Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Manhunts Work

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

When a suspect or prisoner goes on the lam there are plenty of ways to hide: in plain sight, in the mountains, in another country. There are as many types of ways law enforcement uses to track wanted people as their are ways to go on the lam, but there are some founding principles to carrying out a successful manhunt and they actually include you. Learn about how the fuzz tracks down fugitives and how it's evolving in the age of social media in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Amber Ruffin, and I'm her gorgeous sister, Lacey Lamar, and in fact Lacey is not that gorgeous. Amber, get on with it. Okay everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're teaming up with Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network to bring you our brand new podcast called The Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show. We did it. We sold a bunch of books, we conquered late night, and now we'll play fun quizzes and games with friends and take you along for the ride. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey & Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, be on the lookout. APB, middle-aged white male podcaster on the loose, guilty of bad jokes.

Manhunt underway. That's right everyone, how manhunts work. December 16th, 2013. Enjoy it right here, right now. Now I've got to go. I'm on the lam. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charlton B. Chuck Bryant. The podcast producer Noel is hanging out with us for today. Noel. And that makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. That's right. I got to come up with something different to call it. Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. It's boring.

We're the explainerators. It's an info cast. Right. I don't know. Podcast is what it is. Edutainment. Chuck. Yes. Do you know of a man named James Earl Ray? Yeah, he's a jerk. Yes. I saw him referred to as dim-witted.

Oh really? Yeah, which makes his escape pretty thrilling and suspect, really. Let me give you a little background. James Earl Ray was a Missouri prison escapee when he rolled into Memphis to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Who was in Memphis to support the sanitation workers strike there in 1968. And James Earl Ray got a room across the street from the Lorraine Hotel where MLK was staying. Apparently published in the papers, not only where he was staying, but his room number, which I guess was custom at the time. Actually, from what I understand, it was customary.

Okay. Or it wasn't unheard of. And James Earl Ray got a room, found out that he had a decent shot at the balcony outside of King's room. If he leaned out of the bathroom, the shared bathroom of his communal hotel. And shared bathroom, huh? Shared bathroom down the hall. So somebody could have gone in and been like, oh, sorry, sir. Pretty much.

I didn't see you in here with that rifle. With that huge hunting rifle. Yeah. Well, he got a shot off, he killed MLK and he ran out of the, this place it was referred to as a flop house. And he left behind valuable evidence with his prints on it, namely the rifle, bundle of his clothing. And some other stuff that they used to create a trail for James Earl Ray, got a name, eventually got a picture. And James Earl Ray made it out of Memphis. Yeah.

He actually made it to Canada and he made it to Portugal and then the UK. Yeah. And the way he made it was under an assumed passport, which for a dim-witted Missouri prison escapee, a forged passport, that's pretty heavy stuff. Yeah. I think it was probably easier back then. Well, okay. You know. He was traveling under the name George Ramon Snead, right?

Yes. And he found out that he was traveling under that name because Canadian police, after being contacted by American authorities with a picture of James Earl Ray, went through about 150,000 passports that they had accepted. I guess they had copies of them. Yeah. I think about it. And then finally found one that looked like James Earl Ray, found out that the person traveling under that passport was in fact at Heathrow Airport or in London. Yeah.

And when he went to Heathrow Airport, they apprehended him and he said, you got me. I'm James Earl Ray and I killed MLK. I imagine that was tough because everyone back then looked like James Earl Ray. Yeah, pretty much. You know? I thought all those dudes looked the same back in the 50s, although this was the 60s, but he still looked like that in the 50s. He looked 50s-ish. He did.

And he confessed and then later on, of course, recanted and said, no, I was part of a plot and a conspiracy. And they said, T.S. Well, actually, the King family said, you know what? We think this guy's telling the truth. Sure. And they got a new trial brought and he died in prison before he could be brought to trial again. Yeah, in the late 90s. Yeah.

And then you two wrote a song about it. What song? It was the song Pride in the Name of Love. Oh, yeah. Early morning, April 4. Right, right. But that came before James Earl Ray. Yeah.

What do you mean? And then you two wrote, it was just miscommunication. You confused me for a second. Yeah, and I don't know if it was early morning either. I think for some reason, I always heard that Bono got that one wrong. Oh, really? Yeah, I'll have to look that up. I'm not sure what time it was.

Yeah, I'm sure we could find out. But Bono would then say that morning is like a state of mind or something. Right, exactly. I'm cool. Got on blue sunglasses always. So the Humphrey James Earl Ray is just one example, history is littered with manhunts. And what's strange about that is that no manhunt really resembles other manhunts. Yeah, I mean, it's weird.

Like you can hole up in the woods for years and then eventually get caught. Or if you're Whitey Bulger, you can go out in your driveway in Santa Monica and get caught. Like, I guess no manhunt is the same because no going on the lamb is the same. Some prefer hide-in-plane sight deal. Some prefer the middle of the woods. Some people prefer, you know, Bolivia. Sure. You know?

Nazis. What would you do? If I were on the run? Yeah, on the lamb. I would probably be a woodland creature. I don't know, but even if I did know, I wouldn't say on the podcast because that'd be pretty dumb in case I ever do need to go on the lamb in the future. So the hide-in-plane sight thing is there's something to be said for that?

Sure, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, you got to get some plastic surgery done in this day and age. Yeah, or just mesh your face up a little bit. Well, actually with Whitey Bulger, he was on the lamb with his longtime girlfriend, Catherine Grieg, I believe her name was, and she had extensive plastic surgery. Which had nothing to do with being on the lamb. Well, she actually got them found. Oh, really?

Yeah. So Whitey Bulger was on the lamb for 16 years, right? Yeah, it's pretty good. It was. He was up there with Osama bin Laden as one of America's most wanted fugitives. There was a million dollar bounty on it. It was big time. And whenever they found out that he had been somewhere or they thought he was somewhere,

the FBI would take out 30-second commercials on TV saying, have you seen this man? Have you seen this woman? This woman's known to frequent hair salons. This guy's Whitey Bulger, you know, call the FBI if you see him in the area during times when his girlfriend's demographic would be watching TV. Oh, sure. So this served a two-fold purpose. One, if she saw it and he saw it, then it would scare him and hopefully flush him out of hiding because it's a lot easier to catch somebody out in the open.

Yeah, which is a common tactic. Right. Or two, the people that she might be friends with and associate with could be watching TV at the time and drop a dime on her. And in fact, that's what happened. Someone like some lady who gave her a pedicure. Add a hair salon. Really? Called and said, I think this woman that you're looking for is here and this is her address

and the cops went to the apartment. Said, sir, it looks like somebody broke into your storage unit here around the corner and why do you bolt your steps outside and then go clink, clink. What did they even say that? Could they not go inside or something? I guess they didn't have enough probable cause. They had to lure him outside. I love that that's okay.

Right. It's not okay to come in, but it's okay to lie and say that your storage units busted into. Yeah. I'm surprised you fell for that too. Yeah, I'm sure he is too. He might have gotten lazy after 16 years. I don't think so, man. I think he was really wound up pretty tight.

I read a long form article by a neighbor of his, a young guy who befriended him over the years and he said he was wound up real tight. Always on the lookout. Did he write a book? Seemed cagey. He will. Called like neighbor to the mob. Pretty, I'm sure.

And it will start Matthew Modine. Yeah. If I lived next to Whitey Baldred, that book would be on the shelves right now. Sure. And it would be called neighbor to the mob. I wonder what Aaron Cooper is going to make now. So who else? We got John Wilkes Booth.

He famously went on the lamb for a pretty short time after he shot Lincoln. 12 days. And ended up in a farmhouse where there's all kinds of stories on how he might have died, whether he was burned alive or whether he was truly rooted out by the fire and then shot. Did he die instantly? Did he linger for a while? But either way, Manhunts have been around as long as people have been killing people. Yeah.

And there are some principles that do kind of hold true for all Manhunts across the board. And pretty much one of them is get the public involved. Yeah. Because when you do that, time and time again, Manhunts have shown that like somebody out there has seen this person recently and will call, right? Especially these days with technology, with like everyone having a camera in their pocket basically. Right.

Or sharing on social media or being up to the second with news reports. It's like it's made Manhunts easier. Yes. And then the other factor that makes for successful Manhunt is having a lot of people doing a lot of grunt work. Like the Canadian officials going through all of those passports to try to find one that looked like James Earl Ray. Yeah, I wonder how many people they visited before him.

Like the other 12 guys that looked just like James Earl Ray. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, Chuck, so let's say that somebody's on the run in the United States and it's not a big deal. It's not necessarily a national Manhunt.

It's a regional Manhunt, we'll say. Okay. Like someone knocked off a liquor store and shot somebody and was on the loose in a neighborhood. You want to find that guy? What do you do? Well, I'm glad you asked because I've done this. Yeah. With mirrored sunglasses on and like a bloodhound.

The first thing you got to do, my friend, is contain the area. It's called containment. And it sounds just like what it is. You are basically trying to seal off an area and watch all the possible exits from that area. If it's a neighborhood, I guess you're going to just pick out a certain amount of blockage and shut it down and have cops posted it each street exit. Right.

And just know that we have at least this area completely contained if this dude is in here. And we're going to say guys because how many times do women do stupid stuff like this and go in the lamp? Not much. You know? Sure. Have you not heard of Thelma and Louise? That's like the one thing.

So, if you do have an area contained, what you want to do is not just not let anybody enter out without finding out if it's the person you're looking for, you also probably want to go door to door and say, hey, are you being held hostage right now? Did some guy with a gun come into your basement window recently? That's what they did actually with a 20 square block area when they were searching for the Boston Marathon bombers. Yeah. Should we talk about those guys real quick?

Sure. They were jerks too. Yeah. They were brothers. They blew up a couple of pressure cookers, fashioned into bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And the FBI got on it pretty quick with getting photos released of who they thought these guys were, which turned out to be really key because after a kind of a crazy scene where

one of them was shot and killed by the police, like throwing bombs at the cops, it was quite a scene. They were taken over by his brother. And then the one, I guess, is that Zocar? The D is silent, right? Yeah, Joker or Joker. Joker, I think. He is the one that ended up in a residential neighborhood hiding in a boat under a tarp.

Yeah. And they sniffed him off the case with some infrared imaging. And basically it was like predator. They were like, there's a guy in that boat because I see his red body breathing. Right. And the reason that they found out that the dude was in the boat was because the person who owned the boat was in this area under the security lockdown in containment and was well aware, thanks to the local news and social media and everything else, that they were

looking for this guy. So when he saw that there was a dude in his boat, he called the cops. That's how the cops found suspect number two in the Boston bombing case, right? I bet that was a rush for that guy. I read about what he said. I think he was kind of scared. I'm sure. I mean, because it's pretty obvious.

You see a guy. There's a lockdown in your neighborhood and you see a guy go climb under your boat tarp in your backyard. Right. That's him. Yeah. Bleeding guy. I think he was bleeding at the time.

Even more reason. So with Boston's a great case because it's recent, everybody knows about it. But because it has so many different points to it that really kind of give you an idea of what a manhunt consists of. So you've got containment, you've got a door-to-door search, you've got the public transportation being shut down. Yeah. That was a big one.

Sure. That's part of containment as well. Yeah. They set up a no fly zone. They closed the schools. They closed. They shuttered businesses. It was basically the biggest shutdown of a major U.S. city in history.

Right. People who were in the containment area were asked to not leave their house that horrid news speak shelter-in-place term. That sounds like you should be in a corner like hugging yourself. Citizen, shelter-in-place. Yeah. I remember a tweet from Dr. Ruth while that was going on, she's saying, hey, if you're having the shelter-in-place, maybe now's a good time to turn off the TV and get intimate

with your loved one. I couldn't believe it. Wow. Yeah. We're still counting up the monies, but it's tallying up to over a billion dollars for that manhunt. What? Isn't that crazy?

Somebody's milking that. You got to think. A billion dollars. I got a little sidebar. Let's hear it. Not on a manhunt, but President Obama came through my neighborhood a few months ago on his way to a school indicator for something. Cool.

And literally drove down the block for my house. The motorcade did. Did you run out too? Well, no, you can't. But that's my point. My friend, you remember Chris Cox, his wife, we ended up being stuck at the same intersection, and her house was across the street 40 feet away. She's like, sir, that is my house.

I have a babysitter there. I'm paying. Can I just walk across the street? And he was like, nope. He would not let her walk across the street and enter her own home. You have no rights. The president is on your street. Yeah.

And he wasn't even. It took another half hour. And she's like, I really just need to walk right there. And he wouldn't allow it. So that's some serious lockdown. I guess the point is when the government wants to lock you down, they can lock you down. Yeah, pretty much. So Chuck, you do have rights, however.

Well, yeah, it's a good segue, I guess. It was a great segue, buddy. If you're being told not to leave your house, first of all, you can technically leave your house. Can you? It's just your risk of being shot at by the police go through the roof. Maybe. So that's a pretty good reason not to leave your house, just out of common sense.

You can be enraged all you want indoors. Well, just like any other night. And the police can't just come busting down your door saying, is he in here? No. Okay. Let's go kick down the next door. They can knock and say, can we come in and look? And you can say, yay or nay.

If they have probable cause, say one of them saw the suspect run into your house, they can go in after him without asking you. Yeah, or if they're creeping around your backyard and peeking in your windows, which they can do legally. Yeah, the cops. Yeah, they could see somebody they think looks like the suspect and say that's probable cause. There's a loophole big enough to drive like an armored truck through if you're not picking

up on that. Yeah, if they need to provide emergency services, they can do that. Yeah, they can say, oh, we thought you needed CPR. We're glad to see you're okay. Now that we're in your house, we're looking around. Or another big loophole is the exigent circumstances, which I don't know. In the case of Boston, they could probably barge into anyone's home and be covered under that one.

Yeah. That's basically like there's a state of emergency going on like the civil law is just out the window because the situation is so dire. And yeah, they argued that this guy was running around with explosives. That's an emergency. Sure. As far as I know, they didn't like go into any houses unbidden though. Yeah.

And we're not trying to say like, in a case like that, like bust down some doors, you know, like I'm not saying like cops shouldn't be doing this stuff or like two bombers on the loose. So I get it. Even still, the cops don't want to bust down a door because they're going to have to prove exigent circumstances and if they can't, then any evidence that they got from an unlawful search is out the door and so their case could be as well. Yeah.

You got to be careful with stuff like that. Yeah. The last thing you want to do is have your perp walk. You like how this cop speak? Yeah. Walk? Yeah. If your perp walks because of bad evidence, then you're going to be, what's it called

when the cop gets? 86 suspended without pay. I'm feeling like we're channeling the TV show episode. We? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You're like, we had a TV show? Yeah.

Just so I'm doubt about that. Okay. Where are we then? Well, I was saying that one of the hallmarks of a good manhunt is having a lot of people doing a lot of work and again, Boston was a good example of that. You had a lot of different law enforcement agencies, basically ones you hadn't even heard of all ponying up personnel. Yeah.

I mean, you're going to get state cops, local cops, sheriffs, FBI, and that's for a case like that or obviously if it's something like UBL, then everyone's seeing Zero Dark Thirty or if you have it, you should. You've got like thousands of people over a decade all over the world working together. It's just that one lady. Well, it's just the one lady, the pretty redhead. The author of this article makes a pretty good point that during a manhunt there is such a thing as what in police speak would be called collateral damage, I guess.

Sure. Like the LAPD search for Christopher Dorner is a very good example of this. You remember that case? Yeah, man. That was freaky. There's a Facebook page that's 20,000 plus people strong that says it's called We Stand with Christopher Dorner. Oh, really?

Yeah, because he left behind, so he was an LAPD officer who was fired for making a false accusation against another cop when he reported that a cop he was working with kicked a homeless man during an arrest. But that was false? It was found false and he was fired as a result. From his perspective, if you see it through his eyes, that was all just a huge cover-up and they got rid of the troublemaker who was not going with the flow on the force. The LAPD covering up his mouth seasons?

Right. That's weird. He leaves this angry manifesto about how the LAPD is the most corrupt organization on the planet and it's racist and there's a lot of people out there who are like, I know this to be true because I've been on the wrong end of a night stick with the LAPD. I've seen LAPD confidential. Yeah, exactly. That's in the 40s.

Yeah. I mean, I know they've cleaned it up a lot, but that is one department in this country that's been fraught with allegations. His point was they haven't cleaned it up a lot, they've just gotten better at PR. He takes that manifesto and ends up going on an assassination killing spree, killing cops. He killed the woman who represented him in his case, who was the daughter of a cop. It was announced, that's what was so scary about it was he was like, hey, I'm coming

to kill cops. Exactly. You're not going to see me coming either. He was on a rampage. Yeah, it was scary stuff. So the LAPD is super jumpy at this point and they fire on not one, but two cars that don't have Christopher Dorner in them killed two people as a result and finally there's this standoff after they find him thanks to some park rangers in Big Bear or Big Sur, one of

the two. I had Big Bear. Big Bear. Yeah. And he ends up setting the cabin he's in on fire and perishing in flames. That was crazy. But the fact is two different cars were shot on by the LAPD during the search for this guy. So these aren't just necessarily clean affairs, same with Bin Laden.

This was part of the campaign that took place over a very long time and a lot of people were killed to weaken the structure that was hiding him still. Yeah, drone strikes out the wazoo. They used some pretty interesting tactics too that were not in the movie, even though I've heard the movie is pretty accurate, but they didn't include everything obviously. They sent a doctor in, a CIA guy who conducted an immunization drive in the neighborhood where they believed his compound was there and basically hoping to come across DNA from him or his family under the guise of a blood drive.

It was an immunization drive. Yeah, they didn't call it like, hey, it's a DNA collection drive. But there was a big public outcry, especially from the vaccine establishment saying like, dude, you can't do that because now... Our name is on that vaccine. Right, and the next time we want to have a real vaccine drive, no one's going to show up and our vaccination people are going to get killed because they're going to think they're CIA.

Yeah. There's a big hubbub about that. That's legit. These days it's tough, especially if you're in a city like London, England, to do anything without being caught on a closed circuit camera. In fact, that's how they eventually identified with the help of actually one of the victims in Boston. They're on camera too.

But if you're in a big city, it's tough to get away with anything these days. Cameras are everywhere. They also have, I mentioned the infrared device, the forward-looking infrared device. Night vision, you've got all sorts of tricks up your sleeve as law enforcement agencies. If you think you're hiding in a boat under a tarp and it's pretty safe, you don't think about the dude with the predator camera that can see you from 50 feet away breathing heavily. They also have armored trucks, I think you mentioned those. Even not even about this.

Like from Die Hard. Yeah. And you see those things roll in. I'm sure they love to play with those once a year. Again, that was LAPD. Yeah, but those are very expensive, but they do come in handy, I guess, about once a year if you can afford it, if your town's large enough. We should say that there was facial recognition software that they had working on the video

for the Boston bombing and it did not work. Yeah, we have an article on that, by the way. I think we should cover that at some point. Facial recognition. Yeah. Yeah. That's scary stuff. Apparently, Google has one that they won't release to the public because they're afraid

of the use it'll be put to. It's like that good. Wow. That's potentially bad. But the one the CIA has doesn't work that well. I can see Google having way better algorithms than the CIA. That's true. So Chuck, another aspect of Boston search, the Boston Manhunt, was the use of social

media for good and ill or did good effect and bad, I should say. Yeah, getting the word out on Facebook and Twitter is not a bad idea. Yeah, Reddit was kind of the star of the show or the scapegoat, I should say, for social media in the search for the Boston bombing suspects because there were apparently a couple thousand stills, video stills and photographs from the area around the time of the bombing posted on a Reddit subreddit and all of these people were combing through them. They were trying to crowdsource this Manhunt. Yeah, which is a good intention.

Yeah, they were looking for suspects. This is before anybody ever released any official photos. That in and of itself is kind of a good idea. Sure. But it went a step further where the people on Reddit were saying, okay, I've got it figured out and it's this person. Yeah. And they would name a suspect and all of a sudden there's a rumor out there that this

person bombed the Boston Marathon even though they hadn't. So Reddit took a lot of heat for that and apparently they even took that forum down. But social media also helped in a lot of ways because everybody was totally connected to this Manhunt and had complete up to the date information, up to the minute information from within that containment area from everywhere. And I guess kind of helped a little more than just passively watching television during a Manhunt. Yeah, that's a good point.

One of my favorite Manhunts, and this is weird to say that, but actually, you know what? Let's take a break. I'm going to tease that and I'm going to reveal my favorite Manhunt after the break. Hey, everybody, I'm Amber Ruffin and I'm her beautiful sister, Lacey Lamar. Fun fact about Lacey, she's not as beautiful as I am. You guys, we have a brand new podcast on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network called The Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show. We are New York Times bestselling authors and we've written two books on everyday racism

that made you gasp and laugh at the same time. We done did it. We sold a bunch of books. We were on Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Amber Ruffin Show and now we only have one frontier to conquer. That's podcast. Podcast, baby. This quiz show is going to be fun.

We're going to have celebrities. We're going to quiz them about things that they are experts at and we'll see who wins and who loses. You got to watch us. Oh, no. You have to listen to us. I mean, you can still watch us, but you got to listen. But like, if you're watching us, you have to tell us.

You can't just be watching us. Listen to The Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber Show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app or podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So who is it? It's the Unabomber. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Kaczynski was on the lam for 18 years, one of the lengthiest manhunts in US history. Not easy to hide out for that long. And he did it in the wild of Montana, which is a pretty good idea, I guess, if you're going to hide out. Just drop off the map. Yeah, type manifestos. Actually, Montana, they should have been looking there. They should have been going there first.

But he mailed 16 bombs over the course of quite a few years and ended up killing three people, wounding 23 more, and had a million dollar bounty on his head. One was one of the most wanted. And eventually he was rooted out by his own brother, who read one of the manifestos and said, that sounds like Teddy. Yeah. And went to the cops and said, hey, this guy might be my brother. The writing style, the things he's saying, like it very well could be my brother.

And it turned out that was him. Right. So which is another point for the case that for a manhunt to work, you have to get the public involved and they did so by publishing these manifestos and said, anybody familiar with this? Yeah. And the guy's brother said, yeah, me. Yeah.

Same with Eric Robert Rudolph. Yeah. Is that his name? I don't remember how they caught him. I believe it was hikers in the woods. Okay. Turned him in. I might be wrong, but he was definitely hiding out in the woods.

And he was, of course, the Olympic bomber, not the guy they originally pinned it on, which was pretty sad. Right. What was his name? Richard Jewel. Yeah. Man. I felt so bad for that dude.

Yeah. Like life ruined. Yeah. And they compensated him pretty handsomely afterward, but then he only lived a couple, several million. Oh, he died? Yeah. He died of a heart attack a few years after that. Oh, I don't think I knew that.

Yeah. It's because he's like, I'm eating steak and lobster every night. No. That's me, the drawn butter. Poor Richard Jewel. Yeah. I didn't know he died. Yeah.

And then, so back to online real quick, there's evidence that you can crowdsource a manhunt. Yeah. There's a group of people that live online that are into true crime, that use their interest in their online search skills to try to find the identities of long-law serial killers, and there's all sorts of online manhunts that amateurs take on. And apparently the State Department held something called the TAG Challenge, where they had people hiding in cities around the world. And people had 12 hours, online contestants had 12 hours to find them in like these five

different cities. That's fun. Using just mug shots, and it worked. So they found that with a search as time becomes more of an essence, like as the pressure mounts, people stop just shooting the info out to wherever they can and start like really targeting, focusing their search. And once you have a bunch of people doing that who are really focused in searching, but a lot of them in sharing information like on social media, that's when they like a search,

and not just a manhunt or search for a person, but a search for anything becomes most successful, I guess. Well, yeah, imagine in Boston, I bet every thousands of people in that 20 square block radius are looking out of their window for this dude. So you've got thousands and thousands of more eyeballs, that's two eyeballs per person in most cases, unless you're one of those weird pirates, Boston pirates. And that's just, that helps, you know? Yeah.

As long as they're not out, don't grab their guns and, you know, get in position. Well, yeah. That's a little scary. Well, that's why they released the pictures of the suspects, finally, because they were trying to crack down on online vigilantes, and that could lead to real life vigilaniism. Yeah. So hats off to the dude who saw the dude in the boat. You got anything else?

I got nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to learn more about manhunts, you can type that word in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this chess, about chess, and I'm going to read a couple of them, not here, but one now and one another episode, because we got a lot of great feedback from chess enthusiasts.

I noticed. People dig at this game. This is from David Wagner. Hey, guys, while you were discussing the concept of castling, you all said you didn't quite understand the value or strategy behind it. You're right. It is all about protecting the king. Remember how you pointed out that you want to control the center of the board?

Yes. That when your pieces are off to the side, they're not as strong? Yes. Well, that has a lot to do with why you want to castle. Basically, the king is more vulnerable, open to attacks, and has less protection when he remains in his original E or D square, so you want to castle him and get him away from those center squares. Gotcha.

Also, you talk about the en peissant rule, which is one of my favorites, and something I almost never pass up. You sound like PB Herman. Mostly because I rarely get a chance to implement it. It doesn't happen when a pawn passes another pawn, though, on its first move out. It is when it lands next to another pawn that the latter pawn can capture it. I think we screwed that up a little bit. Yes.

Scoot it up big time. Not big time. We were close. No, I got that way wrong. One last thing, and then I'll quit, chess pieces, you're going to love this, and their symbols on top. Many of the basic pieces themselves serve as visual reminders of how they can move. For example, the knight is L-shaped, which is how it moves.

The bishop's mitre has a diagonal slit in it. They move diagonally. The rook, when seen from above, can move in the basic cardinal directions, forward, back, left, right. On top of the rook, there are turrets pointing in all the cardinal directions. A queen has many points on her crown, showing that she can go in any way, any direction, and that small little cross on top of the king lets you know how far he can go, although that doesn't include his diagonals, which he can move in.

So that one, the whole theory kind of falls apart there a little bit. But that is from David Wagner in Columbia, South Carolina. Nice. Thanks a lot, David Wagner. That was a great email, pleasant, approachable, gentle with the correction, just good stuff all around. You can dance to it. All right.

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