MFM Minisode 448

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Bye.

Hello.

And welcome to my favorite murder.

The mini.

So that's right.

It's the one where we read your emails.

And we're going to do it now.

Again.

Again and now.

When you start?

Sure.

I'm not going to read you this afternoon.

Okay.

It's a fun reveal.

Okay.

It starts out.

hello, Karen, Georgia, and pets.

So it turns out I spent part of my childhood in an apartment with a corpse in the attic.

What?

Okay,

starting strong.

So it says, before we begin, I just need to say that my granny had nothing to do with this.

It just happened at the small housing complex where she lived before she moved in, and it came to light after her death.

It also brought the little ex-mining village in Wales.

I would pronounce it Badow, because that's B-E-D-D-A-U.

And

it says in parentheses, pronounced Baythai.

Of course.

How would you have guessed that?

If there's any place that needs a spell it like you say it, it's Wales.

Oh, yeah.

Baythyde High School.

Baythy High School.

Go Baythyde.

This case brought the town of Baythy,

Wales, to the attention of the whole world.

My granny died back in 2015, and she'd been living in a council block of four flats for older people for 15 years since being widowed.

Her upstairs neighbor was a younger woman called Lee, whose husband had, quote, left her before my granny moved in.

Lee had been really helpful to my granny when she was ill.

So when Lee became seriously ill with cancer, my mother and father helped her out as she didn't have a family.

Or so we thought.

When she died, my mother struggled to register her death because her next of kin was still listed as her husband, who we all thought had left her before we knew her.

Fast forward to a month after Lee's funeral, in which my mother said, we all heard so many different stories from Lee, but only God and Lee know who she really was.

She was saying that in the best way possible.

And then it says, oh, how prophetic.

My dad told me that the police had found a body in the shared garden where my granny had lived.

I jokingly asked if it was Lee's husband, and my dad just nodded and said that my mother was being interviewed by the police.

Oh, my God.

She thinks she's being funny.

Yeah.

Oh, is it Lee's husband?

He's like, actually.

Yes.

Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to.

Yeah.

You don't want the affirmative answers to.

Turns out that three years before my granny moved in in 1997, during a row with her husband, Lee hit him in the head with a ceramic frog and killed him.

The shape of the frog perfectly matched the hole in his skull.

She then wrapped him up in plastic and put him in the attic.

He was chemically mummified there, and there were 50 layers of wrapping, including plastic bags, tarps, and roofing plastic.

Sorry, can we go back?

She kept the ceramic frog that she used to kill her husband.

She must have because they either had it or they had to buy a replica.

Right.

Okay, go on.

I mean, if she

killed him.

Yeah.

And then she's like, I really love this frog.

Yeah.

Or I really love that I did this.

Yeah.

I mean,

okay.

Anytime he started to smell, she added another layer.

He was up there for 18 years.

Wow.

She was still claiming his Korean War pension this whole time.

Okay, here we go.

The plastic package the body was in was found under a bench in the shared garden by the woman who moved into my granny's flat when she was clearing a corner of the garden to make a memorial for Lee.

We think Lee broke her leg moving the body to the garden, and that's how she found out she had cancer and was dying, and how my mother started caring for her.

So basically, this is a perfectly laid-out out horror movie.

Yeah.

The like thinking backness of it all.

Yeah.

I'm so glad my dad and my uncle were too busy to help her, quote, get something from the attic when she asked.

They were enmeshed in this woman's life.

Oh my God.

And then it just ends with stay sexy and don't help granny's neighbors move suspicious packages.

L from South Wales, UK.

Wow.

You have to imagine, and I've always thought about this, there has to be at least a couple dozen people in the world who have unknown bodies in their place of residence.

Yes.

Right?

Absolutely.

A few dozen.

Remember the barrel?

Bear Creek?

No, the one where they found a barrel under the house.

Oh, yes, in the basement.

Yes.

Yes.

And like went back a few owners and it turned out he had killed her.

Yeah.

Like there's got to be a few.

There's got to be.

I hope it's not mine.

I thought you were going to say there's got to be people out there who have helped a killer do something unknowingly.

Yeah, too.

Aided and abetted.

Yeah.

There's so many things out in the world.

Okay.

Mine is called Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.

Hi, I'm listening to Minnisode 444, where you ask for Wolf in Sheep's Clothing story.

Oh, okay.

And now my time has finally come.

My family and I spent most of the aughts, 2000s, it says, in a seemingly quintessential small town, I have fond memories of summer days spent at the public pool where my mom, a teacher at the time, would bake in the sun while my brother and I swam for hours.

Yes.

The evenings were spent just eating dinner on the back porch, followed by a game of wiffleball.

Unfortunately, these games often turned into my dad and whoever was over at the time taking turns batting while my brother and I were sent to wait in the neighbor's yard on the other side of the fence to catch the balls.

It was agonizing as an eight-year-old who just learned how to bat without a T, but I digress.

On one occasion, our youth pastor came over for one of these legendary evenings.

This was a normal occurrence as my dad was the pastor at our church.

Rather than cook, my parents ordered wings from our local shop.

About midway through our meal, I look up at our guest and see this man, all caps, covered in wing sauce.

The sauce covered at least two inches around his mouth and coated every finger past his knuckles.

I remember being mesmerized and horrified by this man.

How could this happen?

Didn't it bother him?

Where was his napkin?

Something about that struck a nerve in my eight-year-old body and I never trusted him again, which I totally understand.

Like people who eat like barbecue and just get it everywhere, I couldn't.

live with myself.

It's one thing to do that by yourself at home watching TV alone, but like in a restaurant, that eight-year-old was exactly right.

Like, are you kidding me?

Where you're just like,

you just don't care what people think.

Well, flash forward to 2018, I'm chatting with my mom about this absurd memory when she goes, you know, it's wild you mentioned not trusting him because we found out later that he was paying women for sex at the local college.

That's right.

One day my mom was sitting at the lunch table at school and some student teachers started talking about him and how he pays their friends for sex.

Needless to say, he was quickly fired from his role as youth pastor and sent to therapy.

I feel like they should maybe just fire all the youth pastors and start with a clean slate because I can't,

just all I see are bad stories about this.

And anyone who likes, any man who like asks to be pastor, no, it has to go to someone who doesn't want to do it.

It's too humble.

Yeah.

Yes.

Another crazy coincidence, our masked town flasher suddenly stopped terrorizing young women once this man left town.

Oh shit.

My mom thinks it was him.

She's correct.

Love you both.

You've been alongside me through thyroid cancer, six years in remission.

Yay.

And the births of my three wonderful, insane children.

Thank you for all you do.

Stay sexy and don't trust a messy wing eater, M.

Em, you must have the kind of confidence of a person who's a true visionary where you're just like, as a child, I spotted the town perf.

You're not even doing like anything mean.

It's just like, this is not an okay move for an adult.

And I'm suspicious.

Yes.

Love it.

The vibe is wrong.

The vibe's wrong.

Yeah.

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Okay,

so the subject line of this email is a tale of two tonies.

It says, hi there.

So I've got a story about the coincidence of coincidences.

Years ago in the 90s, my mom needed her car worked on, which seems like the norm for that time.

Yeah.

Remember back when cars broke down and you had to take them to the mechanic all the time?

Yeah, and you had your mechanic and you were his friend?

Yeah.

My auntie referred her to a family friend who happened to be a mechanic named Tony and who worked out of his garage.

This also seemed like the norm for the time where you always saved money on car repairs by going to someone's home.

Yep.

My dad's friend Duke's son fixed our car for years.

Amazing.

Anywho, for whatever reason, my mom used the phone book to get Tony's address while my auntie set up the appointment to drop the car off.

Again, this was the 90s, so I don't remember if people were just way more discreet with information, but my auntie likely referred her to the phone book for his address.

Welp, the time came and we, my 30-ish-year-old mom and her two young children, went to Tony's house.

Nothing was amiss until one hour turned into four hours later and we were still waiting for my auntie to pick us up.

My mom tried calling multiple times using Tony's landline and left increasingly desperate messages.

When my auntie finally answered, she was frantic and asked where the hell we were and that we were supposed to be at Tony's house hours ago.

Confused, my mom told her that we were at Tony's house, but no, no, no, we weren't because she was at Tony's house.

We had a memento moment before memento was even a thing and went in circles putting the pieces together.

Apparently, we stumbled upon a glitch in the matrix where two Tony existed with the same exact name and who work on cars from their homes.

That's wild.

Now, my mom had never spoken to this imposter Tony, nor was there any indication that he was a mechanic in the phone book.

But when we showed up with our broke-ass car, he and his family welcomed us into their home with no questions asked.

I love it.

Okay.

Someone must have agreed to this.

They let us play with their dog for four hours and assured us the car would be fixed.

What a lovely family.

I know.

When all was finally revealed, everyone had a good laugh and imposter Tony insisted on repairing our car.

Oh, my God.

He still wanted to do it.

And he knew how.

Yeah, exactly.

Thank God.

Thinking back, we got very lucky that it worked out better than anyone could have imagined.

I mean, at best, Tony could have just been a regular schmo who had no idea what the hell we were doing at his house.

And at worst, he could have been a murderer waiting for an unsuspecting family to come along.

Yeah.

The laziest murderer ever to.

When someone gets here, I'll take care of it.

Yeah, I'll do it.

But until that time, I'm just going to

do my thing.

Yeah.

Or, and I imagine this often.

What if imposter Tony and his family thought we were the crazed murderers masquerading as a humble family in need of car repairs?

It's like one of those upside-down fairy tales where we terrorize this poor family for four hours with our lies of someone is coming to pick us up.

It will be just another 10 minutes.

Four hours.

It's so embarrassing.

That's how I lived my entire childhood of being at someone's house.

And they're like, well, we're starting dinner.

You can sit in the living room if you want to.

Your mom's not here yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They'll be here soon.

Poor things just wanted to sit down to dinner and get on with their lives.

That's the story.

Just a crazy set of coincidences fostered by the lack of communication in the 90s, I guess.

Who the fuck knows?

Love you guys and can't wait to see you when you come to Denver.

SSDGM Karis.

Yay.

I know.

That's the first can't wait to see you that we've gotten in an email.

Exciting.

Okay.

World War II puppy stowaways and attic treasures, this one's called.

Hi all, longtime listener, first-time writer.

First, thank you for getting me through the pandemic.

I'm a healthcare worker and while not on the front lines, I went to work every day hoping my immunocompromised patients would survive and desperately trying to convince them to wear a mask.

Sorry, how is that not being on the front lines?

You don't, you're there.

You don't have to be in the emergency room.

Right.

Got it.

MFM was a consistent place I could go to laugh and commiserate.

Thank you so much.

Oh, that's nice.

I was listening to episode 486 about Smokey the Yorkie World War II hero dog, where you wondered if people snuck pets when they went to war.

We wondered that.

You know, I love to just throw in some conjecture when you're trying to tell a story.

Yeah.

That's my part.

And the short answer is yes.

Yay.

The long answer is, in 2014, after my grandpa passed, we went through my mom's family home and in the attic, we found boxes of magazines, clippings, photos, camp papers, and other artifacts spanning my grandpa's military service in World War II.

This includes over 500 letters he wrote to my grandma from induction and training to the Pacific Theater and finally occupied Japan.

500.

He was salty about being drafted, but he did the best he could and managed to keep his sense of humor.

The letters are funny, sarcastic, sometimes devastating, but always end with his love and devotion to my grandma.

While going through it all, I found a photo of someone who had snuck a puppy in a boat going to the Pacific.

I guess ultimately, what were they going to do about it?

Nothing like a puppy to boost morale.

They just brought a puppy on.

Into war.

Into war on a ship.

They also traveled with a sanctioned regiment mascot, a dog named Murphy, and a division mascot.

a live all-caps bobcat.

What?

Yes.

What?

Named Tuffy.

That's a good name.

Our second dog.

We had a dog named Muggsy who had a puppy and we named the puppy Tuffy.

What?

I've never heard of it before.

That's so funny.

They were the 81st Infantry Division Wildcats.

That doesn't excuse anything.

How do you train or even slightly control?

This guy's like, can you put me back in the wild, please?

I don't want to be in war.

I live at the zoo at the like worst, but not

the summer.

So that's not specific.

Like mascots are supposed to be drawings, not actual.

And then it says, oh, the 40s of it all.

Yeah.

That's right.

Oh, shameless plug.

My friend Carson, also a big MFM fan, and I have decided to read the letters on a podcast.

It's called 500 Letters to Nana, and it will start August 2025.

Cute.

Yeah.

We keep saying to each other, bigger idiots than you, as we press forward with this project.

Also, thanks to George's Nana.

Oh,

thanks again for snapping me out of it on some dark days.

Love to you and all your morale-boosting pets, Katie.

Hell yeah.

500 letters to Nana.

Go listen.

We'll support your local Merdarino.

I think that's such a great idea.

I would love to hear those letters.

Totally.

That's so exciting.

That's really awesome.

They're going to be doing a podcast for 10 years, too.

Buckle the fuck up.

Have the fun.

You can't end that podcast before they find out how they get out of that fucking war.

Oh, I know.

It's going to happen.

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Hey, Oakland, California.

My Favorite Murder is back on tour.

Join us at the Paramount Theater on Thursday, October 2nd.

Don't wait.

The Friday, October 3rd show is already sold out.

Head to myfavoritemurder.com to buy tickets and your VIP package while supplies last.

Good.

Bye-bye.

Okay, this, when I read this email, I was like, this might be it in terms of people reaching out and giving us some information, telling us their own personal story.

Better than a snail eating green beans.

I mean, it's just, it's all the scale of how you live your life.

Sure.

The subject line of this is a fishy client.

Hey, you guys.

It could be, hey, you guys.

Maybe.

A lot of S's.

I'm writing in after hearing Karen describe how her dad had a fish tank that took way too much effort to care for.

Turns out that's my whole thing.

I am the curator of aquatic husbandry at the

aquarium.

Wow.

Huge.

Yeah.

I've had a storied career as a shark wrangler, jellyfish breeder, and octopus playmate.

What the f ⁇ ?

Already.

Love you so much.

What a life to live.

I used to say I wanted to be a marine biologist because it sounded conceptually interesting as a child.

You got to play with a fucking octopus.

Or wrangle a shark.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

But those aren't the stories I'm here to tell you.

I'm here to tell you about one of my side hustles when I was living in the Virgin Islands taking care of fish tanks at various businesses.

Love that, too.

One of which was in a financial office where I initially felt bad about overcharging them.

That is until I looked down at a baseball hat sitting on the desk of my client, and it read Little St.

James, an island otherwise known by the locals as Pedophile Island.

No.

Ready?

My first thought, who in their right mind would have a hat bragging about visiting that island?

Then it hit me like a wave as I stared at the giant portraits plastering the walls of young girls that I had assumed were my client's daughters.

I was standing in Jeffrey Epstein's actual office.

We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna get, we can't, I'm so this is insane, Right?

Right?

Yeah.

This is the kind of email I've been waiting for.

Shit.

Now, I'm gonna just break right here, right now, listener, and say, hey, we can't verify our emails.

Right.

Nor do we.

It sounds legit.

Someone's got to clean the fish tank of people's business.

There's a large trust factor in the whole mini-sode concept, which there's really no reason not to trust people.

Right.

Usually we can kind of suss out if someone sounds like they're making up a story.

I believe them.

That's when I started to notice the odd details about the building, like where there were and weren't cameras, and that his office locked from both the inside and the outside.

These are details that sometimes we don't notice in the day-to-day.

Yeah.

But we should.

Suddenly overcharging him didn't seem like such a bad idea because fuck that guy.

After that, whenever I came in to clean the fish tank and the boss was in, I always opted to come back a different day.

Holy shit.

In the end, my services were no longer required when he was arrested.

And yes, yes, we did take a boat out there to watch the FBI raid pedophile island.

This person is a first-hand, if they are true in these alleged claims.

Yeah.

They're a first-person witness to all of that shit.

It's wild.

Mostly, I wanted to see if the rumor was true that he had a life-size statue of a cow, which was someone's job to move around the island occasionally.

Anyway,

they don't confirm it.

Anyway, I hope this gets read, that y'all are having a fantastic day.

A girl can dream.

Stay sexy and always figure out who you're working for.

Best fishes, Caroline.

Caroline, let's hang out immediately.

I mean, and how am I the whole time?

I was like, how do I follow this?

How do I follow this?

I have one more.

I can't follow this.

I know.

You feel that?

Caroline brought us.

like hot breaking major worldwide news gossip right so

it's just a different thing Wild.

Amazing.

Kids stay in school and become a marine biologist.

That's right.

I'm not going to read you the title.

Hello, Georgia, Karen, and all the MFM furry friends and family.

Your podcast has brought me so much joy over the years.

So I'll start this story off with a big thank you.

You've made subway rides, long car trips, plane rides, and dog walks all bearable.

Okay, so this story begins in my hometown of Brights Grove, Ontario, Canada.

Ever heard of it?

I didn't think so.

Brights Grove.

I was 15 or 16 years old, just finishing my 10th or 11th year of high school.

I don't remember slash can't do the math, and needed my own income to supply myself with copious amounts of vanilla and lemon-flavored vodka.

And it says I literally winced while writing that for the summer ahead.

Vanilla vodka is really upsetting me right now.

I accidentally ordered a drink recently with vanilla vodka in it.

And as soon as I took a sip, I was just like transported to my 20s.

It was awful.

It was awful.

It's disgusting.

So bad.

Every kid in my hometown either worked at one of two places, the local restaurant or the grocery store.

I was too scared of breaking change, again, the math, so I never applied to the restaurant and got myself a job at the grocery store's produce department.

They have it there too, girl.

You have to go to the produce department.

You're stacking bananas.

Yeah, you're just like, no math.

The jobs were broken down by department.

Most of my friends were hired to work in the bakery or at the front till.

Well, I was blessed with a job of stocking fruits and veggies, perhaps the easiest of the departments or so I thought.

I I bet there's like little customer service that goes along with that.

For sure.

You know,

you have to help people pick ripe things.

I bet there's not a lot of people though.

I would never ask anything to a fruit person.

Would you?

I would never bother a fruit and vegetable person.

Not unless they were like, I think I did it one time because he was already doing stuff.

Yeah.

And it was like, can you help me pick a ripe mango?

Okay.

My shifts consisted of lifting heavy boxes full of bananas, potatoes, what have you, putting them on a wheeling cart and stocking the shelves for anything that needed replenishing.

That's how that works.

Every so often, I had to put together salads or wrap cobs of corn in a five-piece package.

All caps, truly exciting stuff.

You can bet your butts that most of my shifts started with me violently hungover, sneaking off to the giant freezers to regain life or trying not to throw up at the smell of rotting potatoes.

Literally the worst smell, prove me wrong.

I spent so much time in my 20s hungover and trying to make it through.

Yeah.

Like I have gone into a giant freezer to see if it helps with hangover before.

Like I remember, I know that sensation.

It does work a little bit.

I bet.

Yeah.

One of those hungover 6.30 a.m.

mornings of my youth was a memorable one.

I used to stay up all night.

We'd go to a rave.

I'd be on drugs.

And then I'd go into the bakery that morning at 6.30.

A bakery.

I worked at the local bakery.

And I was like, I could still hear the techno in my fucking brain.

Yeah, you're just, you're reverberating with the experience.

Did they know that that's what you were doing?

Or they were just like, I mean, I was like 15.

I just looked great and acted great and could do anything.

I was never tired.

Not like now.

Anyway, while rinsing off romaine lettuce in the giant sinks, I noticed a spider crawling up the wall just one foot away from my head.

If I hadn't been so hungover, I would have screamed and run in the other direction, but instead, I lazily grabbed the box the lettuce came in and smashed a spawn of Satan into the wall.

After cleaning up the demon's remains, I noticed some familiar markings on the spider's body.

All caps.

What they don't tell you when you're hired in the produce section is that you may come across tropical species that have traveled with the tropical fruit.

This is why you don't bring Costco boxes into your, like, you know, they give those to you to pack your groceries.

Don't bring those into your house.

Because there's spiders in there.

Yes.

I wasn't shown this binder of species until I was a whole binder of species.

That's how many.

Until I was literally holding a black widow spider in a Kleenex to show my boss.

I was flinging all sorts of boxes of fruit left and right without any thought, not knowing that a friggin' scorpion could be hiding with the grapes and bananas.

Anyways, the black widow was put in a jar and saved as a reminder to any new staff that you may run into a poisonous insect while on the job and to be mindful.

I'd like to thank my hangover for allowing me to not give a fuck about a spider crawling up the wall.

Had I not had those double shots of vodka the night before, who knows where that spidey would have ended up.

That's all.

Stay sexy and know that the produce section may be the easiest of the jobs at the grocery store, but is also the scariest yeah adele she her wow adele you really lived through something now here's my thing we had black widow spiders around a lot growing up i bet you did because you lived out in the country it was like barn stuff yeah so when she was like about to describe the spider i'm like here we go it's a poisonous tarantula it's like it's the spider you see all the time i've barely seen one really well i've like seen a lot in one place but not yeah a lot in places it is really jarring when when you see it and you see the little red hourglass.

Like it's real.

It's so scary.

All that part, yeah.

Because it's just like your whole life you're brought up being like danger.

Yes.

And then it's there.

Yeah.

Not a fan.

We don't like danger, ladies and gentlemen.

We never have on this podcast, and I don't think we ever will.

But write us about your dangerous things that you've run into.

That's the kind of danger we like.

Yes.

Secondhand.

Right.

At my favorite murderer at Gmail.

Thank you guys so much for listening.

And stay sexy.

And don't get murdered.

Goodbye.

Elvis, do you want a cookie?

This has been an Exactly Right Production.

Our senior producers are Alejandra Keck and Molly Smith.

Our editor is Aristotle Aceveda.

This episode was mixed by Liana Squalacci.

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Listen to MyFavorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Goodbye.

Bye-bye.