Rewind with Karen & Georgia - 76: My Own Sinkhole

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Hello.

And welcome. To Rewind with Karen in Georgia.
That's right. Every Wednesday, we're here recapping our old shows with all new commentary and insights and updates.

Today we're recapping episode 76, which we named My Own Sinkhole. Oh, this episode came out on July 6th, 2017.
All right, let's listen to the intro of episode 76.

Happy 4th of July. Hello.

Wait, let's start over. It's not 4th of July anymore.
Oh, oh.

Happy 5th of July. It's not the 5th.
It's the 6th.

Hello and welcome to my favorite murder. Hi, welcome.
Thanks for coming. That's Karen Kilgarab.
Why do we always start it with like...

It's super uncomfortable. We've gone over this a million times.
We're staring at each other for any part of it. We just stare at each other to see who's going to go first.

And then the fakest voices that we have. to offer come out of our heads.
And then we ask to start over.

But we don't. And we never plan anything.
I mean, what? What are they going to plan? What are you going to plan? I mean, we have an ending. What more do you want? Who cares anyway? Yeah.

Of all the things, have you seen that picture? The newest pictures that have come back from the Hubble telescope that show the galaxies. They're purple.
They did it basically.

It's like black background.

They did purple were the galaxies in the picture, and orange was the gas, the different things of gas that make stars. And

there's a countless number of galaxies in this photo. You're giving me an anxiety attack, right? I'm just saying, who cares how we start this podcast? Dude, we're stardust.

Dude, we're made of stars.

I can't even start to think about it.

Wait, that is it. The

vastness of space gives you anxiety? The vastness of space, the reality of life. What is it? What are we?

We're aliens, clearly. I mean, everyone is.
I'm not.

I'm not. I'm actually Irish.

which is worse

and harder.

There's you know that podcast we love, Mysteries Abound, we go to sleep too. Then, like the last episode is like, are

humans actually aliens? And it's like,

yes, I got so into that episode that when I landed, when I went to Petaluma for Father's Day, when I landed and Lauren Adrian came and picked me up, I got into the car and was like, so the thing is, there's a really good chance we're all aliens.

I said that to Vince too. And he he was, and I explained it very poorly because he was like, I don't know.
Yeah.

And then I turned to him and one night when Elvis was sitting on me and I said, do you think cats are aliens? And he was just like, no.

I am the weird one in the relationship. He is the like,

what's it called?

He's the voice of reason. Yes.

Oh, speaking of which,

there's a reason we can never think of the word trophy. And I would like to say, I would like to take responsibility for it because I think every time it's happened, it's been in my story where we

a serial killer takes trophies. Yeah, they take a thing, they keep it so they can look at it and remember the bad thing they did.
That's called a trophy.

It's the word memento, which is what we use, this is the fucking same word. Yeah, but I guess

the most often used term and the ones that people tweet to us in all caps with 17 exclamation points after is trophy. Yeah.

So maybe here in the podcasting loft, which we finally moved into and everyone, are you going to ever tweet picture or put pictures on Instagram?

Yeah, I just like didn't feel like it was done yet, but I should just post it. It's so good.

You guys, all of the awesome art you sent us and dolls you've made us and pictures and everything, Georgia has arranged in her loft. Obsessively.
And it looks so cool. It's super fun to record in.

I've seen it on social media. But there's like things I want to frame still and things I need to put up here and there, but I'll post it for now.

And there's also a drawing of a let's sit crooked and talk straight. Yes.
Drawing. And I thought it was so funny when I hung it crooked.
Yes. Well, I saw it immediately and it made me laugh.

It's driving me crazy

as a fucking OCD person, but it's got a point. There's a reason it's that way.
Reason I don't need to download the app that is a measure, a leveler. Ooh, they have that? I can have that.
Dude. Dude.

You can have an app for anything. I know.
Man, when the grid goes down, we're going to. We're screwed beyond belief.
Nothing will be straightened. No frames will be straight.

And you won't know, even if there are like land lines, if they can get a hard line in some way.

Do you know even your own phone number anymore? Yeah. Oh.
Do you know mine? No.

Vince and I. purposely memorized each other's, and I'm going to give it out right now.
Okay, great.

Please call us day or night. Do you know what I like? I'm super prepared, trying to prepare for earthquakes, you know? And so I got like extra.
This is boring.

This is so boring. Nobody cares.
Where does I take a huge sip of Diet Coke thinking you're going to cover for at least 30 seconds? Well,

preparing for earthquakes is necessary and a reality in California.

What'd you do? Buy some flashlights? Come on, jiz it up a little bit. I have a flashlight.
I have external batteries in my car and in my hand crank kind?

No, no, no, they're for the phone, like

that have a charge on them. Oh, oh, right.
Listen, everyone, be prepared. Yeah, that's it's very important.
Yeah, I have a, like a,

and I have an earthquake kit in my front closet. I have one too.
But all I think of is, well, what if that's the part of the house that goes down?

Dude, I have one in the loft, and I'm like, clearly the loft is going to collapse. What is it doing here? I stick flashlights under everything in my whole house.
Smart.

And I have actually, when I bought my house, I had to sign a piece of paper declaring that I understood that my house is on land, that if there's a strong enough earthquake, it turns to liquid and sinks into the earth.

What? I will get my own sinkhole, which is, as many people know, one of my great passions of life is sinkholes. Well, I have a question.
What kind of liquid are we talking about?

Because it's something fun like Kool-Aid. Then I'm like, great.
Yes, there's a Kool-Aid spring underneath my house.

No, it's because I'm near the quote-unquote LA River.

You're in the one that's that's feet from my door?

Yes. Well, that goes right up kind of near my house if you go north.

And

that creates the water table is right, I guess, close to under my house. So basically, if the ground shakes,

the kind of silt or whatever ground is under my house will just mix with the water, become like sand, quicksand. Goodbye.
And goodbye.

And goodbye. And good night.
So just things to

skippers.

Come back. Skippers.

This is what you need to know the most. Skippers in places where there isn't and won't be earthquakes ever.
Hi.

You never know, though. Do you think there's a geologist who listens? Is that an earthquake doctor? Yes, definitely.
Okay. He's going to email us.

You're completely incorrect about all of this information. I signed paperwork.
Listen.

Speaking of, I'm not. Oh, experts.
That's right.

I have

a letter, an email from a girl who, so I did the mainline murders, the fucking insane mainline murders last week. Yes.
And the girl who was whose dad was involved in the case emailed us. Whoa.
Okay.

I'm so excited when you covered the mainline murders in your last episode.

As my dad was very closely involved in the case, he prosecuted Karen Reinhardt's lover, William Bradford, Patches, Patches, the Professor. Yeah, for stealing from her estate.

So the one thing he got in the beginning.

He described Bradfield as a master manipulator and a truly evil man, despite being a prosecutor for over 30 years and putting hundreds of murderers behind bars, including billionaire murderer John DuPont.

Ooh.

Wait, wait, is that the fox catcher guy?

Hell yes. My dad says no case has ever affected him quite like this one.
He's the father of four daughters, and he still tears up when he talks about the kids,

the innocent children, and the discovery of Karen's art museum pin on the floor of the car. And by the way, I accidentally called her Carol at the very end of it.
And that's just.

You were off the page, though. You were just trying to talk.
Yes. That's always a mistake.

It's the mistake that we're dedicated to making on this podcast. Yes.
Never apologize for. Like, I just apologize.

So Patches and Principal Smith were co-conspirators, he thinks, and that Patches had agreed, I'm just calling them this, agreed to split Karen's life insurance money with Principal in exchange for killing Karen and her children.

To this day, he's still heartbroken over the police mishandling the evidence that led to Jay Smith's conviction and being thrown out. Thank you guys so much, et cetera, et cetera.
John Monet, JFK.

Thanks again. Stay sexy, don't get murdered, Brianna.
P.S. And Stephen said he acts.
Can I read this, Stephen? Oh, no, you're going to be embarrassed. Stephen said,

I don't want to embarrass you.

Say it, and then we'll decide after. Okay, we can cut it out, Stephen.
P.S. is Stephen Single.
Nope, I said that wrong.

Is Stephen Stanky?

Is Stephen single?

Sorry, Stephen, I'm going to take this one. Wait, can we we say that?

You can cut this out. Obviously, you're in charge of this whole show.

Well, he's got

so many listeners like this. Yeah, inquiring minds.
He's a cat guy, which lots of girls like. But don't mistake that for innocence or any kind of

don't mistake his kindness for gentleness. What is the saying? Don't mistake my weakness for kindness.

I like that. I saw that one time on Tumblr.
I dig it. Right, Stephen? This is going to be in my dating profile.

That whole clip of this podcast.

The whole thing can fit on your stream. Where are you going? Are you going to ginder? Let everyone know.

Oh, I haven't decided yet. Okay.
I think you should take it over

to...

What's it called? Too many fish, the Christian dating site? Too many fish. Is that it? There's plenty of fish.
Plenty of fish. There are too many fish.

I don't like fish, so I feel like there's too many fish. That's true.
Yeah, Stephen, religion. That's really important to you.
I mean, I am a Satanist.

So bring that act over to Too Many Fish and then

make a change of pace. Speaking of traveling,

can I just say one thing really quick?

At the end of that email, did she start calling the woman Karen? Because Karen was the daughter.

Yeah.

Now I know only because

somebody that has my name. No, no, no.
She said the discovery of Karen's art museum pin at the floor of the car. So the kids, the kid, right from Karen, yeah.
But then later on.

yeah, you're right.

She may have. No, you're right.
She did. Fuck yeah.
Not just me. Right.
I just want to make sure. So the mother, I know.
I feel awful. The mothers.

No, this isn't right. Okay.
Anyways, here we go. Well, just so, just so they know we didn't do it.
Yeah. Should we start?

That was just a run-through.

I'm going to say this.

The Cleveland Murderinos had a meetup. They sent us pictures.
They sent us video. There's a bunch of them.

They're a good-looking group. They were all in a bar.
Enthusiastic. And a lot of people were tweeting, just saying what a great group it was, how happy it made them to be a part of it.

Other people were writing, saying, Hey, I didn't know. I wish I was there.

And they ended up collecting $500 for End Backlog. That is amazing.
Which is so cool. So, thank you guys so much.
And congratulations and way to go because that really makes a difference.

That's lovely. Yeah, that's nice.
Des Moines. Sorry.
Des Moines. Sorry, guys.

Sorry, we're talking shit. I actually have no idea what it's like there, but apparently it's lovely.
Yeah, I think Iowa's like a great place.

And I think there was an Iowa meetup, too, where they went and saw a despicable me together. And so does a photo.
And I'm like, what? That's cool.

You don't have to make a bunch of cocktails with funny names. You just go watch a movie.
That's so good.

There was somebody sent, I can't tell if he, it was the person that sent it was wearing the sweatshirt because he kind of looked like a model or if it was just showing the picture of a sweatshirt.

But you can get a sweatshirt that says Des Moines D U H

like it's basically spelled phonetically, but also Des Moines. Des Moines made me laugh really hard.
Yeah.

Well, so we're, you know, I guess we're going to Des Moines. No, we're not.
We're on each other's radar. We might.
Yeah. Can I say one more thing about Murderina?

So on Instagram, they're having, I guess, a thing called the lettering challenge, which I didn't know was a thing.

It's all these people who are like written to calligraphy and like write in like lettering, right? This is a thing. And so they're having a my favorite murder lettering challenge.

I guess there's like a whole, it's a whole community. They have challenges for like the month.
And so they're, it's hashtag letter M F M.

And I think I found my the girl who was going to design my tattoo, my my favorite murder tattoo. Oh, that's great.
So do you want to get one with me or should I surprise you?

That is so fucking weird. Why? I had a dream the other night that everyone in my family was getting a tattoo together.
And in the dream, dream, I was like, really, Aunt Mary? Like, in your mid-70s?

Like, I was just looking around at my family, like, and you know what we were getting a tattoo of? Some toes.

What does that mean? I don't know. I'll look it up.
But yes, I'll get a tattoo with you. Are we going together? Yes.
Okay. Can I, I want to get mine all across my one haunch.
Just

my whole hip, front to back. I think I'm going to get mine like, what's this called?

Under legs, armpit, side of my body ribs i love it and then i'm gonna get an ssd gm and this chick who does calligraphy really well who i'll shout out when i get the tattoo i'm gonna have i'm having her design something maybe i'll get it on my neck

are you serious no

my um

I used to know a guy that used to call neck tattoos job stoppers. Yeah, they have hand tattoos.

But I don't think that's true anymore. Because how many chefs do you see with neck tattoos?

Podcasters. I mean, people who are tatted up or are like, yeah, fuck you.
I run my entire company. I have a face tattoo.
Do you love it?

And I make more money than you and your dad. I'm my own boss.
Too bad. Your dad needs to.
Okay.

Do you know my dad is driving Lyft now, and he said,

I keep wondering if all these young girls who get in my car are murderinos.

That sounded like he was going to kill them at first.

Yeah, he has to be careful with how he brings that up. Yeah.
So if you see Marty picking up on Lyft. Marty.
Marty.

I think that's all. It's all for you.
Let me see. I think Stephen has

a lot of fun.

There's a little fun thing for us based on last week's story on your story, Karen. I know it's July right now, but I think it's never too early for this.
Okay. All right.

What is it? The Andy Williams Christmas special. Holy shit.

Claudine Langer's first husband.

And this was the one that, like, was it, was it that it was, this is the highest ranking television show before he got knocked out by some Super Bowls? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

This is the classics. This is when we spend a weekend

watching this. Yep.
That is amazing. Did we save it for Christmas? Just to get it.
Okay. A July Christmas special event.
Yeah.

Thank you so much. Wait, someone sent it to us or did you get it? I got it.
Yeah. Steven.

Stephen. Really good gift giving.
You're now invited to watch it with us.

Okay, it's me this week, right? Yeah.

Yes. I knew.
Now you know. Stina's not fucking paying attention.
Steve isn't. I'm just trying to look up who went first lesson.

I definitely went first. Yeah.
Yes. Because now we're all back.
We're all like, we're all on it again.

What's a bummer, though, and I think that we have this often is that mine is a real bummer at the end. And I hate closing with a real bummer.

Yeah, but.

Then we have something positive. That's why we have a positive.
That's why we turn it hard. We take a hard left into positive land.
Yeah, people don't like when murder podcasts are a real bummer.

They don't? No, they do. Yeah, that's the whole point.

And we're back. I want to go ahead and say right at the top that because of this podcast and the murderinos who listen, I was able to help my dad retire.
He doesn't drive Lyft anymore.

He has a nice apartment and a van that he loves.

So I just wanted to let everyone know that and thank them for listening. Yeah, that's right.
Every moment that you spend with us has affected our lives

in ways that are so crazy. Yeah.
So crazy.

And I mean, like, it was a really exciting time back then when you got that new, that split-level apartment, that high-class, high-ceiling, split-level apartment.

Just so funny. And now I own a home that is built on granite.
I'm no longer in a liquefaction zone. I got to move on up.
Yeah, we're doing a location update.

My dad is not driving Lyft and lives in an up-grade apartment. Karen's house is standing and not a potential sinkhole.
There's no secret rivers under me anymore. It's great.
So grateful.

I can't believe that the big one hasn't happened though since then.

I'm sorry. That's so stupid of me to say, but like I've been waiting for it this whole time.

For a little while on social media or online or whatever, the thing was that the caldera in Yellowstone was going to blow. And they were like, any second.
Yeah.

But I think it's the kind of thing of a little perspective of the thing we get told what to worry about. Yeah.
And we don't realize it. So suddenly I here comes COVID.
Yes.

COVID's on the way, but I'm literally all eyes on Yellowstone every day. I'm like, how's the caldera? Is it bubbling or not?

It's like, how crazy is it that we just had no clue what was going to hit us in a couple of years like of COVID? We have no clue. Unprecedented in our lifetimes.
Yes. Yeah.

Or sorry, yes, in our lifetimes. I almost was like, wait, the Spanish flu, but we weren't there for that.
In the 21st century, unprecedented. Yes.
Yeah. Definitely.
Yes.

That's what I remember when COVID first started and they were kind of like talking about quarantine where I was like, how are we going to do this? We've never done it before. Right.

And the answer is we're going to wipe down our cereal boxes and freak the fuck out.

Speaking of MFM tattoos, I still haven't gotten one.

Will I ever? But I did recently have a great idea for Vince and I.

What if we got each other's MFM animated characters tattooed on ourselves?

How cute would that be? If I got the little MFM animated Vince and he got the little MFM animated,

let me explain this to you.

I was just thinking of like, would it Vince agree? No, never.

No, no, I already said that. He got excited.
And he reacted like you reacted.

Let's rephrase it. You're going to get a tattoo of We Watch Wrestling.

The logo of We Watch Wrestling across your back. Okay.
And he's going to get MFM.

But I mean, I love those characters. I love the way those characters look.
It would be cute. If we had to get a couple's tattoo, that would be like the fucking cutest thing, don't you think? How big?

It would be Georgia as the Mothman on the back of Vince's calf. Oh my God, that'd be even cooler if I was the Mothman.
Double Bird's whole leg.

That would be so cute. No, he already does enough by wearing our merch, which is above and beyond.
The fucking funniest. It is the funniest.
He's number one.

What I really love is when in the live shows, just forgetting this part and Vince walking on to tell everybody, here's the mic and then I'm going to stand over here.

The way that audience loves Vince is the cutest thing in the world. It's so sweet.
I love it. They start screaming for him.
He loves it.

Also, I just love that we're really laying down the groundwork, the canon of sinkhole, where it's like,

if anybody thought I was a fake lover of sinkholes if i was some sort of bandwagoner right of sinkholes you can just go right back to this fucking episode but karen goes way back she was into sinkholes before they were cool i liked them first all right let's get into karen's story about mark hoffman

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Okay.

Mine is

it's hard sometimes, as we've talked about, to get for me to get my homework done. No, it's yeah.

And especially when I will work on something for a while, and then if I have a friend who goes, have you ever heard of this one? I will switch immediately and go do my friend.

I switch, I switch, you know, you're halfway done. It's not like you're just reading about it.
No. I switch all the time.
Yeah. And

so many of these stories, because, you know, you guys are just as into true crime, if not more, than either of us. So oftentimes you feel like I'm only telling a third of this story.

I know there's so much more. I should have read an entire book about this, whatever.
That's what other people do.

So sometimes I'll bail just because I know a story has much more to it and I should invest more time. You're not going to give it just do it justice.
Right, exactly. Someone else already has.

But this one was so juicy and I loved it so much.

My friend Bridger is the one who told me about it. He's a hilarious,

he's very famous on Twitter and he's a great writer. And he grew up in Utah.

So he was like, have you ever heard of this one? And I had never heard anything about it. Turns out there's a forensic files.
There's lots of stuff. There's an amazing book.

But anyway, I'll just give you, I'll give you what I know. So

we're in Salt Lake City. Okay, what's this?

Is it called anything? I'm not going to call it anything because I usually do that and then I end up giving it away. I totally understand.
Okay.

So we're in Salt Lake City the morning of October 15th, 1985. Okay.

And a man named Steve Christensen, who is a businessman, a husband, a father of four, and a bishop of the Mormon Church, he arrives at his office on the sixth floor of the judge building in downtown Salt Lake City.

One time I did a story, and it was that horrible one about the woman throwing her kids off the top of the hotel. In Utah.
In Salt Lake City, even.

And in that, I threw out the random idea that it was a very,

because, you know, all of Utah, I assume, is very Mormon, that Salt Lake City would be a conservative town. Well, I was, couldn't have been more wrong about that.

Would like to say now, I now know because of making that mistake, that actually Salt Lake City is the like liberal part of Utah, and it's a college town, and it's the hip place, and it's probably best case scenario.

And if you're looking for, I don't know, a great shirt or

really cool flats. I'm not, I don't know.

So

Steve Christensen gets to his office. He sees a brown-wrapped box-shaped package in front of his office door, and his name's written on top of it.

He picks it up, and it immediately, immediately explodes. Oh, fuck.
Here, I thought it was something else, and this is fucking, let's do this. Yeah.

So it was a pipe bomb.

Steve is killed.

The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire. Yeah.

It was a pipe bomb that was made with

concrete nails inside. And concrete nails are the nails you use to pound in.
They're not made of concrete. They're the really strong industrial-sized nails that you pound into concrete.

So the person that made this pipe bomb wanted the person who picked it up to be killed. Wow, what a bummer.
Yeah.

So the ATF

officers arrive, they begin to piece the bomb back together to figure out that it's a pipe bomb

and that was activated by a mercury switch that would go off when the package was picked up and tilted one way or the other. So the minute the mercury like shifts.
Exactly.

It's in a little glass circuit.

And if it in it is laying on one side of this little glass thing and then when you pick it up, if you put it and tip it one way or the other, the circuit connects and that's when the bomb explodes.

Wow. So they know from a bomb like that that the person,

that the bomber dropped that box off because they would have to make sure it stays exactly the way it is. And they couldn't mail it.
Yeah, you can't just give it to somebody else. Okay.
So,

also inside the bomb were Tandy brand batteries, which is,

as many RC enthusiasts know, Tandy is the Radio Shack brand of batteries. Really?

So they start going around to the local radio shacks trying to find out who has bought batteries there

the past week or whatever.

They also

find out that Steve Christensen had recently worked at a financial company called CFS, which after doing huge business in the 70s and the early 80s, had started losing money and was in serious trouble.

So this is the part that I actually found really interesting because so the 80s were like a time of big money.

That's when everybody pretended to be rich and preppies and you know, it was like very Isad Coke time. Yeah.

And apparently Salt Lake City in that time was a hotbed for financial fraud. Really? Yeah.

So what people would do, conmen would go to Salt Lake City and they would kind of like get into the Mormon church.

They would either pretend they were Mormons or they would befriend higher ups in the Mormon church.

And then when they would do business, they would like say they were in securities or whatever stocks box. Hey, like, I got a ground floor fucking thing to get in on.
Exactly.

And then the elders or whoever in the church would be like, oh, this guy is trustworthy.

And so then all the parishioners or Mormons, I'm not sure what you call the general word for it, but all the people in that church would then trust that person and buy into whatever thing that that person was bringing to the table, whether it was high finance or also very popular, pyramid scheme vitamin sales got to be very popular.

What the fuck? Back then. Yeah, so it was kind of an amp.
There was lots of Amway,

low-grade Amway

kind of bullshit going on. Did they get the vitamins?

Did they ever get the vitamins? Did they ever get the vitamins they needed? I don't know. But

it was the kind of thing, they call it

affinity fraud. And it happens in lots of different,

kinds of religions. This is why my money is under my bed.
Right?

And trust no one? Yeah.

It's the same, it's the assumption that quote-unquote one of your own is going to look out for your best interest as opposed to an outsider. You don't trust anyone, do you?

No, I'm scared of my fucking cousin is a financial, whatever the fuck, and I like scared. Sorry, Miss.
Well, because it's so,

anyone can tell you anything. And if you don't know exactly what's going on,

it's 100% pure trust. Yeah.
And if people are that into money, like they're into money and they want it. Yeah, exactly.
Okay. Well, so it's the same thing Bernie Madoff did

to

he got $20 billion, as you well know, watching that documentary. That's so good.
From wealthy Jewish people. A guy named Alan Stanford did it to Southern Baptists.

He had a

$7 billion empire that fell.

There was even a con man named Monroe L.

Beachy who became a trusted within the Amish community, and he went to prison for orchestrating a scheme that defrauded 2,700 investors, many of them his friends and neighbors. What a dick.

So it's just a very common practice of like this idea that your

religion would

stand for your good morals and that

therefore the business is trustworthy.

It's almost worse con than just, you know, clients because, yeah, these these people are trusting because they, because if you're in that religion, it's because you believe the same things they do.

You have the same morals.

They're going right on the inside. You know, they're not just standing out and like rolling the dice that maybe you'll believe them and maybe not.

They're asking you, they're playing on your ultimate faith,

which is very ugly. And

in the Mormon religion, it was the kind of thing where they're,

I believe, a lot. I know lots of Mormons.
I've grown up, I grew up with Mormons. One of my good friends that I used to work with, Betsy, is a Mormon.
And, you know,

it's a very moralistic, the life they live is really,

the whole idea of it is that you live this life based on your faith. So it's like, my friend just said it the other day.
He's like, Mormons really walk the walk. Yeah.
So it's not just.

And maybe I'm only saying this because of all those like design websites that you see these days.

And when you trace them back, it's like a young Mormon family, but it's like the most beautiful, you know, table setting and the cutest design. And it's like, here's a great thing for your baby.

I've heard so many bloggers, like famous bloggers or like the big ones that have beautiful websites are Mormon for some reason. Yeah.

Because it's kind of like, it's the whole idea of like home building and like putting the best into your home. Right.
And being.

ambitious and always having something anyways. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, these are insane generalizations, obviously.

We're not speaking for every single person that's in the religion, but there is just, there's something to that. There's something to that.

Where there's it, there is,

there seems to be an innocence that in the 70s and 80s, con men were like, oh, we can exploit this community, this sense of community that they have. Absolutely.

Okay.

Two hours after Steve Christensen's attack, There's another bombing at the home of Gary and Kathy Sheets.

Gary Sheets was Steve Christensen's boss at CFS, and his wife Kathy was the one who picked up the package. It exploded in her hands and she was killed.
Oh my God. How have I never heard of this?

I know.

So now the police are thinking that these bombings are related to the failed CFS business dealings. And so it could be retaliation from an old employee or even the mafia.
Oh my God.

Police talked to the Sheets' 13-year-old next-door neighbor who saw a tan minivan pull into the Sheets driveway the night before around midnight and thought it was suspicious.

But all he saw was the car. He didn't see anybody

anybody get in or out.

But then they also talked to a jeweler who worked on the fifth floor of the judge building, one floor below Steve Christensen's office.

His name is Bruce Passsey. And he tells the police that

the morning of the bombing, he got into the elevator with his father, and there was a man standing in the elevator wearing a Letterman jacket, but with no letter on it.

And he was holding a brown, like paper-wrapped box that said to Steve Christensen on the top of it. Oh, shit.
And so he,

Bruce Passy, describes this man to the police,

saying he's a white male, five foot eight, medium brown hair.

The next day, there's a third bombing.

This time it's inside a car, and the victim is seriously injured, but he's not killed. It's 30-year-old Mark Hoffman.

He is rushed to the hospital where he's in critical condition, but he ends up being able to tell the police that he had opened his car door and the package was sitting on the driver's seat.

With the action of opening the door, it fell off and exploded. Oh, good.
So, he didn't get the full impact. Right, but he had a fingertip blown off.

He had a huge wound in his knee where parts of the explosives went into his knee cat, like his knee area.

So

he was pretty badly injured.

But immediately the police are suspicious because if he had his fingers blown off,

that means that the box was in his hands, not on the seat and then tumbling to the ground.

Also with the direction, the guy in Forensic Files explains it really well, but it's basically the way they know bombs explode and the directions they go.

If the thing was in his knee, then he he could not have been standing outside of the car. He must have been inside of the car leaning over.
And so they basically reconstruct it. I want to watch that.

I'm like trying to picture it in my head.

Basically, with the trajectory of the stuff that flew out of the bomb, which hit him, they realize he must have been leaning over the center console holding the box

and basically inside the car. So his story, why would you lie about that? Why wouldn't you just tell him exactly? I love when cops figure that out.
Like this person killed themselves.

And it's like, no, the trajectory, like yours last week, the trajectory shows

that that person couldn't have killed themselves. And that's the relatively new forensic part.
That's like what forensic files is all celebrating.

Because it's like, you would never have known that until forensics comes in and is like, hold up.

So the police search Mark Hoffman's house and they find a Letterman jacket just like the one that Bruce Passy said the guy in the elevator was wearing.

And they also find they also see that he has a tan minivan. Oh shit.
And there's gunpowder that they find traces of around his house that match the brand used in all three bombings.

Well, there you go. So Mark Hoffman maintains his innocence, says he's the victim,

and he demands to take a lie detector test. And he does.
They give him a lie detector test and he passes with flying colors. Oh shit.
Yeah.

So the police start looking into who this guy really is. So Mark Kaufman was born in Salt Lake City on December 7th, 1954, raised in a strict Mormon household.

He was a mediocre student, but later he was tested to have an IQ of 169. Wow.
Which is insanely high. That's one point over mine.

I feel like in stories I've read, people who are like mad geniuses are usually in like the mid-130s to 140s. I was going to say that.
Like, I feel like very, very, very fucking smart is like 130.

I think so. But like then genius is like 160 something.
And maybe. I like us trying to guess what genius IQ of

the dumbest way we have. Well, I know when my brother was a kid with fucking attention issues, they tested him and he had like one very high up there because it's like, well, he's just fucking bored.

Yes. That's why.
So yeah, and I never, I was not that smart. And I was never bored.
No, I was always bored. You're like, this is fascinating.
I'm just bored. Not smart and bored.

Okay, so

he collected coins as a teenager. And

when he was young,

that's a weird cut and paste. He collected coins as a teenager.
And at some point, he forged a rare mint mark on a dime that was verified by an organization of coin collectors to be genuine.

And when he was a kid, he tricked the shit out of fucking professional coin people. Exactly.

He got the taste early of like, you know. It's impressive.
I think so too. This don't kill people next.
I mean, so

in 1973, he volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary.

When he came back from his mission, which was in England, he enrolled as a pre-med major at Utah State University.

He married Dora Lee Old in 1979. They eventually have four children together.

And she filed for divorce in 1987.

So in 1980,

Hoffman claims to have found a 17th-century King James Bible with a document inside that he claimed to be the transcript

that Joseph Smith, who was the founder of the Latter-day Saints Church,

he had a scribe named Martin Harris and was supposed to be a transcript that Martin Harris brought to a Columbia Classics professor in 1828

that was originally copied by Joseph Smith from the golden plates

from which he translated the Book of Mormon.

So I'm going to say this probably incorrectly, but the general idea of the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints is Joseph Smith found golden tablets that he dug up, and from those tablets he wrote down

the tenets of the religion.

And

an angel appeared to him as he dug up those tablets to help him.

So

basically,

he presents this document. They freak out because they're like, they had never, it's a historical document from their church.
They've never seen it before. And

the church ends up buying it from Hoffman for $20,000. Fuck.
So this not only sets him financially, but it also sets his reputation as a historical documents dealer. So

I wonder where he said he found it. Oh, is that inside a King James Bible? So he, okay.
So he was already trying to become like a

historical book

dealer. So one of the books.
Okay, that makes sense. It was a really old, it was a 17th century King James Bible.
So then it was like inside that. Got it, got it.
Okay.

So

basically he then starts for the next several years selling forged, quote-unquote, lost LDS documents to the church.

The most

notorious of which was the salamander letter in 1984.

So he basically starts forging pieces of historical text and bringing them to the church and as a church member himself, going, I found this, I found this.

Now, the church is part of it is like a little bit like, oh yeah,

we need to be owning these papers. And sometimes he would donate them, and sometimes they would buy them from him.
But essentially,

it was text that

was relevant to them knowing about their own religion and the founder of their own religion.

So the one that is the most infamous is the salamander letter, which basically said that when Joseph Smith dug up those tablets, it wasn't an angel that appeared to him, but a white salamander.

That

so, so that was such a change of the historical record. And they had never heard that before.
They'd never heard it before.

It was super freaky, and it was kind of like they didn't know if they should announce it. It put them in a really weird position.
Yeah. Because suddenly

it's a very non-religious sounding and almost like a magical, witchy-sounding version of the story of how their church is founded. Right.
Um,

that's a sound salamander, it's kind of like not as cool as a snake. Is it a snake? No.

Uh, well, but snakes are in the in like Christian religion are evil, right? So there's there's just something weird about it's an albino salamander, like as opposed to an angel.

Man, I think he could have done better.

Well, a bear.

An albino bear. A blue bear.
A blue bear.

Well, it turned out he was actually forging all of these documents. And he had lost his faith when he was a teenager.

Like, he went on his mission basically because he felt a lot of pressure from his family because he was raised in such a strict Mormon household. But

he was trying to embarrass the church.

So he was writing these documents and changing these stories and basically adding in

inconsistencies and mistakes so that the church would kind of be scrambling and not knowing what their official approach should be.

And he,

and he was like a master forger because he had already sold,

let's see, this, here's the list. He had forged unpublished poems by Emily Dickinson,

signatures,

signatures of Mark Twain, a full handwritten letter,

supposedly written by Betsy Ross. No.

He tricked the Library of Congress. He tricked Sotheby's.

He sold signatures by George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson,

Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton. Like, wow, this guy is so lucky.
He just finds all this shit. Yeah, and makes a shit ton of money off of it.

There was somebody named Button Gwinnett. No, there was.
Signature was the rarest rarest and therefore the most valuable of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.

A guy named Button signed the Declaration of Independence. Or a girl.
Oh, sure.

No way.

But little Button Gwinnett got up there.

He also said he claimed to have discovered a famous document called the Oath of the Free Man, which

is believed to be, or, you know, some say the precursor to the Declaration of Independence.

It's from the 1600s and it was worth over a million dollars. Oh my God.
But this, they never knew it existed until he came.

They knew it existed, but they didn't. There were no copies of it in America.

So he had claimed he found one and he was trying to sell that, but

the sale of that was kind of held up because

they were questioning its authenticity. Finally, Sam's like, you know what we should do?

Well, in this, it's funny because I think in the forensic files, they start talking about how they, because it's within the church and the way he did it, he was a master manipulator.

He was super smart.

So he knew how to do it where they would not, they didn't question the documents because of who he was and what he had already sold.

So it was like, well, if he sold something to the Library of Congress and Sotheby's and all these places. What are we going to, we're going to question him? Yeah.

This guy's an expert and he's a Mormon.

So get him all the way in on the inside.

But he also would buy really expensive things. So he was always broke, even though he would make big money on selling these forgeries.

He would then buy like rare books and he was buying things so that he could then forge other things later.

I mean, it's very complicated. And

there's a book called The Poet and the Murderer by Simon Worrell.

And that is

tells the story of Mark Hoffman, but specifically from the view of him pretending to have discovered poems by Emily Dickinson.

And the public library in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is where she was from, collects money to buy these heretofore unpublished, lost Emily Dickinson poems that were fake.

Yeah, so

he's he is like a he... He was like one of the greatest forgers or the

most infamous forgers

anyone had ever seen. Working it.

He's doing it. So

essentially, what happened was he was trying to sell some new set of documents to the church. Steve Christensen knew a little bit about

antiquities and old documents. And so he was questioning.
He was like, I heard this guy is being questioned about the oath of the Freeman. They're not even sure.
Like, he's under investigation.

We need to look closer at these papers. Calling him out.
Yeah. So what he did was he plants a bomb at Steve Christensen's office to kill him.

Then he planted the other one at Gary Sheets' house to make it look like it had something to do with CFS instead of anything to do with him. Shit, that's fucking tricky.
Yeah. I mean, this guy is,

you know,

tricky. He is a trickster.

He was eventually arrested in January of 1986, charged with a total of 27 counts,

including murder, forgery, possession of an unregistered machine gun, gun, and Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's it.
Literally, Jesus Christ.

And a salamander. So he

albino salamander. Albino.
You can't forget the albino part. I mean, all of their beliefs for hundreds of years are one thing.

And then he gives them paper that's like, it turns out an albino salamander had a say. They're like, you know, an angel sounds cooler, so we're just going to stick with that.

They're like, we now we need to have a really big meeting. And what if we have to start fucking praying to an albino salamander? I mean, would that ever even have been a choice? No.

They say also, so he had like 600 forgeries that got sold and are in the market where they're still finding them. Yeah, I was going to ask.
Yeah.

So they're apparently, and he wrote a letter from jail explaining which things that he did were forgeries. Because some things, obviously, when he started out, he kind of there were valid ones.
So,

but they're saying that they're like, there's some Daniel Boone

signatures out there that are fake, that like there's,

because there were hardly any in the first place, but then Mark Hoffman comes along and suddenly there's four that are in the marketplace, which brings the value down. Right.

And it turns out, you know, three of them aren't real. Do you think that his forgeries are now worth money, a lot of money?

To murderino types?

Yeah, or like, is there a forgers museum? I'd go to that. I would too.
I mean, I think overall, the historical signatures are going to be worth the most. Of course.
Because they're like the, you know.

But I feel like

there's got to be like the Smithsonian or some kind of thing that's just like, you know, it's history. Look at this rat bastard.
Yeah, look at that. In that department.
Look what happened. Yeah.
Yeah.

I just think it's funny that he did it so much. And when you see the paper, like he would bake the paper in the oven.
Yeah, I was going to ask. Or like the lighters.

Yeah, exactly.

Like an old western. Yeah, Yeah.

All that, they found all this, you know, they found ink that he specifically mixed to match. But then when the

guy who finally started investigating it forensically, he was like, the new ones all glow blue underneath a microscope because they're new. Yeah.

And so he was just really easily able to, once they knew,

start investigating all of them and just be like, none of this is real. Yeah.

Sorry, this letter from Betsy Ross. That's crazy.
i bet he'd be good at the lettering challenge he might be he's got to have good handwriting he would add in

he'd be like i believe that this is a real

um

i don't know where i was going but anyhow

he initially maintained his innocence uh but at a preliminary hearing um the prosecutors showed so much evidence of his forgeries and his debts um and all of the evidence linking him to the bombs That instead of risking the death penalty, he pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder: a count of theft by deception for the salamander letter,

and a count of fraud for the sale of the McClellan collection, which was that last collection he was trying to sell when Steve Christensen stepped in.

He confessed all of his forgeries in open court.

He was in January 1988, he was sentenced to five years to life in prison. He's spending life in prison.
Five years. years.

Wow. And he's still there.
We can. Still there.
Wow. Yep.

That's Mark Hoffman, everybody. At first, I thought you were going like towards the Ted Kaczynski route when I heard about a bomb.
But that's fucking crazy. I've never heard about that.

Oh, to be killed by a bomb. Do you ever open envelopes and you're like, I don't know what this is going to be? Yes.

Well, that's my moth's thing. I never think it's a mom, though.
A bomb, though. Well, I.
Or a mom.

Just a mom coming to tell me to sweep up the kitchen, honey. Do those dishes.
Oh, what is that? Fear, they're just sitting there. You let them soak for too long.

Yeah, you can't just let things soak in cold water, Karen. It's true.
But also, this was the 80s when, like, this was back when you could walk into an office building with a plain package.

I feel like, you know, as worrisome as it all sounds, we don't live in that world anymore. It's like that was definitely a very pre-9/11 era.
Yeah, except I, yeah,

yeah,

but maybe

not.

You know what I mean? Well,

I'm scared. I know, I know.

You can be. Wow, that's fucked up.
Good job. Thank you.
Thanks. And good job.

I don't know what's going on.

Okay, we're back. Karen, do you have any updates? I have a couple.
Mark Hoffman is still in prison. He's never given an interview to the press.
He's only corresponded with his family from prison.

Netflix had a three-part docuseries that covered this case called Murder Among the Mormons.

And victim Kathy Sheets' daughter, Gretchen Sheets-McNees, grew up to actually be a detective with the Salt Lake City Police Department because she wants to ensure that Hoffman is remembered for what he is, which is a cold-blooded murderer.

And she told the Deseret Times, I think they've kind of idolized him and given him a unique status I don't think he deserves.

Yes, he did those forgeries, but he also killed two people and didn't care who he killed.

End quote.

That's so important when we cover these cases that we're not like idolizing these people and thinking, like, especially when we do live shows and we're like, okay, what if the victim's cousin or brother or sister were in the audience?

Right. How would they feel if we were saying this thing and making them seem like a hero when they're not? Yes.
Like, right. Or like, you know, some kind of anti-hero.
Like, we don't want to do that.

We try really hard not to do that. Right.
But it's the kind of awareness that we definitely had to develop over time. Yeah.

And it is the kind of thing, it's like hearing from people and knowing and basically thinking that it made the job a little bit harder because it was that thing of like, what if someone is there?

And then it's like, then if someone is there, write to that. Yeah.

Like represent them while you're putting everything else together and don't be cheap about it, which is what we thought when we started this podcast, we were in this like third person away commentator kind of thing.

but no one is that in true crime. Right.
Totally.

And knowing that like, you know, history is written by the victors, like don't take the reporting and the, you know, what's been written and documented about it as face value because there's so many sides to the story, you know.

And weirdly, the victim side, it's new for the victim side to be considered first, to have that part of it.

Or like, I think even just in the beginning when we would just call serial killers pieces of shit, yeah, felt very revolutionary because it's like, oh my God, can you believe they're saying that?

And it's like, it's a serial killer.

I remember, like, I remember getting into an argument with a guy who was really mad about toxic masculinity ruins the party again.

And he was like all pissy about it because he was a men's rights activist, essentially.

And I remember saying to him, I was like, you do know I'm talking about John Wayne Gacy's father. Right.

Like, there's a context to this conversation, and it's about serial killers and how that comes to be. Totally.
Like that's what you're defending. You're defending us being mean to serial killers.
Why?

Right. What do you mean? And you were saying specifically toxic masculinity.
So he's defending toxic masculinity, not masculinity. Yes.
Toxic. Right.
Okay, dude. Yeah.

The game is you're not allowed to talk about us.

And what we were saying without realizing it is we can talk about whatever the fuck we want to talk about. Right.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Okay. So let's get into George's story now.

And man, what a timely fucking story it is, too. It's the story of the Central Park 5.

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I'm glad we were talking about the 80s and you explained kind of like the money stuff because mine takes place in the 80s too and has a lot to do with class wars and all this stuff.

Maybe, should I not tell you the name of it? Whatever. What do you think? Because I think you'll know immediately about it.
Okay. All right.

I'm going to, yeah, I'm not going to tell you. Okay.
All right. So, New York, late 80s, it's insane.

Jim Dwyer of the New York Times calls it completely schizophrenic. You've got one side where there's just insane wealth from Wall Street.

Everyone's getting fucking rich and doing Coke and having eyes odds and such, like we said.

The financial industry is booming after a long period of stagnation. And it got so bad, like in the 70s and I think early 80s, that the city of New York was going to file for bankruptcy.
What?

Do you remember that?

I didn't know that about New York City.

The city was going to file for bankruptcy. But But I mean, it really was so bad in the 70s and like the late 70s, the Carter administration, where it was just like a recession.

Huge recession. Like we've talked about before, gas lines, you couldn't get gas on certain days.
I mean, the whole

country was going through this, but New York City,

because they had so much violence and

that sort of thing, I feel like it was a lot worse. And in fact,

so during the financial crisis of the 70s, a ton of neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx,

the homeowners and the landlords were lighting the apartment buildings on fire and burning them to the ground just to collect insurance money. So all these people had nowhere to live

and they left them like that. So there are these, you know, looks like how you see, how you saw Detroit for a little while.
Just, you know.

It's insane.

Sorry, there's a movie. Now I can't remember what it's called.
And Albert Finney is in it.

And they have, it's basically like, it's basically a kind of a werewolf in the in New York City movie but there's parts of it where I think it's the Bronx where it's just people maybe like kids whatever playing in like their vacant lots filled with just burned out debris wolfen

wolfen exactly right it's kind of a kooky supposed to be scary goofy movie but you can see all that where it's like now New York City is pristine and amazing and of course like the real estate is like once Giuliani took over and made it fucking Disneyland but there's also photo not that I think that it's better when it was dangerous but there's photographs you can go there's a couple great photo what are they slideshows of New York in the 70s and 80s and I mean just the subways alone are terrifying yeah and yeah and they had kids playing on like mattresses and vacant burned out it's just it's fucking crazy and especially I think younger people who never saw that should go and look those photos because you'd be you'd be very surprised.

Yeah, that's where all that punk rock came from. Yeah.

So it was mostly in black and Latino neighborhoods that this burning down was doing.

Let's see. So both unemployment rates and crime rates were at an all-time high.
And because of the bankruptcy coming up, police and firefighters had been laid off.

Municipal services were cut, including sanitation. And after-school programs were totally cut.
So these kids who had working parents had nowhere to go after school.

So they were, you know, on their own in this insane city.

And during this time, the son of Sam was on the loose. So people were fucking terrified of that as well.

And then there was the blackout of 79. And there's a fucking great American experience called the Blackout.
And I fucking, everyone should watch it. It's so good.

And it shows what it was like at that time. And after that, there were these crazy fires and looting, and it never really got cleaned up.
So you have abandoned buildings, you have all this stuff.

So then in the early 80s, Wall Street suddenly boomed, created crazy wealth for people. I mean, the wealth they had compared to what normal people had even was insane.

And then the other side of the city is experiencing crazy poverty. The crack epidemic starts, crazy violence that's fed by an understaffed, a lot of times racist and corrupt police department.

That is, you know, horrible. And there's class tensions and racial unrest.

In about 84, crack came to New York, and that just increased the crime. The crack wars came.
So also giving really young kids kids access to a lot of money and weapons.

So, you just have these young kids and teenagers, you know, with

all hell breaks loose. That's that was like the way to get a job.
Yeah. And to get out of the hood.
Totally. Basically.

And for some of them, it was the only way. Yeah.
I always, there's an amazing movie called Fresh. It's one of my favorite movies of all time.
I've never seen it. It's really good.

It's a double feature with this other movie. With the Andy Williams Christmas special.

It's such, it's about

a black kid who's trying to figure out a way to get out of the bad neighborhood and the bad situation he's in. And it is so brilliantly written and brilliantly shot.

And it's one of my favorite movies.

I definitely want to watch that. Yeah.
We need a fucking,

I need, and I'm sure other people want, just a lineup of movies you suggest. Because it's never me.

I think I suggest documentaries like Ken Burns. And you're like, here's this movie that'll change your life.
And I'm like, say it. So, we're gonna need someone to make a list of those movies.

We're going to need someone with a mustache to write that down. The only we had,

oh shit, I owe you money. I owe you a paycheck.
I forgot. I didn't forget.
Oh, Stephen, I'm sorry.

So, crack came, hell breaks loose.

All right, on a typical day in 1989, which is where the story takes place, New Yorkers reported one day: nine rapes, five murders, 255 robberies, and 1959 aggravated assaults. Shit.

And that's later in the 80s. 89.
God. Yeah.
Okay.

So,

da da da da da.

So the people who are experiencing this, of course, are the poor working-class families.

They're falling through the cracks.

Brown and Latino. Black and Latino communities in mostly Bedfordstein, in Brooklyn, Harlem, Brownsville, East New York.
These neighborhoods are experiencing all of this.

And then you have the Upper East Side of fucking rich as shit people.

All right, for example, and then I'll get on to the story. In 1984, Bernard gets, he was a 37-year-old Queens native, white dude, nerdy white dude.

He's on the subway and he starts getting accosted by four young black men. They tried to mug him,

and he takes out a gun and shoots all four of them. They all survived, but he became known as a fucking subway vigilante.
People celebrated him. Right.

And he was ultimately found not guilty on all charges except for possession of an illegal firearm and sentenced to one year in prison for shooting four people.

Yes.

So, all right.

That's also sorry, but that's also the time that they started doing Guardian Angels. Yes.
Where they were, it was almost like people didn't believe anyone was going to help them with crime.

And like the Bernard Goetz thing was such a racially kind of motivated situation, but also it's just the

everybody. It's the irony of like what you just said was the people that were in the worst neighborhoods, which were

demographically minorities and people of color, were actually getting the worst of this crime. But then it's like the white vigilante that starts shooting everybody.
Right. You know what I mean?

It's not like, yeah, you don't go to these neighborhoods and every, you know, there's work, these are working class people, meaning they're working their asses off and they're not going to be able to move into other neighborhoods.

There's so much racism. There's kind of this race war between white people and people of color, but it's, you know, it's not everyone who's they're being affected more so

by this. So, okay, so we'll get into this.
Let's get into the Central Park 5 and the Eastside Race. Oh, shit, dude.
Yeah. All right.
I'm going there. You sound all right like you're not.

No, I mean, this is just one of the heaviest.

The thing that I remember most about this case is how

go, you know what? what, go ahead. Tell me.
No, no, no. It's just, it was such a big deal.
And this was like when I was in high school. Yeah, I remember

I was maybe 10, so I didn't, my mom kept that away from me. So you'll have to jump in at any time.
Yeah. Tell me stuff.
Yeah. All right.

The night of Wednesday, April 19th, 1989, around 9 p.m., approximately 30.

30, God, I'm burping, sorry, 30 teenagers who lived in East Harlem went into the northmost part of Central Park and they proceeded to commit several attacks, assaults, and robberies.

Can you imagine 30 teenagers? I don't care

what fucking nationality or color they are, I would run.

No, teenagers are bad. Teenagers are bad people.
Teenagers are horrible. Also, two teenagers are fine.
Yeah. 30 teenagers,

the volume alone. Yeah.

I don't care if they're women, girls, I'd fucking run. I'd think girls are worse.
Yeah.

Here's the thing, though.

Do we know for a fact that they were committing those crimes or was that

like a fact? Well, I can, yeah, I have a list of

crimes they were actually committing.

So, I don't, yeah, it's hard because you want to see everyone is innocent, but they, you know, and it was 30, so who knows how many of them were actually doing it? Right. Right.

So, they attacked several bicyclists, threw rocks at a cab, and attacked a man who was who they assaulted, robbed, and left unconscious. A school teacher out for a run was severely beaten.

They attacked another jogger, hitting him in the back of the head with a pipe and a stick, and they beat two men unconscious, hitting them with a metal pipe, stones, and punches, and kicking them in the head.

Wow. So

there was a group of these 30 kids. And they were basically kind of wilding throughout the park.
Well, that's the word that was created later. Okay.
Yes.

So a chase ensued by the police, and at 10.15, a handful of the kids are taken into custody, including Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana, and they're both 14 years old. So these are young kids.

And they're charged with, quote, mischief. So cut to 1:30 in the morning, passerbys discover the unconscious body of Tricia Miley

in a shallow ravine in a wooded area of the park, wearing only her bra.

Trisha had gone for a run on her usual path in Central Park before 9 a.m., I mean, sorry, 9 p.m.

that evening.

And then, when her almost lifeless body was found about four hours later, she had been knocked down, dragged or chased 300 feet, and violently assaulted.

She was stabbed five times, raped, sodomized, and beaten almost to death. The first policeman who saw her said, she was beaten as badly as anybody I've ever seen.

Meanwhile, back at the police station, the kids were about to be released from custody when a police officer was told about Tricia being found.

And then what followed was hours of intense interrogation using tactics to get them to wear them down. As now we know, that's how you get a confession, whether it's legitimate or not.

Exhausts them,

they get no food, no drink, drink, no sleep for almost two days

it takes. And they're repeatedly told that they could go home once they confessed.

And then eventually, after like two days, the boys turn against each other. They tell them they admit just to, you know, go home.
And these are 14, 15-year-old children

that aren't bad kids.

So there's this documentary by Ken Burns and his daughter. And it's this incredible documentary that I definitely think everyone should watch called the Central Park Five.

And they talk about the kids' backgrounds, and they're all good kids from good homes. None of them had ever, ever been arrested or taken in before.
You know, they were little league baseball players.

These were not bad children. Yeah.
So

also, when there's a group of 30,

how do they know who threw what rock? Who threw, like what, basically, it's the slowest kids get arrested. Well, yeah.
Go ahead. The thing is, later,

none of the people who had been attacked that night aside from Tricia were able to identify any of the boys who got who were brought in for this attack.

So they probably didn't have anything to do with it otherwise they would have been identified. Yeah.

So

they implicate each other in the assault. The boys begin to confess after two days.
I already said that.

So in their written statements and videotaped confessions, each confessed to being an accomplice to the rape, although not participating in the rape itself.

And they start telling details of what happened and how.

And then they implicate three other boys in the attack, and they're picked up for questioning.

Anton McRae, who's 15,

Yusuf Salam, who's 15, and Corey Wise, who's 16.

And they ultimately all confess, except for Yusuf Salam, along with and then along with the other two boys, the five of them are arrested and charged with the attack.

The media fucking loses its shit, which is such a big part of the story, right? And probably how you heard about all of this is it was huge news.

And the story kind of confirmed, you know, the white New Yorkers' image of what's wrong with the city and confirms their racial prejudices.

The boys, when they confessed, were calling it that they were wilding, which is a phrase that became huge and everyone used it.

And it was kind of this reference to them all being these untamed, you know, children running amok. they formed quote a wolf pack which is also was of what they made up

which so sorry those were the boys' words yeah like that's what they were telling the police wilding yes they called it wilding okay which they made up

um and then the underage suspects names were printed despite the fact that the names of criminal criminal suspects under the age of 16 are supposed to be withheld from the media and the public they also print the names so they put the names photos and addresses no fucking way of the juvenile suspects before any of them had been formally arraigned or indicted.

Wow. Yeah.

Who did it? What did

the...

I just think that at that point, it was so many of them.

But it's basically the tabloid. Yeah, the tabloid.
Yeah. Seeds.
Seeds? CD.

None of them were arrested.

And they retracted their statement within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions.

And the confessions themselves were videotaped after they had been interrogated and confessed and written statements. That part wasn't taped at all.

So they had no way to show that they were being fed information and coerced. So they only taped the part where they said, I did it or someone else did it.

They only taped the part after all this when they had their stories down. Okay.
And they knew the details they were supposed to be talking about.

They didn't tape any of the part where they make them tell the story 500 times. Right.
Or, you know, you've seen these things where they say, is that what happened? That's not what happened. Right.

Tell me the truth. And they kind of feed it in this really creepy way.
They lead them into the correct story. Right.
And who knows if they even do it? Do the cops do it on purpose?

Do you think detectives, I just don't think they even know. I mean,

it seems like for a long time it was just the way things were done until people, lawyers and whoever, you know,

rights activists came back and were just like, you can't tell them how it went.

And then when they repeat that back to you, it's because they want a sip of water or they want to go home and use it against them.

Well, it's the whole thing, too, of like that shouldn't be admissible. The confession videotape should not be admissible in court because there's no background.
Right.

It's like apropos of nothing, essentially, yeah. Okay, so meanwhile, Tricia's injuries are so bad that she's given last rights.
Like, they think she's going to die.

Um, but after being comatosed for 12 days, she survives and was eventually able to talk, read, and walk, but she had no memory of the night of the assaults whatsoever.

So now the trial,

and so usually

the homicide detective, usually they look in,

okay.

Instead of the homicide unit getting put on the case because they thought she was going to die, Linda Fairstein of the sex head of the sex crimes unit and her prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer, were put on the case.

And for some fucking reason, they're part of the police investigation from day one. So they're helping investigate this case, thinking that these five kids did it and building the case around that.

So they get to analyze the crime scene. They get to do all of these things that

clearly are going to lead the case for the prosecutors, you know.

And they were supposed to be the defense?

No, they're the prosecutors. Right.
They're the sex crimes unit and they're prosecutors, and they are investigating the case from the minute it happened. Okay.

And that's not normal? No, because this way they can skew the results in the direction they want, which is immediately for these five boys. Okay.

So they're, you know, usually the prosecutors and the defense team and the attorneys wouldn't get the information until after the whole investigation has been completed by the detectives or the sex crimes unit, which is this woman who allowed her prosecutor to be in on.

Oh, oh, I see. Okay.
Got it. Does that make sense? Yes.
Okay.

So the boys are brought to trial. 16-year-old Corey Wise is being tried as an adult for some reason because he's 16.

And the newspapers are going nuts. The case of a white woman being attacked by a rowdy group of black teens,

stirring up the racism in the city, which kind of was this underlying thing that no one was talking about. But finally, they had something to point at.
And like, this is.

It was the equal opposite of the Bernie Goetz situation. Yeah.

It was basically.

Yeah, that's kind of retribution, the idea of retribution. Yeah.
And piling it all very conveniently on these five boys. Yeah.

So, for example, the night of the Central Park rape, a woman in Bedford, Steye, was raped and thrown off a building, never fucking talked about in the media.

And that same week that this happened, 28 rapes were reported.

But those were not being reported by the media.

But the black community even turned against the boys as well, some of them, because they were having their own run-ins with black youths who assaulted and intimidated those people in their own neighborhood.

and they felt that they were giving the whole community a reputation as drug dealers and felons. So, even the you know, the black community was fucking pissed about them.

Oh, and good old Trump puts out a full-page ad in four newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York.

Even though the death penalty wasn't even on the table for this, he just puts it. And at the time,

he was a slumlord, and a very wealthy one, a very wealthy slumlord, a very wealthy businessman

who made money off of basically being a slumlord. Yeah.

Owen casinos. Yes.

Okay. And then the City Sun newspaper and the

Amsterdam News used a victim's name in their paper despite the media policy of not publicly identifying victims of sex crimes. Yeah.
So they gave out her name, even though they weren't supposed to.

And they said it's because, well, if other people are willing to put out the boys' names, then she should have her name out too, which is like so fucked up. That doesn't-to-one

thing at all.

But it sounds like this was the Wild West, essentially. Yeah.
This sounds like the worst.

89, man.

The 80s.

It's just this, like, yeah, Wild West. So the analysis was done on the DNA that was collected at the crime scene, and it didn't match a single one of the suspects.

They also didn't have any hair, any evidence. And the crime scene looked like,

it didn't look like five people could have been attacking someone. It looked like a single person was attacking someone.
There was like this small little path that was

walked up and taken Tricia away from the main road, but there wasn't beat up dirt or anything like that.

So it was like she was down in a ravine and there was like one track down to her body and back up. Yes.
Not like five people walked down. Right.

And when the boys got in there, they didn't have any mud or dirt on them.

And the other thing is, if she were fighting back, which they said, the cops said that she put up a hell of a fight, they would all have scratches and crazy things on there.

One kid had, one of them had a scratch on his eye, but that's it. Right.

So the DNA collected.

And so when the DNA was collected and didn't match, the prosecutors just said that they must have been, there must have been a sixth one of them then that the DNA matches and still brought them to trial

with a case that was almost entirely based on the confession, circumstantial.

So,

okay, so

the four boys, Kevin, Yusuf, Anton,

and Raymond, are convicted of rape, assault, robbery, and riot in the attacks.

They were 15 years old and 14, so they got maximum sentence for juveniles, which is five to ten. But Corey Wise is 16 and tried to as an adult, so he gets five to fifteen in fucking Rikers,

which is like a hardcore prison, and going in as a rapist, especially against a white woman where there's a lot of Aryan people in the prison is ugly.

All right. Well, the summer that the attack on Tricia occurred, there's a serial rapist terrorizing the Upper East Side called the East Side Rapist.
Okay, I just got a weird chill.

Did you remember this?

No, I've never heard of this before. Yeah.

So you know that story, but you don't know that. I know that story very well.

All I know is that the mentality at the time was they caught some, this was the mentality, they caught some of them and they're going to jail. Like, like good.
And everyone, yeah, everyone rejoiced.

Everyone

was absolutely, and I feel like in general, unquestionably swallowing the story that was being fed. Yeah.

Everyone.

I mean, they wanted it to be solved and it was a perfect backdrop and proof of what was going on and what they'd been saying was going on and what they were mad about and something to say, this is why I feel this way

about you know this is why my racism is justified. Exactly right.
And to say as if this is the only, these are the only

people that are breaking the law in New York City.

And that to me is the

thing I feel like all the way up to and obviously past until very recently, but like around the OJ trial, where it's this idea of you don't just get to say

who is innocent and who is guilty but like you don't just get to pull people through the the legal system and just be like there the problem is solved because

if you have if it's a setup which many of them have been you still have somebody that's guilty out there doing it totally and who knows what color that person is

but you've now not solved the problem ruined people's lives supported racial stereotypes not told an accurate story so but the this is how the story ended in 2002. Okay.

So the summer that the attack happened, a serial rapist named the Eastside Rapist is fucking terrorizing everyone. August 5th, 1989, 17-year-old Matthias Reyes is caught after raping another victim.

He's the Eastside Rapist,

up the Eastside Rapist.

He

So the woman who was raped noted to detectives that she saw fresh stitches on his chin, and it was right after the attack on Tricia.

So he ultimately confessed to one murder, five rapes, two attempted rapes, and the rape and murder,

the murder was

Lordis Gonzalez. And she was pregnant, and her three children heard through the bedroom.

So

August 5th, you've got

this guy getting caught for rape and

saying that he murdered people. And then on April, April,

in April, a couple months before that, this rape of Tricia happened, this attack.

Let's see. So, after being in prison, he's in prison for more than a decade for the murder.
In 2002, he finds God, Reyes finds God, comes forward and says that he is the attacker of Tricia.

He did it. So, he then goes on to detail

how he followed, raped, brutally beat her, and then details that the five,

the Central Park Five, never got right. They never even had similar stories of what happened.
They were all different. And he just tells exactly how it really went.

From where he threw the socks to where he threw the keys and why, because he was mad that she wouldn't give him her address so he could break into her house.

So he threw the keys and they had always wondered what the deal with the keys were, exactly what she was wearing, that she had a walkman that was stolen.

And they weren't sure if there was a walkman involved. She, he, all her friends said she always ran with a walkman.
And he said it too. Yeah.
Which it wasn't even at the scene.

So the fact that he knew about it meant, you know, he was there. He definitely fucking did it.
Yeah. And the DNA is then tested and it's his DNA.
Oh, man. Yeah.

So let's see.

The detective who his who gave him who gave the statement, who he took the statement, said Matias Reyes is one of the top five lunatics he's interviewed in more than 20 years investigating homicides.

The five boys had already been released from prison. They're adults now.

But they were struggling because they were now sex offenders on the sex offender

registry. And Raymond Santana was still in jail because he had a drug charge.
He took to selling drugs because he couldn't get a job with a sex offender

as a sex offender.

But his sentencing because of that drug charge, because of his prior convictions, was longer. So he was still in prison based on his prior conviction.
So he's released. And then in 2002,

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau threw out the convictions in the Central Park Jogger case. The five are exonerated, and in 2014, New York City paid them $41 million as a settlement.

Really? Yeah. Are you crying? Yeah.
Yeah. $41 million.
That's like, we fucked up so hard. Yeah.

So the prosecutors, the woman who was the prosecutor, the sex offender

unit head,

refuses to admit that they were wrong. She's now a teacher at some big college and they're like starting a petition to get her.
kicked out because she uses this case as one of the highlights of her

career. Oh no.
Yeah, so she can't say it's true. She says maybe

there were six of them. Still sticks to that story.

And doesn't acknowledge the hard evidence of the lunatic

rapist? No. Who admitted he did it? Why would you admit you did something? And did it alone? And then

actually have the hard evidence and know the details. I mean, that's very difficult to deny.
Right. Yes.

And then, so the police detectives, a lot of them won't admit that they were wrong. And of course, Trump refuses to admit.
He says, look at the confession.

So he's still stuck on this confession, which as we know now,

so many confessions are coerced easily. Right.
Especially out of children. Totally.

As for the victim.

So Tricia had five months of rehabilitation. She returned.
And then she returned to running in Central Park. In 95, she ran the New York City Marathon.

And in 2003, so she had been anonymous up until then. And in 2003, she comes out with a published, publishes a memoir called I Am the Central Park Jogger.
I remember that.

Yeah.

I don't know what I want to know what she thinks about all of the, you know, thinking that these five boys were her attackers for so long and then having to switch her brain completely.

It's just so scary. And I feel so much for her just based on that.

And now she began a career as an inspirational speaker. She works with victims of sexual assault and brain injury in the Mount Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Group.

So that's the Central Park V and the East Side Rapists. Wow.

Huge. I know.
That's such a huge story. Did I tackle that okay? Did I give it justice?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

I mean, this is, I feel like, especially in this day and age, it's so difficult to talk.

The first thing I thought of while we were talking about this is, I remember one time, a long time ago, we were talking about something, and

the way we intimated it, it made it sound like what we were saying is all people of color live in the ghetto. Right.

And we got a lot of people who wanted to talk to us about that, where that is in no way what we meant, but it was like the wording of how it sounded.

And so I would just point that out that, you know, like this isn't the assumption that because you are of color, you live in the worst part of the Bronx.

And it doesn't mean that because you're of color, you go wilding. Like,

none of what we're talking about is to say every single person was living only this one way in New York in that time.

I'm sure there were tons of, you know, upwardly mobile black people and people, Hispanic people, and people of color that lived on the upper west side.

So

it's not that. But I think that the lines are absolutely drawn because back then

the white, like it was basically white men ran most media and white men were the cops usually for the majority, I would say. And so that was the that was the story that we were always given.

And that's that was the story people were reacting to. And that's what we're talking about.

Well, it's just so hard because for this, with this podcast, like, you know, I don't want to do the thing that so many people talk about is that like blonde white women, that's all like the stories we cover, which I don't think think we do, but you know, I want to give, I want to tell them the stories because I want to represent as many people as we can and as many victims as we can, which I totally think these boys are victims in this story.

But, you know, it's hard as a white woman.

I try to empathize, but I'll never, I know I'll never understand completely what's going on. So, you know, like the Mitrice Richardson case, I just really wanted to,

yeah, I just want to make sure that we're covering them, but I know it's never going to be perfect. Definitely.

So it's a bit of a risk to even talk about them because everything is very loaded these days. And I think people, it makes people feel better

if you make, if you misspeak about something. It makes people feel better to tell you how wrong you are.
It makes, it makes it feel like that's...

That's making a difference, which it definitely is. I mean, in some ways.

But I guess our hesitation is when you put stuff like that out there, it's easy to say something incorrectly or sound insensitive or make it sound like you're making a generalization. Right.

I don't want to do that. I tried very hard not to.

But please email us. We're always.
open to you know hear your story or have your corrections and they know that they know

i mean jesus that's the one thing we do get yeah i think but i think what's better than not not covering it because it's it's too loaded is just not talking about it at all.

And so I think that's important as well.

To talk about it. Yes.
Yes. Especially for people who have a podcast, you know, who are talking specifically about murder and podcasts.
And in a podcast, it's like, we can't just cover the easy ones.

Well, and also the ones that have been covered because

you're exactly right. That's the thing.

If it's the blonde cheerleader, when the blonde cheerleader goes missing, everybody freaks out because the society that's built up around us is basically said, well, that's what makes the money.

That's what sells the newspapers. There's a lot of like very convenient rationale that goes into why we talk about some murders and crimes and why we don't talk about others.

I think that example of like a woman who was raped and then thrown off a building on the very same night and no one has heard of that story.

I think that's very kind of symbolic. And I think it's that thing of like, it's just good, it's good to start trying to open your eyes.
I think it's a hard thing for some people to do.

There's some people that'll never be able to do it, but if you can try, I think it's important. I think it is going to help

our society needs this kind of help very badly. Definitely.
To come together and to be like, I get it. Nobody's, nobody's,

you know, horror is worse than another person's horror. And then for you and I to

kind of

open the conversation up because we're two white women and that it's not, you know, that

we're trying to understand what's going on in other people's worlds. And no, take that out.

That was sad.

No, I had it and then it was gone.

Okay, we're back. Are there any updates on this case, Georgia? Yes, there are.
So here's where the exonerated five are today.

Yusuf Salam became a board member of the Innocence Project and has advocated for criminal justice reform, particularly for juveniles. In 2016, he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from Barack Obama.

He won the Democratic nomination and seat for New York City Council's 9th District in 2023.

Incredible.

Raymond Santana started a clothing company called Park Madison NYC and donates a portion of its proceeds to the Innocence Project.

I didn't know that. Park Madison NYC, people should know that so they can buy that stuff just to support him.
Absolutely.

Corey Wise remained in New York where he works with the Innocence Project to advocate for the rights of the wrongly convicted as well as criminal justice reform.

Antron McRae is married with six children and lives in Georgia.

Kevin Richardson served as an advocate with Santana and Salaam to reform New York State's criminal justice practices, advocating methods to prevent false confessions and eyewitness misidentifications.

In 2019, Netflix released a four-part miniseries on the case, which is so incredible, called When They See Us.

The series was highly praised and won a Peabody Award in recognition of its powerful storytelling around racial justice and state violence.

And in December 2022, a Central Park entrance was renamed Gate of the Exonerated to honor the five men. Wow.

On October 21st, 2024, the exonerated five sued Trump for defamation in federal court in Philadelphia after Trump once again claimed they were guilty during a 2024 presidential debate, which is, oh, wow, facts.

Let's not just, let's not even pay attention to them.

Trump tried to have the case thrown out, but Judge Wendy Beetlestone rejected Trump's motion to dismiss the case, and the case is still going through the courts. All right.

So let's head back now to wrap this show up.

Okay. All right.
So something positive. Yes.
That's how we end this. So everyone doesn't get bummed.

do you want to go first no you go first okay uh the good thing that happened to me i you know i said i went last week to a new psychiatrist the fucking change of medication is already working oh really i am it's just makes me so hopeful when i wake up in the morning i'm not exhausted all day

you know, and I'm sleeping at night without any pills. It's just like, it makes me really hopeful.
Oh, good. And really, you know, I had two days of not exhaustion and I was just so happy about it.

That's great. Yeah.

What's yours? My friend, I have a friend, my friend Kevin Farzad has a band called Shore, Shore,

and they have new music coming out. They're truly one of my favorite bands.
It's like the kind of music you can put on. Like, I just feel so stressed out

lately, and I think a lot of people have been.

It's the kind of music that's like super catchy and great, but it's not like invasive. I can't explain it.
It's just very good. I totally recommend it.

I think they're coming out with a new album soon. Um, but uh, I will be retweeting their music.
I'm just a big believer in Sure, Sure, the band, and uh, so I think everyone should listen to them.

That's a good one, yeah. Music is such an important part of you know

the human existence, human experience,

and life and happiness.

Okay, we are back. So, this episode was originally titled My Own Sinkhole.
If we were naming it today, maybe we would call it. Oh my God, I love this one so much.

Too many Fish, which never sounded wrong to me. His still to this day doesn't sound wrong to me.
I'm like, as I read Plenty of Fish, I'm like, oh, got it. That makes sense.

I think that is so, like, that is such a, what's it called? Profreudian, a Freudian slip. A Freudian slip.
Yeah. Too many fish.
Like it says just something about you.

Can't get involved with those fish. There's too many.
Right. And there aren't plenty.
There's no fucking way there's plenty.

plenty no no no okay the other one could be called really aunt mary where we talk about tattoos

we all make our whole family get tattoos that's also some toes is one of the weirder yeah like that's the tattoo i want everyone to get also one point over mine which is george's amazing joke about her iq

168 baby i forgot about that great well that's the episode that's this week's episode of rewind let's let elvis say goodbye from 2017. Thank you guys for listening.
Thank you.

All right, stay sexy and don't get murdered. Bye.

Elvis. Elvis,

Elvis,

want cookie?

Come here. He's coming.

Elvis, want cookie?

Come here.

There he comes. Wash the video back.
Want cookie?

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Goodbye.

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