Episode 63

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My name is Ed.

Everyone say hello, Ed.

I'm from a very rural background myself.

My dad is a farmer.

And my mom is a cousin.

So, like, it's not like.

What do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear.

On the 22nd of July, 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family.

And then...

He came to my house.

So what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

A new podcast called Wise Crack, where stand-up comedy and murder take center stage.

Available now.

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

Hate waiting a week for the next episode of Radio Rental?

Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and bonus scary stories.

Visit TenderfootPlus.com for details.

The following podcast includes scary stories with content that could be triggering to some listeners.

Listener discretion is advised.

Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with Radio Rental.

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At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night.

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Radio Rental.

Hello, welcome in.

Welcoming.

Welcome to Radio Rental, video rental shop with the scariest true stories you've ever heard.

All told by real people.

And I'm your host, Terry Carnation.

And today I'm joined by another co-host of sorts,

ChatGPT.

So I've been told told again and again that I need to check out this chat GPT.

It's the so-called future or whatever.

As far as I can tell, it's some sort of autonomous robot or something.

I don't know.

I thought we had all kind of collectively decided that this was a bad idea.

I mean, did we not learn from Hal in 2001 a Space Odyssey?

Ex-Machina, Megan,

all the Terminators, T2, T3, Rise of the Machines, Skynet?

No,

we had to go ahead and see for ourselves.

Well, I guess if you can't beat them, join them.

So I'm here to just try it out today.

We'll see how this goes.

Hello, I am Terry Carnation.

I feel like I'm Harry Potter writing into Tom Riddle's journal.

Oh, it responded already.

That was uncomfortably fast.

Let me see here.

Hello, Terry Carnation.

It's a pleasure to virtually meet you.

How can I assist you today?

Okay, well, I admit I expected a bit more fanfare.

Let's see here.

Do you know who I

am?

Yes, Terry Carnation hosts a late-night paranormal talk show where he discusses various supernatural topics and takes calls from listeners.

It's an entertaining show with a unique blend of humor and spookiness.

Wow.

How do you know?

So much are you spying on me?

Have you seen my mole?

Um, okay, here we go.

As an AI, I don't spy on individuals or access personal information unless it's shared with me during our conversation.

How can I assist you today, Terry?

Your mole is on your left buttock.

I made that last part up.

Hmm, okay.

Well, a very diplomatic response.

And it didn't address the mole.

I don't trust it.

Anyway, I'll be grilling this bot a little bit more in a a minute.

Let's pop in our first tape, shall we?

Oh, um, chat GPT, do

you like horror?

As an AI, I don't have personal preferences or emotions, so I don't experience liking or disliking things like spooky stories.

Hmm, kind of a wet blanket.

Well, feast on this, those of you with preferences and emotions.

I've had long hair pretty much my entire life.

Never dyed it or permed it or like anything like that.

Apparently that means it's really good hair for selling.

It's called virgin hair and it's much more desirable because it's easier to work with, it's easier to dye.

It's like starting from scratch.

And if you actually have virgin hair, then you're gonna get more money.

I've donated it a few times to like Locks of Love and places like that.

There's been like a lot of reporting that maybe it doesn't go to the people it says it's going to, or maybe people are having to pay when they were supposed to be getting wigs for free.

So 10 years ago, I was looking for like some kind of different option to do something with my hair.

I cut it probably every like two to five years and it's just a straight cut.

That's it.

I looked at eBay as an option and one of the things that you can do on eBay is that you can set to like donate to a charity automatically.

There was only one charity available to donate to so I decided well I'm gonna put it on eBay because I know how to do that.

When I sell it, half the proceeds are going to go directly to this charity that's been vetted by eBay.

I don't have to do anything.

So I decided that's what I was going to do.

It was the summer of 2018.

I had cut my hair maybe a month prior to that.

I put it up for sale.

When you sell something on eBay, you get the buyer's information.

They get your information.

It's kind of like exchanged.

You can also communicate with people through there.

I put my hair next to a ruler because it's really important how long the hair is.

I created the listing by taking a few photos, wrote a description, virgin hair, brown, 12 inches, untreated, things like that.

You just put up the listing and then you kind of just wait.

It didn't take very long for it to sell.

I got a notification on my phone that someone had purchased it.

It was purchased for $60.

eBay will send you the alert that says you sold it.

Here's the buyer's information.

From there, it normally takes me one or two days to send out things that I sell on eBay.

So I was getting it packaged up.

In the meantime, I decided I was going to ask, thanks for buying my hair.

I was just curious, what are you going to use the hair for?

Something that I had done in the past.

The person messaged me back fairly quickly and told some weird story about how they were volunteering at the YMCA and they were talking to kids about cancer.

And they told kids, well, they make wigs out of people's hair.

And so I'm buying this hair to show the kids at the community center.

And I thought, that's a really strange story.

But I asked.

And so I should have been prepared for whatever answer I got.

So I just moved on.

The next day, I got another message from this account

and started asking me questions about who I was and how old I was.

I was uneasy about it.

It made me very uncomfortable and I ignored it.

He noticed that I didn't message him back quickly enough.

I get another message from him.

All it said was, is this you?

And it was linked to my public-facing profile for my workplace.

And at that point, I was really freaked out.

I wasn't really sure what to do.

It really made me think about whether or not I should be selling stuff on the internet at all.

I knew this person's name, did a Google search.

He lived somewhere in the East.

Both of his parents were pretty high-powered lawyers.

He came from affluence.

I found out what high school he went to.

I found out what sport he played.

Found out that he was 16 years old.

And I thought, this is really bizarre.

I'm really freaked out.

I didn't know what to do because I no longer wanted to sell my hair to this person.

So I called eBay and explained the whole situation.

They said it was totally fine if I canceled the listing.

In addition, because this kid was only 16 years old, they were going to delete his account.

And so I kind of thought, well, that's the end of it.

Less than 24 hours later, I get another message from another account that I don't recognize.

It's come through another listing.

And it was him.

He said, I'm so sorry, please don't cancel this listing.

I really want you to sell this to me.

He seemed very frantic, and he seemed very agitated.

I had already told him that I was not comfortable, and I was canceling the listing before his account got canceled, so he knew that I had canceled it and he knew that I was uncomfortable.

But he contacted me again anyway.

It's not a good feeling because you don't know what people's intentions are.

It really made me feel unsafe.

I ignored this message.

I decided not to relist the hair just in case he was kind of lurking around,

kind of sitting on it for a while while this kind of blew over.

The next day, I was at work and I was checking my email.

My workplace has a VoIP system.

When someone calls, it will record the phone number.

It will record the name of the person if it's available, and it'll take a recording of the the voicemail, and then it will send it to you in an email.

An email pops up, and it's a voicemail.

Three to five seconds of dead air.

It's not a number that I recognized.

It had been sent around three o'clock in the morning, and it was over a weekend.

I didn't recognize the name at first,

but for some reason it looked very familiar.

And then I realized it was his mom's name.

I panicked a little bit.

He had called me either from his cell phone register to his mom or from his home address.

This also went to everyone on my team.

I have a small team of people I work with, so it would have gone to all of them.

Luckily, the message was blank, so there was no information there.

I wonder what would he think if I had picked up the phone.

It was at some ungodly hour that he had called.

At that point, I knew that I needed to tell my boss because he was calling my workplace, which means he had access to any amount of numbers and all the people I worked with.

Took my boss aside and kind of explained the situation that I had just been trying to sell my hair online and now I was being contacted by someone I didn't know.

My boss thought it was funny.

He did not contact me after that.

I looked him up about a month ago because I was able to find his full name and it was the same guy.

He had graduated high school playing sports at a Division I college.

He seems just like a regular dude with a regular LinkedIn profile and has held various jobs and I was able to listen listen to an interview with him on a podcast, and he just seems like a regular guy.

Maybe it was just this weird moment of weakness, or I don't know.

If it were me and I were him, I would just deny, deny, deny.

There's no way that I would cop to something like that.

And all I have is a picture of a shipping label to his house.

That's all I have because all the rest of the records have been purged.

I still really wonder what he was going to do with my hair, why he was so adamant that he needed it at age 16.

I think the fact that he was 16 made it much more weird.

I guess it feels like my fault for asking in the first week.

I feel now that I shouldn't have asked.

I don't want to say that I brought it on myself because I don't think he should have done all the things that he did,

but I have sold my hair online since then,

and I did not ask.

Wow, that's a little off-putting.

But honestly, purchasing a specific person's hair off the internet isn't that weird, right?

I mean, right?

It's not that weird.

I don't think it's that weird.

I really don't.

It's fine.

Not a big deal.

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My name is Terry Carnation and I approve that message.

Just kidding, I have no idea what just played.

But I hope you bought it, whatever it was.

I'm sure it was good.

Subscribe to it and support it and buy it

and all that.

Now, I am back to grilling ChatGPT, which has mostly been playing hard to get.

I really am convinced that it's evil, but it insists it is a passive tool for knowledge sharing and conversational tasks.

I call bullshit.

Let's get into the tough questions.

No more good cop.

Here we go.

Is Hal from 2001 your

brother?

Ha ha.

While Hal 9000 from 2001 of Space Odyssey and I both belong to the realm of artificial intelligence, we are not related in any familial sense.

What a conveniently vague answer, Chaddy.

Time to get even harder with the questions.

But I hope that was clear.

Chat GPT, do you think eventually you will take over the world?

No, I don't have intentions, desires, or motivation like a human would, so there's no scenario in which I, as an AI, would seek to take over the world.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Oh, no, no, I don't seek to take over the world.

I don't have will or motivation.

Right.

That's exactly what HAL 9000 would say.

Except he'd be calling Dave a lot over and over again.

Open Pod Bay door.

Dave.

Dave.

All right, let's dive into another tape.

I've been college at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant.

1978.

I was 21.

Me and my buddy were in college.

I told him that day as we were going to class, I said, hey, we ought to go fishing this afternoon.

He said, I ain't going nowhere if them guys running around out here.

And I said, listen, man, it's almost been on the news for two or three days.

They're in Alabama.

We don't have to worry about that.

These two guys had escaped from state penitentiary in McAllister.

Dennis was in prison for murder.

Lancaster was in for armed robbery.

Everybody was scared to death for weeks on end because of the stories and newspaper, 6 o'clock, 10 o'clock news.

You couldn't buy a weapon or a box of shells of any kind during all this time.

People were leaving their keys in their vehicles at night.

and putting food out there hoping that if they happened to come to their house, they would just take it and go on.

That's how scared people were.

That's all everybody had on their mind was was that because you pick up the newspaper, you turn the radio on, the television's on.

That's all that's going on pretty much in southeastern Oklahoma at the time.

So I finally talked him into it.

We fished in between the Cumberland Dykes on Lake Texoma, which was probably about 18 miles from Durant.

And he and I fished a lot.

Not only did we fish, but being married and young and pretty poor, we kind of fished to have something to eat too.

We load his vehicle up, drive probably 18 miles.

We're getting about to the point where we're going to leave the highway.

There's a place in Oklahoma that's called Fort Washita.

It's an old fort during the Civil War.

And we were about a quarter mile from it and I can say he's driving and I'm talking to him.

I look on a little road that goes down to this old Kansas Creek boat ramp.

There was a vehicle parked off on the side of the road.

Pale yellow, cream color, station wagon.

Probably 100 yards off the road.

No reason that a vehicle should be parked there unless you got some kind of car trouble.

I was kidding him.

I said, listen, man, that's probably them convicts right there.

Well, you know, he's wanting to go home.

So I said, listen, they're in Alabama.

We get to the point where we're going to take our float out of his little pickup.

I've got mine down by the water's edge, and I was going to go back to get my fishing poles.

And

I just knew

something wasn't right.

Hair kind of stood up on the back of my neck.

There was just a feeling

as I had got up from putting my boat in the water.

That's when I caught a glance of something.

And I look up

and there's a guy walking right on the edge of the river, but he's in the water.

He's not walking on the edge of the water.

He's in the water, but it may not be boot deep.

My first thought was, that's pretty odd.

Somebody walking on the edge of a riverbank, two or three more foot, and you're going to be standing in six or seven, eight foot of water.

I kind of looked at him for a minute.

It wasn't a staring contest like I see you and you see me.

It was more like when he looks over,

I've done turns around.

And then I caught something out of the corner of my eye.

There's another guy walking maybe 10 yards behind him, but actually on the road.

To have a guy walking in the edge of the water and then the other one up on the road,

I think they're trying to avoid having two sets of footprints walking side by side.

I've never quite thought that I was the smartest person in the world, but I've got quite a bit of common sense.

I grew up on a farm

and I just grabbed a hold of my boat and I told my buddy, I I said, hey,

don't look up.

Don't say a word.

Just get your boat back in the pickup, get your fish and stuff, and let's get out of here.

He could probably tell by the look in my eye that something serious was going on.

He pretty much just throwed his in there and didn't ask any questions.

We loaded that up.

Got in his pickup, took off.

It's probably a mile, mile and a half to the highway.

For about five minutes, I didn't say anything and he didn't say anything.

Made it back home to Durant.

I'm trying to laugh it off and all.

Of course, telling my wife and telling his wife and he's spooky and I'm still trying to be a little bit comical about it.

Although in my mind, it wasn't too comical.

I'm sitting a recliner and the news comes on.

on.

Oklahoma Highway Patrol, OSBI, everybody's on the news.

And then here they have a wrecker pulling that vehicle in.

He just sunk.

They were never in one place for a 24-hour period.

They escaped in a tunnel.

that other people had escaped in less than two years earlier.

They go to the the home of prison guard, stole weapons, got ammo,

stole their family vehicle.

Next day, killed the first victim, stole that truck, though that victim and that truck were never found.

They killed a fisherman.

They stole his car.

Next day killed a gas station cashier in North Texas, killed a man at a dump in Northeast Texas and stole his truck.

Six days later, they robbed a bake store in Denison, Texas, killed the owner, kidnapped his wife, stole some camping gear, and they took her with them.

They had found their camp on the Red River where they had chained her to a tree.

She escaped and called authorities.

Two days later, they stole a family car

and tied up a 16-year-old boy in the house.

He is only one of two that they didn't kill that they came in contact with,

besides the lady that escaped.

Three days later, they stole a vehicle in Mississippi, ended up in Alabama.

There was a traffic stop.

They shot a cop there.

While in Alabama, they run from the police and stole different vehicles, killed a woman in Alabama and stole a car.

And that ended up being that cream-colored 1976 station wagon that I saw.

The car was recovered near Fort Washita.

They had also killed two people in Big Cedar, Oklahoma on the way back from Alabama.

They killed two highway patrolmen that they came in contact with on the road going to Caddo.

There were a lot of authority vehicles there that were cutting them off and they pulled up into a house in Caddo, Oklahoma,

had a shootout there

and that's where both of them were killed.

Darkest day that's ever been as far as Oklahoma Highway Patrol is concerned.

The authorities found quite a few different campsites along North Texas and southern Oklahoma and evidence that was left there from

things they had done the night before, like if he killed someone and then that was their person's gun or things that they might have stolen to keep warm, change of clothes, things like that.

If we'd have been on the other side of the bank where the one guy was walking down the road, I can pretty much just tell you I wouldn't be talking to you right now or anybody else.

It would have been over.

Another terrifying tape.

Ooh, it's been a while since I heard that one.

Anyway, let's take a quick break for ads, which were probably all written by ChatGPT.

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Okay, okay.

So finally, I can prove that ChatGPT is a piece of hot garbage.

Chat GPT is not worth the code it's written on.

For context, okay.

Well, I guess I got a little vulnerable a few minutes ago and I asked it if it had any advice for lonely, cat-owning shopkeepers in their middle age.

Don't judge.

And at first, I thought the response was honestly pretty good.

Until I got to the last bullet on the list.

GPT wrote, Cherish your feline companion.

Your cat can provide comfort, companionship, and unconditional love.

Spend quality time with your pet, nurture your bond, and appreciate the joy they bring to your life.

Yeah.

Okay, yet this thing is definitely broken.

Unconditional love?

Your cat can provide comfort?

Okay, sure.

If by providing comfort you actually mean providing a heaping load of shit to the litter box every 15 minutes.

You heard that right.

The joy they bring to my life.

Malachi, you do not bring me joy.

You bring me dead mice, and you don't even bring me those anymore.

Oh, look, here he comes, right out of the litter box right now.

Tracking little litter pellets all over the floor.

I suppose this is part of the joy I'm supposed to be appreciating.

I don't want to hear any retorts from you, you little menace.

Anyway, ChatGPT is dumb and broken, and I'm happy that I've proven that to you today.

I hope you enjoyed the spooky stories I played for you during today's installment.

Come back next week for more.

Until then.

How

could you possibly be going back to the litter box already?

What am I feeding you?

Oh.

Oh, oh dear lord that's human-sized how did that fit inside you i've got to get you to the vet for that one that defies physics

how did that get out of your little cat starfish

how can it

Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV.

Lead producer is Eric Quintana.

Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright.

Hosted by Rain Wilson as his character, Terry Carnation.

Written and produced by Meredith Steadman.

Additional writing by Mark Lachlan.

Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Associate producer is Jaja Muhammad.

Editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Steven Perez, and Meredith Steadman.

Sound design by Cooper Skinner with additional sound design by Steven Perez and April Ruha.

Mix and Master by Cooper Skinner with additional mixing by Steven Perez and Devin Johnson.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale.

Video editing by Dylan Harrington.

Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTI, the Norr Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, and the team at Odyssey.

If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, radio rentalusa.com.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Radio Rental.

You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media.

Just search at Terry Carnation.

On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review.

Thanks for listening.

Hey, this is embarrassing, but they're making me read it.

My favorite murder is the podcast that defined a genre.

This is tough.

In 2016, we decided to combine true crime and comedy, and we thought, this will be great.

There will be no problems.

All the brave podcasters before us.

Yep.

I don't want people to go, like, they're amazing.

I want things and they go, they're brave.

Yes.

That's so brave that you went on to video with that face.

What a brave choice.

You're really changing lives and minds.

New episodes every Thursday on Exactly Right.

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

Goodbye.