Introducing: PRETEND

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Heads up, this episode has depictions of deviant sexual content.

You should not listen to this without headphones.

You should not listen to this with children in the room.

You've been warned.

When I was really young, I used to live in Oregon, in Portland, Oregon, and I had accepted this job as a personal assistant to a man who was a pornography producer.

It was 2010, and Alicia Lockhart was only 24 years old.

To my knowledge, when I accepted this position, his niche was clown pornography.

Clown?

Clown?

I don't know if it was the streaming.

Did you say clown or?

Clown.

Like birthday party,

you know, like entertainment, children entertainment, clown.

Typically, when I interview someone, I have a prepared list of questions.

I have an idea of what the story is about.

This was not the case when I interviewed Alicia Lockhart.

The clown porn thing completely caught me off guard.

When I went for my job interview, there was a like, honest to God, clown pornography being filmed like in the background of my job interview to be this man's personal assistant.

So it was like, it looked legitimate.

It was weird.

But then again, Alicia Lockhart was a goth girl with neon green hair.

The clown porn thing was weird, but she went along with it anyway.

You can see I'm kind of alternative or creative.

It didn't bother me in that moment.

I was like, okay, cool.

This is an interesting kind of office work.

I'll take that.

But when I showed up for my first shift of work he asked me if i would be comfortable like starring in any of the movies that he made and i told him no that i didn't want to do that a few days later he did call me and said he had like a really strange request he had a strange request come in You see, the director wasn't just into clown pornography.

He was also directing death fetish videos.

Kind of like snuff films where someone is killed, but no one really dies.

These fake murder videos are as disgusting as you imagine.

It's hard to imagine someone actually getting aroused by watching someone stabbed, drowned, or strangled to death.

He wanted a model who would just like lay still on a morgue slab.

And he said that he needed to do like slow pans up and down of their body and that that's all it would be.

Like no touching, no other people, just lay there naked.

So I was a little uncomfortable with it, but he was offering me like $500 to do that.

I was like 22.

It seemed easy.

He said that nobody would ever see it.

It was like going on a CD in somebody's private collection.

There was no contract, no consent form, just his word.

And Alicia, she just went along with it.

I showed up to the filming location like maybe a week later, and it was actually his house and he was wanting to film this in the basement of his house.

He fed me lunch before we filmed.

Nothing fancy, just sandwiches and lemonade.

Also, they weren't alone either.

In fact, the director's girlfriend and son were in the room.

She was a little nervous and the kid was within earshot the whole time.

So they avoided talking about this whole death fetus shoot that was about to happen.

After lunch, they walked downstairs to the basement.

Now, this is where things start getting a little foggy for Alicia.

I asked her, how did she get the mark across her neck?

It made it look like she was strangled.

Was it drawn on or was it something else?

Alicia says she doesn't remember.

And he had this Mickey Mouse watch in it.

And he was like, I need you to put this watch on for me before we start filming.

It's like the most important part of the film, so put it on.

A Mickey Mouse watch?

That's creepy.

And he reiterated that it was super important that the dead girl be wearing the Mickey Mouse watch in the video.

So I put it on, and at this point, like my memory changes pretty drastically from being like a full-blown movie to being like I can barely grasp little moments from that point.

I've unfortunately watched the video.

Yeah, Steve.

Steve.

Yeah, I'm here.

Oh, well, uh,

it looks like it's our guy.

The director was also the star of the video, and he played the part of a CSI investigator examining the crime scene.

I'm in a hurry because I got another one right after this.

Like I said, I'm going to get her back to the field office ASAP.

Alicia is laying on the floor with her back propped on the sofa.

Her head is tilted back, and her mouth and eyes were wide open.

She's posing as a corpse.

He eventually grabs Alicia's lifeless body, lifts her up and carries her off-screen.

In the next scene, Alicia is laying on a platform of some sort.

The director examines her entire body.

Just keep getting hotter and hotter.

I'm sorry for having to describe this in such great detail, but this next part is kind of important.

The man slowly undresses Alicia.

She's completely naked except for this Mickey Mouse watch.

Maybe it's because she was instructed to keep her eyes open and fixed to one spot.

Maybe it's the trauma of being exploited or maybe it was something else.

But Alicia says that she doesn't remember much about this day.

And obviously this was not a comfortable or a normal experience for me anyways.

So I kind of just felt like maybe I disassociated or something.

Like it was uncomfortable.

She's new and bruising in the inner thighs.

But I just kind of had put that memory out of my mind.

It was a really long time ago.

Like I said, it was 2010 and Alicia was just 24 years old.

And it happened to come back up into conversation in 2021 with my sister.

And when I told her about this experience, she was like, this is super creepy.

Why did they want a video of a dead girl with a Mickey Mouse watch?

Where do you think that video wound up?

Like, what, do you know what it looked like?

Did you ever watch it?

So we had this conversation about it, and she ended up Googling Mickey Mouse Watch plus murder.

And that's when they got a hit.

There was a case out of Arkansas where a 21-year-old woman named Melissa Witt went missing.

They found her body six weeks later.

And so when she did that Google search, Melissa Witt is what came up because

that is a detail about that case.

Melissa Witt, her watch was taken from her body after she was murdered.

And they've always kind of believed that the murderer might have kept it as a trophy.

At this point, I was really creeped out.

I didn't think that it was necessarily related, but it seemed random.

Like, it just seemed like such a strange thing.

It's a detail.

It's a detail that's very specific right like the morgue the morgue thing i could kind of understand but the mickey mouse watch that just seems very specific right and like it could not be related at all could just be a coincidence but i figured i will just let law enforcement decide that because i figured they could probably find the guy i used to work for and talk to him about it Could this fetish porn director be linked to the Melissa Witt case?

Does the Mickey Mouse watch have any significance?

They thought maybe this information could be a new lead in this now 30-year-old cold case.

And so that's why I called in a tip.

I really just expected that I would have a phone call with one or two people and that would be it.

But the first person that I spoke with was LaDonna Humphrey.

LaDonna Humphrey.

Remember that name because she is very important to the story.

Listen, I've tried to sum up this story quickly, an elevator pitch, and every time I fail.

When my friends ask me, hey, what's this new series about?

I'm lost for words because there's just no simple way to tell this story in just a few minutes.

So how can I tell it here and where do I start?

I'm about to retell this story the same way I learned about it, completely out of order.

By the end of this thing, you're going to need a suspect board like the ones you see in the movies.

I've conducted more than 20 interviews and counting.

You're going to hear some pretty far-fetched allegations from a lot of different people.

Actually, from complete strangers.

None of these people I've spoken to have anything in common, except they cross path with one particular woman.

There's a lot of he said, she said in the story, and I'm going to do my best to prove and disprove every one of these claims.

This series is going to be a long one.

I can't even predict how many episodes it will be because it's unfolding as you're hearing this right now.

Yeah, it's going to be one of those.

But by the end of this series, hopefully I've done a good enough job for you to make up your own mind and find out why so many people are afraid of LaDonna Humphrey.

I'm Javier Leyva and this is Pretend, stories about real people pretending to be someone else.

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Let's pick up where I left off.

Alicia Lockhart first met true crime author and podcaster LaDonna Humphrey in 2021.

I actually called in a tip to the Melissa Witt tip line.

She runs an unsolved murder tip line for a case from 1994 in Arkansas.

Tomorrow marks 29 years since the abduction and murder of Melissa Witt.

LaDonna Humphrey made a name for herself herself by covering the Melissa Witt disappearance.

She's written books, recorded podcasts, and even produced her own Amazon Prime documentary on the case.

Melissa Witt was a 19-year-old from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who vanished from a bowling alley in 1994.

She was missing for weeks until they discovered her naked body laying on a rock in the Ozarks National Forest.

Her head was badly decomposed, but investigators were able to determine that she was strangled to death, just like Alicia portrayed in the fetish film.

And her Mickey Mouse watch, along with all her other possessions, gone.

Here's LaDonna Humphrey describing meeting Alicia for the first time on her podcast, Extinguished.

Alicia Lockhart came to me via email with a tip in the wit case.

She had been involved in a death fetish film.

She had been asked to pretend to be a girl that had been strangled to death, and the producer asked her to wear a Mickey Mouse watch.

So she reached out to me and we got to know each other.

And that's how I discovered the world, the underbelly of the internet, death fetish.

And that did spark this year-long undercover investigation.

LaDonna wanted to know who commissioned the film?

Who was the producer?

What did any of this have to do with Melissa Witt?

And she was very, very interested in what had happened to me and if it could be related to Melissa's case.

You know, she followed up with me a few times.

In case you're wondering, yes, Alicia did report her experience to the Fort Smith Police Department in Arkansas.

And she had a series of phone calls with the detectives, but eventually that went nowhere.

But it was LaDonna who kept following up.

And she pretty much stayed in touch with me every day from that point on.

She needed more information about the man that I used to work for, the video.

So I agreed to help her as much as I could.

And I started looking for the last name of that man.

She couldn't remember it at the time.

I mean, after all, this video was shot in 2010.

And I was still searching for like a clown pornographer in Portland, Oregon, and I just couldn't find him.

And it was really, um, like really racking my brain.

But one one night I just typed in morg porn and hit enter and um what I found was really horrifying I had no idea that was like a popular kind of pornography Alicia scoured thousands of death fetish videos I found a lot of videos immediately of that nature and most of them were made by this man that I had worked for during that time he called himself Chris Corner, almost like a play on Chris Coroner.

I saw these thumbnails with him in them, and I discovered that that was basically his bread and butter.

As I was scrolling through these images, I found a screenshot of myself, which was really hard for me since I had been told that it wasn't something that was going to be sold on a website.

So

that was a huge discovery.

I was able to give LaDonna the man's name, his company name, his website, and the, you know, the whole entire video for her to review.

And I did end up watching the video.

As I said before, it's really hard for me to remember most of what else happened there.

So I felt like that was something I needed to do for myself.

And I did watch it.

And there's a lot that goes on in the video that I did not consent to.

I was touched inappropriately.

It's my opinion that I may have been drugged in some way during the meal that we shared beforehand, but I don't have any proof of that.

We don't need to go into any graphic details, but let's just say there was no intercourse.

Either way, Alicia said this wasn't what she signed up for.

And thank you for hanging in there, folks, because that was as graphic as the series is going to get.

We needed to talk about it because it's going to come back up at some point in the series.

So we're past it now.

Let's get back to the story.

At this point,

I was again working mostly with LaDonna, not with law enforcement much after the initial interviews.

And what LaDonna was telling me was that

the police were working on it.

They were very interested.

They felt like he could have been involved.

She wanted me to keep helping her research this man and find anything else I could find out out about him online during that time period, potentially figure out who the client was that ordered the video, things like that.

She wanted me and her to work on together.

Now I really feel like that should have been something law enforcement was doing rather than LaDonna Humphrey.

But she sort of explained that away by saying that they were very busy and this was a 30-year-old case.

And, you know, that does make sense that if she could help out in some way, maybe they would just do the last part of the investigation or the important stuff.

And she also had told me that she was a licensed private investigator and that she had access to the case file, could go into the station.

And I know that some detective on that case did give her access like that.

It was hard to believe in the beginning.

Although we did determine after the first interview that we felt like what Alicia was telling us, that she at least believed it to be true.

You know, she was always very consistent with the story.

Alicia was caught in the moment.

She truly believed that her experience could shed new light into the Melissa Witt case.

The Mickey Mouse watch, the strangled girl, either the director or whoever commissioned this film might be the killer trying to relive a twisted fantasy.

I thought that I was helping not just her, but Melissa Witt, the police.

Ladonna was actually paying me to help at this point.

She had sent me money through Venmo to keep doing the research that she needed done about this guy that I used to work for.

And so I started doing quite a bit of research, not only about him, but like that whole industry.

And to be honest with you,

I was appalled by it and fascinated by it.

It kind of became like a moral mission for me at some point.

Especially too, because I did wonder in all these thousands of videos that I was seeing, were any of the other women in these videos, you know, potentially being trafficked or were they drugged in the videos?

Or I just had a lot of questions.

Were any of them dead actually?

And not just pretending to be dead.

So I got completely swallowed whole by

this memory that turned into a kind of a mission.

And LaDonna felt the same about it too.

So we sort of embarked on a mission together to learn more about the communities, about the laws, about who these people were behind their screen names and monikers, like who's really making these videos, how many of them are there.

So

that was a pretty time-consuming mission and it led to us writing a book together and starting a podcast.

And through that process, Alicia and I said, We got to write a book about this.

This is so unbelievable.

We've got to document it.

And they did.

In 2022, Alicia and LaDonna co-wrote a book titled Strangled.

And then as soon as the book came out, we also launched a podcast called Deep Dark Secrets.

After Alicia teamed up with LaDonna Humphrey and started to investigate the death fetish community, that's when the harassment started.

She became the target of a person going by the name of Fetish Master.

Messages to my personal cell phone number, mostly at night time,

about

how I was in danger and that I needed to stop sticking my nose where it didn't belong.

And that

whoever was writing these was telling me that I would be harmed if I didn't stop looking around in these places.

That's after the break.

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When I started researching these communities, it was only a few weeks into our working relationship.

I would say like week two or week three.

I had gotten into a few of the websites that you needed access, like that you needed a special membership to to get in and look around.

And

as soon as that happened, I started to get strange emails and text messages from like burner phone numbers.

And it became sexual pretty quickly.

Like I would get called a cunt or they would talk about my pussy.

Sometimes they would

sort of insinuate that they were going to rape and kill kill me if I kept looking at the websites.

One of them that came through

said something about

finishing what had been started in the basement.

And at that point, I was convinced that it was my former employer who was sending me messages, although I didn't really understand how he would know that I was in any of those forums.

But of course, I you know, showed everything that I was receiving to LaDonna Humphrey because

I had been working with her on this.

I thought she would know what to do with that information.

She told me that law enforcement said that there was no way to trace the numbers and that they would recommend that I just keep my phone number how it was because maybe these people would mess up at some point and send something from something that could be traced.

And so I was told that if I just kept documentation of everything that was being sent to me, that that was like a better option than like changing my phone number or anything like that.

So let's recap for a second.

Alicia takes part in a morgue porn video in 2010.

11, 12 years go by and she hasn't heard a thing from this director.

But the moment that she starts working with LaDonna and poking around these death fetish forms, the director comes back and starts harassing Alicia.

The timing is just so bizarre.

Like, why now?

Yeah, that started pretty early on and continued for almost two years.

Like, the whole time I was working with her, I think there's like 70-something different phone numbers that were writing me different messages like that.

Or

things about LaDonna herself.

They would send me threats, but it would be like a threat towards LaDonna, not towards me.

And she would show me things too that she was receiving from the same phone numbers.

These people were attacking both of us on the same evenings.

Here's LaDonna.

I'm going to kidnap you.

I'm going to burn your house down.

I'm going to do all these horrible things to you.

But also, on a larger scale, in some of these online death fetish forums, I had been doxxed.

And then I would show her because I was like, look, look at this.

This is terrifying.

And she would get really upset about it.

But it did scare me to get those kinds of messages.

It scared me for her and for myself.

Despite the barrage of threats, Alicia and LaDonna continued to work together.

In fact, they achieved a pretty high level of success.

After all, LaDonna Humphrey was already an established published author, speaker, and now popular true crime podcaster.

Writing a book, any book that ends up having any measure of success does come with a price.

You know, I'm not saying that for anybody to feel sorry for me, but you know, I don't have the level of security that I once did.

I find it very difficult to go places because now people know who I am.

So there is that level of, you know, I can't go somewhere anymore and just kind of like go be LaDonna,

you know, on my own in a grocery store.

Leveraging LaDonna's public figure, they were able to get in front of the largest true crime audiences.

She got us into CrimeCon UK and then U.S.

It felt like the work we were doing was interesting and important to other people.

And so I continued to do it.

And I was personally invested in it as well.

The Deep Dark Secret podcast mostly centered around Lalicia's sexual assault and their work infiltrating the Death Fetish community.

One day, while on a video call while doing research on the necrophilia sites, LaDonna Humphrey shared some files with Alicia.

We would be like, what do you think of this user?

Have you seen him on here?

Is he dangerous?

Do you know where he lives?

What's his story?

So she was just sending me a screenshot like we often did one day.

One of those screenshots that LaDonna shared left Alicia stunned.

This particular day, the screenshot that she sent to me showed her username, but it wasn't the one that I knew.

It was actually a username of a user that had been harassing me.

It was the username Fetish Master.

This user in particular had been sending me emails,

posting in the forums a lot of kind of scary things about wanting to hurt the podcasters and some other things about dead girl porn.

And I thought, oh my God,

she has created this fake account just to like farm social media content for our podcast.

Why was LaDonna logged in under the screen name Fetishmaster?

Could it be that she was behind these harassing messages the whole time?

Was she just terrorizing Alicia every other day for two years straight for the hell of it?

And so I kind of expected that when I called her out on this, she would admit that to me, like say, I'm so sorry.

I made this account so that I had something to post on TikTok this week.

And that's not great, you know, but it would have made some kind of sense to me.

We could have talked through how I was not okay with that or like, let's not do that.

In the moment, I just couldn't help myself.

i was like how long have you been fetish master

at this point she immediately switches to voice memo and tries to explain to me but she doesn't explain it at all listen as a journalist i believe it is crucial for the public especially families of the missing homicide survivors sexual assault victims and those who have been harassed to be aware of these serious allegations against a public figure who has has built a whole career on covering crime.

Therefore, I'm going to play you some of these voicemails sent to Alicia that reveal information about a possible crime or significant misconduct involving LaDonna Humphrey.

I am being honest with you.

I am not.

Fetish Master.

I don't know what to say, but I am being completely honest with you.

I don't know what's going on.

I took that screenshot this morning because we logged in first thing, or maybe I did that last night.

Ruttro,

I've seen the screenshot Alicia is talking about and she was clearly logged in as Fetish Master.

I don't know how she's going to explain this.

I'm not Fetish Master.

It's not me.

I'm going to try to figure this out because it is absolutely 100% not me.

I am really angry whoever did this for sure.

I have 10 minutes of voice memos of LaDonna trying to convince Alicia that she has it all wrong.

So I'm a little freaked out.

So I went and looked on my phone and I'm not logged into anything at all.

I'm a little scared right now, actually.

Actually, a lot scared.

I am not Fetish Master, I promise you.

But this is super weird because one, how would I not notice that when I'm in there taking a screenshot?

Like, that doesn't make sense to me.

I don't know.

I'm really, really confused about what's going on, but I'm going to get to the bottom of it.

At one point, she even blames her husband for logging in as Fetish Master.

Hold on, let me ask Danny too because

I don't think he would do that, but let me ask him.

Hold on, it does kind of scare me about what they're up to.

This is probably the most freaked out I've been in a while.

But again, you ask me any question you want to.

I am kind of

frustrated if it was somebody close to me that isn't telling me the truth, but I

don't think it is.

I mean,

that would be super odd.

Then she blames it on hackers.

Well, I'm wondering if I clicked on a link somewhere and have gotten spyware or malware on my phone or my laptop or both, which is completely possible, I guess.

I mean, this just throws me.

I mean,

I'm not mad you asked.

Have I had a dollar for every time someone blames it on the hackers?

Okay, so I googled merge two screen names in PHP BB3, which is their platform.

And there's a, it looks like there's an extension that allows an admin of a forum to merge the accounts of two different users.

PHPB3, merge screen names, extension.

Sounds like a dialogue out of a bad sci-fi movie, but she's technically correct.

What LaDonna just described is possible.

We're going to discuss that in more depth on a future episode.

For a few days, yeah, she continued to tell me that she was looking into it and trying to to figure out how that happened.

I'm perplexed.

I don't know why I would be shocked that they would be doing something like this, but I'm shocked.

I just don't know what to do.

I'm,

I'm just, I'm sitting here in my chair in my room.

I'm stunned right now.

I don't, I don't know.

I hate the fetishers.

I hate them so much.

I can't even explain to you how much I want their communities to just.

be blown up.

These people are so evil-wicked.

Then reality slowly starts sinking in.

This

Fetish Master account actually makes us look really bad and I'm kind of freaked out about it actually.

I just, my mind is blown right now.

I'm truly, this is the first time I think I've ever felt like it's not terror.

It's like, what the heck is happening right now?

Alicia is just as perplexed.

The only way she can explain this is if LaDonna was creating the illusion of Fetish Master to make their podcast more interesting, creating the story rather than reporting on it.

And I just asked myself, why?

Why would she do all this to you?

I mean, of all people, like I could see why she would do it to other people, but you were like, you were just doing a podcast.

I mean, why is she targeting you?

When I called the tip line and told her my story, I think that she just thought it was an interesting story and that it was something that might

earn her money or fame or something like that.

And

I think about if somebody decided to

harass and scare somebody to the degree that I was harassed and scared, they would be doing that to make a story more compelling, right?

But for what the reason would be, I don't know, for fun, for fame?

I'm really not sure.

That was the only reason I could think of why my best friend and business partner would be logged into that account.

And you'll never guess, but all the harassing messages stopped after Alicia confronted her.

In fact, the Fetish Master screen name was last active the very same day Alicia confronted her about it, November 22nd, 2022.

I've confirmed this with my own eyes.

But I did think, like,

what if all the messages were from her, not just that one?

How frequently were you getting these messages?

Like every 48 hours for almost two years.

Holy crap, the dedication.

It's such a big, I mean, it's a mind fuck.

One night, when they were sitting across from each other, typing on their laptops, Alicia says that she received an email from Fetishmaster.

I think the last email said,

I'm going to enjoy fucking your rotting pussy.

And that email in particular had been sent to me while I was in Arkansas in LaDonna's living room with her.

I opened it and I gasped and I read it to her.

And then she gasped and she was like, who is that?

She had me in her living room.

And I believe she sent me a message to just like watch my face as it came in.

After I spoke with Alicia, I quickly learned that she wasn't alone.

There were other people who were claiming to be harassed by LaDonna Humphrey after they had a falling out.

And she's just an attention seeker.

You know, it adds to the mystery and the riveting

fear that you get when reading her book.

And it was these messages that I was getting, which I started realizing that these are the same messages everybody else has been getting.

It's time that LaDonna Humphrey is held accountable.

It's that lives stop being ruined at the hands of la donna humphrey it's got to stop she's using fear-mongering and people are buying into it buying into her fear i don't know how to stop her it's the one of the worst types of evil how are you gonna be this person who is highly respected in society a journalist a writer and then behind closed doors when nobody sees your face be this terror like I said earlier, these people have nothing in common.

They didn't know each other.

The only thing that binds them together is that at some point in their lives, they've crossed LaDonna Humphrey.

And soon after, the threatening messages start.

Is there something here?

I mean, why would this award-winning investigative journalist involve herself in this level of drama?

I mean, typically when a story sounds too good to be true, It's probably not.

So I've been talking with all these people trying to weigh out what's true and what's not and boy these folks showed up with receipts.

This season you will hear story after story from people who for the most part were too afraid to talk to me but ultimately they felt they had no other choice.

They're terrified of her and they do not want her to fixate on them or focus on them any longer.

They just want her out of their life.

And you will hear from supporters of LaDonna Humphrey.

You're even going to hear from LaDonna Humphrey herself.

In fact, I called her and I had six pages of questions prepared for her, thinking she was going to hang up on me after question number two.

But guess what?

No, she answered every single one of my questions.

If you can't wait and you want to be the first to listen to the next few episodes, subscribe to Patreon or Pretend Plus on Apple Podcasts.

The next few episodes are available right now.

I'm still putting these together in real time.

But if you can wait, they will be available to listen weekly here for free.

This episode was produced by me, Alice and Brian, and edited by the talented Puna Shinoy with the podcast pundits.

I want to make something clear before we wrap the episode that Alicia Lockhart received many messages for two years straight from people claiming to be part of the Death death fetish community the fetish master account was one of 78 different harassments that she got the only evidence right now is that ladonna was logged in under fetish master we can't say the same for the other accounts that were emailing alicia we don't know if these messages were from multiple people or one by the way ladana and her surrogates are already going online trying to dispute this fetish master thing they say they have a perfectly good explanation and we are going to talk about that in a future episode but just so you know just the other day I received my very first anonymous email.

And I've been doing this podcast for seven years, covering stalkers.

And this is the very first time.

The timing is impeccable.

I've never had one before.

It was titled Missy Wit Case.

And the email I verified is a spoof account.

The sender goes by the name of Nixon O'Neill, which will make more sense in a future episode.

It reads, Javier, I appreciate your coverage on the Missy Wick case.

I grew up in the area and you seem to be an expert on the case.

Do you have time to compare notes?

In my 45 years living in Arkansas and being familiar with this 30-year-old case, you must be a genius.

Regards, Nixon.

All right, that's it for this episode.

Part two and part three are posted right now on Patreon, Apple Podcasts.

So if you can't wait, you got to listen to these episodes because it's a very big story.

Let me know what you think.

All right, talk to you next week.