man So he hadn't seen

Oh man So he hadn't seen George walking around George had a st. Bernard a big st. Bernard. He's a little guy George too even when he's an adult He's small so Well, the same Bernard's like bigger than him like taller than him like you can't like if the dogs walking looks like it's alone And then you're like oh, there's a kid over there, okay, and by the way there's I think like in this area There are exactly two black families. It is this one and Bill Russell oh Yeah, Billy, Russell, Bill Russell the all-time great player with like 11 rings and all that kind of shit and Bill Russell's Bill Russell's kid is

about George's age and Everything like that too. So they, yeah. So they grow up together. Yeah, well he'll, people will be like, oh you must be Bill Russell's kid. He's like, no, other black family. No, yeah.

So Boris, this is a quote from Boris. He said he liked George right away. He said he was short like me. He had big round bubbly face. His big eyes, a loud infectious laugh He's your best friend in a second. He emphasized that his name was George Russell, Jr I asked him if he was related to Bill Russell and he said he thought so he's not all related to Bill Russell Crazy that he moved to an area where Bill Russell is the only other black guy and he's got his same last name

So people just assumed he was like, you know Bill Russell's nephew that moved up there having hard times somewhere or some shit. So He said yes, he said I got the idea. He didn't want to get too personal He said my mother took one look at George and said watch out for that boy. He's trouble But after she got to know George she was totally charmed. He was polite, respectful, even as a little kid he had this uncanny ability to make you like him, an easy style, warm, very southern. He'll lose his southern accent later on on purpose, but at this point he's got a real like heavy, like he said his favorite food was the way this kid pronounced it, griots.

G-R-R-G-R-E-E-I-T-S. Griots. Food was the way this kid pronounced it greets grr or gre e-its Greets yeah, I'm not saying that in a southern accent. I'm saying it like he's saying and he called me Boris. Oh Yeah, so he said when I asked him what part of the south was he was from he shrugged Fuck are you talking about how How do you not know? Around, I don't know. He finally said he was from Maryland. Not true. I thought griots must be fish eggs.

He didn't realize that meant grits. He couldn't put that together. He didn't know what that was. So he said on his second visit to George's house, little Boris met his mother, Joyce, He said on his second visit to George's house, little Boris met his mother, Joyce, and he said he had difficulty finding the right word to describe Joyce. He said, he thought about it, he goes,

dignified, austere, these aren't warm motherly words really that you wanna hear. Kind, nice, things. Dignified is good, yeah. Dignified's fine, but I don't care if my mom is dignified I just wanted to be nice to me, you know like an austere. That's not a great means That's if you're slashing budgets, you're being austere. You know what I mean? That's like She's very I guess sleek and streamlined Before he finally said I think I found the right word ominous

Again, uh, that's real bad doesn't sound I know that word real motherly Austere and ominous don't sound like warm traits that much So Boris went on to say she was small like George slender short, short black hair, nice face, looked like Coretta Scott King. It's like I know one other black lady who exists, I think it's that one. She had a thin voice, not threatening or overbearing, sounded a little British. She's not at all British, she's southern, but she went to school and they very much want to speak in a certain way in this area to be accepted.

They're both highly educated. One's a doctor, one's a professor. So yes, she's exuding that. Yeah. She had a thin voice, not threatening sound, a little British. George said she taught school English, drama, black history, stuff like that. He said, quote, tell you one thing, she didn't make you feel overly welcome. Oh. Her look kept you quiet, he said. Her look kept you quiet.

You didn't hear her talk about griots. George was kind of subdued around her and so was I. She scared me. She dot dot dot scared me, the kid said. But don't forget, we were trying to slam dunk our socks in her living room. That's the other thing, too He talks about this game. They played where they would Over the curtain rod they would play basketball with these socks and fuck up the curtains and fuck up the curtain rods and You know they played mostly at his house because shit would get broken and then they'd go to George's and he didn't want to

Play and now he understood why because he was afraid of his mother And then they'd go to George's and he didn't want to play and now he understood why because he was afraid of his mother So when Boris asked George why he was a Russell and his mother was a Mobley Right what the fuck he's like. I don't understand that because it's like 1970 and he doesn't really and with all these rich people There's probably not a ton of divorces, you know So he explained in a few words that his natural father lived back East The man George now called dad was his mother's second husband, the dentist. So Boris attempted to ask another personal question and he said, George just turned away and stopped talking and then never invited me over again.

He just quit talking. You're too close. He's like, can't do it. So George has some arms length shit that's going on here that's a little bit weird. I guess it's, his family would cause that I suppose. So he gets into some trouble here right away. And a lot of times too if you're new and you're trying to make friends,

you might get into trouble trying to show off and you know. And kids having balls as currency as a kid. Truth, yeah, yeah. You know, like especially boy. I don't know how it is with girls. I don't think it's the same I don't think girls are like that bitch is crazy. She's awesome whereas guys are like that motherfuckers crazy He's the he's the coolest you know I mean I Do think that? That is something with girls though like braver. I don't know that yeah Yes, yeah, she's the one that'll take us out and be the crazy one. There's that but there's something to a With boys. It's like if you'll do something that defies authority

Yeah, that's cool. It's all your you know what I mean like oh, man I wish I would do that whereas I don't know if girls are quite the same I mean like, oh man, I wish I would do that. Whereas I don't know if girls are quite the same. They don't have the same weird drive that boys do to be assholes here. So he has a little bit of a problem. Him and two other kids from the seventh grade, they snuck in to a beautiful waterfront home.

Oh. They crept in. Do you know what these awful kids did in here? What'd they do? They made toast. Oh That's all then they left We've snuck in made toast and left and left somebody was out of bread. I suppose I don't know what happened, but wow, but they didn't steal anything. They just accept the toast

I mean real dangerous cutups these kids. That's what I mean So yeah, they then they ended up These kids that's what I mean So yeah, they then they ended up Boris and two other kids not George just two other kids stole several electric guitars from a music store called musicwest Yeah, and took them all to their fork there all these kids have tons of forts by the way There's a bunch of woods and everybody's building the force everybody within the woods they do that That's kids in the city are jealous of that fucking magical shit. Yeah forts, but he George takes it to another level He's got several forts. He's got underground tunnels that he made. He's like he's like the Viet Cong this fucking guy out there

He's it's crazy. He's It's tunneling. Yeah So Boris was excited to tell George dude. I fucking scored all these guitars. You do bad shit with me But George wasn't impressed No, he said that was a bad move Boris bad move my friend. That's the way that's the quote from Boris bad move Boris George said what were you thinking man he said you know what the fuck bro he's like he can't be doing that he said Boris said I don't know and he said maybe we can sell it to like rock bands and George said who's gonna buy hot guitars man right that's not gonna work you don't want

that nobody wants that so George said man you're crazy and George went home that evening there's a knock on Boris' front door and it's fucking a shitload of cops with a warrant for Boris' arrest. Oh, what Boris do? He stole guitars from the music. And then now. Boris said, they came on like Joe Friday.

We got the goods on you, better come clean. They said it ended in a stern lecture. They had to return all the stuff. And they they were 12 so and 12 year old rich kids So you know they're not gonna get in trouble So they said the probation officer sure got our attention is what Boris said shape me up nice and early I got a new respect for the Mercer Island cops. They nailed our asses good. They weren't such a comedy anymore So the cut yeah the thing is George obviously told on them. Oh Really? Yeah, George went right to the cops and told them everything

George for some reason is Obsessed with the cops and really likes to hang around them loves to he's very ed Kempery like that Like he's always wanting to be in the mix, and I don't know if that's to know what they know He just loves the whole crime aspect yeah Absolutely so they were impressed to the cops are like wow thanks a lot kid. That's great you get 24 hours We cleaned up a robbery fucking awesome. Yeah, we even got all the guitars back like accommodation for you shit, man This is awesome a few days later. He gave them more information about some stolen bikes So they were like this kids, you know got the goods. Yeah good. So they got a little informer. Yeah, they got

later more later by the way on his love of police and informing and being part of it all, because it's, he has some ulterior motives, let's just say here, to that. So the forts are a big deal, like I said, in the woods. All the boys have forts, some in trees, some hidden in the woods, some in long abandoned logager shacks and shelters

and shit like that, because there's all sorts of cool places. So George took Boris to his fort. Let me show you my fort here. And George, by the way, would like to try to like, he would make it a challenge for people, try to find my fort and then laugh at them when they couldn't, stuff like that.

So it was well hidden in the woods above the old islander tavern behind that, concealed with blackberry bushes, vine maples, and a prickly aggravation called Devil's Club. That's from a book that we'll mention later on. George said that Boris would be his first and only visitor. He said, this fort was off limits to the world, quote unquote, that's what George said. This is my private area.

So he's got that, he's got his own little lair. Now in school, he became a real loud, boisterous kid, very funny, kind of class clown kind of a kid. But very charming too, even the teachers liked him, even though he was a class clown. Really? Yeah, very high IQ, very shitty grades. Way more, sounds like a comedian very

Not not here not in this place so he had the Like this book says he had the vocabulary of an English teacher son because mom's an English teacher But couldn't really make that into a coherent paper or a thought or a report or an essay. His teachers liked him though and Mercer Island also is a very good school system because it's very rich up there. Eighth grade science teacher described him as quote bright but immature, small for his age, antsy hyper all over the place. You couldn't get mad at him though. He wasn't the least bit malicious He kept us all laughing, but he just wasn't interested in schoolwork

He wanted to play as long as I knew him. He was a playful little boy Yeah, and the other thing is he doesn't even hit five feet until high school. He's real a tiny guy Smallest kid in the class always smallest boy anyway Yep, and George by the way backed up the teacher's thoughts. He told his friend Boris, I only pay attention in classes I like. I don't need those goofy little art classes. I always feel like let's speed this up. Not interested which is exactly what I did in school. Social studies got a hundred. Yeah but if you speed that up James you're James 55 play all over the fucking place art

Didn't give two fucks about that. No, don't care. I like art, but I'm not making it You know what I'm saying? Like it's just I'm not an artist I'm not good at it. So didn't give a shit about that same exact way I my report card looked like did you send two different people to classes? What the fuck happened here? F a F B plus F. Okay, A, F, B plus F. It makes no sense. So George was trying to figure out, he's trying to figure out his role and what's going on here. You know, what his life is and what his every kids go through that. You're trying to figure out who you are and where you fit into the social structure of the world here. And school is your world when you're 12.

So about 1971, 72, cops found him just a couple of weird things. He's peering through some blackberry bushes at night at one point. He's found a kid peering into the format of the bushes, which is weird. It's nothing that's like a crime, but just weird. Certainly, yeah. Certainly lends to some bizarre behavior. Yeah, and now he gets in trouble for truancy. So the cops start like a program around him basically

that is come hang out at the police station, we'll give you some work and hang out with us. Like a kind of a mentor program. Free work, that's a mentor program. So they would make him do like paperwork and shit. Now while this is going on, his stepfather makes it clear to the police that George is absolutely not his son. Like he's like, I don't take biological blame

for anything that's happening right now. Yeah, so they asked the dentist guy, he said, well, he's not your son. How'd you, how, how'd you end up with him? And he said, he said, quote, I lived in a boarding house when I was going to dental school in Washington, DC. And this little orphan kid was living there. I picked him up and put him under my arm. I've had no sense. Yeah. Now you just married his mom. Weird.

So yeah, he liked the attention the police gave him. It made him feel big and important that he was hanging out with these people. One of the cops said, the first time I saw Georgie, he was in trouble for some petty thing, maybe truancy. And the youth bureau had given him some work around the station. He was 13 or 14, little bitty kid, well-dressed, frail, innocent, very likable.

He could charm your socks off. So he said he was the last kid on Mercer Island you'd expect would turn into the biggest nightmare. He became a fixture at the Mercer Island police station. One of the cops said he'd come around a couple times a week and we'd let him straighten things up, wipe the blackboard, sharpen pencils, empty the trash. We thought, hey, if we're giving him some responsibility, maybe we're helping him a little bit.

You're giving him all the responsibility of a kid in detention though. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, a kid has to stay after school. That's all the punishment at the school and you're making them do it at the police station. We call it the breakfast club down there at the old police station so they gave him his own official cubby hole as well. Got his own cubby at the station too. He was telling classmates then he wanted to be a policeman before that he was saying he wanted to be a fighter pilot that he was saying he wanted to be a fighter pilot now

he switched to a policeman and One of the officers said it was the first time we ever took in a kid like that But there was something different about him. He said, you know, it's just a nice kid He's they said the cops would buy him snacks and he really seemed to take to all the cops that worked there Except the black ones didn't like the black cops No to all the cops that worked there except the black ones. Didn't like the black cops. No, wouldn't talk to them, wouldn't be a point. Had no interest in the black cops whatsoever. And they tried to be real nice to him

and he was like, don't care, fuck off. Yeah, yeah, I mean, wow. Weird, right? I mean, the first black cop that I think I remember was fucking Carl Winslow. I don't know. Well, I mean. No, no, maybe it was, maybe it was the other Winslow

in Police Academy that. Oh, you're talking the other Winslow in Police Academy that. Oh, you're talking about Michael Winslow. You're talking about like in movies? At all. Really? I guess you grew up out there, that makes sense. All the cops are like. I didn't see cops that much.

No, and all the cops in Arizona are like white guys from the Marines. Yeah, they're like MPs that are now, yeah, like square headed dudes like that. Yeah, they're not. Dudes that were in the military got it discharged And they're like now what one of my dad's best friends from high school that lived across the street from us was a cop And he was black so I never there's a lot tons of black cops

That's fucking funny, so yeah, he said that I He didn't like the black cops, which is strange. So after a few months, they said we'd talk one on one with him and he'd listen to your troubles like you were the most important person in the world. Talking about the kid. You'd have to keep reminding yourself you were talking to a kid.

Really? Yeah, they're like, yeah, my wife, man, I gotta tell you, I'm having marriage problems and he's like, lay it on me, brother, let's hear you. Yeah, you don't have to tell me about my hemorrhoids. Man, I gotta tell you man. I'm a marriage problems, and he's like lay it on me brother. Let's hear you Yeah, it was odd They thought it was odd too that he would be Basically making a bunch of cops and it was substitute family for a kid that age who had a family it just seemed odd So a lot of them said that he didn't get very personal about his own stuff

And they thought maybe this cheerful exterior and all these jokes are a cover for some darker shit, you know, like a comedian. So he said, uh, they said, we wondered why he didn't illuminate things. If we got too nosy, he made it plain. He didn't want to talk about his home life. So we just stopped asking hardest thing in the world for a bunch of nosy cops. But we liked Georgie enough to give him the space was he was it what was bothering him he would never say so he's having this home life that he doesn't want to talk to people about his mom is austere

and ominous right his stepdad makes it clear that this did not come from my dick that's not mine yeah this is this did not leak from my pipe here. I just picked it up and put it under my arm. Fuck yeah. So May of 1973, his kind of high school area when it starts to go. Now in high school, he just hits five feet as he's a freshman. And that makes him a little bit uncomfortable

in high school, and that's tough for high school to be five foot tall. So he'd start hanging out with younger kids who looked more like him. That was kind of the way he'd do it here. Um, and they said that one of the cops said he noticed that George was definitely hanging out with the younger kids. He said, one of the cops said he was always skinny, didn't reach a five foot till high school. and I think he felt sort of intimidated by people his own age He could be a big shot with the littler kids

He craved that attention people looking up to him it was something he didn't seem to be getting anywhere else Somebody get this kid to an open mic. I just have to say either an open mic or a prison cell one of the two Because those are your only option somehow and yeah Open mic or prison cell, one of the two, because those are your only options. He's damaged somehow, and he's funny. That's probably hilarious. So by the time he entered the ninth grade, he's not hanging out with Boris much anymore either.

Boris says, I changed and George didn't. I was getting interested in girls. George was too, but he was secretive about it. It was something else he kept to himself, how he felt about girls. His style attracted younger kids. I preferred older company. So yeah. And he said he realized that he never really knew the guy is what he realized too. So him and his classmates, he has two classmates and they disappear from school one day and run away. When he's 14. This is May of 73, so he just turned 15. And he and two classmates, they disappear.

The next afternoon, they were arrested in a little town 50 miles east of there. They got 50 miles away? They got 50 fuckin' miles away somehow. I don't know how, if they hitchhiked or what, 73. You could hitchhike your way across the country back then. So yeah, they end up there at Clee alum,

which is a town 50 miles each of there. So the Mercer Island juvenile unit comes to pick them up. One of the officers said, quote, they told the local deputy they were on a ski trip from North Mercer Junior High. Said they didn't know how to ski so they wandered into Klee alum to look around. It was a good story. The deputy asked for their phone numbers and George and one of the kids gave their right numbers because they knew nobody was home. George had prepped the third kid with the number of a phone booth because he knew his parents were home.

But the kid panicked and gave up his booth because he knew his parents were home. Nice work, yeah. But the kid panicked and gave up his home number. He couldn't do it. He couldn't do it. Not exactly nerves of steel over here. So they got caught. They said but it was all planned out like the Brinks robbery and most of the thinking was done by George.

He was the one telling everyone else what to do. So they asked George, why'd you wanna run away in the first place, are you unhappy, are you mistreated? You know, can we? What's the deal, Georgie? Couldn't we help you? And he said, no, I got everything I could want. And they said, well, then why'd you run away?

And he said, quote, we heard you guys were trying to frame us for a burglary. And they were like, okay, no, what are you talking about? Like it's a very odd thing to say. So they said, this is a pattern that forms though. Whenever George gets into trouble, he blames someone else or claims it's all a big misunderstanding. So he goes. So they noticed that it's a, it's a just a repeated thing.

He will not take responsibility. They could watch him do something and he'll blame it on somebody else Okay, very I'm being framed Why are you very? Yes, it's it's very much like Ted Bundy getting caught with all that stuff in his car And he's like well I mean I have an ice pick for my it's a common household item and I have this tape because I have this and I have This because I have that yes

I keep them all in a ski mask and some nylons because I put it on under my ski mask and I go one of any of those items is fine. But when all of them are in one bag, it's an issue. That's when it becomes a problem. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This a silent pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him.

We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world and the suspect he's been identified as Luigi Nicholas man, Johnny became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history was targeted premeditated and it's so terror. I'm Jesse Weber host of Luigi produced by law and crime and twist this is more than a true crime investigation we explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country

forever. The people to a true issue. I mean maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This a silent starts firing at him and the suspect he's been identified as Luigi Nicholas manjani became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history was meant to

sow terror is walking the people to a true issue. Listen to law and crimes Luigi exclusively on one degree plus enjoying one degree plus one degree app Spotify or Apple podcasts. to law and crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest and most mysterious stories are not found

in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices? Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bollin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show.

Listen to Mr. Ballen's medical mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. He also likes guns here, so him and two of his friends took a bus to the gun exchange in Seattle to look at guns. Then he leads them, his friends, I don't know how he knew about this, but he leads them to a porn movie house and snuck them in.

So this is fucking amazing. Here's a friend of his talks about this and he talks about this as like a great day. This friend, he said, me and George and another guy like guns so we all got scrubbed up and took a bus to the gun exchange in Seattle. Then he led us to a porny movie house, porny. Porny, yeah.

Never heard it put like that before. Pornish. Pornish, no P-O-R-N-I-E. Not even like with a Y. So it would be like corny and porny. No, porny. I don't know. I've never heard of that before. A movie house called the Green Parrot. We went down the back alley and up the fire escape and into an empty building, then climbed through the rafters to a big cooling fan. It's die hard going on here. What the hell is going on? Why are they crawling through?

What are they doing? Crawling through vents. We skinned through a ceiling hatch and dropped into the men's bathroom of the porny house. And that's how we snuck in? Yep. He said our clothes were smudged. We were a mess. But they got in to watch the movie. Yeah, we just walked out of the bathroom and right into the- Right on in, yeah, like they'd been in there. Watch me a porny. So he goes on to say,

the movie was about a hillbilly family. The man's getting a blowjob in a rocking chair. The woman says, why'd you go limp, Big Daddy? She looks up, says, big daddy's dead. What? She sucked him to death? Yeah. It was so corny. We were laughing out loud. Yeah. She sucked him. That's a blowjob. Wow. Suck the life out of a hillbilly is a blowjob. They showed a famous old short. A knock on the door, the guy says pizza delivery, a woman answers and he unzips his fly and says here's your pepperoni. Oh, we loved it. We were laughing so hard we got caught and had to run out the exit

doors. Yeah. Everybody else is there to whack it. Adults go there to whack it, not for entertainment. Anybody laughing is underage, obviously. Anybody there who's 40 is there concentrating fucking staring, looking through the screen. Burning a hole in Big Daddy. No shit. So he said that George went back a couple days later with a black kid from Mercer Island. They pulled the ceiling hatch and looked into the men's room and there's a guy standing in one of the stalls They wait and wait for him to leave but finally another man walks in and the two of them do anal sex So they watched these guys have live anal sex from the ceiling

George's friend had a fro comb in his hair and it slipped out and fell into the men's room and everybody ran. Yeah. You heard like a cork popping like a champagne bottle as those two guys separated and one guy ran one way, one guy ran the other, they went through the fucking rafters again.

One ran and took the other guy with him. Yeah. Either way. the other they went through the fucking rafters again one ran and took the other guy with them yeah either way he said I always it's a three-legged race now he said I always wondered how George learned about the green parrot how to 15 year old kid even know about something like that I asked and he just kind of winked yeah how would you know that yeah that's so weird so yeah yeah I wouldn't know. I didn't know where to watch it. I know those existed around, but I didn't know where to go to see it. Not even where you live, too. Someone said, like you, if you were growing up in Phoenix when you were 12 and someone said,

there's a porn place in Tucson, you go, how the fuck do you know that? This is pre-internet. You go, get to Tucson. Yeah, I don't think we're supposed to get there. That's crazy. You want us to take a bus to internet, you know, you go get to Tucson. Yeah, I don't follow we supposed to get there That's crazy. You want us to take a bus to Tucson and you know a place So he earned some nicknames in school here George. Yeah, George. Apparently he's very agile So they call him the fly because he's little and agile They also call him chicken George because that's a that's not good is it? No, but that's Chicken George was in a book.

Right. What one? I can't remember. One of the... Something. Some book that I've forgotten because it was a school book. They made us read it in school. You made me read it. I fucking hate it. Yep. Pretty much. They called him the mouth because he talked a lot and Leaping George.

Yeah. Leaping George. Yeah, leaping George. So by the time he got into high school, that's what he is. He's the fly and all that kind of shit. People called him leaping George after leaping Lee Winfield of the Seattle Supersonics. That's why they called him that. But they said that they also called him Chicken George or the mouth because he chattered a lot and he would always When he's playing basketball would always say he got fouled on every play

So they they said he was a game player, but it wasn't basketball It was chess backgammon checkers poker things like that Cerebral things they said that he was so skilled that he would complain to friends that he had to play beneath his skill to get a game with these fucking people. His friend Tom Hagar loved hanging out with him. He said quote, he was so bright, so entertaining. He had an incredible memory. He wanted to be a writer and kept an ongoing list of our dead schoolmates. What? There's a whole, I'm not gonna go through it because it's like four pages but it's all of these kids have died from like weird accidents that happened to rich kids. You know what I mean? Like fucking skiing accidents and like kids killing themselves

and horse collision and polo. Yeah. Tried to judge a dressage accident. You know how things go when you're rich. Yeah. Kids like that, crashing their parents' Porsches. One kid actually, this is a fucking thing that happened, he cranked up his parents' very expensive car, him and his girlfriend in it, popped free bird on the 8-Trek, cranked it up and ran into a wall as hard as they could and killed themselves. Oh my, suicide. Suicide with free bird fucking blaring through the A-Trek. That is-

That's a crazy suicide. That's a wild suicide. That's what rich kids do to kill themselves. But it worked? Oh yeah, yeah. No, they smashed the wall going 80 miles an hour and fucking back then no airbags and you know, just impaled themselves themselves on this fucking on the steering wheel So he said he he'd sit in his room and write out their stories good stuff publishable

He had stacks of yachting magazines how to find the right sailboat how to make your own had a rig for storms Hurricanes stuff on motorcycles guns. We read spy magazines went to spy movies guns. We read spy magazines, went to spy movies. He said it's odd considering the way things turned out, but in our adolescence we weren't big on girly magazines. We read them, but they weren't a special interest. Mainly we were dreamers. Anything was possible. We'd smoke a joint and ramble on. We'd get on our bikes and ride to Luther Burbank Park and talk about sailing around the world. George had maps of every ocean on his walls. He figured out the winds, how to cross the Indian Ocean, how to handle the currents at Tierra del Fuego.

Wow, he said, we read popular science and decided we were gonna build a submarine. We went down to my dock and got two plastic garbage cans with locking tops, made a seal, locked them and put a hole in the top, screwed a hose in it, and then I said to George, we gotta be crazy, and we both started laughing, and George said, this'll never work, and it didn't.

Two garbage cans they tried to make a submarine out of. That's not gonna work. It's amazing that he has so many adult dreams. Very. 14 at this point. He's really smart. That's the thing. He's got a really high IQ, but he doesn't translate that into anything that could be helpful for him at all. They said he wanted to be a detective, but we didn't buy the crime magazines. He was into CIA stuff where you nicked somebody with an umbrella tip and they

died three weeks later. You know, like James Bond shit, spies. Yeah. Spies intrigue. He had secretive ways. He'd stand outside my room at night and flash his little light till I saw him. That was a way better than throwing little pebbles, I guess. Yeah, it's a lot. He'd say things like, people in lighted houses can't see out their windows.

That's important to remember. That's what he would tell his friend. I'd say, why is that important? And he'd just shrug and smile. Nothing seemed to bother him. He got along with everybody. He said, no, I take that back. George didn't like to be excluded from anything.

If he got left off a team or didn't get invited to a party, he'd sulk. I always wondered, what the hell did George get left out of when he was a little boy in Maryland? What was it that made him this way? And I never found out. He got left out of his family. That's what he get left out of when he was a little boy in Maryland? What was it that made him this way and I never found out he got left out of his family That's what he got left out of his mom He already knows that if the lights on inside the room anybody in the room can't see outside the window Yeah, but you can see inside real creepy

Exactly. Exactly. He's that's what I'm saying. He's thinking about shit that you know It's one thing to have like a I'm gonna sail around the world fantasy or some shit like that But to think that in depth about something like that at 14 is creepy So yeah, he gets into like smoking a little weed and partying a little bit, but nothing nothing real big here By like the fall of 73 he gets angry when people call him black It's not the term you could call him anything you want you can call him black. He doesn't like to be called black? It's not the term. You can call him anything you want. You can call him black, call him African American,

call it, he doesn't like it. Don't call me that. One friend said as a kid, he never wanted to be referred to as black. You could get him hackled up real quick. He was visibly annoyed when a high school coach mentioned that Bill Russell Jr. was developing

into a better basketball player than him. Gee, the son of a top 10 all-time player, at the time, a top two all-time player in the history of the league is better than me, weird. Is he 6'11 also, cause that would help. And he said that Buddha, that's what they called Bill Russell's kid Buddha Buddha's headed for the NBA and you're not

Gee, thanks Wasn't planning on it George complained to his friends. Why do you compare me to Buddha? Why not compare me to a white kid? Which he got a point he did yeah. Yeah, I mean they classified it as that so He also Didn't like black women at all black girls at the time no interest whatsoever only likes white girls at the time He they said after a while This is a from the book an excerpt here that I'll tell you about later on what the book is After a while the color that George disdain gave him an entree into the high school elite He was the perfect token a walking a walking proof of his friend's tolerance. He became the group of rich white kids and they have a black and they're like,

see, look, we're not racist. We have a black kid friend. Yeah. They said, but therein lie the problems as his friend Hagar recognized early. This is his friend. A quote from him. They treated him like their favorite eunuch. Jesus. That's a coming out the gate hard. God damn. He projected the image of the pet black and that was fine with the socialites, but they left him out of things that mattered. They pretended to accept him as a friend because they knew they'd never have to take him seriously. I always felt this helped to cause the rage that came out later because he was tight with a lot of girls and they tempted him like they tempted the rest of us but they never let it go anywhere.

George was permanently excluded and he knew it. Those lily white socias were never going to put out for the local black guy. George just kept suffering, never complained, that would have been uncool. But we all felt that pain, not just George raging hormones. He rarely confided about girls. It was just another subject he wasn't open about. He told me he wanted love, not sex. He was always looking for the ideal woman to put on a pedestal, but the ideal woman wasn't looking for him. That's what his friend said. So, also during this time, he sneaks, this is so 1973 or four, he sneaks his friends

into a Led Zeppelin concert. Hell yeah. Fuck yeah. How'd they do that? Rock on, well, they played Seattle, $12 per ticket. Now, George told his friend Michael O'Hara, we don't need to pay shit, I got us covered. So this is his friend's quote here.

He told me to meet him outside the Kingdome fence an hour before the concert. The Kingdome's where the Mariners and the Seahawks used to play. Yeah, it's gone now but was big. When I got there he was wearing a parking attendants jacket, brown and orange polyester. So uncool, so unlike George, but it put me in hysterics.

He flips a bundle over the fence and there's an attendant jacket inside. I slipped it over my clothes and walked right into the Kingdome parking lot. Wow. George and I are directing traffic as we edge toward the employee entrance. They'd stop every once in a while, pretend they were working. I slipped out of the outfit in the men's room so George could bundle it up for another friend. He got nine of us in. Wow!

Just kept throwing the outfit over and people would walk right in and direct traffic for a minute and then change. Smart. He said, we were in total admiration. How did a teenage kid from Mercer Island outwit Kingdome security? He was always doing things like that. It seemed like scams had become his life. He said, quote, And a lot of us were drifting, not just George. Half the high school smoked pot, maybe 20% took harder drugs, acid, acid, mushrooms, hash, maybe 90% drank. We spent a lot of time in

our forts, smoking, drinking. On Friday nights, the cops would come stormtrooping through the woods, and George would disappear. Interpol couldn't have found him. After the cops left, he'd climb out of his foxhole grinning. He loved to outwit people, especially cops. Especially the thord. Especially the fuzz, yeah. He also stole pills from his stepdad's dental supplies and shared them with his friends. He was caught by the cops with some weed, gotten a lot of little trouble trespassing after hours in the park, curfew violation, shoplifting, drinking, having Valiums on him.

He stole a rare penny from a friend's coin collection, but then talked his way out of it somehow. Yeah, so it's very odd here. Then he starts doing, then he started like sneaking, stealing things from people's little school lockers and stuff like that. Soon he was sneaking into people's houses while they slept and taking souvenirs, as he called it, like cash and jewelry and also just standing over women

while they slept and watching them. Okay, that's too much. That's really fucked up. That's too much. That's weird. The local cops didn't know what to do, and they thought that they just had like this mystery burglar going on,

people breaking in, but nothing major being stolen. That's the weird part. I mean, yeah like there could be a stack of hundred dollar bills and one twenty and the twenty be gone. That's the way weird shit like that. You can't report your dignity stolen or your safety or your your comfort in your own home your peace of mind your violated. Yeah. Yeah. just your your your comfort here. Yeah, so So anyway that the cops knew him from the truancy program and all that kind of shit So there they try to keep him closer. They're like, alright, let's get him closer

You know what I mean that kind of thing soon things at home get worse, which is a great Stepdad the dentist cheated with a businesswoman Now in this time they that couple had had a little girl, a little sister of George. So mom and the sister, mad at, oh the sister's not mad, she's like three, but mom, very mad at the stepfather, leaves him and takes the sister and moves to Maryland

and leaves George with his stepfather. With the guy that just picked him up and refuses to admit that it's his. Dude, how many times can you be abandoned by your mother and not feel shitty about it, you know? And to be left with this guy who's not even your dad? It's just- And actively and aloud proclaims it.

It's fucking crazy. So that's wild. She apparently accepted a teaching position at the University of Maryland and It's crazy They one of their friends said they both wanted out meaning of the marriage both participants Wanzel was seeing a white businesswoman and Joyce hated the idea of being in the same town with the two of them, maybe running into them socially. She needed to get as far away from the situation as possible.

She and the Wanzel family agreed that Erica, the daughter, would move east with Joyce but spend summer vacations on Mercer Island. When it came to George, it was like, you take him, No, you take him. No, you take him. No one wanted him. Of the what? So they said, Wanzel ended up with a 16-year-old kid who was already stealing him blind. You gotta give the man credit. He tried to do the right thing.

Think about it. They weren't even blood, which is true. That is true. Just to feed him is more than he's required to. Indeed, yeah. Just to give him a room. He doesn't need to do shit for him. Just before Christmas 74 is when Joyce and Erica

moved to Maryland and they said close friends noticed an immediate just dampening of George's boisterousness. Just not, doesn't have the same thing anymore. One of his friends called it a slippage of spirit. That he would try to just gloss over now shortly after that Dr. Wanzel Mobley has a new wife and and he's got a new stepmom Yeah, which is weird as fuck cuz he's got that's like a step step mom. That's not a double step No, it's a couple of friends. It's either a double step or nothing, right?

No, it's a couple of friends. It's either a double step or nothing right? It's a nothing Step or nothing. I don't know what the yeah, it's just this this my ex-stepfather's wife I guess I don't know my old stepdad is broad, but I guess they loved this lady her name was Chris and His friend Tom Hagar. This is George's friend said quote Chris was nice to us prim proper Respectable and gorgeous when she arrived all us adolescent boys went ooh la la I'm sure she tried to play down her looks, but she was 12 years younger than wanzel and still a knockout She really had our motors running George's mother has had always worn hats and glasses and looked like a professor not unattractive But Chris was different.

Chris was a second wife, not a first wife. That's why. George's mom's got it going on. Yeah, exactly. They said right from the start, she tried hard to work with George to change his ways and she helped Wanzel fit into the neighborhood. The older, wealthier people always considered him quote, the black guy. They didn't know him But Chris arranged cookouts and get-togethers and old Islanders then said my god dr. Mobley's black, but he's not that different Wow, what a thought God took that my god in front of that my god my god What was it? A fucking blast from the past.

Oh, my lucky stars, a Negro. That's what they said. It feels like that's what they're saying. Oh my, look at him. I can't believe it. We're just like them. Just different colors. Strange. I mean, I looked too. It's just a different color. It's weird. It was an astounding discovery for some of those dinosaurs. Yeah, incredible. How many black people do they know living on Mercer Island their whole life? Pretty soon the Mobleys were the only racially mixed couple

in a manual, episcopal church. The kids went on to say, "'My mom wound up crazy about Chris "'and very fond of Wansel. "'After that, they were always a part of my family's lives.'" The guy kids went on to say my mom wound up crazy about Chris and very fond of Wansel after that They were always a part of my family's lives so now around this time

There starts to be some stories that confidential police files. Oh Have somehow take make made their way from the police station and locked drawers To the halls of the high school on Mercer Island. Wonder how that happened. Real weird, right? Where's the leak? So, strange. So several parents called to complain

that their children's reputations were being tarnished by leaks of juvenile information that was supposed to be secret. That's what he was doing. He was saying like, oh, I found, you know, Billy did this and that, check it out. So after an investigation investigation they came to the conclusion that it's George that's doing this shit And yeah, so they said he's using his police information to try to inflate his image at school of being cool So the cop said we had no proof, but it was obvious. We hated to cut him loose

We never told him why we just said Georgie. You can't come around here anymore to cut him loose. We never told him why. We just said, Georgie, you can't come around here anymore. You could see it bothered him. It bothered us too. You couldn't not like the guy no matter how bad things got. So at this point, he's just cutting classes. He's drinking, he's stealing, he's popping pills, he's smoking weed, he's in juvenile court all the time because he's getting caught. He has some problems at home here also. He is, hemom, and I mean, he likes his stepmom. Yeah, he began sneaking into her room and watching her sleep, which is never good behavior, which ends up getting him kicked out of the house.

Oh, she woke up. Yeah, he gets caught doing that. The stepfather's like, okay, that's enough here I don't even you're not even my kid and she's not technically related to you. So I don't want you to whack in it on her please so I So then George would go between family members and friends couches and all this type of shit They do end up shipping him off to off the island to a guy named. Dr. Michael Washington's house This is a stepdad's old classmate.

So one of the patrolmen from Mercer Island ran into George at a place called Totem Lake. And he said he was at a hardware store there. And he said, we'd all wondered where he went and why he wasn't causing any more problems on the island. I met this dentist. He was staying with a tall, good-looking, muscular guy, very nice, very responsible, just what George needed. He moves him there. This guy said, I'll straighten him out.

Really? And he does. He takes him like, he has to go out running every morning. They go hunting all the time and they'll be out at four o'clock in the morning And they won't get home till late And then he'll make George do all the you know clean all the boots and clean wash the dogs off and all that kind of shit and like Trying to keep like a military school basically but at his house keep so busy. He can't do anything bad Absolutely, but the problem is he's not gonna that's not gonna last very long with this kid

He's not gonna do that and he does it too he ends up back in Mercer Island hanging out with kids and Kind of bullying his way around Yeah, well he likes to borrow cars quote-unquote borrow means I might be back in an hour It might be four or five days. You never know. That's borrow. I'm gonna go to the store. So they said that at this point he's coming back and all of his classmates are graduating,

going off to college, and now even all the kids he knew and were hanging out with and shit, they're all gone now. So now he's kind of alone again. So he starts hanging out with younger kids again. They're stuck here a while. And he can boss them around. They'll do whatever he wants. He can hustle them out of money.

He can do shit like that. He did that like crazy. One of the cops said, quote, he developed a bunch of wannabe George Russells. They met in video stores, Denny's, the 7-Eleven. There'd be a hundred kids milling around that store and King George would go inside and buy beer for them and stash it in the woods.

Nice. Yeah, he said he also supplied weed and discipline is what this cop said, discipline. He never liked to fight, but he kept those kids cowed. It was almost impossible to prosecute him because the kids were too scared to snitch if they got out of line He'd flash his knife at them. He's carrying a blade multiple as we'll find out 16 year old kids 14 15. Wow. Yeah, once they have a license. They don't want any part of him

They can go drive around look for girls at that point But when you're 14 you're riding your bicycle around this guy's cool Fucking said yeah, this is like their satanic bill. This is, remember we've talked about satanic bill a bunch of times. This weird carny guy that would come around and he'd bias 40s and he'd do all that kind of shit. Sure.

Sure, satanic bill. He knows where to get coke, you know, whatever. So he said he'd take one of those rich kids and say, lend me your car. I'll be right back. I got to pick up a friend. And the kids were too afraid to complain when he kept it a day or two. That became a habit.

He was borrowing cars the same way 10 years later. One day Sergeant Glendon Booth spotted him putting a stranglehold on a boy who reached to his chin. And he said, the cop interceded. And George said, quote, this punk wasn't cooperating. I mean, what do you want from me? The parent, I gotta choke him. The parents declined to press charges.

Then he beat up a nine-year-old boy. Mmm nine Not a lot of challenge there it's a fourth grader for putting a slug in a video machine Slug coin yeah, we have to say by the way for people who are under probably 30 what a slug is because you You don't even know what a quarter is at this point Thirty what a slug is because you you don't even know what a quarter is at this point It's a fake coin that was just a smooth lump and people used to sell them You know they'd sell them like a hundred for five dollars or some shit You get a quarter and you and you cut a bar a sliver off of it. That's the same size and weight It's it worked throw it through a video game, and that's a whole credit. That's it

throw it through a video game and that's a whole credit. That's it. The cop said it offended George's sense of control. It was okay for him to put slugs in the machines, but nobody else. Don't fuck my thing up. They're gonna crack down on this if you all start doing this. So also they said that he would pick out a parked car

and bet he could clear it on a single bound with a jump. Yeah. He would jump over the hood and then collect the money. He'd say he promised. He said, I never said I'd clear the roof. He's doing evil, can evil shit now. Yeah. Like, all right.

Didn't say I'd do that. One day him and a friend of his, this is a cop, a cop and his partner took up positions on a hillside to check out the 7-Eleven action through binoculars. They need some crime in this town or less cops. If the cops... They're searching out crime. Not just one cop, a team of cops.

It's just lays on a... It's taking out the 7-Eleven for solicitors. For 14 year olds to commit crimes. Yeah, that is... What's the other word? Loiterers is loiterers Jesus Christ that is wild so they saw George come out of the 7-eleven with several six packs and disappear into the woods They also saw drugs change hands from time to time when the cops patted George down during the arrest

He had a kitchen knife up each sleeve. Kitchen knives. Up each sleeve. Yep. And several bags of weed. So he's selling weed to the kids. Now, a judge put him on probation, but then he got arrested again,

charged with criminal trespassing, possession of marijuana, second degree burglary, possession of stolen property, and nuisance noise, whatever that is. But now it's gonna start stacking up and he's got minor infractions that are gonna look bad over time. Yeah, and he just turned 18 too.

So now it's going to district court, not juvenile court. He was sentenced to three days in the King County Jail. That's not good. Got out, re-offended, served four more days. Got out, re-offended, went back in for 32 more days. And his arrest record just grows and grows and grows. He called it later on those little tic-tacs of trouble. Tic-tacs. You shake them and they're loud but individually they're nothing. So yeah, he's doing all sorts of shit like that. 1976 is all of that shit happened in 32 days

and all of that. Now Tom Hagar, his friend who loved him, remember that? He says that George lived at night. He would hide in bushes and learn your habits. He was patient. He'd watch a house for a week if that's what it took. It's called stocking. It's called. Yeah, it's called what BTK did. It's fucking crazy. He could slip through any opening. He got into one house through

the dog port. He's so tiny. He's a little skinny fuck too. He knew that our doors were always unlocked and the keys were always in our Jag. So when I was away at college, he started borrowing it after midnight. Taking the car, the Jaguar. The Jaguar. When he finally got caught, he told the cops he had permission. Ah, this is the Hagar's. I know them. They told me where the keys are.

Yeah, they told me to take it. It's fine. So this guy continues, this was just too much and our family decided we had to do something. We had put together a complete dossier of arrests and convictions plus everything he'd gotten away with since junior high and presented it to the judge for this crime when he got caught for it. When you saw it on paper, it was an eye opener. George ended up serving 35 days.

It was his longest stretch and everybody hoped it would straighten him out. When he was released, did he stay away from our house not George? He made it a regular target We had a sliding glass door That was his entry point a point my mom had a stash of silver dollars that she gave out as rewards George took six or seven at a time. I guess he figured she wouldn't notice Thinking about think about it the guys slipping into our house at night, risking a felony burglary charge for pocket money.

Made no sense, he said, there had to be some other motivation, but we didn't learn about it till it was too late. He said, other stuff began disappearing. I came home from college on a break and ran into him at Luther Burbank Park. From 35 yards away, I recognized my old orange coat He was wearing my sweater and pants, too

He asked if I wanted to get high he looked terrible wasted like every other bum on the street It brought a lump to my throat. George was the brightest the most interesting kid I've ever met He still had that smile that big laugh, but you could see he was lost I said George that's my down coat Yeah, he said oh is it? Oh, it's really he sounded kind of vague here. Let me give it back avoiding the question of where he got it from Oh here. Yeah, I must have art. I said Christ sakes. No, I don't want it back. It was beat up and dirty He said I felt guilty because of this huge gulf between us and I said George if you'd asked me for the coat I'd have given it to you. The point is how did you get it? He evaded an answer and I wasn't gonna push. Yeah

So that's it. Now the Mercer Island Police Department starts getting Persistent complaints of a night prowling small person with dark skin, baby black, somebody else possibly. Yeah. And I doubt that, uh, Bill Russell's kid is this guy's size. Yeah. Gotta be a foot taller by now. Crouch that much. No, exactly. And his kid has got to be taller. So the, they began, um, getting persistent complaints. And they also, when the sergeant here of the police force called his stepfather, he learned

that George had taken liquor, money, clothes, and then was banished from the house. So he's gone. He drops out of high school, never graduated, poor attendance record, failing classes, and then dropped out as a senior. So. In retrospect, by 18, everybody should know, oh, this is gonna go so bad for this kid. Not looking good for him. But with these rich kids, it doesn't really work like that. You can always figure it out,

and if you keep propping them up, give them an internship enough of the time, eventually they'll get burned out of this shit. And if you, you know, that's how rich people deal with shit. They get into coke too at that point and have a terrible drug problem. Fuck yeah. It's still by 35, they've got three kids in life and they're doing fuck. Ah, they're born again Christian, they're fucking doing great.

So at this point, he's sleeping in abandoned houses, George's, under houses that are occupied. He gets under them, just in the high grass, sleeps in the field, sometimes in his old forts. He removed the vent from the swimming pool heating duct and crawled in there at a park. Did the same with the grate at a bank. People would come home and find their bed messed up, the heater turned on and food on the table.

They said if there was snow on the ground, you could track him in and out of every yard. You could see exactly where he went. One family, the Ferris family, had a boat cabana and they'd come down in the morning and they'd find him wrapped up and around the base of the toilet in the boat cabana little boathouse yeah yeah a friend let him sleep in his crawlspace not that great of a friend if he said I mean I guess you could stay but you got to go in the crawlspace that's a pretty

shitty friend you go under the house if you want I don't I give I give my friends couches and shit maybe even a bed And I know there's a crawl space if you could squeeze anyway, I guess yeah, there's certainly protection from the elements Jesus Yes, wow there was an old garage back in the woods near his home, and he finally just moved in there there's no heat no light no toilet and The cop said we'd shine our police flashlights through the blackberry bushes and he'd peek out and yell no problem officer Thanks for checking. I'm fine. Yeah, and then he'd say how's the wife? How's everything at the station? Gee? I'll have to drop in and see you guys From the blackberry bushes in a stalking

That's odd. They said some of those nights it was below freezing and we didn't have the heart to turn him out. So They said some of those nights it was below freezing and we didn't have the heart to turn them out. So, he'd have unsteady jobs, he's depending on petty thievery and other misdemeanors and shit like that. One of that sergeant, Sergeant Booth became one of the first to realize that these, what he's doing isn't so innocent basically. He said George would try every car door he passed looking for change cigarettes cassette tapes and small stuff Then he'd sell it or trade it he'd go to parties and leave it with a leave with a ring or a watch

Steel shit yeah Mostly he operated in the north end of the island where he was raised the south end was uphill and George was lazy Literally didn't want to walk up hills When we stopped him he was usually on foot, unless we caught him on a stolen bike, and then he'd say a kid loaned it to him. What kid, George? I don't know, I just met them, he'd say.

I bet he stole 100 bikes on Mercer Island, mostly from boys who thought that he was their friend. Then he moved to a little bit more shit here. He'd steal somebody's wallet. And if he'd get caught, he'd, from somebody else, by the cops, he'd smile and go, I was teaching him a lesson. You know?

Gotta be a little street smart, yeah. He said everything was a game. They said he'd meet some rich family and get in with them. And then just long enough to figure out where they hid their hide-a-keys. And then they'd get in with them. And then just long enough to figure out where they hid their hidey keys. And then they'd get burglarized. That's how it would work. So, and people, they said a lot of the neighbors

couldn't bring themselves to turn them in. One guy said- It would feel bad for him. And one guy said, how could you hold a grudge against good old George? He's just adorable. He's just a charmer. And that's the thing.

The book on him is called Charmer. That's the name of it. That's what it is. So they'd said you'd ask how he was doing and he'd give you 10 minutes of how things were fine with him and his dad and Chris and their new baby, his new baby brother, who he's not related to at all. It's not his brother at all.

How is his mom? Oh, great, teaching back East, giving lectures. She just sent me a nice birthday present. I talked to her on the phone last night his mom? Oh, great. Teaching back East, giving lectures. She just sent me a nice birthday present. I talked to her on the phone last night, blah, blah, blah. It was all bullshit. He was living on the street and talked to these people anymore, had nothing. Dr. Moe's Mobley said to the cop, or the cop says about Dr. Mobley, Dr. Mobley had

me check his closets and under his beds because George was sneaking back in at night and they didn't wanna confront him. I got the impression that George was still bothering Chris too and I agreed that this could turn dangerous. And they said, every time we stopped him, by the way, he had the same things in his bag. You'd have a duffel bag with a police scanner.

Oh shit. Miniature chess and backgammon sets. A playboy or a penthouse. Something to feed off to. And general pictures of girls. Oh. Just random? Yeah. Random. Oh no. Yeah. Odd. He would take people's cars and the police scanner is a big deal so he knew all the local cop channels So he would listen and was going on and listen in whether he was gonna get caught or not One of the cops said we seldom nailed him for burglary We usually had to settle for criminal trespass which means we caught him where he didn't belong Said he'd trip an alarm and we drive up and he'd be doing the George Russell heel and toe down the street

with the scanner at his ear. Oh hi officer, how's it going? He knew they were on the way so he got out. That's what he would do. They said he had a long string of burglaries on First Hill, chippy stuff. He was a major criminal of minor crimes. People would call and say I had $40 in my wallet when I went to bed. I heard a noise in the middle of the night and now I got 20 he wouldn't even take the whole 40

That's what I mean thoughtful fella. It's a weird fucking weird. It's just it's creepy genius though Because how many times have you ever like woken up from and you got cash and you don't know almost gaslighting. Yeah, you know Almost but not quite that I think from you you spent it probably I don't know Almost, but not quite that definition. I didn't steal anything from you. You spent it probably. I don't know. It's so weird, but that's just a strange... Yeah.

I guess he thinks that maybe they won't notice that. Yeah, it's... Yeah, or they'll just... You go, did I have 40 or 20? I guess I must have had 20. You certainly had 20, yeah. Yeah. Because if I had 40 and somebody stole any, they'd steal all 40.

That's what... Yeah, that doesn't make sense. It makes you sound crazy when you call the cops So or they'd say my front door is open and I'm sure I left it closed or I heard somebody downstairs But nobody answered by the way, this is such a ritzy area people call the cops for that My front door is open and I'm sure I closed it and I would never yeah, then close it stupid Yeah, well good then no one's in your house. Go back to sleep you fucking idiot That's what the cops would have told me where I'm from like what he was wrong with you

He said we knew it was George who the hell else would ignore thousand dollar rings and steal a Mickey Mouse watch He'd hit the same house three or four times I began to suspect that there was a sexual aspect to it in nighttime intrusions. There often is Said if we could have caught him with the goods things wouldn't might have been different but he had rat holes. We'd find his stash in the woods and we couldn't tie it to him. It was like connecting a squirrel with his acorns. Loot didn't stick to him long. He'd trade it or hide it or give it away. George had a big need to give as he had to take but first he had to have something to give earrings rings bracelets all from his burglaries

So yeah, he would take the small shit He would impersonate a cop To he'd tell yeah go into like a bar and be like yeah I'm investigating a bunch of coke being sold in here So I'm gonna be you know investigating all this shit, so you should go ahead and give me free drinks now and shit like that in here so I'm going to be you know investigating all this shit so you should go ahead and give me free drinks now and shit like that. Spend a lot of short stretches in jail two days a week things like that. Tom Hagar the kid who was his best friend who then got his Jag stolen all the time said

the first time I went to visit him in King County jail he'd been there less than a week and was already a trustee handing out milk running errands working in the dispensary. Already doing the. Oh less than a week and was already a trustee handing out milk running errands working in the dispensary. Already doing the- Oh, less than a week. Doing the like four or five years in guy. Yeah, doing the fucking lifer shit. Jail was the closest George ever got to the pension system he really needed.

Three meals a day, cable TV, full medical and dental. He figured that King County Jail beat Dr. Washington's's tough love if only they'd let him sleep a little later He'd be fine Doesn't get along with the other black inmates by the way. They all call him Oreo That's his name His name is Oreo because they say that he looks black and talks white and acts white. Oh, it's not even he's not like no He's not lights. No, nope. It's the behavior.

Yep. Wow. So they said he had a few flare ups. He did not like, he didn't like them either. He thought they were beneath him, the jail guys there. One of the prisoners said he didn't, when George acted like a brother, quote unquote, he was doing an impression of a black guy basically.

Oh. Yeah, it's weird. He's basically like Carlton from Fresh Prince. Yeah yeah so they said that they called him Oreo all the time they called him house n-word they called him Tom which is short for Uncle Tom and they called him a snitch too. Oh no. So yeah, they said he would, if guys that didn't know him came up and talked to him in like slang and street shit,

he would look at them because he didn't understand. He was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Which they were like, all right Oreo, and then that would be that. Jesus. So yeah, he said he enunciated and things he said, he would say that this, it didn't happen, it transpired, it transpired. That transpired.

He didn't say I graduated, he said I was graduated. Proper English. I'm not in jail, I'm incarcerated. I don't talk to people, I interact with them. Uses words like consensus of opinion and shit like that, which doesn't get a lot of shit thrown around jail probably I would think So he 1978 ish he's out of jail

He's hired as the assistant manager of a teen disco Perfect for him called tonight's the night TNT or TTN Tonight's the night you're finally gonna get fingered here. It is everybody It's happening life. Ah is so it's a friend of his that knows him that hired him for this whole deal He checked IDs collected tickets, you know worked the ropes and you know the velvet rope outside there You know, he's got to make it like a little nightclub, even though it's for kids And he would also steal shit as well nightclub even though it's for kids. And he would also steal shit as well. He would pass his friends to the front of the line and really be a real hard ass on troublemakers. And one

of the security guards said he would lose it real easy whenever a kid would ask, would question his authority, especially if the kid was female. They'd say, well, who are you? And George would yell, Hey, bitch, I'm the guy that's gonna throw your little ass out of here Little aggressive I would say And it said he was like normally so jolly and jocular and then this would happen here But when he got drunk, he'd be a different guy completely They said a bar room acquaintance complained to George that her boyfriend hit her and he said where's the guy live? Let's go. We'll blow up his car. I'll show you how come on we'll go get some gas Wow he steals thousands of dollars from tonight's the night over a couple year period has to be expected oh yeah

absolutely man right out of the till right out of the till and also causes more trouble here's a police story from him at a private party we had a complaint that he was causing trouble at a private party. We found him hiding under a bed. Okay, George, we said, come on out. He knew we couldn't arrest him. He just says, I'm just helping these guys clean the house, you know, get under the bed and everything. He said, they want off all these diamonds and there is dust bunnies under here you wouldn't believe So they said they want you out George And he said I'm staying and they said you're out of here and at that point the guy said quote George completely lost it

This is the first time they're seeing the other side of him. They said he completely lost it. He slobbered He spit he went crazy Called us white trash honky bigots, screaming. He'd always kept his temper concealed. Whenever I handled him after that, I didn't think of him as cute little George or the station mascot. I thought of him as a mean son of a bitch.

No shit. Yeah, at one point here, he wrecks a car also. He had a BMW that he took from a friend of his. And I guess he, his friend said he was doing 60 in a 35, weaving back and forth across the center line. It was worse than bad driving. It was like psychotic. It was psychotic.

He claimed he knew all about performance cars because he'd driven his dad's Ferrari, because by the way, the dentist has a Ferrari. Of course he Ferrari, but you could see that he didn't have a clue. Then three weeks later George rolled that car on West Mercer Way and he had an explanation they said, quote, the cops checked the skid marks and found out that those special T7 nylon tires have no traction till they're warmed up. It was also the tires' fault when he totaled a friend's Datsun on a drive from California. At 5am he spun off Interstate 5 near Reading and broke through the median rail fracturing his femur. He blamed the

accident on a blowout, but police thought he fell asleep at the wheel. Then he lost control of his 1981 gold Honda Civic, wiped out a fence and crashed into a tree. When police arrived he was on his feet babbling and the report from the police said Russell denied driving the car stating it had been stolen from him even though he's there with it. I caught him. He stated he just happened to be driving by and found his car crashed there so he got

in and tried to drive it out. There's no other car there though. Where's your car you drove? Yeah. Russell stated to me when I arrested him quote, you're lucky if I had a gun, you'd be dead. He sold the cop that. Oh, God damn. So he also sentenced to one day in jail for using plates from a stolen stolen from a friend to put on a car. His stepmom went to court after one of the car accidents and blamed his bad behavior on his biological mom leaving, so he's had a hard time, so he deserves another chance.

Yeah, also tried to break into the tonight's the night club owner's car, was arrested, but escaped out of a holding room at the police station I'll say that again. It took him to the police station and he escaped They know who he is. He's like this is ridiculous. They've taken your fingerprints. They've got you. They know your name They know your fate. They know you they know you he evaded two chases on foot He evaded the helicopter and three canine units. He finally got caught and arrested and convicted finally of his first felony, which is escaping

the police station. Not allowed to do that. He is sentenced to 10 months in county jail for that. Finally. that finally now around this time obviously he had also at the same time been like giving the cops tips about drug dealers and shit like just anonymously forming yeah very weird very very weird also they said he had a unique way of using his police connections to gain women's trust that's why a lot of times these serial killers pose as cops,

they pulled women over like Ted Bundy did that, other people did it, it's terrifying. They said, and it worked a lot of the times, but if his advances fell flat, he'd take the rejection personally and get really angry and be like all heated for like 10 minutes before he'd calm down and then go to the next chick. He couldn't just be like, oh well.

So they said his temper was starting to worry his friends. He couldn't hold a legitimate job. He carried all his possessions, including his collection of porn mags in a duffel bag and in paper bags. And his daytime home was the apartment of whoever the fuck he could was his friend at the time basically and then he's told Everybody he worked as an undercover cop at night Wow, so people liked him still because he showed that good side of him. It's great But people said he showed no emotion no guilt

Growing hostility toward women. He was growing obsession with sex They said he'd hit on anybody didn't matter a bartender started calling him the schizo Because his personality changed so profoundly after drinks. He's also one of these guys get booze in the system Different guy they said cool lovable George annoyed women and barely avoided fights with their boyfriends He seemed to revel in baiting females, then slipping away to stir up trouble somewhere else. A friend said George tried to surround himself with girls, but they never really liked him. You only had to watch him for five minutes to see it.

Nobody knew why. Probably because he's like five foot one, I would assume. Booze probably has a crazy effect on that guy. Oh my God, yeah, he comes up, he's like a tiny, he's like a drunken dwarf, nobody wants to fucking, who wants to bang that guy? You know what I mean? Vern Troyer was the only one that could pull that off.

That wasn't even, I don't know, that was scary. It's scary to see a little guy that hammered. It's weird, yeah, it's fucking weird. I don't like it at all. It's weird, yeah, it's fucking weird. I don't like it at all. It's strange, yeah, I feel, well that's because as an adult, and this sounds so bad because it's,

we know these are adults and everything like that, but we look at little people as children for some reason, even though they're not, you know what I mean? Obviously they're not. And if we don't look at them as children, we look at them with- Our brains. Yeah, yeah, just with the care of a child.

I don't mean intellectually think of them as children. I mean our brains react to, oh, it's a little child. It's cute, that's a cute little person. It's like, no, that's an adult person. But our brains, intellectually we know that. And that's why we don't go up to them and offer them candy and stuff. So, but 82 to 85 here in this era, And that's why we don't go up to him and offer them, you know candy and stuff. So but

82 to 85 here in this era. He is phoning tips into crime watch He starts using younger he starts having sex with young with teenagers now Has a relationship if you could call it that we'll say he molested a 14 year old girl. Let's just say She said the sex was consensual though, which you can't have consensual sex with an adult when you're 14, just can't, that's impossible. That word's definition doesn't work for that. Later though, he forced her to perform oral sex on him.

He admitted that he tried to leave his younger sister, who's like three years old at this point, not even his sister, his stepfather and step-step-mother's kidfather and step-step mother's kid. His ex-stepdad's kid. At a gas station when she was younger. Just tried to leave her there. He's arrested for stealing a TV, lottery tickets, selling beer to minors, sentenced to 30 days

in jail, but he ends up serving seven months because he's a dick in jail too. Gets out, hangs around Mercer Island and he's doing the same old shit. Now a lot of his friends, they'll, they'll still let him crash at their house. He'll borrow their car. You know what I mean? Cause they said he'd turn around and cook you a gourmet dinner. Treat your friends to a round of drinks, give you, uh, you know, earnest advice and be all of this and they, you know, be all cool and smile and huggy and all that kind of shit. And they were like, oh, wow, they just liked him.

One of the police, the police chief said Russell was regarded as more of a character than dangerous. He said he was more of a sneak thief or anything like that. Every time they picked him up, though, he's armed with a knife. Anything from a kitchen knife to an old bayonet. So yeah, he's always got some form of blade on him. Yeah. Of some kind. Now they never heard of him using the knife to hurt anybody, but they said they did have information that he had brandished the knife on a couple of occasions. Yeah, the one, the police chief said he was a good talker. He was I suppose for lack of a better word charming Yeah, they said he probably could have been anything he wanted to be he was very knowledgeable about a lot of different subjects Often when police arrested him he'd have a backpack with books on him now

They all had pictures of pussies in him, but still they were books They said the cops didn't fear him. They said there are people like that. They don't assault police officers. They make you chase them. He's a chaser. He's not a, he doesn't run at you. He runs away from you. He's that guy.

He's also the only prisoner who ever broke out of the city's temporary holding cell facility as well. Never happened before. Yeah, he kicked a window out crawled through and escaped and He said That's what I mean they said I mean it wasn't like a diabolical it wasn't tango and cash You know what I'm saying where they had to slide down an electrical wire to get out the gates They make a paper mache head like Alcatraz

He just fucking kicked a window and walked out. Come through the fucking ground like Raising Arizona, John Goodman popping his head out. That's more on you than it is him. Jesus, you gave him an opportunity to break a window. Fuck, they said he was a model prisoner who seemed to do very well in a controlled environment except for that one escape. So he at some point wants to marry a 14 year old.

Why? I don't know. He wrote letters to this 14 year old talking about marriage and that they have forever and also would talk about anal sex fantasies with her. And he got her pregnant and she had an abortion. Oh my God. So he got a 14 year old pregnant.

May of 87. So much for the anal sex. Yeah, no shit. He was going the wrong route there. May of 87, released from jail after seven months. So biology isn't his strongest subject, we figured out. Five weeks later, he ends up pleading guilty to a charge of criminal trespassing

and possession of a dangerous weapon, spent five days in jail, and finally underwent psychological counseling. Let's see here. The results here, they found him to be, let's read this out, self-centered, limited in capacity to form deep interpersonal relationships, quite impulsive, demonstrates poor judgment, having little patience or frustration tolerance, a risk taker, often rebellious toward authority figures, and has trouble incorporating traditional standards and values of society, he is diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, which is

doesn't mean you don't like people. It means that you're actively... He's dangerous. Yes. It's around that time that he gets banned from a Denny's. Hell yeah. Now, to be... you can be kicked out of a Denny's. That happens. But to be banned permanently from a Denny's, you got to really do something, man. To set yourself apart as lower than Denny's clientele. Yes. Lower than the other drunks at 3 a.m. that are smoking and falling asleep into their mozzarella sticks, like into their fucking moons over Miami.

Wow, he got banned for stealing tips off the table. Oh. He didn't work there. He'd just go in and steal tips off the table. Yeah, remember when that was a thing? Wow. Wow, so he gets banned. 1988, he's hired at an arcade the Nintendo

arcade well Nintendo Seattle think about it that's there a big deal there he ends up skimming twenty three thousand dollars in eight months from the arcade from an arcade is that how much those fuckers were making? God damn. Yeah, especially the Nintendo one. It was probably big hot shit at the time. Wow. I don't know. He walked down the street jingling and jangling like crazy. That's a lot of quarters.

It's weird because normally he weighed about 130 pounds, but after a shift he weighed about 210 pounds. It was very strange. Then in 1989 after he's fired from that job for stealing, he tells everybody that will listen that he has turned over a new leaf and he is now a born-again Christian. So no need to fear anymore. He's all fine. All right.

He even meets a nice lady. He moves in with an of age woman named Mindy. Oh, that's great. Yeah. She's a blue-eyed, beautiful girl named Mindy. He of course began physically abusing her and showing just an us level of interest, which is an unhealthy level of interest

in the Green River Killer murder case and the 49 victims, because that was when they were still looking for him. So yeah, an unhealthy obsession with the Green River Killer. He went to jail for five days for drug charges, committed about 60 burglaries in Kirkland during this time. February 20th, 1990, he's arrested for domestic assault, for beating up Mindy, I think.

1990, right after that, he's banned from the Black Angus restaurant. This guy is really class. That's class right there. What'd he do at Black Angus? So you're telling me, yeah, you're telling me I can't go to fucking Denny's and I can't get a shitty steak either? Jesus, come on.

He's really running the gamut on the bottom rung of whatever the restaurant offers. No shit. on bottom rung of whatever it is the restaurant offers. No, shit, he was a regular customer at Black Angus, apparently, from 89 through March of 1990, when he's banned from the restaurant. And we'll find out why in a little later. But he was very angry about being banned from the Black Angus. Like, wow, that was furious.

Furious. I'm gonna get the status, man. What's next, Outback? Texas Roadhouse? I won't stand for it! June 22nd, 1990. That is when Mary Ann Polryk, remember her from the beginning of the show? She is 27 years old. She works at a medical device manufacturing company. Remember she was found on the 23rd. This is the 22nd. She went to Papagayos. P-A-P-A-G-A-Y-O. Yeah, it's a nightclub here, known as a place where you go meet people. It's like a singles bar

type of drive. That's exactly what meet, M-E-E-T they say. It was known as a place where you go meet people. It's like a singles bar type of drive. That's exactly what, meet, M-E-E-T, they say. It was known as a quote meat market. So she went with her friends that night. That's in Bellevue. The three drove in Mary Ann's 1984 Camaro. She's driving. Her two friends left at about 9.30 p.m. But she stayed behind.

She wanted to hang out and party. She's like, I didn't come here to fucking bitch out at 9.30. You guys can go wherever you want. Now George is also there that night with his friend Smith MacLean to have dinner. Hanging out with his buddy having dinner. Once they were there, Russell and another friend talked to Mary Ann a little bit. After they ate dinner

Russell here George borrows the keys to his friend's truck Smith McLean Explaining that he had to change in a shirt with a collar because that's what the dance floor required at the bar He had to have a collar on for some fucking reason so Russell those guys don't rape people James. No no no you put a collar on and you are aces from that on man Now he's got a collar. So he had a duffel bag in the truck and he was gonna go change So he goes outside with the keys and doesn't come back in. Oh Never comes back Smith McClain looks outside his fucking truck is gone. Oh So is his buddy. They're all gone.

So this Smith McLean is pissed off, and he spent the rest of the evening waiting at the Overlake Denny's restaurant in Overlake, where that's where people from Papagayos would go after closing, to the Denny's. That's how hard it is to get kicked out of Denny's. That's where all the drunks go. They're taking pent up, guys not getting laid, all that.

All of that. So that's, he waits all night, he never shows up. At about 5.30 a.m., this guy finally finds a ride home because he doesn't have his truck. So that morning, the morning that Mary Ann's body's discovered, that same morning George calls Smith McLean's house and he said, Oh man, where you been? This is George talking. He said, where you been? I was looking for you all night. All night. Well I was at the bar till closing, you know, the place you said you were going to be back

in five fucking minutes. That's where I was for most of it. Then I went to Denny's until the sun came up. What the fuck, man? Until the drunks fell asleep and then I left. So at about 6 a.m., Maclean's sister saw George return in the truck. So shows up to Smith Maclean's house with the truck. George told her he borrowed the truck to drive a friend home

and then he couldn't find her brother, so that's what happened. During this conversation, the sister notices a reddish-orange stain on the passenger seat of the truck. That wasn't there before. Russell said, oh yeah, my friend that I picked up vomited clam chowder everywhere. Manhattan, apparently.

Yeah, not New England I guess here. So George declined the offer of a ride home from the sister and just walked away with his duffel bag. Now Smith McLean woke up well after George had left and went outside to inspect his truck. He smelled a strong offensive odor that reminded him of vomit or the smell of a deer gutted after a hunting kill Those are very different things that what they see their Death or vomit. I can't tell I'm getting I'm getting notes of gutted venison. No that it's either the

an into the canal of an interior of an animal or That puke yeah Is that rib cage of a deer? No, it's vomit. It's it's vomit. Yeah, Jesus Christ So George called Smith McLean later that morning and told him that he had thrown up in the truck after drinking too much wasn't his friend George also told Smith that he had driven a woman home in the truck because he didn't want to be seen in the woman's Porsche. Now, George Russell had spoken previously about a woman with a Porsche.

That woman's name was Tamara Francis. Now, Francis knows him, but never left that bar with him. At all. So, now that same morning, that is when old Jimmy finds the body of Mary Ann outside the dumpster by the Black Angus. Now a little bit more of this here. They say here that the post-mortem injuries

obviously are spending all that time with the body like we talked about is not normal. They decide from a medical examination here that there's a number of significant injuries. The most likely cause of death was manual strangulation. Okay. She also, her skull is fractured and has numerous facial injuries

that appear to be inflicted by a fist. Oh. So, beaten until her skull fucking cracked. Her liver, they assume that someone was kicking her inflicted by a fist so beat until her skull fucking cracked her liver they assume that someone was kicking her so hard that it split her liver in two basically in two pieces she broke her broke her liver she also had a distinct anal tear that the medical examiner opined was caused by a solid non-human object Her blood alcohol level was point one four at the time of her death so drunk but not fallen over drunk and the

They said yeah the posing and all of that very strange here Now back at the bar her car is still there. Yeah, it's still at the bar the 84 Camaro and Inside the bar is her purse and sweater as well. Oh What woman leaves anywhere without her purse if she's out with it that purse and sweater you gotta have that yeah You gotta have that Yeah and sweater. You gotta have that. Yeah. You gotta have that. The purse is imperative no matter where you go, especially if you're going out, you're not with somebody, you're by yourself,

you gotta be able to pay for drinks and shit. Absolutely, you gotta have your license to drive all that shit. So they said finding the car and her purse and sweater at the bar, the police detective said that tells us she wasn't intending on leaving that place, she'd left against her will.

So they investigate. One of the bouncers is a Bellevue police officer that was working off duty. And he often spoke with George, who was a frequent patron of papagayos. And that night he saw Russell twice, he said. Once shortly after his shift began at 10 30 p.m. and again approximately an hour later. On the second occasion, George told this officer that he was going to quote, take this girl over to her place to get something. The officer did not see the woman well enough to identify her. However, he described her size and general description. And it's similar to Maryann and He also said he noticed the woman seemed pretty intoxicated as well So that night that's what happens there. Okay

Now let's talk about Carol Marie beef or beefy be Ehti I think it's B probably yeah She's 35 years old. She is a bartender at Cucina Cucina, which is a restaurant in Bellevue, double Cucina. She lived in a condo with her two kids. Her ex-husband Paul lived very nearby, very close. Now August 8th, 1990, Carol speaks with her ex-husband Paul

at about 9.30 p.m. At about 10.30 p.m. she spoke with her boyfriend, Mike Sewell, with whom she's planning on going on vacation. They talk. At midnight, she's out. She's out and about. She meets a friend at a restaurant where he was the bartender and left at approximately 2.15 p.m.

This this bar is called the keg. OK, now they describe Carol as pretty blonde haired and svelte. So small, thin, hot blonde woman. They said that this is from the book slotted well with her crowd. She they talk about she's a shit talker. She's smart. She trades sexual innuendos, teases the men. They say that she invites their flirtations

and then would turn them down. She's breaking balls, yeah. So they said it was kind of her game and kind of what she did for her ego type of thing. One night though, on this night, they said she was talking to the bartender and wasn't talking to any of the other guys. And so she hadn't realized, though, that someone's been watching her here.

Now, she left the keg a little past two a.m. Like we said, she drove straight home. A neighbor out walking his dog later said that he had seen Carol unlock the front door of her home and then enter at about 2 30 a.m. She was alone and she looked a little tipsy. They said there was no one with her or near her or on foot or cruising by or there was no like anybody that could like ran in the door behind her type of shit inside her home. She looked in on her two daughters.

She's a nine and a 13 year old, and they're both asleep. She takes a quick shower, gets ready for bed. She has to work the next day, the late shift, and she tends bar at Cucina Cucina, like we said, and she didn't like leaving her kids alone so often at night, but she thought they were responsible, and her ex could check on him because he lives nearby. So she, little after three, laid down to sleep.

And the moon apparently was very bright, so she turned away because she has French doors that in her room that the moon is shining through, so she turned the other direction. Now she figured her yard was private, so the French doors looking over her yard isn't a big deal. She doesn't have to close the drapes, whatever.

She also doesn't really lock doors that often. Really? Not a big door locker. Now, at 4.30 a.m., the 13-year-old daughter, Kelly, heard someone in the hall of the condo, then saw a person shine a flashlight in the bathroom into her sister's bedroom and then into her bedroom She thought the person was Mike her mom's boyfriend was coming over so then Kelly went back to sleep She woke up at 830 a.m. And her mother was not up as she usually mother was already usually up doing shit And she wasn't she went to go check on her mom and her mom's bedroom door was locked. So she tries knocking on the door, she's

yelling for her mother, mother never answers. No answers. She won't wake up. So Kelly goes outside around to the sliding glass door to her mother's room and she saw her mother through the door and freaked the fuck out because we'll tell you why. She ran back in and called her father who came home and came over and actually entered the glass of the room through the sliding glass door. Wow. Carol was on her back on the bed. The bedspread was pulled all the way down to the foot of the bed. She's completely naked except for a pair of red high heeled shoes. Weird. Her feet are together with her legs spread apart toward the door of the room and her knees are bent.

So you can picture that. Blood had been smeared on her legs in a manner that resembled finger painting, they said. It was definitely on purpose. Somebody had smeared it. Now, under her bed she had kept a savage 22 long rifle. Yeah a gun this rifle has been placed it is resting symmetrically between her legs with the the stock the butt of the gun on no the butt of the gun on her shoes down there and The firearm the barrel of it is inserted into her. Oh my God.

It's five and a half inches into the vagina. Oh dear Lord. Yeah, that is just obviously fucking disturbing as shit. Her left arm was bent upward at the elbow while her right arm was bent down at the elbow, nearly touching her hip. So, picture that. Now the weird part is they see a,

there's a pillow over her face. So they think maybe she's suffocated. They take the pillow off and find her head is wrapped in a dry cleaning plastic bag. It's over her head with a belt tied around her neck to keep it in place. Oh dear Christ. So this is definitely not an accident obviously.

She's been had her head beat in here. With a bag over it. Bag over the head and they're calling it blunt force, blunt force trauma to the head and really bad stuff. They said that she was killed by beating. Also, there was bites on her arms at her post-mortem. Medical examiner found that her death had been caused by head injuries.

The head injuries were inflicted by an instrument swung with considerable force and rapid succession. The blows left a distinct Y-shaped marks and crushed the entire left side of her skull. So that's fucking weird. Also, whatever this was had sliced her ear and left 13 distinctive Y-shapes on her body. She had been bitten and kicked with such ferocity that two broken ribs penetrated the chest cavity. Good Christ, anger, rage. Yep, she'd been struck many times with a knee or a fist in the torso, and her liver was also lacerated.

And the kids heard none of this? Didn't hear a fucking thing about this. Now, she had rings on her right hand hand but not on her left hand. At the time of her death she owned two wedding ring sets, one from her mother and one from her previous marriage. The rings were kept in a jewelry box in her bedroom, but they were never found. They were gone.

They were gone. Now during the investigation, the police will publish photographs of the ring in the newspaper and everything of these rings. Her family was also informed that she had a half dozen small crown royal bags, or I'm sorry, her family told the police she had a half dozen small crown royal bags in the top drawer of her dresser containing silver dollars

and other change from tips. When police allowed the ex-husband to reenter his wife's house, he noticed all the bags were missing. That's why, where they found out that police like. Loose change. All the loose change is gone, but nothing else. to reenter his wife's house, he noticed all the bags were missing. That's where they found out that. All the loose change is gone, but nothing else. And wedding rings.

And possible wedding rings, yeah. So they investigate, they interviewed the neighbor who had seen her returning home, but he had no other details other than I saw her coming home. They spoke with some neighborhood children who'd been camping out next door and they seemed to be, they said that she seemed to be in a hurry as if afraid of someone or something that was outside. Who knows? I mean, she also surprised that it's two 30 and I got to work tomorrow. Who knows? So, um, they questioned John Comfort. He's the bartender who she hung out with at the keg that night.

And the police learned that, um, she, Carol had helped him close up the bar, then went with him to the car where they made love. Oh, really? Yes. She's supposed to leave for the trip with her boyfriend the next day here. He said he saw no signs of life in the parking lot, nor any suspicious characters hanging around the restaurant at closing time

He said there had been a few last-minute stragglers, but they were all gone by the time they locked up So they obviously detained him for a minute So you're saying you had sex with her and then we found her dead five hours later. Well, then let's have a chance And the boyfriend will both talk to oh, yeah Very yeah a lot and the ex-husband for that matter. Everybody, all of them. So he was detained, but then they let him go and placed him under surveillance.

Let's see what he does. So they refused to believe at this point that this was some kind of serial killer. They said no, the MO between Mary Ann and Carol's crimes were different. One was outside, one they thought that Mary Ann had been the victim of a spontaneous date rape gone awry and Carol had died at the hands of a housebreaker

who may have actually been mad at her personally. They said that both crimes, but they didn't recognize this though, that both crimes bore signs of graphic sexual deviancy, both women's bodies had been treated with sheer contempt by the killer both corpses were posed To laugh at him align the law and even though the MO had altered the signature had not fucking altered That's the thing that just means you're more ballsy, right?

They will develop different things Ted Bundy wasn't going into people's houses and doing that shit to later you know what I mean like there's the people they they grow you know I mean an artist grows a comic grows a serial killer grows you grow all yeah you evolve so they also find out that George Russell and Carol were acquaintances, and one person said that both of them frequented the Overlake Denny's. Also, a waitress at the Black Angus restaurant... By the way, the Black Angus that is next to the McDonald's is the one he got banned from, that they found Marianne outside.

Now, a waitress at the Black Angus testified later that on two separate occasions she was talking to Carol about a quote situation between George and her and saw George glaring at them. Who they're just hanging out at the Black Angus who just doesn't go there eat dinner and go home. What are you doing? You glaring at folks?

They said this occurred before he was banned from the black Angus and after these two murders George told his friends that he knew the victim of the second murder and that she was a bartender at the Cochina Cochina restaurant and then also they find somebody that says that George tried to sell him rings that resembled the missing set as well. Uh oh. Now they try to work up a profile here. So they call in an expert on sexualized crime who said the murders are the work of one man. Because you're looking for one guy. The expert said the serial killer would be a young white male.

But police zero in on Russell who they said grew up in a white upper-class middle-class neighborhood so much to the fact that all the prisoners said he acted white. So they're like, that's kind of his personality. So they do that. Now George reads the paper clearly because friends say that he cut pictures of the first two victims out of the newspaper and called them skanky sluts. Oh.

Then taped them up to the wall, on the wall. In the cell, in the jail? No, at his house. Oh, at his home. He's not arrested, yeah, he's out. He's just got, okay. Yeah, he reads the newspapers, tells his friends, you see the skanky sluts that got killed?

And he's putting those clippings on the wall. And then said, they're never gonna find who killed her. Never gonna find who killed these two ladies. So yeah, now about three weeks after Carol's murder here, Russell and a friend drove to a wooded area on Mercer Island. And George informed his friend that he had to pick up some money owed to him.

George stepped out of the car and returned with a paper bag full of silver dollars and change. Okay. Probably from one of his little hidey holes that he had there. Yeah, I had him somewhere, yeah. Yeah. So we're using BTK language with that hidey hole shit.

Now, forensic evidence reveals none of George's fingerprints in Carole's residence. There is a fabric glove impression left on the sheet of her bed that suggested that gloves were worn, and they find hairs on her sheet, pillow, and underwear that were from a black person. No, they were from a black person. The hairs they found, but the fragments were not suitable for any kind of comparison. This is the very beginning of DNA. So you need like a whole hair with a root attached

and everything else. So August 30th, 1990, Andrea Levine is 24 years old. She goes by Randy with an I, and she goes to some of the same places everybody else went, the same nightclubs the other two went to. She rented a basement apartment in the home of Robert Hayes and his wife here and on August 30th, 1990 the landlord Robert Hayes saw Randy after she returned from work. Later that evening, Randy met her boyfriend at a restaurant in Kirkland where they discussed plans to go to the San Juan Islands.

So somebody else going on vacation. She was known for her sarcasm and being witty as well. This one, same as Carol. Same as Carol. They said that she is known for urging on going along with flirting and then rejecting a guy and being like, I don't think so, fuck off. So the night, this night, she met several of her girlfriends

for a drink, but left the bar alone, according to her friends. Now, none of her acquaintances could recall her chatting with or teasing any guys that night. They said, was she breaking balls that night? No. They said she hadn't been there that long and she wasn't in her usual high spirits. So she took off from the Maple Gardens, which is a play, a bar, not long after midnight. They figured saying she was tired after a long day. And they figured that she drove home in her pickup truck and went straight home and went to bed.

So she declined to ride home and drove herself home to pack for her vacation at about 1.30 a.m. So drove herself home. Now the next morning, the landlord, Bob Hayes, and his wife woke up about 5 a.m. They opened the back door to let their dogs out. The dogs began barking like fucking crazy soon as they let him out He stepped out to look around and saw a dark figure just in the dark couldn't see who it was just a figure

Silhouette about 25 to 30 feet away So yeah, he was roaming along the exterior wall Near Randy's rear window by the basement. Now, he threw on his robe and put a leash on his dog and went out to confront what he thought was someone trying to break into his house, but they said that the dogs must've scared the guy away and he took off and the guy took off

and he couldn't catch up to him, the landlord. So he said, all right, scared that guy off. He checked his property, didn't find any broken windows or jimmied locks or anything like that. Everything was in place. So he figured, Hey, I thwarted it. Good, good for me. So he checked the window closest to where he spotted him and inadvertently realized that it was Randy's bedroom window. And he said he could see her, see her asleep in bed. And he felt like, Oh God, I intruded. I, you know, I'm looking in the window at this girl sleeping. Holy shit. So he said he could see her asleep in bed, and he felt like, oh God, I intruded. I'm looking in the window at this girl sleeping, holy shit, so he said he, yeah, he said he stepped back,

went into his own house, gave the dog some treats, like that was it. Felt like a pervert and a piece of shit. I didn't even, I know I didn't whack it, but still. As far as I was sleeping, I felt gross. Felt awful. So he said that he was glad to get rid of that guy. He said there'd been some break-ins in the building

only a couple days earlier. Randy had told him there'd been a number of things missing from her apartment. So someone must've broke in. He said since then, he's made a habit to keep an eye out and he said maybe he scared the guy off for good this time, but he never saw the person. He said it looked like a thin, young, and agile man.

That's all he could get out of it. We don't know. Could have been a ninja. We have no idea. It was dark out. I don't know, I'll tell you. It was dark, yeah. So he said it was just an adult with a white form,

approximately two thirds the width of the person or in front of the individual's abdomen. He said he called out and fled. He called out, the guy fled. He said he chased him a short distance, but stopped because he was unarmed. And he just called the police. And the police examined the exterior and said,

all right, everything looks good and that's fine. So days go by. Days go by. And the following Monday, the landlord's wife here, the landlady, I guess, went into Randy's apartment because one of Randy's cats was crying and crying and crying and you know if she was hungry or what the hell was going on. As she walked down the hallway, she said she smelled something like old blood coming from the bedroom.

Or was it vomit? It could have been clam chowder vomit, we don't know. Someone could be gutting a deer in the living room, we're not sure. We don't know. So she opened the door to the bedroom and found Randy. She was on her back on the bed, face turned toward her left shoulder,

legs spread with her knees straight. So, extended out this time, not like making a diamond shape. Her right arm extended above her right shoulder while her left arm rested by her side. Does this sound familiar? Yeah. Under her forearm, her left forearm was the book, More Joy of Sex.

Oh, the sequel. That's placed right under her. And a plastic dildo is in her mouth. Her brains are leaking on the bed. Oh my God. There's brain matter all over the bed. This is fucking, this is a bad one. It's another pose.

Medical examiner determined that she died from several multiple multiple head wounds inflicted with an object such as an iron bar or an aluminum bat. She's also covered with post-mortem stab wounds. They said she was stabbed and basically covered from there her scalp to the bottom of her feet with 231 small knife wounds 230 some of them are in patterns like on purpose. Yeah, like an art project they appear to have been flicked it after death and I

Guess this is a peeker ism. They call it. It's a necrophilic perversion peeker ism There because okay, yeah So the forensic evidence reveals the presence of a single Pubic hair from a black person at the crime scene the hair could not be matched anyway to any samples there Fingerprints no fingerprints found they said it looked like somebody had wiped the scene down. They found no fingerprints of anybody. They also found the bat and the killer had wiped down the bat because that was there and clean.

So they think it was an aluminum bat that did it and taken every knife in the kitchen. Really? That's all that's missing, all the knives. Just knives? Just all the knives, yep. So they theorized that he used a kitchen knife to violate this poor woman and then took them all so the real weapon couldn't be identified ever. You get all of them, if you take the one you used,

you know that's the one. And her favorite amethyst ring was missing. They said that she had been wearing a ring that was removed during the assault and obviously the one cop said I know that all of us felt that when we found the ring we'd find the killer well no shit so the Seattle Times is now running articles titled the East Side Killer yeah because there's a bad man on the loose this is now a serial killer referring to the geographic placement and basically said since when do lunatics have their field day, a local paper asked.

A cartoon analogized that the Bellevue, basically compared Bellevue freak to Jack the Ripper. One commenter remarked that Ted Bundy, though he was dead, I'm sure had been resurrected and went to Bellevue. So people are just, it's all that shit. Now, remember John Comfort? I do, yeah. He's gonna get a little more comfortable because they take him off surveillance.

He has an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, but they also doubted that knowing he was under watch, he would have attempted another crime like that. So he's not the serial killer. They're thinking now whoever killed one killed them all. So if you didn't couldn't have killed that one, you didn't kill the other two. Now they find out George knew her on one occasion.

Randy's boyfriend drove her home in her truck and George followed in the boyfriend's car. So he knows where she lives. and his girlfriend drove her home in her truck and George followed in the boyfriend's car. So he knows where she lives, is what it means. A few weeks later, George and some friends drove out to Renton, which is a town, to help Randy put a new battery in her truck. Then George rode back to Kirkland with her. On a third occasion, Randy was at a bar

and George came over to talk. So they know each other, he's been to her house more than once. After the murder, George made disparaging remarks about her, stating that she slept around, used men, and that she was a whore. Okay, now where the fuck was George on August 30th? Where indeed? Well, he, because it was Labor Day weekend, he and some friends were going to Canada that weekend. And on August 30th, the night before they left,

the group stayed in a motel. George left the hotel dressed in dark pants, white tennis shoes, a blue dark sweatshirt, and a dark cap. He said he had to go to work. Okay, he doesn't even have a job. What are you talking about? He returned at 6 a.m. wearing the same clothes. He didn't have a car, by the way.

So he did this on foot. Randy lived about a mile from the hotel by car. But walking distance was shorter, because if you took the direct route. A friend of George's said that she received a ring from Russell several days after Labor Day. It's an amethyst ring. And she wore the ring several times, then gave it to a friend who pawned it.

They later retrieved the ring from the pawn shop and Randy's sister-in-law identifies the ring as the one that she had given to Randy. Oh boy. So police brought the ring to the jewelry store where the employee identified it as the one he worked on for Randy in February 1990. And so then there's a guy named, a kid named Matt McCauley who's 16. He's a neighbor of Carol Beath.

Soon after the murder, McCauley told police that he saw a blue corvette with a black top driving near Carol's house around the time of the murder. He also said he heard a cat scream around that same time. Weird. So they interview him and he described using alcohol and drugs and having drug related hallucinations that whole summer. And he also said that he definitely drank some bourbon that night So we don't know how reliable of a witness. He is is what I'm saying But he's fun. Here we go. He's fun September 12th 1990 Robin Oldenburg

She is a young lady packing up for a trip when she notices a strange sound She said all of a sudden I heard a knock on my window. It was a very firm knock. I was really nervous. Everything was going on, but my first thought was you're being paranoid. But the noises continued, so she called the police. When they arrived, they found the screen from her door was missing. Someone was in the process of breaking in to her house and

they had a suspect because someone had been driving away as the cops drove up. Oh, they ran the plates and learned that it is George Russell. Oh boy. And they also learned that he had a warrant out for his arrest for impersonating a police officer. So they chased him down. They said, he can have all the excuses he wants while he's here. He's going to jail for that. So she said, the woman here, Robin said she was shocked to learn that this potential assailant

was George cause she knew George. Well, friends with him. Yep. She said the first time I met George Russell, I thought he was a fun, happy, go lucky, great guy, But things started to change and I realized there was a dark side to him So George is arrested on outstanding warrants and under investigation here He said they asked him about the other women and he explained that yes he knew Mary Ann and he knew Randy and He said I he had an alibi, well he gave an alibi for his time of the murders.

And he also told the police that the night with Mary Ann with the truck, he used his friend Smith McClain's pickup truck that night, but I didn't kill anybody, I just used the truck. He denied killing people, but he also refused to hand over a DNA or hair sample. Won't do that though? Yeah So they had to continue the investigation because they don't have any physical evidence at this point

After he was questioned by the police he telephoned one of his roommates and asked her to give the police His copy of crime scene search and physical evidence handbook That he has the handbook outlines police procedures and gathering evidence from the scene of a crime and contains chapters on fingerprints and body fluids, but does not contain a chapter on DNA testing. So I don't know if he's fucking with them, like tell them to, so you know how to investigate a crime scene.

He also admitted having basically every book that was ever written about Ted Bundy, but denied that he was a fan of his, or like, you know, thought he was cool or anything. He just said it was just very interesting. Now, Smith McLean is tracked down and he says, yeah, George Russell asked to use my truck that night to take a girl home and the next morning when he returned,

he claimed that he had to get it clean because a girl he knew threw up clam chowder in it. So he said he remembered saying it smelled like blood or if something had been gutted in there instead of a person vomiting. So based on this, here's everybody saying he had the truck. They go to do tests on the truck on October 11th, 1990. They remove the interior of the truck.

Now it has been cleaned and detailed during the summer, but the floor now it has been cleaned and detailed during the summer But the floor mats had not been cleaned in the oh the seat did so McLean had removed the floor mats which were made from house carpet remnants No, whether tech eat your heart out Here's a four by two that I cut out Wow There's a four by two that I cut out a bathroom Carpet scrap from the fucking guest bedroom here He had put them in the garage because they smelled so bad didn't throw them out. Just put them in the garage

so the upholstery in the truck reacted positively for blood and antigens that matched the blood and HO and and a antigens which matched the HO and A antigens, which matched the HO and A antigens in the vaginal swab taken at Marianne Polrick's autopsy. Both antigens could have been contributed by her herself because she was a type A secretor. George was type O, although he could have been the source of the HO antigens, he could not have contributed

the A antigens. The also spent sent the vaginal swab and upholstery Samplings for DNA testing poor quality of the samples But they did conduct a PCR test which is kind of like the most basic DNA tests they can do That's like the first one that they do just to see if you're even in the ballpark Got it, and then if a certain certain things match up then you go to more specific DNA. This is one of those, you know, yeah, one in five thousand people type of thing or whatever, one in ten, whatever the number is at that particular thing. But it's not the one in eight billion type of shit. So the PCR test results indicated that neither George nor Smith-McLean could have been the

source of the blood in the truck, but that Mary Ann could have been. The testing also revealed that only George, of all the comparison samples, could have been the donor of the sperm. Only George. In addition to the sperm and blood, and the one hair from a black person consistent with Russell's was found in the debris on the sheet in which her body was wrapped, by the way. Five fibers in the pubic comings were consistent with the truck carpet as was one fiber from the sheet debris.

Another fiber in the sheet debris was consistent with the truck's upholstery. Yeah, they also were able to track down her ring. Like we said, they also were able to track down her ring like we said They got that apparently it was discovered that in a pawn shop in Canada Here they were able to get the ring back identify it and really tie him to the murder So they charged George with murdering Mary Ann Carol and Randy Levine All three of them. He wants all of his statements tossed in pre-trial. Sure, of course. He said the police failed to read him his Miranda rights prior to questioning.

He sought to have them suppress not only that statement but also fruit of that statement. Him saying he was in the truck led to the truck search, which he wants that out too, because that's part of it. They got that from his statement here. Now, the trial court concludes that the questionings occurred in a custodial setting,

requiring police to read the Miranda warnings, but due to conflicting testimony, the court found the state had failed to prove by a preponderance that Russell had been advised of his rights, so the state was not permitted to use his statement in the case. The court found, however, that his statement was voluntarily given that his free will was not overborn,

noting that the atmosphere in the interview room was relaxed and friendly. Evidence also indicated that Russell had been Mirandized on previous occasions, including one occasion four months before the questioning. Well, you have to do it every time. You can't, they do it when they, like they'll leave the room for an hour,

they'll re-Mirandize somebody. Like just for shits and giggles here. They said he knew his right to legal counsel was also clear since he eventually terminated the questioning by asking to speak to an attorney. Before his statement was voluntarily given in a non-coercive atmosphere, the trial court ruled that the evidence derived from his un-Mirandized statements would be admissible now.

So before it got contentious. The court excludes the defense evidence of similar attacks. And I say evidence with quotes around it. They want to put two other assaults into the mix here that occurred in September of 1990 and they state that the incidents were similar to Carol B. then Randy Levine, because the female victims lived on the ground floor of an apartment building,

and both received head injuries inflicted by a heavy object. But they said there's absolutely no connection. They said the first assault occurred early in the morning. The victim had locked herself out of her apartment building and was banging on her door when a man approached offering his help They walked around to the back of the building to see if she could climb in a window And he struck her on the head with what appeared to be a rock. She screamed and he fled

There's no posing. There's no anything So nothing there second assault happened when a victim was surprised a burglar in her home The burglar struck her once in the eye then fled with money Yeah, he had an yeah, he had an alibi because he was in custody, but they said there's no similar no similarities here at all Just because there's a murderer and serial killer that breaks into place doesn't mean that every burglary is Is this exactly yeah, they were trying to do that They also said he is they said he they want to get in the court refuses to admit evidence that two men George Grums and Brett Carlson may have murdered

Maryann and Randy George Grums was considered a suspect in rape murder case where the body was left in a parking lot The victim in that case was a black woman with a history of prostitution and a heroin habit. She had been seen driving with grums, although her body was left in a parking lot, fully clothed and not posed. So nothing like this is what they're saying here. So anyway, also there's condoms. He wants to have exclude the unused condoms found in his belongings. The state asserted that the condoms were relevant to rebut an argument that Carol Beath and Andrea Levine had been killed by someone other than Mary Ann's killer because

Seaman was found at the scene of Mary Ann's murder and not at the other two murders. So the state intended to argue that the absence of Seaman in the bodies of Levine and Beath could be attributed to the use of condoms. Now they said the court indicated here they concluded that condoms are out, and then the next day they came back and said, change my mind, condoms are in. Condoms are in, it's fucking wild. So the trial comes up here, DNA,

I could do a four hour show on the fight over the DNA and I'm not even gonna get into it. I'm not gonna get into it, not gonna get into it. Prosecution succeeds in admitting into evidence the controversial DNA tests for the hair semen and blood stains, the PCR tests. But winning a conviction here is gonna rest on more than this, I think here.

So the Levine evidence, they say George knew Levine, knew where she lived on the morning of the murder he was staying at a motel that was less than a 15 minute walk from her residence. Early in the morning he left the motel at approximately 5 a.m. An intruder was seen leaving her residence. The intruder, like George, wore dark clothing and eyewitness saw something white,

about two thirds as wide as the person, superimposed against the chest or abdomen and he was wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with a white logo on the front. After Randy's murder, George told some of her friends that he was a whore. She was a whore who'd been sleeping with a friend of his and had used men. Hair found on her body was similar to his. And finally, it was discovered that a distinctive ring obviously was given away.

So there's that. That's that's a lot right there. Also, the crime scene book. They argue that the handbook was relevant because it showed knowledge of techniques that were apparently used by these killers. The trial court initially ruled it inadmissible and then changed its mind again. This judge is real flighty with shit. They get Matt McCauley, the 16-year-old there, to try to support the theory that Carole was killed by a boyfriend, Mike Sewell. He identified a photograph of Mike Sewell's white-topped Corvette as possibly being

the car he saw. On cross-examination, he denied drinking any bourbon that night and then the state reminded him of his statements in which he admitted consuming a shitload of bourbon that night. He then admitted drinking some bourbon that night but denied it was enough to affect his system. What? And he also said he's been having hallucinations all summer. Wow. So the state repeatedly questioned him on discrepancies in earlier statements,

because they said it was a different color top. Now he's saying it's a white top Corvette. Yeah, it was black. Before he said it was blue. It was black. Yeah. The mine hunters are here. All right.

John Douglas and Robert Keppel both testify at this trial. Really? Yeah, this is big shit. They absolutely do. They have all of this. They talk about the posing. They talk about the hits and the VICAP computer programs that they've built all these profiles and shit of.

These programs use forms filled out by local law enforcement officials listing the various characteristics of homicides and they enter it all in there. Now the defense pursues the issue of the similarities and differences among the three murders and the court allows Keppel to testify that his opinion of all the murders

that they were committed by the same person. He said that all were killed within a short period of time of contact with the offender. Each crime involved the sexual insertion of a foreign object that the offender needed to display these victims and ensure their discovery and all of that. They said that the fury that was expended at the crime scenes and the obvious lengths he went to to show whomever found his victims' bodies the contempt he felt for those women but speak of kind of deep residing cauldron of anger

that's way beyond normality. Yeah, he's so mad. Wow. I guess so. Absolutely. They call him a violent necrophile and a sadistic necrophile. And they said that because they were,

what he told them basically, he's saying that these women needed to suffer. Pleasure came when he was able to deliver it with the wax of a baseball bat or an iron rod or whatever he used to smash their skulls. The physical act of killing sparked such a fury that he reached a form of sexual satisfaction releasable only through prolonged violence.

That's why, although he knew that they were dead, he'd still keep going at them, because it felt good. The same reason why BTK came in his pants when he would fucking kill somebody. So they said, of course, his warped sense of justice the murders wouldn't have been a success unless he could tell the world what sluts they were.

So he would pose them into erotic, erotically weird shapes and then degrade them with leaving something phallic in them. So yeah, they said that the the reinforcing the concept of degradation he placed in and on the victim's sex toys and sexual propaganda, such as that book, all that kind of thing. They said also he displayed a steadily increasing guile and confidence spending more time with each victim as his killing spree progressed, which is absolutely true. Now, Douglas, John Douglas here,

says that all the victims were posed that night and that exhibited the same signature. He talks about signature a lot. He said that the victims were posed that night and that exhibited the same signature. He talks about signature a lot. He said that the victims were penetrated vaginally, anally or orally with some type of device or foreign object and said the time frame of the murders pointed to one perpetrator. Douglas agreed there were differences among the crimes but explained on redirect the differences were insignificant compared to the similarities. The significant part is the posing of the victims, the posing in this degrading type

of position that's critical. In addition to them, they bring in another bunch of detectives that testify that the body seemed posed and only one said he'd ever seen another murder scene involving posing. So they're trying to show how rare it is for posing. This isn't going to be some other guy doing this. Manipulating the body show how rare it is for posing. This isn't gonna be some other guy doing this. Manipulating the body after post-mortem is so rare. It doesn't happen that much. Most people kill them and run the fuck away.

They get the fuck out of there. You gotta have some serious guile to stick around and do this type of shit. And it's gotta be a thing you need. The defense brings in their own posing expert who's a retired 20-year FBI veteran Who says there's too many differences in the way they were killed degraded imposed to been the work of one person their bodies are Almost the exact same positions the fuck are you talking about?

On cross-examination they elicited his current opinion that all the murders were contributed were done by the same person though But he said at first he didn't think they were were done by the same person though, but he said at first he didn't think they were. Okay, now the defense in closing, the public defender team of Miriam Schwartz and Brad Hampton, these poor bastards, they gotta talk about a fucking mountain to climb here. That's no fun.

They tried to poke holes in the, no, they tried to poke holes in the case. They told the jury that if George, a high school dropout, were indeed a serial killer, there would have been more victims sooner. He just started now. He's 30, what are we talking, he was 32 years old. What are we talking about? They said that the one defense attorney

claimed that Carol Bede's boyfriend, who left a fingerprint on a Coca-Cola can in her house, that's your killer right there. Problem is, he's got reason to have fingerprints on Coca-Cola cans, because he goes there. Because that's his girlfriend. He, George, has no reason to leave a hair or any sperm behind anywhere.

Yeah, so the verdict comes in, 22 hours of deliberation. Really? 22 hours, I'll tell you why in a minute, because it's fucking hilarious. The jury returns guilty of all three on first degree murder.. I'm sorry first-degree murder for Maryann and Aggravated first-degree murder for Carol and Randy really yes because they did a lot more post Now what the fuck took them 22 hours. Yeah, what were they talking about? Jurors told reporters that they weren't in any disagreement. They were never an argument. They thought he was guilty from the beginning

They just took a long time to discuss how weird everything was It was fucking crazy They sat around like dude and then that could you've got one do like they just talked about the case and they're like we should Really? I mean, there's a whole courtroom of people waiting for us. We should probably tell him to hammer all this shit out I mean, there's a whole courtroom of people waiting for us. We should probably go out and tell them what we got. Let's not leave until we hammer all this shit out. Dude, they couldn't vote and then be like, let's get together at fucking Denny's later?

Isn't that some black Angus? Fuck. Fuck it, yeah. So the sentencing comes around, and obviously you can imagine what the, what they were saying about him. He's a monster, menace to society, our greatest nightmare, obviously. he is sentenced to you, sir

May fuck off two life sentences with no parole yeah, and then another 29 years in prison on top of that Yeah, for the other one. Yeah consecutive. Yeah, so bye bye George Very quickly his appeal says he wasn't Mirandized, so there's that. He wanted the cases severed. He wanted to sever count one from counts two and three, and they wouldn't let him sever it. He said John Douglas's testimony was ridiculous,

and that the court, it's inflammatory, that both, they say that they shouldn't have been able to testify about the posing, the court ruled. That's what I mean. They say, get the fuck out of here, George, you're gone. No, so that's denied. Now, here's an article I found from 2025 with an interview with George Russell.

What? Junior. Yeah, I'm a fucking idiot though, because I went right to the middle of it to see what the meat of it was, and there's some talk of the South and stuff, so I thought it was him, and then I went right to the middle of it to see what the meat of it was. And there's some like talk of the South and stuff. So I thought it was him. And then I went to the beginning and it says, I'm here for the Conservation History Association

of Texas or in Huntsville, Texas. And we've got the good fortune to be visiting with George Russell, who's a forest activist and conservationist in East Texas. I'm like, shit, wrong guy. Okay. Mistaken identities are a motherfucker, man. Now his story here was detailed in the book that I quoted a lot in this Jack Olsen's 1995 book, charmer, a ladies man and his victims.

Um, so the also it was examined in serial violence analysis of modus operon, operandi and signature characteristics of killers by Robert Kepler. This book is $93 on Amazon. God damn. The Kindle version is $92. What? So there's not even a- It's a fucking scan.

What are you talking about? It's crazy. The case was dramatized in several investigation discovery shows, including Dead of the Night, Secrets of the Morgue, City Confidential, and Murder by Numbers, and also George was analyzed in Most Evil, that show, where he was ranked at 17 out of the 22 level scale.

Very fucking evil, very evil. Also examined by the new detectives and Mark of a Killer on the Oxygen Network. And there you go, everybody, that is Kirk is Kirkland Washington and a fucked up-ass serial killer I mean a Ted Bundy in the making he would have been Ted Bundy. So many bad guys in that area of the country why? It's so strange it's I mean it's so fucking weird right after that too because you had the Green River Killer you had Bundy you have him it's all happening so, if you like that show, tell the world about it.

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This week's executive producers are Gary Howard, Seta and Bug, Amanda Brennan, Kamen Wendy Koshwara, happy birthday. Happy birthday. Jordan Bennett and Simon, they made it back to England. Happy travels, man. Good for you guys. They go tomorrow.

They'll make it. You guys got this. Yeah, they'll hear it. And Jared McMillan, thank you guys for everything you do. You're fucking amazing. Other producers this week are Happy Hour and Hobbs New Mexico, Janice Hill, Peyton Meadows, Adam with no last name, Leslie with no last name,

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Richardson, Kevin with no last name, Courtney Enrich, Laurie Taylor, Melissa with no last name, Edward Chandler, Nicolette Primley, Jim Bradford, Katie Kavanagh, Kaelin Sandvig, or Kaelin? Is that a T? I don't know. It's one of those two. Kaelin or Kaelin Sandvig. That's who it is, James. Allison Combs, Sharon Schneider, Dylan Kormanik, Jessie Joy, and all of our patrons. You guys are the best, thank you! Thank you so much, everybody. We cannot tell you what you mean to us and the people that do that.

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