Episode 54

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Ho ho ho.

Welcome to Radio Rental.

Or should I say the North Pole?

Kill me.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from yours truly, Terry Kringle.

I am your host and proprietor of this video rental Sha'a toy factory.

And today we're celebrating the holidays.

Oh, God, this is painful.

Business has been slow, and no, you don't need to tell me how many times I've said that to you.

But I had to do something, and well, apparently, if you advertise that Santa's coming to town, you get a lot more patrons stopping in for holiday shopping.

Trouble is, it's all kids and mucus-y fingers and COVID mechan.

Bad idea.

But I'm glad you came in for for some scary stories.

It might help me take my mind off of all this forced merriment around here.

Just one second.

Hi, kiddies.

Santa will be doing a book reading in just a few minutes, so make sure you're on your best behavior.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, you, put that down.

That's a limited edition Gremlins Blu-ray.

Gremlins was a movie from the 80s, and it was very popular.

I'll have you know, don't, don't, don't,

you are going on my naughty list.

You,

young man, are going on the naughty list.

You see that?

They don't even care anymore.

They don't care about the naughty list.

Let's pop out a tape for you while I go adjust my beard and rearouge my cheeks.

When I was 10 years old, Me and my family decided to go visit my grandmother during my spring break.

My My cousin came to visit too.

There wasn't a whole lot to do at my grandmother's house, so we decided to go to the YMCA for the day.

There wasn't really anybody in there because it was a weekday.

We played basketball, we ran laps around the gym.

After a while, we got bored.

We decided that we would go to the pool.

I don't really like swimming that much, but this YMCA had a pretty cool pool.

They had all kinds of water slides and a whirlpool.

So we got on our bathing suits and we headed in there.

We swam laps, played some games.

After a while, we got kind of bored because there was no other kids to play with.

So we decided to see how long we could hold our breath underwater and take turns.

We stood in the shallow end near the lifeguard deck and there was a clock up on the wall, which which is how we used to keep time.

On our last try, I had my face down in the water

and somebody tapped me on the shoulder.

I thought it was my cousin telling me that she gives up.

But it turned out it was a lifeguard telling us that we needed to stop or else she was going to kick us out of the pool.

Since there was nothing else to do, we were like, okay, let's get out, change back in our clothes, go back into the gym or something, because we had an hour left.

We went over to the steps to get out of the pool, and as we were starting to like walk away, she was like, hey, do you guys want to go into the sauna?

You guys can dry off and get warm.

I'll let you guys in.

We were like, yeah, of course.

That sounded like an excellent idea to me because I was freezing and it was pretty cool because you're not allowed in there unless you're 18 years old.

She let us in, she unlocked the door.

She went over to the thermometer and turned up the heat.

She left and then out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw her pull her keys back out and lock it.

But I wasn't completely sure.

I thought, why would she want to do that?

Because we might want to get out.

I looked at the clock that was above the door and and thought we should probably get out in about 10 or 15 minutes.

We don't want to be in there for too long.

So we sat there talking, warming up.

It felt pretty nice.

And then I was like, okay, let's get out.

I went to the door.

It wouldn't open.

I kept trying to shake the handle and it wasn't opening.

So I had my cousin try.

She try to open it.

It didn't work.

So we sat back down and we thought, well, the lifeguard will come and get us in just a couple of minutes.

She wouldn't just leave two kids in a sauna alone.

Maybe she said that she was going to come and get us, and I just didn't hear her.

A couple minutes went by, she still hadn't gotten up.

And I was starting to get really hot.

I got up to the door, started trying to open it again.

Still wouldn't open.

So I started banging on the door,

screaming, come and get us, let us out.

She was just sitting in her lifeguard chair, just staring straight ahead.

Didn't move or look at us or anything.

My cousin got up to join me.

She started kicking and banging on the door, screaming.

Nothing.

And then I started yelling, we need out.

Let us out of here.

There's no way that she can't hear us.

Between the sauna door and her would be maybe 50 or 60 feet.

There's no other sounds going on around us.

Just a still, stagnant pool.

She never looked over once.

She couldn't have forgot us in here, like, she's gonna come back.

You are not supposed to be in a sauna for more than, like, 10 or 15 minutes.

You can have heat stroke.

You can die.

We had been in there for about 25 minutes, and it was getting really, really hot.

I was getting so dizzy.

The wood on the seats, it was like burning our skin.

It was starting to get hard to breathe.

Breathing in the air, it burned.

It was like breathing in fire.

We decided to put our towels over our heads because it kind of made it easier to breathe.

They were a little bit damp.

This is starting to get extremely uncomfortable, and I need to out of here.

Eventually, after we sat there for a little bit, I got back up, try again.

Still nothing.

She just kept staring straight ahead.

She seemed like she was staring aimlessly at nothing.

Completely ignoring us.

There was no way that she couldn't have heard me and my cousin banging on the door, screaming at the top of our lungs.

Nobody else would hear us because there was nobody else in the YMCA.

So I sat back down again.

I was just hoping and hoping that somebody would walk by the door.

Somebody would come into the YMCA that day.

It got to the point where my towel was completely dry.

I wrapped my hair across my face, like over my nose, and I squinted my eyes so that it didn't burn as bad, but I could still see.

My skin was like burning and my whole body was aching.

I just couldn't get myself to get up and move.

And eventually, it got to the point where my cousin, she just was laying down on the bench, face down with a towel over her head.

My whole body hurt, it ached.

My skin was on fire, my lungs were on fire, my eyes were on fire.

I just stared at the door, waiting and waiting and waiting for somebody to come by.

It felt like I was in there for hours.

Finally, this man,

he walked past the door.

He walked over to the lifeguard.

Luckily, he wasn't trying to get into the pool.

He was wanting to come into the sauna.

The lifeguard and him walked over to the door.

She pulled out her keys

and she unlocked it.

Immediately, I grabbed my cousin.

I jumped up and I pulled her over to the door as the guy was walking in.

We were trying to shove our way out, and she started trying to close the door back on us.

The guy was so confused, he didn't know what was going on.

He said to her, I think they want out.

She sighed, and she opened up the door.

And then we ran into the changing room.

And we just got our clothes on so fast.

I remember trying to put on my clothes and my hands and my arms were shaking and like I was so shaky.

We only had about five or ten minutes before my grandma was gonna come and get us.

So we just sat at the door and waited for her.

We didn't say anything on the drive home.

When we got to my grandma's house, my parents were cooking us dinner and I told them everything that had just happened.

They thought that we were like exaggerating.

We weren't in there for that long,

making up crazy, silly story.

I don't know what to think.

If we had died, she would have gotten the blame.

She was the only one in there, and she was the one who let us in.

I don't understand what her endgame was.

It makes me feel sad that somebody would want to hurt two little girls.

It makes me scared for any other little kids that go to that YMCA or anybody else that was alone with her as a lifeguard.

And I do worry about that man.

I wonder what happened to him if she locked him in there too.

What did we do to deserve that?

Did she mean to?

Was that all on purpose?

I would just want to know her reasoning for all of it or know if that was like a huge misunderstanding somehow.

And if it was on purpose, then I would love to send her away to prison.

Half of me thinks I don't want to know her reasoning,

the other part of me wants to know why she was trying to cook us alive in there.

Jingle bells, Susie smells, my BCR is rad.

Malachi likes pumpkin spice and Terry ransom ads.

Hey!

And here they are.

Welcome to Only Murders in the Building, the official podcast.

Join me, Michael Cyril Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of the amazing actors, writers, and crew from season five.

The audience should never stop suspecting anything.

How can you not be funny crawling around on a coffin?

Catch Only Murders in the Building official podcast.

Now streaming wherever you get your podcasts.

And watch Only Murders in the Building, streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus.

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Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

Sort

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary, and subject to availability, flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

Welcome back.

The only good thing about this whole holiday shindig is that Malachi is dressed up like a little elf.

Little feline elf.

I mean, look how cute he is.

Little jingle toes on his tiny paws.

Look at him go.

Oh, adorable.

Adorbs.

Let's play another tape.

Oh, oh, oh, look.

This one says, don't open till Christmas.

Oh, I bet it's good.

I was working at a bank in a very small town in East Texas called Diana.

It's one of those towns you can just kind of drive in and out of in about two minutes.

I had been a teller there for about a year and had just learned how to close personal and auto loans.

And so I was really excited about that.

It was approaching the holidays.

We had just had robbery training.

We would talk about things like looking for specific details on the suspects to give police,

identifying information,

when to push the panic buttons, things like that.

Where this bank sat,

it was on this little plot that actually backed up to a pasture.

Behind the bank, it was just this field and there was a ton of like trees and foliage.

You couldn't really see behind it.

Our third co-worker had just left.

Me and one other girl were working.

She was working a teller area in the back in the drive-thru.

I was actually closing two loans for some back-to-back customers.

I had just gotten done booking these two loans.

Picked up my phone to text my boss and just say, like, woohoo, we have two new loans on the books.

And I had set my phone down,

put my hands down on the keyboard to actually type an email to the loan department and send all the loan documents.

Out of nowhere, I just hear this male voice.

Hey.

I look up and about 20, 25 feet to my left,

there is this guy

standing there

holding this gun and pointing it right at me.

I just go completely numb,

completely froze.

I was just floating.

All I see is

the end of this gun and this guy standing there holding the gun.

Okay, we just had robbery training.

This is a joke.

This is a drill.

This isn't real.

This can't really be happening.

I have to be dreaming.

This wouldn't happen here.

I instantly feel the fight or flight kick in.

We have to get out alive.

I don't care what we have to do, as terrible as that sounds.

I have to make it home to my kid.

I don't want him to think that I have a panic button under here or that I'm alerting police police in any way.

The only things that I could really make out were that he had a covering over his head and his face.

All I could really see were

his eyes and like that section of his face.

That was it.

He had a gun.

He had on dark clothing.

I instantly backed up away from my desk, pushed my chair back, threw my arms up.

The only thing I could get out was,

Do you want the money?

And he said, Yeah, we want the money.

I got up and I went to walk around my desk to go through the hallway that actually led to the door that would get you into the teller area.

I looked at the door

and saw two more guys coming in.

As I'm walking, I remember saying this little prayer in my head.

God, if it's my time, I accept that.

But please don't let it be my time because I have an eight-month-old son and I still have so much life to live with him.

Feeling so much panic and feeling like I wanted to run,

but I couldn't run in that moment.

He's got a gun.

I could vaguely hear him in the background instructing the other two guys to do something.

But I couldn't make out the words.

Everything's just kind of muffled.

That fight or flight kicks in.

And you're just numb to everything.

He was trying to catch up to me.

And so he came running up behind me.

He caught up with me right as I was turning to get to the door.

Went to type type the code in and mistyped it and I just remember audibly saying shit.

I don't know if he could sense my fear or if there was something in him that made him feel like he had to say this, but word for word, he just said, don't worry, I ain't gonna hurt you.

I said, do you promise?

And he said, yes.

And I don't know why in that moment I felt like because he had promised I believed him.

It was like a wave of calm washed over me, almost like when a father comforts their child.

When I got the door open, I noticed that the two guys were already back there

and they were already grabbing everything out of the other teller's drawer.

I remember just flinging my drawer open and saying, here's the money.

You can have it.

all of this here is yours.

I look up and I notice that the other teller is walking to the vault area.

The other teller is probably terrified.

I need to get over there.

She's only been here 30 days.

Each person has a combination to get the keys out of the key box.

Each section of the vault has a key that goes in it and a combination lock.

She doesn't know any of that.

I do it every day so I know it.

Like I have to get in there to help her.

I instantly just followed her into the vault.

We got our keys out.

We got the vault door open and I went to open the compartment that had the larger bills.

Two of the keys looked very similar.

In my daze or my panic, I remember picking the wrong key.

I went to open it and it would go in, but it wouldn't actually turn.

I heard one of the other guys saying, hurry up, hurry up.

I was panicking a little bit.

I didn't know if that guy was going to hurt me.

That wasn't the guy that promised me he wouldn't hurt me.

I didn't know what the other guys were going to do.

I still had that fear of, I've got to do this right and I've got to get him out of here.

I got that section open

and for this brief moment, everyone just paused.

They just stood there.

They didn't say anything.

They didn't move.

I was expecting them to just kind of bum rush the vault and like start grabbing money.

And they didn't.

I just remember looking at them and saying, do you want to get the money or do you want me to get it?

And they said, you get it.

They slid the bag over to me.

I started scooping money just into this bag to try to get them out of there.

The only thing I can think is, I need to get us out of this situation.

I need to get home to my son, and I'm the only one that can get us out of this situation right now.

I get that done, and then I go, do y'all want the ones as well?

Because those were in a completely different compartment with different codes and everything.

One guy said, yeah, we want the ones.

Another guy said, well, that's because you're greedy, man.

And in that moment, I almost laughed.

It was just such an ironic statement.

Y'all are robbing a bank.

Y'all are all greedy.

But the fact that you would say that out loud and be like joking with your buddy right now is just crazy.

I look up as I'm finishing getting the rest of the money out of there and notice that the other teller is getting her wrists zip zip-tied together.

I'm thinking, okay, well, it just gets worse and worse.

We gave them everything they wanted.

This can't be good if this is what they're doing now.

As soon as I got done helping get all the money out of the vault, I just instantly turned to him with my wrists together because I knew that he was going to zip tie mine as well.

And I didn't want him to think that I was going to put up a fight or try to go against what they wanted at all.

I was just trying to do everything they wanted to get them out of there.

As he was zip-tying my wrists, I looked down and noticed that they were making the other teller kneel in the corner of the vault.

Okay, now we are going to die.

They made me kneel facing her.

So we were just kneeling in front of each other.

She can see behind me, and all I'm seeing is like the corner of the wall and her.

And I can't see anything going on behind me.

Are they about to kill us?

What's going on?

All I could hear was just movement.

Shuffling, like people walking out.

I heard someone fidgeting with something.

Then I heard the door close.

They think that we've seen something that could identify them.

They think that they're going to get caught.

This is the point like where we're going to die.

Like this is going to be bad.

There were no good outcomes going through my head at that point.

I didn't know if there was still someone in the vault with us.

So I didn't want to say anything.

Then the other teller looked at me and she said,

are you okay?

And I was like, yeah,

I'm okay.

Are you okay?

And she was like, yeah, I'm okay.

Do you think we should go out there?

And she said, I don't know.

I don't know where they are.

The last thing either of us wanted to do was open the door and the suspects are still in the bank.

We waited probably 20 seconds and I kind of creaked the door open

and heard the back door shut on the other side side of the bank.

Okay,

some or all of them have left at this point.

And I pop my head out.

We notice that there's a lady sitting in the commercial drive-through.

Ironically, she's the girlfriend of the guy whose loan I had just closed.

I click the button to talk to her through the window.

Hi, how are you?

And she goes, did y'all just get robbed?

It's finally hitting me that this is reality.

This really did just happen.

This isn't a dream.

This isn't a prank.

This isn't a joke.

She goes, well, I just saw three guys run out this door back here and run into this pasture.

I had confirmation that all of the guys had left the building.

I started running through the bank.

looking in closets, clearing offices, and I just remember telling the other teller, push the panic button.

And she said, well, which one?

All of them.

Just push all the panic buttons.

Keep pressing them until somebody gets here.

Within just a couple minutes, an officer from the neighboring town shows up.

And we just told him, yeah, we're okay.

You know, we're really scared and we're shaking up, but we're okay.

At that point, the adrenaline was wearing off.

We were visibly shaking.

That was the first moment where I finally felt like we were fully safe.

The FBI came, interviewed us.

He encouraged us, if you hear anything, it's a small town.

Let us know.

About a year after this happened, I got a letter in the mail stating that it had been assigned for me to contact like a victim specialist with the FBI and that the case had been closed.

I have no idea if they were ever caught, if something happened while they were in the commission of another crime.

I don't know, there's just not that closure.

I don't know if I'll ever get that closure.

Well, that last story was ho-ho horrible, if you ask me.

Now, in case you're not done with your holiday shopping, let's squeeze in a few last-minute ads.

Then you can buy the things and prove that you actually love your family.

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Your receipt did.

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Welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed your dosage of thrills today.

Consider it my present to you.

Really do.

Because I didn't get you anything else.

Nightmares are the gifts that keep on giving.

Enjoy.

I already told you money was tight.

And on that note, here I go.

All right, kiddies, it's story time.

Gather around Terry Kringle while he tells you a tale.

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring.

Not even a mouse.

Well, actually, that's not true.

We do have a mouse now.

And funny story, at first I thought the mouse was the reincarnation of my wife, because, hey, hey, what?

What was that, a gumdrop?

Don't throw gumdrops at me.

You're all getting coal this Christmas.

No, on second thought, coal is too valuable and does too much damage to the atmosphere.

So you're all getting a less valuable fuel source like ethanol or peat moss

or wind.

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 Stedman.

Additional writing by Mark Lachlan.

Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Associate producer is Jajah Muhammad.

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

Sound design, mix, and master by Cooper Skinner.

Additional sound design and Mixing by Devin Johnson.

Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set.

Video Editing by Dylan Harrington.

Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler and Rob Sheridan.

Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station16, 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, radiorentalusa.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.