#583 - Charming Serial Killer - Kirkland, Washington

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When a young woman

named Desiree

vanishes without a trace,

the trail leads to Kat Torres,

a charismatic influencer

with millions of followers.

But behind the glamorous posts and inspirational quotes,

a sinister truth unravels.

Binge all episodes of Don't Cross Cat early and ad-free on Wondery+.

This week, in Kirkland, Washington,

what seems like one horrifying but simple murder

quickly turns into a serial killer stalking the area

and escalating his horrible acts to a Ted Bundy level of brutality. Welcome to Small Town Murder.
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay! Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy.
Yay indeed. My name is James Petrogallo.
I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jimmy Wissman.
Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely insane, brutal, and awful, and hilarious episode of Small Town Murder. We have a crazy episode for you today.
Another serial killer in our midst and really strange one too. Just an odd guy and lucky he was caught when he did.
Put it that way. We'll get into all of that and more.
But first head over to ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com Get your tickets not only for regular live shows, which in May we're in Chicago at the Riviera. Get your tickets right now.
St. Louis is sold out in May.
Also, the virtual live show, April the 19th. It's the 420 virtual live show.
Takes place Saturday, April 19th. And you can buy it, watch it, do whatever you want with it for two weeks after that.
So you can watch it over and over. Do anything you want anywhere in the world.
With internet, you can watch this just like a regular live show, except you're wherever the hell you want to be. Wherever that is.
We're going to have the screen, the pictures, the costumes. I'm going to force Jimmy to smoke out of crazy contraptions.
It'll be a wild time. Can't wait for that.
And like I said, get your tickets also for the rest of the year because they are going fast and a lot of the dates are sold out like after the summer. So get those right now.
Shut up and give me murder dot com. Also, listen to our other two shows, which are crime in sports, which if you haven't heard, if you haven't listened to, you don't have to like sports, especially what we're doing now.
It's like a 10 parter on Evil Knievel. So you don't need to like sports.
You just need to like crazy people who do insane things. Who doesn't? And want to hear us make fun of them.
So definitely check that out. And also your stupid opinions, which is absolutely hilarious when we go over one-star reviews and things like that from all over the internet.
And then if that's not enough, you need Patreon. There you go.
Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of the bonus material. Anybody, $5 a month or above, you're going to get tons of stuff.
First of all, you're going to get hundreds of episodes that you've never heard before immediately upon subscription of bonus stuff. And then you get new stuff every other week.
One crime in sports, one small town murder, and you get it all. This week, we're going to talk about, for crime in sports, some cheating scandals and things like that.
One really is the highlight, though. The Spanish Paralympic team who had no actual disabled members.
Bad news there. They did win the gold, so I mean, that's pretty impressive.
Good job, guys. And then for Small Town Murder, we're going to talk about American Nightmare.
It's a documentary on Netflix, and I read the whole book that goes with it, too. Long book.
And it's the craziest story I've ever heard in my life, honestly. It's insane.
Edge of your seat. You think it's a Sherry Papini fake kidnapping situation.
Then you don't, and then you do again. It's the craziest thing you ever want to hear.
It's the deepest quirk you've ever been in. It's so wild, man.
We'll get into all that. Patreon.com slash crime in sports.
And you get a shout out at the end of the regular show as well. That said, disclaimer time.
It was a comedy show, everybody. We are comedians.
Now, that doesn't mean anything in this show is not real. Every last little detail is real.
Nothing's embellished for comic effect or any garbage like that. This is meticulously researched stuff.

And we're going to find places for some humor.

Now, we might go, how does that happen?

Very easily.

There's a lot of dumb things to make fun of in this.

Here's what we don't do, though.

We don't make fun of the victims or the victims' families.

Well, why is that, James?

Because we're assholes.

But?

But we're not scumbags.

See how that goes?

That's how it works.

But otherwise, there's plenty to make fun of. First of all, someone going, I think I can get away with murder.
This seems pretty easy. When you have no experience doing that, probably a bad idea.
That right there is going to get made fun of and a whole lot of other things like that. But if you think that true crime and comedy should never, ever go together, then maybe we're not for you, but maybe we you should check it out i think we're for everybody

we're for the children damn it small town murders for the children no it's not it's one thing it's not for is the children but uh it's to protect the children yeah there you go uh but for the rest of you though that want to hear a crazy story and want to hear some wild stuff i think it's time to sit back here we go clear here, and let's all shout, shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody.
Okay. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's do it.
We are going all the way to Washington State this week. Okay.
Heading out to the West Coast. We're going to Kirkland, Washington, which is a little bigger town than we usually cover, but a burb you know what i mean it's a suburb so well we'll talk about that actually um it's uh it's in yeah i was gonna say i was wondering if you're gonna bring that up or not one thing i was like he'll probably bring up the walmart brand or not walmart costco cost Is it? Yeah.
No. We'll talk about it.

This is in western Washington, and it's about 20 minutes to Seattle, so suburb outside of

Seattle, about an hour and 40 minutes to Everson, Washington, which was our last episode there.

It was an express episode called Ghost Hunter, where a woman said that she thought her boyfriend

was a ghost, so she shot him, which is, you know, likely excuse, obviously, because I

shoot at ghosts when I see them.

Right.

Thank you. a woman said that she thought her boyfriend was a ghost, so she shot him, which is, you know, likely excuse, obviously, because I shoot at ghosts when I see them.
That's what I would do right away. This is in King County, area code 425.
The motto here, and really sucking on Seattle's teat here, the gateway to Seattle. Sure.
Come through here. There's got to be a door there somewhere.
Has to be. History, a little bit of history.
In 1886, a guy named Peter Kirk, where Kirkland came from, was a British-born businessman who wanted to expand his family's steel production company and wanted to go to Washington and do that because he heard iron deposits had been discovered in the Cascade Mountains.

So under this Kirkland Land and Development Company, he purchased thousands of acres of land in what's now downtown Kirkland.

But this was in 1888 when it was just nothing.

So they started the construction of a new steel mill.

And he was saying, telling everyone that this was going to be the, pittsburgh of the west yeah yeah didn't quite happen um and the company ended up amounting to nothing and another steel company opened up and took all what they wanted so totally over but he did get the the town named after him so there is that that's helpful now, Costco previously had its headquarters in Kirkland. Oh.
Headquarters are in a different place, but they kept the namesake of the Kirkland Signature store brand. That's because that's where they were based out of.
That's the only reason why. Yeah, well, you've got to keep the name because otherwise people won't know that it's the same.
What the hell is that? Yeah, Walmart's got Great Value stuff at Kirkland. Is it Great Value? Yeah, Great Value.
We've done several on your stupid opinions, like the Great Value pizza. Oh, right, right, right.
So reviews of this town, we've never been there. Let's find out what the people think.
Here's five stars, and there's a lot of good reviews of this town, too. There's tons of good ones.
You're not a Costco shopper, are you? No. I'm not.
I don't have seven kids. What the fuck do I need? Why would I need to buy things in that volume? I don't need.
No, I don't need three cases of fucking chicken nuggets. I just don't need that to come in one box.
It's crazy. A pallet of cheese.
It's an yeah, it's what I'm saying. A pallet of kegs of cheese puffs.
It's crazy the amount that they sell people.

Yeah, I don't want a dresser full of raisin bran. That's too much raisin bran for me.
I can't eat all that. So it's going to be bad stuff here.
So let's get to reviews here. Five stars.
Kirkland is a beautiful small city on the east side of Lake Washington. Downtown Kirkland is a lively seaside area often populated by swift walking locals and their adorable dogs.

Well, even the dogs are cuter in Kirkland.

That's nice.

With summers, there's a weekly farmer's market that brings new trinkets and delicious food

options to the area.

So my personal experience in Kirkland has been nothing short of wonderful. Wow, this is crazy.
All right, here's five stars. I've lived in Kirkland ever since I was born in 1997 of May.
That's how he writes it. I don't know.
97 of May. I've grown to love the beautiful atmosphere of nature and friendly neighbors.
The local food is amazing and the parks are always clean. It's a quiet place to raise a family, but not great if you like to go out to clubs, as most suburbs aren't real big on nightlife.
The rent is incredibly inflated as well. This is a very expensive area, by the way.
Is that right? Yeah, this is like an upscale suburb of an expensive city. Seattle's already an expensive city.
And the burbs are expensive, too. Here's three stars.
Properties on the water are expensive, but very nice. Mostly apartment housing.
Very few abandoned properties. Yeah.
Places where there's high real estate values, you're not going to get a lot of abandoned. someone's going to get in there and sell it then two stars

street lights are not great

for night time driving of abandoned someone's gonna get in there and sell it um then two stars street lights are not great for nighttime driving that's it that's the whole good for that's the only thing they're good for whole review of the town is that that's like saying that this taco bell isn't good for 2 a.m drunk eating what else is it there for? It's its job. Yeah.
So people of this town, population is 91,656. That's now.
When this all happened, there was less people there. It's exactly 50-50 male and female here, which we never see for some reason.
Median age is like exactly the national average to 37.8, like exactly what it is. Family here, 55% married, way less people have children and are single.
Everybody's like married with children, expensive suburb, that kind of thing. Race of this town, 72.6% white, 1.1% black, 14% Asian, and 7% Hispanic.
So spread around there. Religious, it's about 38% religious.
And the highest group here is going to be Catholics with 15.5%, which isn't that high. Yeah, as we know, the Catholics are the Baptists of the Pacific Northwest.
Obviously, we all know that. The Willamette Valley.
Of the entire Cascade Mountain region. So the unemployment rate here is about the national average.
It's pretty low, and median household income here is very high. It is national average is $69,021.
Here it is $121,998. Almost double.
That is a healthy income they got going on there. They're doing fantastic.
The problem is the cost of living is equally as high. That's the issue here.
$100 is regular in the United States for cost of living. Here it is $158.
So high. That's expensive.
The housing is the high one. That's the big one here.

The housing is a $329 out of $100.

Holy.

The median home cost here, $1,055,900.

Median.

Median.

That is rough, man.

That's what I mean.

This is.

Yeah.

Your average house is a million dollars.

You're pricing out the riffraff, I guess.

I guess so.

And wait till we tell you about these houses.

I mean, these start with our matter of fact, let's get to it right now with the Kirkland, Washington real estate report.

The average two bedroom rental here goes for twenty six hundred eighty dollars which is almost like manhattan prices that's a lot that's crazy it's over twice what the average wow yeah that's insane here is a six bedroom three bath sounds like they made a couple of big bedrooms into two smaller bedrooms type of thing. Somebody had some extra kids and just added some bedrooms.
That's possible here. They don't get to shit anywhere.
Out in the hallway. Line up out in the hallway.
As long as there's a master bath we don't care what you two do out there. You kids do.
3,059 square feet. It just looks like a basic house.
It's like a raised ranch house. It's not like anything spectacular.
Nothing wonderful. You can't even really tell what the inside looks like because it's all photoshopped to be staged.
Basically. So that's weird.
It is $1,775,000. Bottom rung home.
No land either. This is on a little lot of a house.

There's no acre of woods or something.

None of that shit.

Next up, four bedroom, four bath.

Tea hole.

Tea bowl for each and every

bee hole.

3,520

square feet. This is on

.32 acres. This is on 0.32 acres.

That's a third thing.

A third of an acre.

A third of an acre.

It is like a fancy log cabin.

Yeah.

It's got nice windows.

3,000 square feet of this fucking window.

Yeah.

A rich person's log cabin is what it is.

A rich person pretending to be a woodsman over here.

Yeah, yeah.

You're a real Abe Lincoln.

Look at you over there.

$2,800,000

for this.

It's fucking crazy.

You got no land.

I don't even know what to do here.

Next up, three bedroom,

five baths, so T-Ball for everybody's

B-Hull, 3,990

square feet.

That's almost 4,000. On .69 acres.
This is on the water. Another kind of .69.
Not a lot. It's on Lake Washington.
It says spectacular Kirkland Gold Coast waterfront on coveted Lake looks like a like a small like a hunting lodge that's

fancy like a fancy lodge 12 million nine hundred fifty thousand dollars 13 million dollars

your ass 13 million dollars you gotta be out of your fucking mind that's crazy uh things to do

here let's do this kirkland uncorked let's get into it wine time yeah where wine meets street fair fun fuck yeah we're drinking in the streets happens that's what that is it's fascinating that costco uses kirkland as like this as their brand and it's like you know it's store brand so it's like the lower rung but they are treating kirkland like it's oh 13 million dollars for a house there it's expensive you tell me kirkland wine in the street i'm like i know the people that are going there yeah no you would think so but uh i know it's great it's what's wild about it yeah you would imagine it would be like this is not you know it'd be guys in like cut off sweatpants with six kids traveling behind them just standing in the tv section while they're while their wife shops for fucking clothes that are for some reason in the middle of the store next to dry goods i don't know why calvin clines that wouldn't sell elsewhere and she's dragging that fucking cart that wagon that foldable wagon. They have Adidas sweatsuits.

Do you want?

Should I get one?

Do you want just the pants or do you want the matching set?

It's only $38 for both.

Costco's fine.

I mean, I've gone there in Arizona.

It's like a weird number, too.

In Arizona, we went there at some point.

I have a problem with Costco because of the receipt checking thing that I've ranted and raved about the whole time.

So they can go fuck their mothers all together.

So this festival is split into two parts, a 21 plus tasting garden and an all ages street fair.

Yeah.

All ages.

So you can wander out drunk from the garden into where the kids are.

The tasting garden, this seems like where the fun is, features wine tasting, live music, and a Saturday food truck feast. Sure.
The street fair features artisan booths and crafts. So nothing.
Just walking around, digging off. A band called The Chancellors will be there.
Yeah, that's good. That sounds okay.
And then soon as they wrap they wrap up they clean up all their instruments get the drum set off the stage and then there's a dog model contest which is yes which is awesome i'll stay away yeah yeah i'm gonna stay away i don't want him to just you know i don't want oscar to make them all feel bad so they can all kiss my ass a bunch of male dogs walking walking around with their dicks out. With their dicks out.
A bunch of red rockets. Balls clipped.
Because the whores are just trapped. Oh, look at them.
These bitches are everywhere. So there's also a harvest festival.
It says save the date for Kirkland's fourth annual harvest festival. And it takes place at a beach.
It features food trucks.

We got live music by Roman, R-O-E-M-E-N, Roman.

And yeah, they're really in favor of Roe versus Wade.

They're just, they're really the Roman.

Yeah.

And the whereabouts, the Roman and the whereabouts, That's a band. And also a band called 24 Madison.
All right. Don't get your dress out, guys.
That's where we'll be practicing if you need to find us later. And Activities for Children at the Kids Corral.
Yeah. With two Ks.
It's a kid and then corral with a K. Luckily, it's not like the, you know, could have

been a lot with the Kirkland kids corral

could have gotten real ugly real fast. So

I'm glad there.

There's also a cornhole tournament, of course.

Sure. Register your team

at, you go to kirklandparks.net

and you search

cornhole, it says.

Just pop cornhole

in your query search there and see what happens, everybody. Throw cornhole in your search engine.
I love that so much. Do it with your pants off.
You're going to need it. You are going to need it for sure.
Holy shit. Crime rate in this town.
We're interested in here. Property crime.
Now, this is a very expensive area so i would yeah i would assume zero it should be low but that's kind of where the riffraff goes to steal shit too but like i would i would assume in like a neighborhood like that like remember when we went to uh we went to do some shit in la and we went and found oj's house we were driving around brentwood at some every turn we made you just expected three cops to pull up on us and tell us to get the fuck out of there because we're scumbags and don't belong here right yeah that's what I picture this area would be like hey scump you don't belong here you're not wealthy get out of here in a 2012 Honda Civic that that screeches when you shift gears this is in your jeep this is in your jeep was in my jeep it was in your jeep which kind of made us look worse it made us look like somehow it made us look worse that was after you upgraded to the to the jeep but yeah just about average on property crime so that's odd um and then violent crime murder rape robbery and of course assault the mount Rushmore of crime, that's low. So that is one-third of the national average.

So two- under it. Very, very low there.
That said, let's talk about some horrible murder, shall we? All right. We're going to jump right in and jump in hot here.
Let's go to June 23rd, 1990. Yeah.
And let's meet Jimmy. Let's meet Jimmy.

Let's meet us.

Neither of us.

Jimmy, he's a Mickey D's employee who's at work at 5 o'clock in the morning.

Oh, God, the poor bastard.

Jimmy's not having a great run in life here at this point in time.

He woke up early for this shit.

Oh, man.

Imagine getting up at 4 to make the fries.

That sounds horrifying.

The fries, James. You're making hash browns and shitty eggs bad eggs so here's jimmy here he is he's coming out he's got a heavy you know it's going out to the dumpster taking out i guess last night's trash or whatever uh which god fucking overnight mcdonald's trash this guy's you know it's leaking everywhere yeah nasty those dumpsters smell so bad oh they're so disgusting they're so disgusting yeah nothing smells worse for some reason than a chinese food place dumpster yeah yeah i worked downtown in phoenix and there was a dumpster that was for this chinese place and it was it's the most this is an alley full of dumpsters and this one stood out as particularly fucking rank i used to have to take the trash out at the pizza joint and that yeast and milk oh that'll do it too bad shit soaking in there forever and then people just throw the bag into the back room and then once a day somebody has to go back there to take the and you're throwing like 13 bags of giant amounts of trash that are leaking it's so gross we could have that the thing here.
I'm picturing lots of Diet Coke and Orange High C leaking out of this fucking thing. It's going to be nasty.
It's a sour juice. So he gets to the back door, and he gets out of the back door.
He's got like a gurney thing that he's taking it out on, like multiple garbage things, and he's heading out toward the dumpster, which those dumpsters are kind of in the middle of the parking lot because they share a little dumpster bay with the black angus restaurant that's also right there so that's what's going on here so he's walking and it's very early in the morning and doesn't really can't really see very much going on and he does see something kind of laying in the in the parking lot between him and the dumpster. So he sees that.
He's like, what's that? It looked like a long white and long and twisted like a tree branch is the way he thought it looked like. So he's like, what the hell is that there? Not a lot of white tree branches unless it's like a birch tree or something.
So they were like, what is this? They didn't know if it was like, he said, didn't know if it was something from like that fell out of black angus's trash cans or i don't it's like i don't know what black angus does over there i don't know what the hell kind of shit they throw out so it's very odd so he's looking he's like what the fuck he stops for a minute and then he thought oh no is this some kind of animal or some shit i don't want to get close to it if it's a wounded animal it's gonna bite me my life sucks already i'm taking mcdonald's garbage out at five o'clock in the morning i don't need to get bitten by a rabid raccoon now too on the way to do it so he goes a little bit closer and he thinks it's a mannequin thinks it's always they always say that god damn it it looks like a mannequin it's never been a mannequin ever in one of our facebook groups there i noticed somebody put i know i hear that It's never a mannequin. It's never been a mannequin ever.
In one of our Facebook groups there, I noticed somebody put, I know I hear that it's never a mannequin.

And then posted a picture and put, I was walking one day, it actually was a mannequin.

She had a whole story about how she was walking, thought it was, assumed it was a dead body because she listens to this show.

Right.

And it was a mannequin.

So that's pretty fun.

Saw it and walked closer?

Yeah, because he was like, what is it? He's got to go to the dumpster. It's McDonald's, man.
You want that big payday. You've got to go to the dumpster.
You saw a mannequin. Yeah.
I thought it was a mannequin. Then you're like, well, it's never a mannequin.
I'm going to go look. I'm going to investigate closer and then look closer.
And that's one of the other things we said is keep walking. You think you see a mannequin, you didn't.
I'd call-1 and say it's never a mannequin it's never get it just i don't know it could be a mannequin but he's like he's looking and he goes it just it looks real it just looks really really real and like you know no clothes on this mannequin just looks like it's laying there yeah then it's got to be a person it can't be a mannequin he's like you know processing all this and going, what the fuck is it? Some kind of some drunk over here felt like a homeless person fell down. What's going on? But the way the the way this is form was twisted.
Unnatural. It was very unnatural.
Yeah. So he looked closer and then said something took off, ran in the mcdonald's and um so he uh later on a police officer would say he sees something really strange and it's the body of a woman and so he rushed in called 9-1-1 police arrive at the scene and they find a young woman dead and they're looking at her she's got no visible gunshot wounds or stab wounds or anything like that.
So that's interesting. It's a naked dead lady.
Naked dead lady in the McDonald's Black Angus parking lot there. And the odd thing is her body has been posed.
Twisted up like that? Clearly posed. This is not an accidental deal here.
Just a dumping and the body rusted like that. They put it like that.
Absolutely. She was found partially inside the dumpster corral area.
You know, those dumpsters with the little gate that opens up in the parking lot there. And it's definitely posed.
The way they say it is she's nude, wearing nothing but small articles of jewelry, and bent into shapes that a human doesn't bend into. The cops said it looked like complete degradation is what it looked like, somebody was trying to do.
This is from Dr. Robert Keppel, who is John Douglas's partner in the profiling and all that.
Yeah, wrote a million books and all that kind of thing from the FBI. Yeah.
He says the victim was left lying on her back with her left foot crossed over the instep of her right ankle. Her head was turned to the left and a Frito-Lay dip container.
You know, those little fucking cans, basically rested on top of her right eye weird real weird and in one hand they find a douglas fir pine cone she's holding a pine cone so there's a there's a frito-lay dip can on her eye and a pine cone in her hand and there's no like this isn't like't like a big pine tree is above me. And they fall over.
There's no other pine cones around. What the shit? That's very interesting.
What's that message? That, it's what I'm saying. She's wearing two pieces of jewelry.
Arms are folded over her stomach. Legs extended, crossed at the ankles and had a pine cone in her hand, like we said.

A detective said somebody had taken quite some time staging the body.

I had noticed there was a large-sized coffee cup lid covering her right eye, which it's not.

It's a Frito-Lay dip lid.

That's what it is.

One foot was crossed over the other.

Her hands were folded over her stomach, and they were holding a pine cone.

The post-mortem injuries and spending a lot of time with the body really isn't that common yeah it's not it's really yeah it's especially in a public place like this because you to it's one thing to pose someone in a private place it's another thing to kill someone and then just dump them but to take somebody to a public place where there's you're fully exposed in fully exposed and no cover in a fucking parking lot and take a dead naked body and be posing it, you've got to have some nerves of steel to do that. Like, I couldn't fucking do that.
I'd be shitting my pants. Wouldn't you? Oh, my God.
Jesus Christ. I don't like running red lights.
You know what I mean? Oh, fuck. It wasn't your god it wasn't you god damn it i'm looking all around this is crazy i want to be around dead people so uh they find out that the young lady who they have discovered is mary ann polreich she is 27 years old and that's who who it is so in the early hours of december 4th 2024 ceo 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan.
This assailant starts firing at him. And the suspect.
He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione. Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history.
I was meant to sow terror. He's awoken the people to a true issue.
Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant starts firing at him.
And the suspect. He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione.
Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history. I was meant to sow terror.
He's awoken the people to a true issue. Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus.
You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. They're going to have to investigate all of this, and it's really, clearly somebody is a sick fuck, and they know it.
So this is a dangerous person out there, and they don't know if it's personal. They don't know anything about it.
That said, let's talk about a man here. Let's talk about, let's start over here.
We'll talk about George Waterfield Russell Jr. Waterfield Russell.
George Waterfield is his middle name, which I'm sure that somebody's maiden name or something. Russell Jr.
He's born in April of 1958. He's born down in Florida, and he'll spend his first few years in Florida here.
Goes from Florida. He'll end up in Washington.
So can't get any farther away from Florida, really. So he's the oldest of three children that we'll find out.
Step brothers and sisters that come much later. His parents are separated when he's about six months old.
So his mom has a lot of ambition. His mom, Joyce, here, and his dad, George Waterfield Russell, Sr.
So they had him. They looked fine.
But apparently the family wasn't doing very well. And Joyce decided when young George is about six months old that she's had enough and she wants out of this whole thing.
She wants a different, not just a different situation romantically or whatever. She wants a different life completely.
She's like, I'm done with all this shit. Yeah.
So she left her husband and also leaves George behind with her mother. Oh, she wants out of everything.
Yeah. She wants a different life.
A wife or a mom. Nothing.
So leaves George with the mother, and she went off to college. She said, fuck that., had the kid too early, got married too early, going back to college.
Now she said she'd be back. She's like, I'm going to, I'm going to go to college and I'll come back.
I'm going to have a degree and I'll be able to take care of my son better. So, and she does come back actually.
Really? In 1964. And, uh, she'd gotten her diploma.
She'll be, end up being a college professor. Wow.
She's pretty smart lady. And not only does she come back with a diploma, she comes back with a new husband.
Oh, OK. I got this paper and I brought you a new dad.
Here you go. Yeah.
I don't hear, by the way, anything about George Sr. for the rest of the story.
He just might as well have disintegrated, just vanished into thin air here. So the, uh, this guy that she has, this new husband is a very successful dental surgeon.
That does very well for himself. He's like, he's the dental, uh, he does all the dental work for the university of Washington sports teams and all that kind of shit.

Yeah, he's a really successful guy.

And she comes back saying, I'm picking George up, and we're moving to Washington State.

We're moving to somewhere very, very wealthy also and ritzy here, and not Kirkland, somewhere much ritzier than that.

What?

So, yeah, the problem here is George is never, ever ever gonna feel like he's a part of this family ever which from somebody who has done that i get it but a lot of that looking back on it as an adult now i'm as part you too you you because you feel like you're not welcome doesn't mean you're not welcome. You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm saying.
They could have been very welcoming and very conciliatory to him and everything else, but still he could have felt like that just because that's how people feel. You know what I'm saying? That's how I felt and it wasn't anybody's fault really so i don't know so uh but he never really feels like he's like uh as close to his mom as he should be because she has the new husband and you know he feels like an add-on just attack on you know like a responsibility i had to go get my son so so they move uh out to this area here.
By the way, the dentist's name is Wanzel Mobley. Dr.
Wanzel Mobley. That's the dentist here.
Now, they end up, this guy makes a lot of money, and they end up going to Mercer Island. That's where they move, which is an extremely wealthy little enclave up there i mean it's its own little planet really it's the best way to put it there's all kinds of little islands up there that are just dominated with incredibly wealthy people and it's there they have their own goddamn uh it's their own ecosystem on these little islands i mean there's not the outside world really doesn't matter because it's all about the looks of this and how your house is and do you have the right clothes and the right cars and the one thing is described as uh they said on mercer island poverty is driving last year's mercedes that was a quote that somebody had i was like wow that's it gives you a pretty good idea um now george is with his mother and his stepfather here.
By the way, they're the only black family in the neighborhood. Is that right? Yeah, they're the only black family in this neighborhood.
There's a couple other black people, I guess, on Mercer Island, but right where they are there, they're the only ones there. so um and they don't seem to mind i mean like uh the doctor doesn't mind.
The mother doesn't mind. George doesn't mind either because it's it's a pretty nice area.
And he's got so he doesn't feel left out or anything like that with that at all. That doesn't really come up for him.
But he does feel like an afterthought in the family, though. He feels like they don't care about him.
About 1970 ish he's in about seventh grade and he meets a kid named boris brockett which is a tough name for an american kid to grow up with that's just boris at all boris brockett last name too oh man um so he hadn't seen uh george walking around george had a saint bernard a big saint bernard He's a little guy, George, too, even when he's an adult, he's small. Doesn't matter how big you are around the St.
Bernard. Well, St.
Bernard's, like, bigger than him, like, taller than him. Like, if the dog's walking, it looks like it's alone, and then you're like, oh, there's a kid over there.
Okay. And, by the way, I think, like, in this area, there are exactly two black families.
It is this one and Bill Russell. Oh, really? Yeah, Bill Russell, Bill Russell, the all-time great basketball player with like 11 rings and all that kind of shit.
And Bill Russell's kid is about George's age and everything like that, too. So they grow up together.
Yeah, well, people will be like, oh, you must be Bill Russell's kid. He's like, no, other black family.
So Boris, this is a quote from Boris. He said he liked George right away.
He said, he was short like me. He had big, round, bubbly face.
His big eyes allowed infectious laugh. He's your best friend in a second he emphasized that his name was george russell jr i asked him if he was related to bill russell and he said he thought so he's not at all related to bill russell crazy that he moved to an area where bill russell's the only other black guy and he's got his same last name so people just assumed he was like you know bill russell's nephew that he moved up there having a hard time somewhere or some shit.
So he said, yes. He said, I got the idea.
He didn't want to get too personal. He said, my mother took one look at George and said, watch out for that boy.
He's trouble. But after she got to know George, she was totally charmed.
He was polite, respectful. Even as a little kid, he had this uncanny ability to make you like him an easy style, warm, very Southern.
He'll lose his Southern accent later on on purpose. But at this point he's got a real like heavy, like he said, his favorite food was the way this kid pronounced it.
Griots G R R or G R E E dash I T S. Griots.
Yeah. I'm not saying that in a southern accent.
I'm saying it like he's saying it. And he called me Boris.
Oh. Yeah.
So he said, when I asked him what part of the south he was from, he shrugged. I don't know.
I don't know. That's what the fuck are you talking about? How do you not know? Around.
I don't know. He finally said he was from Maryland.
said he was from maryland not true um i thought griots must be fish eggs he didn't realize that meant grits he couldn't put that together he didn't know what that was so he said um on his second visit to to uh george's house little boris met his mother joyce and he said he had difficulty finding the right word to describe Joyce. What does that mean? He said, he thought about it, and he goes, dignified, austere.
These aren't warm, motherly words, really, that you want to hear. Kind, nice.
Dignified is good, yeah. Dignified's fine, but i don't care if my mom is dignified i

just want her to be nice to me you know what i mean like and austere that's not a great that means that's if you're slashing budgets you're being austere you know what i mean that's like she's very i guess sleek and streamlined yeah yeah before he finally said i think i found the right word, ominous. Again.
That's real bad. Doesn't sound.
I know that word. Real motherly.
Austere and ominous don't sound like warm traits that much. So Boris went on to say she was small like George, slender, short black hair, nice face, Look like Coretta Scott King.

It's like I know one other black lady who exists. I think it's that one.

She had a thin voice, not threatening or overbearing.

Sounded a little British. She's not at all British.
She's Southern, but she went to school.

And they very much want to speak in a certain way in this area to be accepted. They're both highly educated.
One's a doctor. One's a professor.
So, yeah. She's exuding.
She's exuding that. Yeah.
She had a thin voice, not threatening, sounding a little British. George said she taught school English, drama, black history, stuff like that.
He said, quote, tell you one thing. She didn't make you feel overly welcome.
Oh, her look kept you quiet. He said her look kept you quiet.
You didn't hear her talk about greets. George was kind of subdued around her.
And so was I. She scared me.
She dot dot dot scared me. The kid said.
But don't forget, we were trying to slam dunk our socks in her living room. That's the other thing, too too he talks about this game they played where they would over the curtain rod they would play basketball with these socks and fuck up the curtains and fuck up the curtain rods and uh you know they played mostly at his house because shit would get broken and then they'd go to george's and he didn't want to play and now he understood why because he was afraid of his mother yeah so when boris asked george why he was a russell and his mother was a mobley right what the fuck he's like i don't understand that because it's like 1970 and he doesn't really and with all these rich people there's probably not a ton of divorces you know probably yeah so he explained in a few words that his natural father lived back east um the man george now called dad was his mother's second husband the dentist so boris attempted to ask another personal question and he said george just turned away and stopped talking and then never invited me over again he just quit talking you're too close he's like can't do it so george has some arms length shit that's going on here that's a little bit weird um i guess his family would cause that, I suppose.
So he gets into some trouble here right away. And a lot of times, too, if you're new and you're trying to make friends, you might get into trouble trying to show off.
And kids having balls is currency as a kid. Truth, yeah.
Especially with boys. I don't know how it is with girls i don't think it's the same i don't think girls are like that bitch is crazy she's awesome whereas guys are like that motherfucker's crazy he's the he's the coolest you know what i mean i do think that uh that is something with girls though of like braver i don't know that yeah yeah she's the one that that'll take us out and be the crazy one there's that but there's something to a with boys it's like if you'll do something that defies authority yeah that's cool it's all your you know what i mean like oh man i wish i would do that whereas i don't know if girls are quite the same i don't have they don't have the same weird drive that boys do to be assholes here so he has a little bit of a problem um him and two other kids from the seventh grade they snuck in to a beautiful waterfront home oh they crept in do you know what these awful kids did in here what they do they made toast oh really that's all then they left we've snuck in made toast and left and left somebody was out of bread i suppose i don't know what happened but wow but they didn't steal anything they just except for toast i mean real dangerous cut-ups these kids that's what i mean um so uh yeah they then they ended up um boris and two other kids not George, just two other kids, stole several electric guitars from a music store called Music West and took them all to their fort.

All these kids have tons of forts, by the way.

There's a bunch of woods and everybody's building forts.

Yeah, everybody in the woods, they do that.

Kids in the city are jealous of that shit. It's fucking magical shit.
Yeah, forts. But George takes it to another level.
He's got several forts. He's got underground tunnels that he made.
He's like the Viet Cong, this fucking guy out there. It's crazy.
He's tunneling. It's tunneling, yeah.
So Boris was excited to tell George, dude, I fucking scored scored all these guitars you do bad shit with me but george wasn't impressed no no he said that was a bad move boris bad move my friend that's the way that's the quote from boris bad move boris george said what were you thinking man he said you know what the fuck bro he's like't be doing that. He said, Boris said, I don't know.
And he said, maybe we can sell it to like rock bands. And George said, who's going to buy hot guitars, man? That's not going to work.
You don't want that. Nobody wants that.
So George said, man, you're crazy. And George went home.
That evening, there's a knock on Boris's front door. And it's fucking a shitload of cops with a warrant for boris's arrest oh what boris do he stole guitars from the music boris said they came on like joe friday we got the goods on you better come clean they said it ended in a stern lecture they had to return all the stuff and you-year-old rich kids.
So, you know, they're not going to get in trouble. So they said the probation officer sure got our attention, is what Boris said.
Shaped me up nice and early. I got a new respect for the Mercer Island cops.
They nailed our asses good. They weren't such a comedy anymore.
So, yeah, the thing is, George obviously told on them. Oh, really? Yeah, George went right to the cops and told them everything.
George, for some reason, is obsessed with the cops and really likes to hang around them. Loves to.
He's very Ed Kemper-y like that. Like he's always wanting to be in the mix.
And I don't know if that's to know what they know you know he just loves the whole crime aspect yeah it's fascinating to him absolutely um so they were impressed too the cops were like wow thanks a lot kid that's great you get 24 hours we cleaned up a robbery fucking awesome yeah we even got all the guitars back like accommodationcommodation for you. Shit, man.
This is awesome.

A few days later, he gave them more information about some stolen bikes. Okay.
So they were like, this kid's got the goods. Yeah.
So they got a little informer. Yeah.
They got later, more later, by the way, on his love of police and informing and being part of it all because it has some ulterior motives, let's just say, here to that. So the forts are a big deal, like I said, in the woods.
All the boys have forts, some in trees, some hidden in the woods, some in long-abandoned logger shacks and shelters shit like that. Cause there's all sorts of cool places.

So George took Boris to his fort.

Let me show you my fort here.

And George, by the way, would like to try to like,

he would make it a challenge for people try to find my fort and laugh at them

when they couldn't stuff like that.

So it was well hidden in the woods above the old Islander tavern behind that

concealed with blackberry bushes, vine maples, and a prickly aggravation called Devil's Club. That's from a book that we'll mention later on.
George said that Boris would be his first and only visitor. He said this fort was off limits to the world, quote unquote.
That's what George said. This is my private area.
So he's got that. He's got his own little lair.
Now in school, he became a real loud, boisterous kid. Very funny, kind of class clown kind of a kid.
But very charming, too. Even the teachers liked him, even though he was a class clown.
Really? Yeah. Very high IQ, very shitty grades.
Hmm. Way more concerned.
Sounds like a comedian. Smart guy,, uh, not, not here, not in this place.
So he had the, like, uh, this book says he had the vocabulary of an English teacher's son because mom's an English teacher, but couldn't really make that into a coherent paper or a thought or a report or an essay. His teachers liked him, though, and Mercer Island also is a very good school system

because it's very rich up there.

Eighth grade science teacher described him as, quote,

bright but immature, small for his age, antsy, hyper all over the place.

You couldn't get mad at him, though.

He wasn't the least bit malicious.

He kept us all laughing, but he just wasn't interested in schoolwork. He wanted to play.
As long as I knew him, he was't the least bit malicious he kept us all laughing but he just wasn't interested in school work he wanted to play as long as i knew him he was a playful little boy yeah and the other thing is he doesn't even hit five feet until high school he's real a tiny guy little guy smallest kid in the class always smallest boy anyway yep um and george by the way backed up the teacher's thoughts he told his friend boris i only pay attention in classes i like i don't need those goofy little art classes i always feel like let's speed this up not interested which is um exactly what i did in school social studies got a hundred yeah but if you speak art up james 55 play all over place. Art, didn't give two fucks about that.

Don't care.

I like art, but I'm not making it. You know what I'm saying? It's just I'm not an artist.
I'm not good at it. So I didn't give a shit about that.
Same exact way. My report card looked like, did you send two different people to classes? What the fuck happened here? F, A, F, B+, F.
Okay, it makes no sense. so um George was

trying to figure out he's trying to figure out his

right F, B plus, F. Okay, it makes no sense.
So George was trying to figure out, he's trying to figure out his role and what's going on here, what his life is and what his, every kids go through that. You're trying to figure out who you are and where you fit into the social structure of the world here.
And school is your world when you're 12. So about 1971, 72, cops found him.
Just a couple of weird things. He's peering through some blackberry bushes at night at one point.
He's found a kid peering from out of the bushes, which is weird. I mean, nothing that's like a crime, but just weird.
Certainly, yeah. Certainly lends to some bizarre behavior.
Yeah. And now he gets in trouble for truancy.
So the cops start like a program around him, basically. That is, come hang out at the police station.
We'll give you some work and hang out with us. Like a kind of a mentor program.
Free work. That's a mentor program.
Yeah. So they make him do like paperwork and shit yeah um now while this is going on his stepfather makes it clear to george to the police that george is absolutely not his son like he's like i don't take biological blame for anything that's happening right now okay yeah so they asked the dentist guy he said well he's not your son how'd you How'd you end up with him? And he said, quote, I lived in a boarding house when I was going to dental school in Washington, D.C.
And this little orphan kid was living there. I picked him up and put him under my arm.
I've had him ever since. Yeah.
No, you just married his mom. That's weird.
So, yeah, he liked the the whole he liked the attention that police gave him it made him feel big and important that if he was hanging out with these people um one of the cops said uh the first time i saw georgie he was in trouble for some petty thing maybe truancy and the youth bureau had given him your youth bureau had given him some work around the station he was 13 or 14 14, little bitty kid, well-dressed, frail, innocent, very likable. He could charm your socks off.
So he said he was the last kid on Mercer Island you'd expect would turn into the biggest nightmare. He became a fixture at the Mercer Island police station.
One of the cops said he'd come around a couple times a week

and we'd let him straighten things up,

wipe the blackboard, sharpen pencils, empty the trash.

We thought, hey, if we're giving him some responsibility,

maybe we're helping him a little bit.

You're giving him all the responsibility

of a kid in detention, though.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, a kid has to stay after school.

That's all the punishment at the school

and you're making him do it at the police station. We call it the breakfast club down there at the old police station.
So they gave him his own official cubby hole as well. Got his own cubby at the station too.
How about it? He was telling classmates then he wanted to be a policeman. Before that, he was saying he wanted to be a fighter pilot.
Now he switched to a policeman. And one of the officers said, it was the first time we ever took in a kid like that.

But there was something different about him.

He said, you know, he's just a nice kid.

They said the cops would buy him snacks.

And he really seemed to take to all the cops that worked there, except the black ones.

Didn't like the black cops.

No, wouldn't talk to him.

Had no interest in the black cops whatsoever. And they tried to be real nice to him and he was like don't care fuck off yeah yeah i mean i wow i mean the first black cop that i think i remember and was fucking carl winslow i don't know well no no maybe it was maybe it's the other winslow in uh police academy that oh you're talking about michael wins.
You're talking about like in movies? At all. Really? I guess you grew up out there.
That makes sense. I didn't see cops that much.
No, and all the cops in Arizona are like white guys from the Marines. They're like MPs that are now square-headed dudes like that.
Yeah, they're not... Dudes that were in the military got it discharged and they're like, now what? One of my dad's best friends from high school that lived across the street from us was a cop and he was black so i never there's a lot tons of black cops i don't know first black cop i saw was hightower that's that's fucking funny so yeah he said that uh he didn't like the black cops which is strange so after a few months they said he we'd talk one-on-one with him, and he'd listen to your troubles like you were the most important person in the world.
Talking about the kid. You'd have to keep reminding yourself you were talking to a kid.
Really? Yeah, they're like, yeah, my wife, man, I've got to tell you, I've got my marriage problems, and he's like, lay it on me, brother. Let's fear you.
Yeah. It's weird.
I'll tell you about my hemorrhoids. Yeah, it was odd um they thought it was odd too that he would be basically making a bunch of cops into a substitute family for a kid that age who had a family it just seemed odd so a lot of them said that he didn't get very personal about his own stuff and they thought maybe this cheerful exterior and all these jokes are a cover for some darker shit, you know, like a comedian.
So he said, uh, he said, we wondered why he didn't illuminate things. If we got too nosy, he made it plain.
He didn't want to talk about his home life. So we just stopped asking hardest thing in the world for a bunch of nosy cops, but we liked Georgie enough to give him the space.
Was he, uh, was it what was bothering him? He would never say, so he's having this home life that he doesn't want to talk to people about um his mom is austere and ominous right his stepdad makes it clear that this did not come from my dick that's not mine yeah this is this did not leak from my pipe here so i just picked it up and put it under my arm Fuck yeah. So May of 1973 is kind of high school area when it starts to go.
Now in high school, he just hits five feet as he's a freshman. Yeah.
And that makes him a little bit uncomfortable in high school. And that's tough for high school to be five foot tall.
So he'd start hanging out with younger kids who looked more like him. That was kind of the way he'd do it here.
And they said that one of the cops said he noticed that George was definitely hanging out with the younger kids. He said, one of the cops said he was always skinny, didn't reach five foot till high school.
And I think he felt sort of intimidated by people his own age. He could be a big shot with the littler kids.
He craved that attention people looking up to him. It was something he didn't seem to be getting anywhere else.
Somebody get this kid to an open mic. I just have to say it.
Either an open mic or a prison cell. One of the two because those are your only options.
Yeah. But it's funny.
It's probably hilarious. So by the time he entered the ninth grade uh he's not hanging out with boris much anymore either boris says i changed and george didn't i was getting interested in girls george was too but he was secretive about it it was something else he kept to himself how he felt about girls yeah his style attracted younger kids.
I preferred older company. Okay.
So, yeah. And he said he realized that he never really knew the guy is what he realized, too.
So him and his classmates, he has two classmates, and they disappear from school one day and run away when he's 14. This is May of 73.
He just turned 15. And he and two classmates, they disappear.
The next afternoon, they were arrested in a little town 50 miles east of there. They got 50 miles away? They got 50 fucking miles away somehow.
I don't know how, if they hitchhiked or what, 73. You could hitchhike your way across the country back then.
So, yeah, they end up there at Clee Alum, which is a town 50 miles each of there. So the Mercer Island Juvenile Unit comes to pick them up.
One of the officers said, quote, they told the local deputy they were on a ski trip from North Mercer Junior High, said they didn't know how to ski, so they wandered into Klee alum to look around. It was a good story.
The deputy asked for their phone numbers, and George and one of the kids gave their right numbers because they knew nobody was home. George had prepped the third kid with the number of a phone booth because he knew his parents were home.
Nice work, yeah. But the kid panicked and gave up his home number.
He couldn't do it. He couldn't do it.
Not exactly nerves of steel over here. So they got caught, they said, but it was all planned out like the Brinks robbery, and most of the thinking was done by George.
He was the one telling everyone else what to do. So they asked George, why do you want to run away in the first place? Are unhappy are you mistreated you know what's the deal georgie can we help you and um he said no i got everything i could want and they said well then why did you run away and he said quote we heard you guys were trying to frame us for a burglary and um they were like okay no what are you talking about like it's a very odd thing to say so they said this is a pattern that forms though whenever george gets into trouble he blames someone else or claims it's all a big misunderstanding that's how he goes so they noticed that it's a it's a just a repeated thing he will not take responsibility they could watch him do something and he'll blame it on somebody else okay very i'm being framed why are you very yes it's it's very much like ted bundy getting caught with all that stuff in his car and he's like well i mean i have an ice pick for my it's a common household item and i have this tape because i have this and i have this because i have that yes i keep them all in a ski mask and some nylons because i put it on under my ski mask when I go.
One of any of those items is fine. But when all of them are in one bag, it's an issue.
That's when it becomes a problem. You know, those creepy stories that give you goosebumps, the ones that make you really question what's real.
Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices? Hi, I'm Mr. Bollin, the host of Mr.
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You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan.
This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world.

And the suspect.

He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione.

Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history.

I was targeted, premeditated, and meant to sow terror.

I'm Jesse Weber, host of Luigi, produced by Law and Crime and Twist.

This is more than a true crime investigation.

We explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever.

He's awoken the people to a true issue.

Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people

to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system.

Listen to Law & Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus.

You can join Wondery Plus

on the Wondery app, Spotify,

or Apple Podcasts.

In the early hours of December 4th, 2024,

CEO Brian Thompson stepped out

onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan.

This assailant pulls out a weapon

and starts firing at him.

We're talking about the CEO

of the biggest private health insurance corporation

in the world.

And the suspect.

He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Thank you. pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him.
We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world.

And the suspect.

He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione.

Became one of the most divisive figures

in modern criminal history.

I was targeted, premeditated, admit to so terror.

I'm Jesse Weber, host of Luigi,

produced by Law & Crime and Twist.

This is more than a true crime investigation.

We explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoken the people to a true issue.
Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law & Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus.

You can join Wondery Plus on the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

He also likes guns here.

So him and two of his friends took a bus to the gun exchange in Seattle to look at guns.

Then he leads them, his friends, I don't know how he knew about this, but he leads them to a porn movie house and snuck them in. So this is fucking amazing.
Here's a friend of his talks about this and he talks about this as like, you know, a great day. This friend, he said, me and George and another guy like guns.
So we all got scrubbed up and took a bus to the gun exchange in Seattle. Then he led us to a porny movie house.
Porny. Porny.
Yeah. Never heard it put like that before.
Pornish. No, P O R N I E.
Not even like with a Y. So it would be like corny and porny.
No, porny. I don't know.
I've never heard of that before. A movie house called the green parrot.
We went down the back alley and up the fire escape and into an empty building, then climbed through the rafters to a big cooling fan. It's diehard going on here.
Yeah. What the hell is going on? Why are they crawling through? What are they doing? Crawling through vents.
We skinnied through a ceiling hatch and dropped into the men's bathroom of the porny house. And that's how we snuck in? Yep.
He said our clothes were smudged. We were a mess.
But they got in to watch the movie. Yeah.
We just walked out of the bathroom and right into the... Right on in.
Yeah, like they'd been in there. Watch me a porny.
Yeah. So he goes on to say, the movie was about a hillbilly family.
The man's getting a blowjob in a rocking chair. The woman says, why'd you go limp, Big Daddy? She looks up, says, Big Daddy's dad.
What? She sucked him to death? Yeah. It was so corny we were laughing out loud.
Yeah, she sucked him. That's a blowjob.
Wow. Suck suck the life out of a hillbilly as a blowjob uh they showed a famous old short a knock on the door the guy says pizza delivery a woman answers and he unzips his fly and says here's your pepperoni oh we loved it we were laughing so hard we got caught and had to run out the exit doors yeah everybody else is there to whack it adults go there to whack it not for entertainment the kid anybody laughing is underage obviously anybody there who's 40 is there concentrating fucking staring yeah looking through the screen burning a hole and big Daddy.
No shit.

So he said that George went back a couple days later

with a black kid from Mercer Island.

They pulled the ceiling hatch and looked into the men's room

and there's a guy standing in one of the stalls.

They wait and wait for him to leave,

but finally another man walks in and the two of them do anal sex.

So they watched these guys have live anal sex from the ceiling. Oh, my God.
George's friend had a fro comb in his hair and it slipped out and fell into the men's room and everybody ran. Yeah.
You heard like a cork popping like a champagne bottle as those two guys separated. One guy ran one way.
One guy ran the other. They went through the fucking rafters again.
One ran and took the other guy with them. Yeah.
Either way. He said, I always it's a three legged race now.
He said, I always wondered how George learned about the green parrot. How do 15 year old kid even know about something like that? asked, and he just kind of winked.
Yeah, how would you know that? Yeah. That's so weird.
Yeah, I wouldn't know. I didn't know where to watch it.
I know those existed around, but I didn't know where to go to see it. Not even where you live, too.
No. Someone said, like, if you were growing up in Phoenix when you were 12, and someone said, you know, there's a porn place in Tucson.
You go, how the fuck do you know that? This is pre-internet. You know, you go.
Get to Tucson. Yeah.
I don't know how long are we supposed to get there. That's crazy.
You want us to take a bus to Tucson and you know a place? So he earned some nicknames in school here. George? Yeah, George.
Apparently he's very agile. So they call him the fly because he's little and agile.
They also call him Chicken George because that's a. That's not good, is it? No, but that's Chicken George was in a book.
Right. What one? I can't remember.
One of the. Walking Bird or something.
Some book that I've forgotten because it was a school book. They made us read in school.
You made me read it. You made me read it.
I fucking hate it. Yep.
Pretty pretty much they called him the mouth because he talked a lot and leaping george yeah leaping george so by the time he got into high school that's what he is he's the fly and all that kind of shit um people called him leaping george after leaping lee winfield of the seattle supersonics that's what that's why they called him that um but they said that uh they also called him chicken george or the mouth because he chattered a lot and he would always when he's playing basketball would always say he got fouled on every play so they they said he was a game player but it wasn't basketball it was chess backgammon checkers poker things like that cerebral things cerebral things um they said that he was so skilled that he would complain to friends that he had to play beneath his skill to get a game with these fucking people um he uh his friend tom hagar loved hanging out with him he said quote he was so bright so entertaining he had an incredible memory he wanted to be a writer and kept an ongoing list of our dead schoolmates what there's a whole i'm not gonna go through it because it's like four pages but it's all of these kids have died from like weird accidents that happen to rich kids you know i mean like fucking skiing accidents and like kids killing themselves and horse collision and polo. Yeah.
A dressage accident. You know how things go when you're rich.
Kids doing shit like that. Crashing their parents' Porsches.
One kid actually, this is a fucking thing that happened. He cranked up his parents' very expensive car.
Him and his girlfriend did it. Popped Freebird on the 8-track, cranked it up and ran into a wall as hard as they could and killed themselves.
Oh, my. Suicide.
Suicide with Freebird fucking blaring through the 8-track. That's a crazy suicide.
That's a wild suicide. That's what rich kids do to kill themselves.
But it worked? Oh, yeah, yeah. No, they smashed the wall going 80 miles an hour and fucking back then no airbags and you know, just impaled themselves on the steering wheel.
So he said he he'd sit in his room and write out their stories. Good stuff.
Publishable. He had stacks of yachting magazines.
How to find the right sailboat. How to make your own.
How to rig for storms, hurricanes, stuff on motorcycles, guns. We read spy magazines, went to spy movies.
He said it's odd considering the way things turned out, but in our adolescence, we weren't big on girly magazines. We read them, but they weren't a special interest.
Mainly, we were dreamers. Anything was possible.
We'd smoke a joint and ramble on. We'd get on our bikes and ride to Luther Burbank Park and talk about sailing around the world.
George had maps of every ocean on his walls. He figured out the winds, had to cross the Indian Ocean, had to handle the currents at Tierra del Fuego.
Wow. He said, we read popular science and decided we were going to build a submarine.
We went down to my dock and got two plastic garbage cans with locking tops, made a seal, locked them and put a hole in the top, screwed a hose in it. And then I said to George, we got to be crazy.
And we both started laughing. And George said, this will never work.
And it didn't. Two garbage cans.
They tried to make a submarine out of. It's amazing that

he has so many adult

dreams. Very

14 at this point.

He's really smart. That's the thing.

He's got a really high IQ, but

he doesn't translate that into anything

that could be helpful for him at all.

They said he wanted to be a detective, but we didn't buy

the crime magazines. He was into

CIA stuff where you nicked somebody

with an umbrella tip and they died three weeks

later. You know, like James

Thank you. Said he wanted to be a detective, but we didn't buy the crime magazines.
He was into CIA stuff where you nicked somebody with an umbrella tip and they died three weeks later.

You know, like James Bond shit.

Spies.

Yeah, spies.

Intrigue.

He had secretive ways.

He'd stand outside my room at night and flash his little light till I saw him.

That was a way better than throwing little pebbles, I guess.

He'd say things like people in lighted houses can't see out their windows. That's important to remember.
That's what he would tell his friend. I'd say, why is that important? And he'd just shrug and smile.
Nothing seemed to bother him. He got along with everybody.
He said, no, I take that back. George didn't like to be excluded from anything.
If he got left off a team or didn't get invited to a party, he'd sulk. I always wondered, what the hell did George get left out of when he was a little boy in Maryland? What was it that made him this way? And I never found out.
He got left out of his family. That's what he got left out of.
His mom. He already knows that if the light's on inside the room, anybody in the room can't see outside the window.
Yeah, but you can see inside real good. Exactly.

Creepy.

That's what I'm saying.

He's thinking about shit that, you know, it's one thing to have like a I'm going to sail around the world fantasy or some shit like that.

But to think that in depth about something like that at 14 is creepy.

So, yeah, he gets into like smoking a little weed and partying a little bit.

But nothing, nothing real big here.

By like the fall of 73, he gets angry when people call him black. He doesn't like to be called black? It's not the term.
You can call him anything you want. You can call him black, call him African-American, call him.
He doesn't like it. Don't call me that.
One friend said as a kid he never wanted to be referred to as black. You could get him hackled up real quick.
He was visibly annoyed when a high school coach mentioned that Bill Russell Jr. was developing into a better basketball player than him.
Gee, the son of a top 10 all-time player at the time, a top two all-time player in the history of the league is better than me. Weird he 6 11 also because that would help yeah um and he said that uh buddha that's what they call bill russell's buddha uh buddha's headed for the nba and you're not gee thanks okay well i wasn't planning on it um george complained to his friends why do you compare me to buddha why not compare me to a white kid? Which he got a point.
He didn't. I mean, they classified it as that.
So he also didn't like black women at all. Black girls at the time, no interest whatsoever.
Only likes white girls at the time. They said after a while, this is from the book, an excerpt here that I'll tell you about later on what the book is.
After a while, the color that George disdained gave him an entree into the high school elite. He was the perfect token, a walking proof of his friend's tolerance.
He became the group of rich white kids and they have a black kid. And they're like, see, look, we're not racist.
We have a black kid friend. We got this guy with us.
Yeah. Yeah.
They said, but therein lie the problems, as his friend Hagar recognized early. This is his friend, a quote from him.
They treated him like their favorite eunuch. Jesus.
That's a... Coming out the gate hard.
God damn. He projected the image of the pet black, and that was fine with the socialites.
But they left him out of things that mattered. They pretended to accept him as a friend because they knew they'd never have to take him seriously.
I always felt this helped to cause the rage that came out later because he knew he was tight or because he was tight with a lot of girls and they tempted him like they tempted the rest of us, but they never let it go anywhere. George was permanently excluded and he knew it.
Those lily white sochas were never going to put out for the local black guy. George just kept suffering, never complained.
That would have been uncool. But we all felt that pain, not just George.
Raging hormones. He rarely confided about girls.
It was just another subject he wasn't open about. He told me he wanted love, not sex.
He was always looking for the ideal woman to put on a pedestal, but the ideal woman wasn't looking for him. That's what his friend said.
So, um, and also during this time he sneaks, this is so 1973 or four. He sneaks his friends into a Led Zeppelin concert.
Hell yeah. Fuck yeah.
How do they do that? Rock on. Well, they played Seattle, $12 per ticket.
Now, George told his friend Michael O'Hara, we don't need to pay shit. I got us covered.
So this is his friend's quote here. He told me to meet him outside the Kingdome fence an hour before the concert.
The Kingdome's where the Mariners and the Seahawks used to play. Yeah, gone now, but was big.
When I got there, he was wearing a parking attendant's jacket, brown and orange polyester.

So uncool, so unlike George, but it put me in hysterics.

He flips a bundle over the fence and there's an attendant jacket inside.

I slipped it over my clothes and walked right into the Kingdome parking lot.

Wow.

George and I are directing traffic as we edge toward the employee entrance. They'd stop every once in a while, pretend they were working.
Wow. Wow.
Wow. Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow. Wow.
Wow then change. Smart.
He said, we were in total admiration. How did a teenage kid from Mercer Island outwit Kingdome security? He was always doing things like that.
It seemed like scams had become his life. He said, quote, and a lot of us were drifting, not just George.
Half the high school smoked pot, maybe 20% took harder drugs, acid mushrooms, hash, maybe 90% drank. We spent a lot of time in our forts, smoking, drinking.
On Friday nights, the cops would come stormtrooping through the woods, and George would disappear. Interpol couldn't have found him.
After the cops left, he'd climb out of his foxhole grinning. He loved to outwit people, especially cops.
Especially the thorns. Especially the fuzz, yeah.
he also stole pills from his stepdad's dental supplies and shared them with his friends he uh was caught by the cops with some weed uh gotten a lot of little trouble trespassing after hours in the park curfew violation shoplifting drinking having valiums on him he stole a rare penny from a friend's coin collection, but then talked his way out of it somehow. Yeah, so it's very odd here.
Then he starts doing, then he started like sneaking, stealing things from people's little school lockers and stuff like that. Soon he was sneaking into people's houses while they slept and taking souvenirs, as he called it, like cash and jewelry and also just standing over women while they slept and watching them.
That's too much. That's really fucked up.
That's weird. The local cops didn't know what to do.
And they thought that they just had like this mystery burglar going on people breaking in but nothing major being stolen that's the weird part I mean there could be a stack of $100 bills and $120 and the $20 be gone that's the way weird shit like that you can't report your dignity stolen or your safety your comfort in your comfort in your own home, your peace of mind. Your castle violated.
Yeah, just your comfort here. So anyway, the cops knew him from the truancy program and all that kind of shit, so they try to keep him closer.
They're like, all right, let's get him closer. You know what I mean? That kind of thing.
Soon things at home get worse, which isn't great. Stepdad, the dentist, cheated with a businesswoman.
Oh, boy. Now, in this time, that couple had had a little girl, a little sister of George.
So mom and the sister, mad at, oh, the sister's not mad. She's like three.
But mom mom very mad at uh the stepfather leaves him and takes the sister and moves to maryland and leaves george with his stepfather with the guy that just picked him up and refuses to admit that it's his dude how many times can you be abandoned by your mother and not feel shitty about it you know and to be left with This guy who's not even your dad? And actively and aloud proclaims it.

It's f crazy. So that's wild.
She apparently accepted a teaching position at the University of Maryland. And it's crazy.
One of their friends said they both wanted out, meaning of the marriage, both participants. Wanzel was seeing a white businesswoman, and Joyce hated the idea of being in the same town with the two of them, maybe running into them socially.
She needed to get as far away from the situation as possible. She and the Wanzel family agreed that Erica, the daughter, would move east with Joyce, spend summer vacations on Mercer Island.
When it came to George, it was like, you take him. No, you take him.
No, you take him. No one wanted him.
So they said Wanzell ended up with a 16-year-old kid who was already stealing him blind. You got to give the man credit.
He tried to do the right thing. Think about it.
They weren't even blood, which is true. That is true.
Just to feed him is more than he's required

to. Just to give him a room.
He doesn't

need to do shit for him. Just before

Christmas 74 is when

Joyce and Erica moved to Maryland

and they said

close friends noticed an immediate

just dampening

of George's

boisterousness. Just not, doesn't

have the same thing anymore.

One of his friends called it a slippage of

Thank you. Immediate just dampening of George's boisterousness.
Just doesn't have the same thing anymore. One of his friends called it a slippage of spirit that he would try to just gloss over.
Now, shortly after that, Dr. Wanzel Mobley has a new wife and he's got a new stepmom.
Yeah. Which is weird as fuck because that's like a step-stepmom.
mom is that a double step that's that's no it's a couple of friends it's either a double step or nothing right it's nothing it's step step or nothing i don't know what the yeah it's just this this my ex-stepfather's wife i guess i don't know my old stepdad is broad but i guess they loved this lady. Her name was Chris and his friend

Tom Hagar, this is George's

friend, said, quote, Chris was nice to us.

Prim, proper, respectable

and gorgeous. When she arrived,

all us adolescent boys went ooh la la.

I'm sure she

tried to play down her looks, but she was

12 years younger than Wanzel and still

a knockout. She really had our

motors running. George's mother had always worn hats and glasses and looked like a professor.
Not unattractive, but Chris was different. Yeah, Chris was a second wife.
Yeah. Not a first wife.
That's why. George's mom's got it going on.
Yeah, exactly. They said right from the start, she tried hard to work with George to change his ways, and she helped Wanzel fit into the neighborhood.

The older, wealthier people always considered him, quote, the black guy.

They didn't know him.

But Chris arranged cookouts and get-togethers, and old islanders then said, my God, Dr. Mobley's

black, but he's not that different.

Wow.

What a thought.

God took that. My God in front of that my god my god what was it uh fucking uh blast from the past oh my lucky star's a negro that's what they said it feels like that's what they're saying oh my look at him i can't believe it we're just like them just.
Wow. Just different colors.
Strange. I mean, I look, too.
It's a different color. It's weird.
It was an astounding discovery for some of those dinosaurs. Yeah.
Incredible. How many black people do they know living on Mercer Island their whole life? Pretty soon, the Mobleys were the only racially mixed couple in Emanuel Epcopal church um the guy kids went on to say my mom wound up crazy about chris and very fond of wanzel after that they are always a part of my family's lives so um now around this time there starts to be some stories that confidential police files have somehow made their way from the police station and locked drawers to the halls of the high school on Mercer Island.
I wonder how that happened. Real weird, right? Where's the leak? Strange.
So several parents called to complain that their children's reputations were being tarnished by leaks of juvenile information that was supposed to be secret. That's what he was doing.
He was saying, like, oh, I found, you know, Billy did this and that. Check it out.
So after an investigation, they came to the conclusion that it's George that's doing this shit. And so they said he's using his police information to try to inflate his image at school of being cool.
So the cop said, we had no proof, but it was obvious.

We hated to cut him loose.

We never told him why.

We just said, Georgie, you can't come around here anymore.

You could see it bothered him.

It bothered us too.

You couldn't not like the guy no matter how bad things got.

So at this point, he's just cutting classes.

He's drinking.

He's stealing.

He's popping pills.

He's smoking weed.

He's in juvenile court all the time because he's getting caught he has some problems at home here uh also he is he likes his stepmom and i mean he likes his stepmom uh yeah he began sneaking into her room and watching her sleep which is never good behavior uh which ends up getting him kicked out of the house. Oh, she woke up.
Yeah, he gets caught doing that. The stepfather's like, OK, that's enough here.
I don't even you're not even my kid. And she's not technically related to you.
So I don't want you whacking it on her, please. So so then George would go between family members and friends, couches and all this type of shit.
They do end up shipping him off the island to a guy named Dr. Michael Washington's house.
This is his stepdad's old classmate. So one of the patrolmen from Mercer Island ran into George at a place called Totem Lake.
And he said he was at a hardware, there. And he said, we'd all wondered where he went and why he wasn't causing any more problems on the island.
I met this dentist. He was staying with a tall, good looking, muscular guy, very nice, very responsible.
Just what George needed. He moves him there.
This guy said, I'll straighten him out. Really? And he does.
He takes him like, uh, he has to go out running every morning um they they have to they go hunting all the time and they'll be out at four o'clock in the morning and they won't get home till late and then he'll make george do all the you know clean all the boots and clean wash the dogs off and all that kind of shit and like trying to keep like a military school basically but at his house keep him so busy he can't do anything bad absolutely but the problem is he's not gonna that's not gonna last very long with this kid he's not gonna do that and he doesn't too he ends up back in mercer island hanging out with kids and uh kind of bullying his way around oh yeah well he likes to borrow cars quote unquote. Borrow means I might be back in an hour.
It might be four or five days. You never know.
I'll keep it a little while. That's borrow.
I'm going to go to the store. So they said that at this point he's coming back and all of his kind of classmates are like graduating, going off to college.
And now even all the kids he knew and were hanging out with and shit, they're all gone now. So now he's kind of alone again.
So he starts hanging out with younger kids again. They're stuck here a while.
And he can boss them around. They'll do whatever he wants.
He can hustle them out of money. He can do shit like that.
He did that like crazy. One of the cops said, quote, he developed a bunch of wannabe George Russell's.
They met in video stores, Denny's, the 7-Eleven. There'd be a hundred kids milling around that store and King George would go inside and buy beer for them and stash it in the woods.
Nice. Yeah.
He said he also supplied weed and discipline is what this cop said discipline he never liked to fight but he kept those kids cowed it was almost impossible to prosecute him because the kids were too scared to snitch if they got out of line he'd flash his knife at them he's carrying a blade uh multiple as we'll find out 16 year old kids 14 15 wow yeah once they have a license they don't want any part of him they can go drive around look for girls at that point but when you're 14 you're riding your bicycle around this guy's cool fucking sad yeah this is like their satanic bill this is remember we've said talk about satanic bill a bunch of times this weird carny guy that would come around and he'd buy us 40s and he'd do all that kind of shit sure sure satanic bill he knows where to get coke you know whatever so he said uh he'd take one of those rich kids and say lend me your car i'll be right back i gotta pick up a friend and the kids were too afraid to complain when he kept it a day or two that became a habit he was borrowing cars the same way 10 years later. Goddamn.
One day, Sergeant Glendon Booth spotted

him. The parents declined to press charges.
Then he beat up a nine-year-old boy. Nine.
Not a lot of challenge there. It's a fourth grader.
For putting a slug in a video machine. Slug coin.
We have to say, by the way, for people who are under probably 30, what a slug is.

Because you don't even know what a quarter is at this point.

It's a fake coin.

It's a fake coin.

That was just a smooth lump.

And people used to sell them.

They'd sell them like $100 for $5 or some shit.

You get a quarter and you cut a bar, a sliver off of it that's the same size and weight.

That's it.

And it worked. Throw it through a video game and that's a whole credit.
That's it. The cop said it offended George's sense of control.
It was okay for him to put slugs in the machines but nobody else. Don't fuck my thing up.
They're going to crack down on this if you all start doing this. Yeah.
so also they said

that he would pick out a parked car

and bet he could clear it on a single bound with a jump. Yeah.
He would jump over the hood and then collect the money. He'd say he promised.
He said, I never said I'd clear the roof. He's doing evil Knievel shit now.
Yeah. Like, I didn't say I'd do that.
one day him and a friend a friend of his this is a cop a cop and his partner took up positions on a hillside to check out the 7-eleven action through binoculars they need some crime in this town or less cops if the cops they're searching out crime not just one cop a team of cops just lays out the 7-eleven for solicitors for 14 year olds to commit crimes yeah that is uh loiterers loiter yes there it is those are the two most uh jesus christ that is wild so they saw george come out of the 7-eleven with several six packs and disappear the woods. They also saw drugs change hands from time to time.
When the cops patted George down during the arrest, he had a kitchen knife up each sleeve. Kitchen knives? Up each sleeve.
Yep. And several bags of weed.
So he's selling weed to the kids. Now, a judge put him on probation, but then he got arrested again.
Charged with criminal trespassing, possession of marijuana, second-degree burglary, possession of stolen property, and nuisance noise, whatever that is. But now it's going to start stacking up, and he's got minor infractions that are going to look bad over time.
Yeah, and he just turned 18, too. So now it's going to district court, not juvenile court court he was sentenced to three days in the king county jail not good got out re-offended served four more days oh boy got out re-offended went back in for 32 more days and his arrest record just grows and grows and grows um he called it later on those little tic-tacs of trouble.
Tic-tacs of trouble. Tic-tacs.
You shake them and they're loud, but you know, individually they're nothing. So, yeah, he's doing all sorts of shit like that.
1976 is that, is all of that shit happened in 32 days and all of that. Now, Tom Hagar, his friend who loved him, remember that? He says that George lived at night.
He would hide in bushes and learn your habits. He was patient.
He'd watch a house for a week if that's what it took. It's called stalking.
Yeah, it's called what BTK did. It's fucking crazy.
He could slip through any opening. He got into one house through the dog port.
He's so tiny. He's a little skinny fuck little skinny fuck too he knew that our doors were always unlocked and the keys were always in our jag so when i was away at college he started borrowing it after midnight taking the car the jaguar the jaguar uh when he finally got caught he told the cops he had permission this is the hagars i know them they told me where the keys are.
Yeah, they told me to take it. It's fine.
So this guy continues. This was just too much.
And our family decided we had to do something. We had put together a complete dossier of arrests and convictions, plus everything he'd gotten away with since junior high and presented it to the judge for this crime when he got caught for it.
When you saw it on paper, it was an eye opener. George ended up serving 35 days.
It was his longest stretch and everybody hoped it would straighten him out. When he was released, did he stay away from our house? Not George.
He made it a regular target. We had a sliding glass door.
That was his entry point. My mom had a stash of silver dollars that she gave out as rewards.
George took six or seven at a time. I guess he figured she wouldn't notice.
Think about it. The guy slipping into our house at night, risking a felony burglary charge for pocket money.
Made no sense. He said there had to be some other motivation, but we didn't learn about it until it was too late.
He said other stuff began disappearing. I came home from college on a break and ran into him at Luther Burbank Park.
From 35 yards away, I recognized my old orange coat. He was wearing my sweater and pants too.
He asked if I wanted to get high. He looked terrible, wasted, like every other bum on the street.
It brought a lump to my throat. George was the brightest, the most interesting kid I've ever met.
He still had that smile, that big laugh, but you could see he was lost. I said, George, that's my down coat.
He said, oh, is it? Is it? Oh, is it really? He sounded kind of vague. Here, let me give it back, avoiding the question of where he got it from.
Oh, here. Yeah, I must have borrowed it.
I said, Christ's sakes, no, I don't want it back. It was beat up and dirty.
He said, I felt guilty because of this huge gulf between us. And I said, George, if you'd asked me for the coat, I'd have given it to you.
The point is, how did you get it? He evaded an answer, and I wasn't going to push. yeah so that's it now the mercer island police department starts getting persistent complaints of a night prowling small person with dark skin baby black somebody i'll possibly yeah and i doubt that uh bill russell's kid is this guy's size.
Got to be a foot taller by now.

I don't think Bill Russell can crouch that much.

No, exactly.

And his kid has got to be taller.

So they began getting persistent complaints.

And they also, when the sergeant here of the police force called his stepfather,

he learned that George had taken liquor, money, clothes, and then was banished from the house.

So he's gone.

He drops out of high school, never graduated, poor attendance record, failing classes, and then dropped out as a senior. In retrospect, by 18, everybody should know, oh, this is going to go so bad for this kid.
This is not looking good for him. But with these rich kids, it doesn't really work like that.
You can always figure it out. And if you keep propping them up, give them an internship enough of the time, eventually they'll get burned out of this shit.
That's how rich people deal with shit. They get into coke too at that point and have a terrible drug problem.
He's still by 35. They've got three kids.
They're a born, Christian. They're fucking doing great.
Yeah.

So at this point, he's sleeping in abandoned houses.

George is under under houses that are occupied.

Yeah.

He gets under them just in the high grass, sleeps in the field, sometimes in his old forts.

He removed the vent from the swimming pool heating duct and crawled in there at a park. Did the same with the grate at a bank.
Just, yeah, people would come home and find their bed messed up. The heater turned on and food on the table.
They said if there was snow on the ground, you could track him in and out of every yard. You could see exactly where he went one family the ferris family had a boat a boat cabana and they'd come down in the morning and they'd find him wrapped up and around the base of the toilet in the boat cabana little boat house yeah yeah a friend let him sleep in his crawl space not that great of a friend if he said i mean i guess you could stay but you got to go in the crawl space that's a pretty shitty friend you go under the house if you want i don't i give i give my friends couches and shit maybe even a bed i don't know there's a crawl space if you could squeeze into it i guess yeah there's certainly protection from the elements jesus yes wow uh there was an old garage back in the woods near his home and he finally just moved in.
There's no heat, no light, no toilet. And the cop said we'd shine our police flashlights through the Blackberry bushes, and he'd peek out and yell, No problem, officer.
Thanks for checking. I'm fine.
And then he'd say, How's the wife? How's everything at the station? Gee, I'll have to drop in and see you guys. From the Blackberry bushes in a stalking.
That's odd. They said some of those nights it was below freezing and we didn't have the heart to turn them out.
So, uh, he'd have unsteady jobs. He's depending on petty thievery and other misdemeanors and shit like that.
Um, one of that Sergeant, uh, Sergeant booth that became one of the first to realize that these, what he's doing isn't so innocent, basically. He said George would try every car door he passed, looking for change, cigarettes, cassette tapes, and small stuff.
Then he'd sell it or trade it. He'd go to parties and leave with a ring or a watch.
Steal shit. Mostly he operated in the north end of the island where he was raised the south end was uphill and george was lazy literally didn't want to walk up hills when we stopped him he was usually on foot unless we caught him on a stolen bike and then he'd say a kid loaned it to him what kid george i don't know i just met them he'd say i bet he stole a hundred bikes on mercer Island mostly from boys who thought that he was their friend um benny moved to a little bit more shit here uh he'd steal somebody's wallet and if he'd get caught he'd from somebody else by the cops he'd smile and go i was teaching him a lesson you know hang on to that better gotta be a little street smart yeah he said everything was a game they said he'd meet some rich family and get in with them and then just long enough to figure out where they hid their hide of keys and then they'd get burglarized that's how it would work um so and people they said a lot of the neighbors couldn't bring themselves to turn him in one guy guy said.
You could just feel bad for him.

And one guy said, how could you hold a grudge against good old George?

He's just adorable.

He's just a charmer.

And that's the thing.

The book on him is called Charmer.

That's the name of it.

Like, that's what it is.

So they'd said you'd ask how he was doing, and he'd give you 10 minutes of how things were fine with him,

and his dad, and Chris, and his new baby brother,

who he's not related to at all. He's not his brother at all.
Yep. How is his mom? Oh, great.
Teaching back east, giving lectures. She just sent me a nice birthday present.
I talked to her on the phone last night, blah, blah, blah. It was all bullshit.
He was living on the street. Didn't talk to these people anymore.
Had nothing. Dr.
Mobley said to the cop, or cop says about Dr. Mobley Dr.
Mobley had me check his closets and under his beds because George was sneaking back in at night and they didn't want to confront him. I got the impression that George was still bothering Chris too and I agreed that this could turn dangerous.
They said every time we stopped him by the way he had the same things in his bag he'd have a duffel bag with a police scanner oh shit miniature chess and backgammon sets a playboy or a penthouse something to hang off to general pictures of girls oh just random yeah random yeah odd, random. Oh, no.
Yeah. Odd.
He would take people's cars, and the police scanner is a big deal, so he knew all the local cop channels, so he would listen in what was going on and listen in whether he was going to get caught or not. One of the cops said, we seldom nailed him for burglary.
We usually had to settle for criminal trespass, which means we caught him where he didn't belong.

Said he'd trip an alarm and we'd drive up and he'd be doing the George Russell heel and toe down the street with the scanner at his ear.

Oh, hi, officer. How's it going? He knew they were on the way, so he got out.

That's what he would do. They said he had a long string of burglaries on First Hill.
Chippy stuff.

He was a major criminal of minor crimes. People would call and say, I had $40 in my wallet when I went to bed.

I'm going to go ahead. a long string of burglaries on First Hill.
Chippy stuff. He was a major criminal of minor crimes.
People would call and say, I had $40 in my wallet when I went to bed. I heard a noise in the middle of the night, and now I got $20.
He wouldn't even take the whole $40. That's what I mean.
What a thoughtful fella. It's fucking weird.
It's just creepy. It's kind of genius, though, because how many times have you ever, like, woken up from, and you got cash, and you don't know how much know almost but not quite that steal anything from you you spend it probably i don't know it's so weird but that's just a strange yeah i guess he thinks that maybe they won't notice that yeah it's yeah or or they'll just did i have 40 or 20 i guess i must add 20 20 yeah yeah because if i had 40 and i and somebody stole any they'd steal all 40 that's Yeah, or they'll just...
Did I have 40 or 20? I guess I must have had 20. You just only had 20, yeah.
Yeah. Because if I had 40 and somebody stole any, they'd steal all 40.
Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It makes you sound crazy when you call the cops.
Or they'd say, my front door's open and I'm sure I left it closed. Or I heard somebody downstairs but nobody answered.
By the way, this is such a ritzy area. People call the cops for that.
My front door's open and I'm sure I closed it. And I would have never.
Yeah. Then close it, stupid.
Nobody answered. Yeah.
Well, good. Then no one's in your house.
Go back to sleep, you fucking idiot. That's what the cops would have told me where I'm from.
Like, what is wrong with you? He said, we knew it was George. Who the hell else would ignore thousand dollar rings and steal a Mickey Mouse watch? He'd hit the same house three or four times.
I began to suspect that there was a sexual aspect to it. In nighttime intrusions, there often is.
He said, if we could have caught him with the goods, things might have been different, but he had rat holes. We'd find his stash in the woods and we couldn't tie it to him.
It was like connecting a squirrel with his acorns. Loot didn't stick to him long.
He'd trade it or hide it or give it away. George had a big need to give as he had to take, but first he had to have something to give.
Earrings, rings, bracelets all from his burglaries. So yeah, he would take the small shit.
He would impersonate a cop too. He'd go into like a bar and be like, yeah, I'm investigating a bunch of coke being sold in here so i'm gonna be you know investigating all this shit so you should go ahead and give me free drinks now and shit like that um spend a lot of short stretches in jail two days a week things like that uh tom hagar the kid who was his best friend who then got his jag stolen all the time said the first time i to visit him in King County jail, he'd been there less than a week and was already a trustee handing out milk, running errands, working in the dispensary.
Already doing the... Oh, less than a week.
Doing the like four or five years in guy. Yeah, doing the fucking lifer shit.
Yeah. Jail was the closest George ever got to the pension system he really needed three meals a day cable tv full medical and dental he figured that king county jail beat dr washington's tough love if only they'd let him sleep a little later he'd be fine doesn't get along with the other black inmates by the way they all call him oreo that's his name his name is oreo because they say that he looks black and talks white and acts white.
Oh, it's not. He's not light.
No. No.
It's the behavior. You act.
Yep. Wow.
So they said he had a few flare ups. He did not like he didn't like them either.
He thought they were beneath him. The jail guys there.
One of the prisoners said he didn't. When George acted like a brother, quote unquote, he was doing an impression of a black guy, basically.
Oh. Yeah.
It's weird. He's basically like Carlton from Fresh Prince.
It's almost racist. Yeah.
Yeah. So they said that they called him Oreo all the time.
They called him House N-Word. They called him Tom, which is short for Uncle Tom.
And they called him a snitch, too. Oh, no.
So, yeah. They said if guys that didn't know him came up and talked to him in slang and street shit, he would look at them because he didn't understand.
He was like, I don't know what you're talking about. Which they were like, all right, Oreo, and then that would be that.
that would be that so yeah he said he enunciated and um things he said he he would say that this it didn't happen it transpired it transpired that transpired he didn't say i graduated he said i was graduated you know proper english in you know i'm not in jail i'm incarcerated um i i don't talk to people I interact with them uses words like consensus of opinion and shit like that which doesn't get a lot of shit thrown around jail probably I would think so he 1978 ish he's out of jail he's hired as the assistant manager of a teen disco perfect for him called tonight's the night tnt or ttn tonight's the night you're finally going to get fingered here it is everybody it's happening your life uh is so it's a friend of his that knows him that hired him for this whole deal uh he checked ids collected tickets you know worked the ropes and you know the velvet rope outside there you know you've got to make it like a nightclub even though it's for kids. And he would also steal shit as well.
He would pass his friends to the front of the line and really be a real hard ass on troublemakers and one of the security guards said he would lose it real easy whenever a kid would question his authority, especially if the kid was female. They'd say well who are you and george would yell hey bitch i'm the guy that's gonna throw your little ass out of here a little aggressive i would say um and it said he was normally so jolly and jocular and then this would happen here but when he got drunk he'd be a different guy completely um they said a barroom acquaintance complained to george that her boyfriend hit her and he said where's the guy live let's go we'll blow up his car i'll show you how come on we'll go get some gas wow uh he steals thousands of dollars from tonight's the night over a couple year period has to be expected oh yeah absolutely man just right out of.
Right out of the till. And also causes more trouble.
Here's a police story from him at a private party. We had a complaint that he was causing trouble at a private party.
We found him hiding under a bed. Okay, George.
We said, come on out. He knew we couldn't arrest him.
He just says, I'm just helping these guys clean the house you know get under the bread under the bed and everything he said they want off all these diamonds and there is dust bunnies under here you wouldn't believe so they said they want you out george and he said i'm staying and they said you're out of here and at that point the guy said quote george completely lost it this is the first time they're seeing the other side of him said he completely lost it. He slobbered.
He spit. He went crazy.
Called us white trash, honky bigots, screaming. He'd always kept his temper concealed.
Whenever I handled him after that, I didn't think of him as cute little George or the station mascot. I thought of him as a mean son of a bitch.
No shit. Yeah.
At one point here, he wrecks a car. Also, he had a BMW that he took from a friend of his.
And I guess he his friend said he was doing 60 in a 35 weaving back and forth across the center line. It was worse than bad driving.
It was like psychotic. It was psychotic.
He claimed he knew all about performance cars because he'd driven his dad's Ferrari. Because by the way, the dentist has a Ferrari.
Of course he does. But you could see that he didn't have a clue.
Then three weeks later, George rolled that car on West Mercer Way. And he had an explanation.
They said, quote, The cops checked the skid marks and found out that those special T7 nylon tires have no traction until they're warmed up. It was also the tire's fault when he totaled a friend's Datsun on a drive from California.
At 5 a.m., he spun off Interstate 5 near Redding and broke through the median rail, fracturing his femur. He blamed the accident on a blowout, but police thought he fell asleep at the wheel.
Then he lost control of his 1981 gold Honda Civic, wiped out a fence and crashed into a tree. When police arrived, he was on his feet babbling, and the report from the police said Russell denied driving the car, stating it had been stolen from him, even though he's there with it.
He stated he just happened to be driving by and found his car crashed there, so he got in and tried to drive it out. There's no other car there, though.
Where's your car you drove? Russell stated to me when I arrested him, quote, you're lucky if I had a gun, you'd be dead. He told the cop that.
Oh, God damn. So he also sentenced to one day in jail for using plates from a stolen stolen from a friend to put on a car.
His stepmom went to court after one of the car accidents and blamed his bad behavior on his biological mom leaving. So he's had a hard time.
So he deserves another chance. Yeah.
I also tried to break into the tonight's the night club owner's car was arrested but escaped out of a holding room at the police station i'll say that again they took him to the police station and he escaped they know who he is he's like this is ridiculous they've taken your fingerprints they've got you they know your name they know your fate they know you they know you he evaded two chases on foot he evaded the helicopter and three canine units okay he finally got caught and arrested and convicted finally of his first felony which is escaping the police station not allowed to do that he is sentenced to 10 months in county jail for that. Finally.
Now, around this time, obviously, he had also, at the same time, been, like, giving the cops tips about drug dealers and shit, like, just anonymously. Informing, yeah.
Very weird. Very, very weird.
Also, they said he had a unique way of using his police connections to gain women's trust. That's why a lot of times these serial killers pose as cops.
They pull women over. Like Ted Bundy did that.
Other people did it. It's terrifying.
They said, and it worked a lot of the times. But if his advances fell flat, he'd take the rejection personally and get really angry and be, like, all heated for, like, ten minutes before he'd calm down and then go to the next chick.
He couldn't just be like, oh, well. So they said his temper was starting to worry his friends.
He couldn't hold a legitimate job. He carried all his possessions, including his collection of porn mags in a duffel bag and in paper bags.

And his daytime home was the apartment of whoever the fuck he could was his friend at the time, basically.

And then he told everybody he worked as an undercover cop at night.

Wow.

So people liked him still because he showed that good side of him.

It's great.

But people said he showed no emotion, no guilt, growing hostility toward women. He was a growing obsession with sex.
They said he'd hit on anybody. Didn't matter.
A bartender started calling him the schizo because his personality changed so profoundly after drinks. He's also one of these guys.
You get booze in the system. Different guy.
They said cool, lovable George annoyed women and barely avoided fights with their boyfriends. He seemed to revel in baiting females, then slipping away to stir up trouble somewhere else.
A friend said George tried to surround himself with girls, but they never really liked him. You only had to watch him for five minutes to see it nobody knew why probably because he's like five foot one i would assume oh my god yeah he comes up he's like a tiny he's like a drunken dwarf nobody wants to fucking who wants to bang that guy you know what i mean sure verne treyer was the only one that could pull that off that wasn't I don't know.
That was scary. It's scary to see a little guy that hammered.
It's weird. Yeah, it's fucking weird.
I don't like it at all. It's strange.
Yeah, I feel. Well, that's because as an adult, and this sounds so bad because we know these are adults and everything like that, but we look at little people as children for some reason, even though they're not.
what i mean obviously they're not and if we don't look at them as children we look at them with with our brains yeah yeah just with the the care of a child i don't mean intellectually think of them as children i mean our brains react to oh it's a little child it's cute or that's a cute little person it's like no that's an adult person it's but our brains intellectually we know that and that's why we don't go up to him and offer them you know candy and stuff so but um 82 to 85 here in this era he is phoning tips into crime watch he starts using younger he starts having sex with young with teenagers now has a relationship If you could call it that we'll say he molested a 14-year-old girl, let's just say. She said the sex was consensual, though, which you can't have consensual sex with an adult when you're 14.
That's impossible. That word's definition doesn't work for that.
Later, though, he forced her to perform oral sex on him. He admitted that he tried to leave his younger sister, who's like three years old at this point.
Not even his sister, his stepfather and step step mother's kid. His ex step dad's kid.
At a gas station when she was younger. Just tried to leave her there.
He's arrested for stealing a TV lottery ticket, selling beer to minors, sentenced to 30 days in jail. But he ends up serving seven months because he's a dick in jail, too.
Gets out, hangs around Mercer Island, and he's doing his same old shit. Now, a lot of his friends, they'll still let him crash at their house.
He'll borrow their car. You know what I mean? Because they said he'd turn around and cook you a gourmet dinner.
Yeah. Treat your friends to a round of drinks.
give you, you know what i mean because they said he'd turn around and cook you a gourmet dinner yeah treat your friends to a round of drinks give you uh you know earnest advice and be all of this and you know be all cool and smile and huggy and all that kind of shit and they were like oh wow they just liked him um one of the police the police chief said russell was regarded as more of a character than. He said he was more of a sneak thief or anything like that.
Every time they picked him up, though, he's armed with a knife, anything from a kitchen knife to an old bayonet. So, yeah, he's always got some form of blade on him of some kind.
Now, they never heard of him using the knife to hurt anybody, but they said they did have information that he had brandished the knife on a couple of occasions. Yeah, the one, the police chief said he was a good talker.
He was, I suppose, for lack of a better word, charming. They said he probably could have been anything he wanted to be.
He was very knowledgeable about a lot of different subjects. Often when police arrested him, he'd have a backpack with books on him.
Now, they all had pictures of pussies in them, but still they were books. They said the cops didn't fear him.
They said there are people like that. They don't assault police officers.
They make you chase them. He's a chaser.
He's not a he's a he doesn't run at you. He runs away from you.
He's that guy. He's also the only prisoner who ever broke out of the city's temporary holding cell facility as well.
Never happened before. Yeah.
He kicked a window out, crawled through, and escaped. And they said...
That's not... Anybody could have done that.
That's what I mean. It wasn't like a diabolical...
It wasn't Tango and Cash. You know what I'm saying saying where they had to slide down an electrical wire to get out the gates didn't make a paper mache head like alcatraz he just fucking kicked a window and walked out come through the fucking ground like raising arizona john goodman popping his head out that's more on you than it is him jesus you gave him an opportunity to break a window fuck they said he was a model prisoner who seemed to do very well in a controlled environment, except for that one escape.
So he at some point wants to marry a 14-year-old. Why? I don't know.
He wrote letters to this 14-year-old talking about marriage and that they have forever and also would talk about anal sex fantasies with her. And he got her pregnant and she an abortion oh my god so he got a 14 year old pregnant uh may of 87 much for the anal sex yeah no shit he was going the wrong route there may of 87 released from jail after seven months so biology isn't his strongest subject we figured out uh five weeks later he ends up pleading guilty to a charge of criminal trespassing and possession of a dangerous weapon, spent five days in jail and finally underwent psychological counseling.
Let's see here. The results here, they found him to be, let's read this out, self-centered, limited in capacity to form deep interpersonal

relationships, quite impulsive,

demonstrates poor judgment,

having little patience or

frustration tolerance, a risk

taker, often rebellious toward

authority figures, and has trouble

incorporating traditional standards

and values of society.

He is diagnosed with

antisocial personality disorder, which doesn't mean you don't like people. It means that you're actively.
Yes. It's around that time that he gets banned from a Denny's.
Hell yeah. Now, you can be kicked out of a Denny's.
That happens. But to be banned permanently from a Denny's, you got to really do something, man.
To set yourself apart as lower than Denny's clientele.

Yes, lower than the other drunks at 3 a.m. that are smoking and falling asleep into their mozzarella sticks.

Into their fucking moons over Miami.

Wow, he got banned for stealing tips off the table.

He didn't work there.

He'd just go in and steal tips off the table. Yeah, remember was a thing wow wow so he gets banned um 1988 he's hired at an arcade the nintendo arcade they had a nintendo one all right well nintendo seattle think about it that's their big deal there he ends up skimming 23 000 in eight months from arcade? From an arcade.
Is that how much those fuckers were making? God damn. Yeah, fuck, especially the Nintendo one.
Yeah, it was probably big hot shit at the time. Wow.
Yeah, I don't know. He walked down the street jingling and jangling like crazy.
That's a lot of quarters. It's weird, because normally he about 130 pounds, but after a shift, he weighed about 210 pounds.

It was very strange.

It's tough.

Then in 1989, after he's fired from that job for stealing, he tells everybody that will listen that he has turned over a new leaf and he is now a born-again Christian.

So no need to fear anymore.

He's all fine.

All right.

He even meets a nice lady.

He moves in with an of-age woman named Mindy.

She's a blue-eyed, beautiful girl named Mindy.

He, of course, began physically abusing her and showing just an us level of interest,

which is an unhealthy level of interest in the Green River Killer murder case and the 49 victims, because that was when they were still looking for him. So, yeah, an unhealthy obsession with the Green River Killer.
He went to jail for five days for drug charges, committed about 60 burglaries in Kirkland during this time. February 20th, 1990, he's arrested for domestic assault for beating up mindy i think 1990 right after that he's banned from the black angus restaurant this guy is really class that's class right there what'd he do at black angus so you're telling me yeah you're telling me i can't go to fucking denny's and i can't get a shitty steak either.
Jesus. Come on.
He's really running the gamut on bottom rung of whatever it is the restaurant offers. No shit.
He was a regular customer at Black Angus. Really? From 89 through March of 1990 when he's banned from the restaurant.
And we'll find out why in a little later. But he was very angry about being banned from the black angus like wow that was furious furious man what's next outback texas roadhouse i won't stand for it um june 22nd 1990 yeah that is when m Ann Polreich, remember her from the beginning of the show?

She is 27 years old.

She works at a medical device manufacturing company.

Remember, she was found on the 23rd.

This is the 22nd.

She went to Papagayo's.

P-A-P-A-G-A-Y-O.

Yeah.

It's a nightclub here known as a place where you go meet people it's like a singles bar type of that's exactly what meat M-E-E-T they say it was known as a quote meat market so she went with her friends that night this is in Bellevue the three drove in Mary Ann's 1984 Camaro. She's driving.

Hell yeah.

Her two friends left at about 9.30 p.m.,

but she stayed behind.

She wanted to hang out and party.

She's like, I didn't come here to fucking bitch out at 9.30.

You guys can go wherever you want.

Now, George is also there that night

with his friend Smith McClain to have dinner.

Hanging out with his buddy, having dinner.

Once they were there, Russell and another friend talked to Marianne a little bit. After they ate dinner, Russell here, George borrows the keys to his friend's truck, Smith McClain, explaining that he had to change into a shirt with a collar because that's what the dance floor required at the bar.
He had to have a collar on for some fucking reason.

So Russell.

Those guys don't rape people, James.

No, no, no, no.

You put a collar on and you are aces from that on.

Chained man.

Now he's got a collar.

So he had a duffel bag in the truck and he was going to go change.

So he goes outside with the keys and doesn't come back in.

Oh.

Never comes back.

Smith McClain looks outside. His fucking truck is gone.
Oh. Goes outside with the keys and doesn't come back in.
Never comes back.

Smith McClain looks outside.

His fucking truck is gone.

So is his buddy.

They're all gone.

So this Smith McClain is pissed off and he spent the rest of the evening waiting at the Overlake Denny's restaurant in Overlake where that's where people from Papagayo's would go after closing to the Denny's. That's how hard it is to get kicked out of Denny's.
That's where all the drunks go. Taking pent up, guys not getting laid, all that.
All of that. So, he waits all night, he never shows up.
At about 5.30am, this guy finally finds a ride home because he doesn't have his truck so that morning the morning that marianne's bodies discovered that same morning george calls smith mclean's house and he said oh man where you been this is george talking he said where you been i was looking for you all night all night well i was at the bar till closing you know the place you said you were gonna be back in five fucking minutes that's where i was for most of it then i went to denny's until the sun came up what the fuck man until the drunks fell asleep and then i left so at about 6 a.m mclean's sister saw george return in the truck so shows up to McLean, Smith McLean's house with the truck. George told her he borrowed the truck to drive a friend home, and then he couldn't find her brother.
So that's what happened. During this conversation, the sister notices a reddish-orange stain on the passenger seat of the truck.
That wasn't there before. Russell said, oh yeah, my friend that I picked up vomited clam chowder everywhere.
Manhattan, apparently. Yeah, not New England, I guess here.
So, George declined the offer of a ride home from the sister and just walked away with his duffel bag. Now, Smith McClain woke up well after George had left and went outside to inspect his truck.
He smelled a strong offensive odor that reminded him of vomit or the smell of a deer gutted after a hunting kill. Those are two.
Those are very different. Thanks.
Is that what they say? It's either death or vomit. I can't tell.
I'm getting, I'm getting notes of gutted venison. No yeah no it's it's either the an into the canal of an interior of an animal or that puke yeah was that rib cage of a deer no it's vomit it's it's vomit yeah jesus christ so uh george called smith mcclain later that morning and told him that he had thrown up in the truck after drinking too much.
Wasn't his friend. George also told Smith that he had driven a woman home in the truck because he didn't want to be seen in the woman's Porsche.
Now, George Russell had spoken previously about a woman with a Porsche. That woman's name was Tamara Francis.
Now, Francis knows knows him but never left that bar with him at all so now that same morning that is when old Jimmy finds the body of Marianne

outside the dumpster by the black Angus um now a little bit more of this here um they say here that

the uh the post-mortem injuries obviously are spending all that time with the body like we

Thank you. Now, a little bit more of this here.
They say here that the post-mortem injuries obviously are spending all that time with the body like we talked about is not normal. They decide from a medical examination here that there's a number of significant injuries.
The most likely cause of death was manual strangulation. She also, her skull is fractured and has numerous facial injuries that appear to be inflicted by a fist.
Oh. So, beat until her skull fucking cracked.
Her liver, they assume that someone was kicking her so hard that it split her liver in two, basically in two pieces. Jesus.
Broke her liver. She also had a distinct anal tear that the medical examiner opined was caused by a solid non-human object.
Her blood alcohol level was .14 at the time of her death. So drunk, but not fallen over drunk.
And they said, yeah, the posing and all of that very strange here um now back at the bar her car is still there yeah it's still at the bar the 84 camaro and inside the bar is her purse and sweater as well oh what woman leaves anywhere without her purse if she's out with it that a purse and sweater you gotta have that yeah you gotta have that and um yeah imperative no matter where you go especially if you're going out you're not with somebody you're by yourself you gotta be able to pay for drinks and shit absolutely you gotta have your license to all that shit so they said finding the car and her purse and sweater at the bar. The police detective said that tells us she wasn't intending on leaving that place.
She'd left against her will. So they investigate.
One of the bouncers is a Bellevue police officer that was working off duty. And he often spoke with George, who was a frequent patron of Papagayo's.
And that night he saw Russell twice, he said, once shortly after his shift began at 1030 p.m. and again approximately an hour later.
On the second occasion, George told this officer that he was going to, quote, take this girl over to her place to get something. The officer did not see the woman well enough to identify her.

However, he described her size and general description, and it's similar to Marianne.

And he also said he noticed the woman seemed pretty intoxicated as well.

So that night, that's what happens there.

Okay.

Now let's talk about Carol Marie Beeth, or Beethy, B-E-E-T-H-E. I think it's Beef probably.
Yeah. She's 35 years old.
She is a bartender at Cucina Cucina, which is a restaurant in Bellevue. Double Cucina.
She lived in a condo with her two kids. Her ex-husband, Paul, lived very nearby, very close.
Now, August 8th, 1990, Carol speaks with her ex-husband, Paul, at about 9.30 p.m. At about 10.30 p.m., she spoke with her boyfriend, Mike Sewell, with whom she's planning on going on vacation.
They talk. At midnight, she's out.
She's out and about. she meets a friend at a restaurant where he was the bartender and left at approximately 2 15 p.m this this bar is called the keg okay um now they describe carol as pretty blonde haired and svelte so small thin hot blonde.
They said that this is from the book, slotted well with her crowd. She, they talk about, she's a shit talker.
She's smart. She trades sexual innuendos, teases the men.
They say that she invites their flirtations and then would, you know, turn them down. She's breaking balls.
Yeah. So they said it was kind of her game and kind of what she did for her ego type of thing um one night though on this night they said she was talking to the bartender and wasn't talking to any of the other guys and uh so she hadn't realized though that someone's been watching her here now she left the keg a little past 2 a.m like we said she drove straight home.
A neighbor out walking his dog later said that he had seen Carol unlock the front door of her home and then enter at about 2.30 a.m. She was alone and she looked a little tipsy.
They said there was no one with her or near her or on foot or cruising by or there was no, like, anybody that could have, like,

ran in the door behind her type of shit.

Inside her home, she looked in on her two daughters.

She has a 9 and a 13-year-old, and they're both asleep.

She takes a quick shower, gets ready for bed.

She has to work the next day, the late shift,

and she tends bar at Cucina Cucina, like we said.

And she didn't like leaving her kids alone so often at night, but she thought they were responsible and her ex could check on him because he lives by nearby. So she little after three laid down to sleep and the moon apparently was very bright.
So she turned away because she has French doors that in her room at the moon is shining through. So she turned the other direction.
Now she figured her yard was private. So the French doors looking over her yard isn't a big deal.
She doesn't have to close the drapes, whatever. She also doesn't really lock doors that often.
Not a big door locker. Now at 4 30 AM, the 13old daughter, Kelly, heard someone in the hall of the condo.

Then saw a person shine a flashlight in the bathroom into her sister's bedroom and then into her bedroom.

She thought the person was Mike, her mom's boyfriend, who was coming over.

So then Kelly went back to sleep.

She woke up at 8.30 a.m. and her mother was not up as she usually, her mother was already usually up doing shit and she wasn't.
She went to go check on her mom and her mom's bedroom door was locked. So she tries knocking on the door.
She's yelling for her mother. Mother never answers.
No answers. She won't wake up.
so Kelly goes outside around to the sliding glass door to her mother's room

and she saw her mother through the door and freaked the fuck out because we'll tell you why. She ran back in and called her father who came over and actually entered the room through the sliding glass door.
Wow. Carol was on her back on the bed.
The bedspread was pulled all the way down to the foot of the bed.

She's completely naked except for a pair of red high-heeled shoes.

Weird.

Her feet are together with her legs spread apart toward the door of the room.

And her knees are bent, so you can picture that.

Blood had been smeared on her legs in a manner that resembled finger painting, they said.

It was definitely on purpose.

Somebody had smeared it.

Now, under her bed, she had kept a Savage .22 long rifle, a gun. This rifle has been placed.
it is resting symmetrically between her legs

with the stock, the butt of the gun

on her shoes down there. And the firearm, the barrel of it is inserted into her.
Oh, my God. It's five and a half inches into the vagina.
Oh, dear Lord. Yeah, that is just obviously fucking disturbing as shit.

Her left arm was bent upward at the elbow while her right arm was bent down at the elbow, nearly touching her, her, her hip.

So picture that.

Now the weird part is they see a, there's a pillow over her face.

So they think maybe she's suffocated.

They take the pillow off and find her head is wrapped in a dry cleaning plastic bag it's over her head with a belt tied around her neck to keep it in place dear christ so this is definitely not an accident obviously um she's been had her head beat in here with a bag over it bag. Bag over the head, and they're calling it blunt force trauma to the head

and really bad stuff.

They said that she was killed by beating.

Also, there was bites on her arms at her post-mortem.

A medical examiner found that her death had been caused by head injuries.

The head injuries were inflicted by an instrument swung with considerable force in rapid succession. The blows left a distinct Y-shaped marks and crushed the entire left side of her skull.
So that's fucking weird. Also, whatever this was had sliced her ear and left 13 distinctive Y-sh her body.
She had been bitten and kicked with such ferocity that two broken ribs penetrated the chest cavity. Good Christ.
Anger. Rage.
Yep. She'd been struck many times with a knee or a fist in the torso and her liver was also lacerated.
And the kids heard none of this. Didn't hear a fucking thing about this.

Now, she had rings on her right hand, but not on her left hand.

At the time of her death, she owned two wedding ring sets, one from her mother and one from her previous marriage.

The rings were kept in a jewelry box in her bedroom, but they were never found.

They were gone.

They were gone.

Now, during the investigation, the police will publish photographs of the ring in the newspaper and everything of these rings. Her family was also informed that she had a half dozen small crown royal bags.
I'm sorry, her family told the police she had a half dozen small crown royal bags in the top drawer of her dresser containing silver dollars and other change from tips. When police allowed the ex-husband to reenter his wife's house, he noticed all the bags were missing.
That's where they found out that. Loose change.
All the loose change is gone, but nothing else. And wedding rings.
And possible wedding rings, yeah. So they investigate.
They interviewed the neighbor who had seen her returning home, but he had no other details other than I i saw her coming home they spoke with some neighborhood children who'd been camping out next door and they seemed to be they said that she seemed to be in a hurry as if afraid of someone or something that was outside who knows i mean she also's price it's 230 and i gotta work tomorrow who knows so questioned John Comfort. He's the bartender who she hung out with at the keg that night.
And the police learned that she, Carol, had helped him close up the bar, then went with him to the car where they made love. Oh, really? Yes.
She's supposed to leave for a trip with her boyfriend the next day here.

He said he saw no signs of life in the parking lot, nor any suspicious characters hanging around the restaurant at closing time.

He said there had been a few last-minute stragglers, but they were all gone by the time they locked up.

So they obviously detain him for a minute.

So you're saying you had sex with her, and then we found her dead five hours later.

Well, then, let's have a chat, sir. And the boyfriend we'll both talk to.
Oh yeah. Very, yeah, a lot.
And the ex-husband for that matter. Everybody.
All of them. So he was detained but then they let him go and placed him under surveillance.
Let's see what he does. So they refused to believe at this point that this was some kind of serial killer.
They said, no, the MO between Marianne and Carol's crimes were different. One was outside.
One, they thought that Marianne had been the victim of a spontaneous date rape gone awry, and Carol had died at the hands of a housebreaker who may have actually been mad at her personally. They said that both crimes, but they didn't recognize this, though, that both crimes bore signs of graphic sexual deviancy.
Both women's bodies had been treated with sheer contempt by the killer. Both corpses were posed to laugh at and malign the law.
And even though the MO had altered, the signature had not fucking altered. That's the thing.
That just means you're more ballsy. Right.
They will develop different things. Ted Bundy wasn't going into people's houses and doing that shit till later.
You know what I mean? Like there's people, they grow. You know? I mean, an artist grows.
A comic grows. A serial killer grows.
You grow. You evolve.
Yeah. You evolve.
So they also find out that George Russell and Carol were acquaintances. And one person said that both of them frequented the Overlake Denny's.
Also, a waitress at the Black Angus restaurant. By the way, the Black Angus that is next to the McDonald's is the one he got banned from that they found Marianne outside.

Now, a waitress at the Black Angus testified later that on two separate occasions, she was talking to Carol about a, quote, situation between George and her and saw George glaring at them.

They're just hanging out at the Black Angus who just doesn't go there, eat dinner and go home. What are you doing? Are you glaring at them.
They're just hanging out at the Black Angus,

who just doesn't go there, eat dinner, and go home.

What are you doing?

They said this occurred before he was banned from the Black Angus.

And after these two murders,

George told his friends that he knew the victim of the second murder

and that she was a bartender at the Cochina Cochina restaurant.

And then also they find somebody that says that George tried to sell him rings

that resembled the missing set as well.

Thank you. at the Cochina Cochina restaurant.
And then also they find somebody that says that George tried to sell him rings that resembled the missing set as well. Now, they try to work up a profile here.
So they call in an expert on sexualized crime who said the murders are the work of one man because you're looking for one guy. The expert said the serial killer would be a young white male but police zero in on russell who they said grew up in a white upper class middle class neighborhood so much to the fact that all the prisoners said he acted white so they're like that's kind of his personality so they they do that.
Now, George reads the paper, clearly, because friends say that he cut pictures of the first two victims out of the newspaper and called them skanky sluts. Oh.
Then taped them up to the wall, on the wall. In the cell? In the jail? No, at his house.
Oh, at his home. He's not arrested.
Yeah arrested yeah he's out he's just got okay yeah he reads the newspapers tells his friends you see the skanky sluts that got killed and he's he's putting those clippings on the wall and then said they're never gonna find who killed her never gonna find who killed these two ladies so yeah now about three weeks after Carol's murder here, Russell and a friend drove to a wooded area on Mercer Island and George informed his friend that he had to pick up some money owed to him George stepped out of the car and returned with a paper bag full of silver dollars and change probably from one of his little hidey holes that he had there yeah Yeah. So we're using BTK language with that hidey hole shit.
Now, forensic evidence reveals none of George's fingerprints in Carol's residence. Really? There is a fabric glove impression left on the sheet of her bed that suggested that gloves were worn.
And they find hairs on her sheet, pillow, and underwear that were from a black person. No, they were from a black person.
The hairs they found, but the fragments were not suitable for any kind of comparison. This is the very beginning of DNA, too.
You need like a whole hair with a root attached and everything else. So August 30th, 1990, Andrea Levine is 24 years old.
She goes by Randy with an eye and she goes to some of the same places. Everybody else went the same nightclubs.
The other two went to, she rented a basement apartment at the, in the home of Robert Hayes and his wife here. And on August 30th, 1990, the landlord, Robert Hayes, saw Randy after she returned from work.
Later that evening, Randy met her boyfriend at a restaurant in Kirkland where they discussed plans to go to the San Juan Islands. So somebody else going on vacation.
She was known for her sarcasm and being witty as well. one same as Carol same as Carol they said that she is known for urging on going along with flirting and then rejecting a guy and being like I don't think so fuck off so the night this night she met several of her girlfriends for a drink but left the bar bar alone, according to her friends.
Now, none of her acquaintances could recall her chatting with or teasing any guys that night. They said, was she breaking balls that night? No.
They said she hadn't been there that long, and she wasn't in her usual high spirits. So she took off from the Maple Gardens, which is a bar, not long after midnight, they figured, saying she was tired after a long day.
And they figured that she drove home in her pickup truck and went straight home and went to bed. So she declined to ride home and drove herself home to pack for her vacation at about 1.30 a.m.
So drove herself home. Now, the next morning, the landlord, Bob Hayes, and his wife woke up about 5 a.m.
They opened the back door to let their dogs out. The dogs began barking like fucking crazy.
Soon as they let him out, he stepped out to look around and saw a dark figure just in the dark. Couldn't see who it was.
Just a figure silhouette about 25 to 30 feet away. So yeah, uh, he was roaming along the exterior wall near Randy's rear window by the basement.
Now, um, he threw on his robe and put a leash on his dog and went out to confront what he thought was someone trying to break into his house. But they said that the, the dogs must've scared the guy away and he took off the guy took off, and he couldn't catch up to him, the landlord.
So he said, all right, scared that guy off. He checked his property, didn't find any broken windows or jimmied locks or anything like that.
Everything was in place. So he figured, hey, I thwarted it.
Good for me. So he checked the window closest to where he spotted him and inadvertently realized that it was Randy's bedroom window.
And he said he could see her asleep in bed. And he felt like, oh, God, I intruded.
I'm looking in the window at this girl sleeping. Holy shit.
So he said he's he's. Yeah, he said he stepped back, went into his own house, gave the dog some treats like that was it.
Felt like a felt like a pervert and a piece of shit. You know, I didn't even I know I didn't whack it, but still.
Yeah. I saw her sleeping and I felt gross.
Felt awful. So he said that he was glad to get rid of that guy.
He said there had been some break-ins in the building only a couple days earlier. Randy had told him there had been a number of things missing from her apartment.
Okay. So someone must have broke in.
He said since then he's made a habit to keep an eye out. And he said maybe he scared the guy off for good this time, but he never saw the person.
He said it was a look like a thin, young and agile man. That's all he could get out of it.
We don't know. Could have been a ninja.
We have no idea. It was dark.
I don't know. It was dark.
Yeah. So he said it was just an adult with a white with a white form, approximately two thirds the width of of the person or in front of the individual's abdomen.
He said he called out and fled. He called out.
The guy fled. He said he chased him a short distance, but stopped because he was unarmed.
And he just called the police and the police examined the exterior and said, all right, everything looks good and that's fine. So days go by.
Days go by. And the following Monday, the landlord's wife here, the landlady, I guess, went into Randy's apartment because one of Randy's cats was crying and crying and crying.
And she didn't know if she was hungry or what the hell was going on. As she walked down the hallway, she said she smelled something like old blood coming from the bedroom.
Or was it vomit? It could have been clam chowder vomit. We don't know.
Someone could be gutting a deer in the living room. We're not sure.
We don't know. So she opened the door to the bedroom and found Randy.
Yeah. She was on her back on the bed.

Face turned toward her left shoulder.

Legs spread with her knees straight.

So extended out this time, not like making a diamond shape.

Her right arm extended above her right shoulder while her left arm rested by her side.

Does this sound familiar?

Yeah.

Under her forearm,

her left forearm, was the book

More Joy of Sex.

Oh, the sequel.

That's placed right under her

and a plastic

dildo is in

her mouth.

Her brains

are leaking on the bed right now. There's brain

matter all over the bed. This is fucking

this is a bad one. It's another pose.

Medical examiner determined that

Thank you. Her brains are leaking on the bed right now.
There's brain matter all over the bed. This is fucking, this is a bad one.

It's another pose. Medical examiner determined that she died from several multiple head wounds inflicted with an object such as an iron bar or an aluminum bat.
She's also covered with post-mortem stab wounds. They said she was stabbed and basically covered from her scalp to the bottom of her feet with 231 small knife wounds.

Wow.

What's the deal?

230.

Some of them are in patterns, like on purpose.

Yeah, like an art project.

They appear to have been inflicted after death.

And I guess this is a pikerism, they call it.

It's a necrophilic perversion.

Pikerism.

There.

Because.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the forensic evidence reveals the presence of a single pubic hair from a black person at the crime scene.

The hair could not be matched anyway to any samples there.

Fingerprints, no fingerprints found.

They said it looked like somebody had wiped the scene down.

They found no fingerprints of anybody.

They also found the bat and the killer had wiped down the bat because that was there

and clean.

So they think it was an aluminum bat that did it and taken every knife in the kitchen. Really? That's all that's missing, all the knives.
Just knives? Just all the knives. Yep.
So they theorized that he used a kitchen knife to violate this poor woman and then took them all so the real weapon couldn't be identified ever. If you get them if you take the one you used you know that's the one and her favorite amethyst ring was missing they said that she had been wearing a ring that was removed during the assault and obviously the one cop said i know that all of us felt that when we found the ring we'd find the killer well no shit so the seattle times is now running articles titled the east side killer yeah because there's a bad man on the loose this is now a serial killer referring to the geographic placement and um basically said since when do uh since when do lunatics have their field day a local paper asked a cartoon and now uh analyze analyzed that the bellevue basically compared compared Bellevue freak to Jack the Ripper.
Wow. One commenter remarked that Ted Bundy, though he was dead, I'm sure had been resurrected and went to Bellevue.
So people are just, it's all that shit. Now, remember John Comfort? I do, yeah.
He's going to get a little more comfortable because they take him off surveillance. He has an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, but they also doubted that knowing he was under watch, he would have attempted another crime like that.
So he's not the serial killer. They're thinking now, whoever killed one killed them all.
So if you couldn't have killed that one, you didn't kill the other two. Now they find out George knew her.
On one occasion, Randy's boyfriend drove her home in her truck, and George followed in the boyfriend's car. So he knows where she lives.
That's what it means. A few weeks later, George and some friends drove out to Renton, which is a town, to help Randy put a new battery in her truck.
Then George rode back to Kirkland with her.

On a third occasion,

Randy was at a bar and George came over to talk.

So they know each other.

He's been to her house more than once.

After the murder,

George made disparaging remarks about her,

stating that she slept around,

used men,

and that she was a whore.

Okay.

Now, where the fuck was George on on august 30th well he because it was labor day weekend he and some friends were uh were going to canada that weekend yeah and on august 30th the night before they left the group stayed in a motel he george left the hotel dressed in dark pants, white tennis shoes, a blue dark sweatshirt, and a dark cap. He said he had to go to work.
Okay, he doesn't even have a job. What are you talking about? He returned at 6 a.m.
wearing the same clothes. He didn't have a car, by the way.
So he did this on foot. Randy lived about a mile from the hotel by car.
But walking distance was shorter because if you took the direct route. A friend of George's said that she received a ring from Russell several days after Labor Day.
It's an amethyst ring. And she wore the ring several times, then gave it to a friend who pawned it.
They later retrieved the ring from the pawn shop and Randy's sister-in-law identifies the ring as the one that she had given to Randy. So police brought the ring to the jewelry store where the employee identified it as the one he worked on for Randy in February 1990.
And so then there's a guy named, a kid named Matt McCauley, who's 16. He's a neighbor of Carol Beath.
Soon after the murder, McCauley told police that he saw a blue Corvette with a black top driving near Carol's house around the time of the murder. He also said he heard a cat scream around that same time.
Weird. So they interview him and he described using alcohol and drugs and having drug-related hallucinations that whole summer nice and he also said that he definitely drank some bourbon that night so we don't know how reliable of a witness he is is what i'm saying um but he's fun here we go he's fun september 12th 1990 robin olden.
She is a young lady packing up for a trip when she notices a strange sound. She said, all of a sudden I heard a knock on my window.
It was a very firm knock. I was really nervous.
Everything was going on. But my first thought was you're being paranoid.
But the noises continued. So she called the police.
Oh. When they arrived, they found the screen from her door was missing.
Someone was in the process of breaking into her house. And they had a suspect because someone had been driving away as the cops drove up.
They ran the plates and learned that it is George Russell. Oh, boy.
and they also learned that he had a warrant out for his arrest for impersonating a police officer. So they chased him down.
They said he can have all the excuses he wants while he's here. He's going to jail for that.
So she said the woman here, Robin, said she was shocked to learn that this potential assailant was George because she knew George well. Friends with him.
Familiar. She said, the first time I met George Russell, I thought he was a fun, happy-go-lucky, great guy.
But things started to change, and I realized there was a dark side to him. So, George is arrested on outstanding warrants and under investigation here.
He said they asked him about the other women, he explained that yes he knew mary ann and he knew randy and he said i i he had an alibi well he gave an alibi for his time of the murders and he also told the police that the night with mary ann with the truck he used his friend smith mcclain's pickup truck that night um but i didn't kill anybody i just used the truck. He denied killing people, but he also refused to hand over a DNA or hair sample.
Why? He'll do that, though. Yeah.
So they had to continue the investigation because they don't have any physical evidence at this point. After he was questioned by the police, he telephoned one of his roommates and asked her to give the police his copy of Crime Scene Search and Physical Evidence Handbook that he has.

The handbook outlines police procedures and gathering evidence from the scene of a crime and contains chapters on fingerprints and body fluids,

but does not contain a chapter on DNA testing.

So I don't know if he's fucking with them, like tell them so you know how to investigate a crime scene.

He also admitted having basically every book that was ever written about Ted Bundy, but denied that he was a fan of his or like, you know, thought he was cool or anything. He just said it was just very interesting.

Now, Smith McClain is tracked down and he says, yeah, George Russell asked to use my truck that night to take a girl home.

And the next morning when he returned, he claimed that he had to get it clean because a girl he knew threw up clam chowder in it. So he said he remembered saying it smelled like blood or if something had been gutted in there instead of a person vomiting.
So based on this, here's everybody saying he had the he had the truck. They go to do tests on the truck on october 11th 1990 they remove the interior of the truck now it has been cleaned in detail during the summer but the floor mats had not been cleaned in detail the seat did so mclean had removed the floor mats which were made from house carpet remnants no weather tech eat your heart out here's.
Here's a four by two that I cut out of the bathroom. Carpet scrap from the fucking guest bedroom here.
He had put them in the garage because they smelled so bad. Didn't throw them out.
Just put them in the garage. So the upholstery in the truck reacted positively for blood and antigens that matched the blood and HO and and a antigens, which matched the HO and a antigens in the vaginal swab taking taken at Marianne Polrick's autopsy.
Both antigens could have been contributed by her herself because she was a type A secretor. George was type O, although he could have been the source of the HO antigens.
He could not have contributed the A antigens. The state also sent the vaginal swab and upholstery samplings for DNA testing.
Poor quality of the samples, but they did conduct a PCR test, which is kind of like the most basic DNA test they can do. That's like the first one that they do just to see if you're even in the ballpark.
And then if certain things match up, then you go to more specific DNA. This is one of those, you know, yeah, one in 5000 people type of thing or whatever, one in 10, whatever the number is at that particular thing.
But it's not the one in eight billion type of shit. So the PCR test results indicated that neither George nor Smith McLean could have been the source of the blood in the truck, but that Marianne could have been.
The testing also revealed that only George of all the comparison samples could have been the donor of the sperm. Only George.
In addition to the sperm and blood and the one hair from a black person consistent with Russell's was found in the debris on the sheet in which her body was wrapped. By the way, five fibers in the pubic comings were consistent with the truck carpet.
What? As was one fiber from the sheet debris. Another fiber in the sheet debris was consistent with the truck's upholstery.
Yeah. They also were able to track down her ring, like we said.
They got that. Apparently, it was discovered in a pawn shop in Canada here.
They were able to get the ring back, identify it, and really tie him to the murder. So they charged George with murdering Mary Ann, Carolol and randy levine all three of them he wants all of his statements tossed in pre-trial sure of course he said the police failed to read him his miranda rights prior to questioning he sought to have them suppress not only that statement but also fruit of that statement him saying he was in the truck led to the truck search, which he wants that out, too, because that's part of it.

They got that from a statement here.

Now, the they the trial court concludes that the questionings occurred in a custodial setting requiring police to read the Miranda warnings.

But due to conflicting testimony, the court found the state had failed to prove by a preponderance that Russell had been advised of his rights, so the state was not permitted to use his statement in the case. The court found, however, that his statement was voluntarily given that his free will was not overborn, noting that the atmosphere in the interview room was relaxed and friendly.
Evidence also indicated that Russell had been Mirandized on previous occasions, including one occasion four months before the questioning. Well, you have to do it every time.
They do it when they leave the room for an hour, they'll Mirandize somebody, just for shits and giggles here. They said he knew his right to legal counsel was also clear since he eventually terminated the questioning by asking to speak to an attorney.
Before his statement was voluntarily given in a non-coercive atmosphere, the trial court ruled that the evidence derived from his un-Mirandi statements would be admissible. Oh.
So before it got contentious, the court excludes the defense evidence of similar attacks. And I say evidence with quotes around it.
They want to put two other assaults into the mix here that occurred in September of 1990. And they state that the incidents were similar to Carol B.
than Randy Levine because the female victims lived on the ground floor of an apartment building and both received head injuries inflicted by a heavy object. But they said there's absolutely no connection.
They said the first assault occurred early in the morning. The victim had locked herself out of her apartment building and was banging on her door when a man approached offering his help.
They walked around to the back of the building to see if she could climb in a window, and he struck her on the head with what appeared to be a rock. She screamed and he fled.
There's no posing. There's no anything.
So nothing there. Second assault happened when a victim was surprised a burglar in her home.
The burglar struck her once in the eye then fled with money. He had an alibi because he was in custody but they said there's no similarities here at all.
There's also, just because there's a murderer and serial killer that breaks into place doesn't mean that every burglary is. Is this exactly? Yeah, they were trying to do that.
They also said he has they said they want to get in. The court refuses to admit evidence that two men, George Grums and Brett Carlson, may have murdered Marianne and Randy.
George Grums was considered a suspect in a rape murder case where the body was left in a parking lot. The victim in that case was a black woman with a history of prostitution and a heroin habit.
She had been seen driving with Grums, although her body was left in a parking lot, fully clothed and not posed. So nothing like this is what they're saying here.
So anyway, also there's condoms. He wants to exclude the unused condoms found in his belongings.
The state asserted that the condoms were relevant to rebut an argument that Carol Beath and Andrea Levine had been killed by someone other than Mary Ann's killer because semen was found at the scene of Mary Ann's murder and not at the other two murders. So the state intended to argue that the absence of semen in the bodies of Levine and Bede could be attributed to the use of condoms.
Now they said the court indicated here, they concluded that condoms are out and then the next day they came back and said, change my mind, condoms are in. Condoms are in.
It's fucking wild. So the trial comes up here.
DNA, I could do a four hour show on the fight over the DNA and I'm not even going to get into it. I'm not going to get into it.
Not going to get into it. Prosecution succeeds in admitting into evidence the controversial DNA test for the hair, semen, and bloodstains, the PCR tests.
But winning a conviction here is going to rest on more than this, I think, here. So the Levine evidence, they say George knew Levine, knew where she lived.
On the morning of the murder, he was staying at a motel that was less than a 15 minute walk from her residence. Early in the morning, he left the motel at approximately 5 a.m.
An intruder was seen leaving her residence. The intruder, like George, wore dark clothing.
An eyewitness saw something white about two thirds as wide as the person superimposed against the chest or abdomen.

And he was wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with a white logo on the front.

After Randy's murder, George told some of her friends that he was a whore.

She was a whore who'd been sleeping with a friend of his and had used men.

Hair found on her body was similar to his.

And finally, it was discovered that a distinctive ring obviously was given away. So there's that.
That's a lot right there. Also, the crime scene book.
They argue that the handbook was relevant because it showed knowledge of techniques that were apparently used by these killers. The trial court initially ruled it inadmissible and then changed its mind again.
This judge is real flighty with shit. They get Matt McCauley, the 16-year-old there, to try to support the theory that Carol was killed by a boyfriend, Mike Sewell.
He identified a photograph of Mike Sewell's white-topped Corvette as possibly being the car he saw. On cross-examination, he denied drinking any bourbon that night, and then the state reminded him of his statements in which he admitted consuming a shitload of bourbon that night.
He then admitted drinking some bourbon that night, but denied it was enough to affect his system. What? And he also said he's been having hallucinations all summer.
Wow. So the state repeatedly questioned him on discrepancies in earlier statements because they said it was a different color top.

Now he's saying it's a white top Corvette.

Yeah, it was black.

Before he said it was blue, it was black.

Yeah.

The Mindhunters are here.

All right.

John Douglas and Robert Keppel both testify at this trial.

Really?

Yeah.

This is big shit.

They absolutely do.

They have all of this.

They talk about the posing. They talk about the hits and the VICAP computer programs that they've built all these profiles and shit of.
These programs use forms filled out by local law enforcement officials listing the various characteristics of homicides, and they enter it all in there. Now, the defense pursues the issue of the similarities and differences among the three murders, and the court allows Keppel to testify that his opinion of all the murders, that they were committed by the same person.
He said that all were killed within a short period of time of contact with the offender. Each crime involved the sexual insertion of a foreign object that the offender needed to display these victims and ensure their discovery and all of that.
They said that the fury that was expended at the crime scenes and the obvious lengths he went to to show whomever found his victims' bodies, the contempt he felt for those women, but speak of kind of deep residing cauldron of anger that's way beyond normality. Yeah, he's still mad.
Wow. I guess so.
Absolutely. They call him a violent necrophile and a sadistic necrophile um and they said that uh because they were what he told them basically he's saying that these women needed to suffer pleasure came when he was able to deliver it with the wax of a baseball bat or an iron rod or whatever he used to smash their skulls.
The physical act of killing sparked such a fury that he reached a form of sexual satisfaction releasable only through prolonged violence. That's why, although he knew that they were dead, he'd still keep going at them because it felt good.
The same reason why BTK came in his pants when he would fucking kill somebody.

So they said, of course, his warped sense of justice, the murders wouldn't have been a success unless he could tell the world what sluts they were. So he would pose them into erotic, erotically weird shapes and then degrade them with leaving something phallic in them.
so yeah they said that the the reinforcing the concept of degradation he placed in and on the victim's sex toys and sexual propaganda, such as that book, all that kind of thing. They said also he displayed a steadily increasing guile and confidence, spending more time with each victim as his killing spree progressed, which is absolutely true.
Now, Douglas, John Douglas here says that all the victims reposed that night and that exhibited the same signature. He talks about signature a lot.
He said that the victims were penetrated vaginally, anally, or orally with some type of device or foreign object. And so the timeframe of the murders pointed to one perpetrator, Douglas agreed.
there were differences among the crimes, but explained on redirect the differences were insignificant compared to the similarities. The significant part is the posing of the victims, the posing in this degrading type of position.
That's critical. In addition to them, they bring in another bunch of detectives that testify that the body seemed posed and only one said he'd ever seen another murder scene involving posing oh so they're trying to show how rare it is for posing this isn't going to be some other guy doing this manipulating the body after post-mortem is is so rare it doesn't happen that much most people really doesn't run the fuck away they get the fuck out of there they don't you gotta have some serious guile to stick around and do this type of shit.
And it's got to be a thing you need. The defense brings in their own posing expert, who's a retired 20-year FBI veteran, who says there's too many differences in the way they were killed, degraded, and posed to have been the work of one person.
Their bodies are in almost the exact same positions. What the fuck are you talking about? On cross-examination, they elicited his current opinion that all the murders were done by the same person, though.
But he said at first he didn't think they were. Okay.
Now, the defense, in closing, the public defender team of Miriam Schwartz and Brad Hampton, these poor bastards, they gotta talk about a fucking mountain to climb here. That's no fun.
They tried to poke holes in the... No! They tried to poke holes in the case.
They told the jury that if George, a high school dropout, were indeed a serial killer, there would have been more victims sooner. He just started now.
He's 30. What are we talking about? He was 32 years old.
What are we talking about? They said that the one defense attorney claimed that Carol Bede's boyfriend, who left a fingerprint a Coca-Cola can in her house, that's your killer right there. Problem is he's got reason to have fingerprints on Coca-Cola cans because he goes there because that's his girlfriend.
He, George, has no reason to leave a hair or any sperm behind anywhere. Yeah.
So the verdict comes in, 22 hours of deliberation. Really? 22 hours.
I'll tell you why in a minute because it's fucking hilarious. The jury returns guilty of all three on first degree murder.
Or I'm sorry, first degree murder for Marianne and aggravated first degree murder for Carol and Randy. Really? Yes, because they did a lot more post.
Yeah. Now, what the fuck took them 22 hours yeah what were they talking about jurors told reporters that they weren't in any disagreement they were never an argument they thought he was guilty from the beginning they just took a long time to discuss how weird everything was this is fucking crazy they sat around like dude and then that could you that one dude like they just talked about the case and like, we should really, I mean, there's a whole courtroom of people waiting for us.
We should probably go out and tell them what we got. Let's not leave until we hammer all this shit out.
Dude, they couldn't vote and then be like, let's get together at fucking Denny's later. You guys want some black Angus? Fuck.
Fuck it, yeah. So the sentencing comes around, and obviously you can imagine what they were saying about him.
He's a monster, menace to society, our greatest nightmare, obviously. He is sentenced to, you, sir, may fuck off two life sentences with no parole, and then another 29 years in prison on top of that.
For the other one, yeah. For the other one.
Yeah, consecutive. So bye-bye, George.
It's never happening again. Very quickly, his appeal says he wasn't Mirandized.
So there's that. He wanted the cases severed.
He wanted to sever count one from counts two and three, and they wouldn't let him sever it. He said John Douglas's testimony was ridiculous the court it's inflammatory that both uh they say that uh you know they shouldn't have been able to testify about the posing the court ruled that yeah that's what i mean they say you get the fuck out of here george you're gone no so that's denied um now here's an article i found from 2025 with an interview with george russell what junior.
Yeah. I'm a fucking idiot, though, because I went right to the middle of it to see what the meat of it was.
And there's some, like, talk of the South and stuff. So I thought it was him.
And then I went to the beginning, and it says, I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. We're in Huntsville, Texas, and we've got the good fortune to be visiting with George Russell, who's a forest activist and conservationist in East Texas.
And I'm like, shit, wrong guy. OK, mistaken identities are a motherfucker, man.
Now, his story here was detailed in the book that I quoted a lot in this Jack Olson's 1995 book Charmer, a lady's man and his victims. so the also it was examined in serial violence analysis of modus operandi and signature characteristics of killers by robert kepler this book is 93 on amazon god damn the kindle version is 92 dollars what so there's not even a a.
What are you talking about? It's crazy. The case was dramatized in several investigation discovery shows, including Dead of the Night, Secrets of the Morgue, City Confidential, and Murder by Numbers.
And also, George was analyzed in Most Evil, that show, where he was ranked at 17 out of the 22 level scale. Very fucking evil.
Very evil. Also examined by the New Detectives and Mark of a Killer on the Oxygen Network.
And there you go, everybody. That is Kirkland, Washington, and a fucked up ass serial killer.
I mean, a Ted Bundy in the making. He would have been Ted Bundy.
So many bad guys in that area of the country. Why? It's so strange.
I mean, it's so fucking weird. Right after that, too, because you had the Green River Killer.
You had Bundy. You have him.
It's all happening. So anyway, if you like that show, tell the world about it.
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You fuck you want Patreon.

Yeah, you do.

Patreon.

P.A.T.R.E.O.N. dot com slash small town.

No, damn it.

P.A.T.R.E.O.N. dot com slash crime in sports is what it is.
Just like the name of our other show that you should be listening to. And anybody $5 a month or above, you're going to get a giant back catalog of stuff you've never heard before immediately upon subscription.
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Congratulations to them. Only problem is none of them are disabled.
That's the issue. Bastards.
And then small town murder. The bonus, the absolute craziest story I've ever heard.
The documentary on Netflix is called American Nightmare. Never been on the edge of my seat more.
It's like a papini situation. You think it's a kidnapping, but is it fake? Are they faking it? Maybe they are.
It's fucking crazy. And there's a resolution too, so we won't leave you hanging.
Yeah, thank God. That would have been too much.
So that is patreon.com slash crime in sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, which is right fucking now.
Jimmymy hit me with the names of the people who would never ever ever pose us in crazy in crazy sexual positions after we've been murdered hit me with them right now this executive producers are gary howard setta and bug amanda brennan cam and wendy kashwara happy birthday happy birthday jordan bennett and uh simon they made it back to england uh happy travel, you guys you guys got this and Jerry McMillan thank you guys for everything you do other producers this week are Happy Hour in Hobbs New Mexico Janice Hill, Peyton Meadows Adam with no last name, Leslie with no last Bad A Davis. I think that means I think the A stands for ass,

James. I really do.

I really believe that. Nice.
You got a rebel.

Saquon Person.

Rose with no last name. Lacey Renee.

Heather Kirkwood. Riley Rumpus.

Leah Baskett. Yep.

Baskett. Brooke Dolan.

Stephanie DeShazzo. Brian Watkins.

Courtney Rathbun. AJ Beldonza.
yep, Justin Boone, Karen Frenning, S. Valere, Valerie, not ween, I? I don't know what you're trying to get me to say.
Yeah, maybe it's not weenie. I don't know, James.
Not weenie, thank you. Notorious G-Man.
I got that one. Chris would know the last name.
Jimmy P. Angie would know the last name.
Cody Pinkstock. Lori Davis.
Burgundy Escobar. Valerie Ayala.
Noah H. Colleen Sams.
Terry would know the last name. Lindsay Benedict.
Caroline Moore. Oh, boy.
Hajni. Hajni would know the last name.
Hunter would know the last name. Megan Grice.
Maybe Grise. Who knows? Maybe it's Grise.
Courtney Douglas. Elevate.
Levate. Bree with no last name.
Dave Kearney. Kearney.
Kearney. John with no last name.
Christopher. All of them.
Oglesby. Christopher.
Oglesby. Christopher.
that's you. Liza Rodriguez.

Grover Sharp.

Katie Bowers.

Therob D?

Therob D.

Oh, what is that?

That's no last name, just Thero.

T-Hero B-D.

I don't know what that is.

Don't look at me.

I'm confused as shit.

Delaney Ellenberger.

Shelby Roberts.

Stacey Nary.

Jen Murphy. Sarah with no last name.
Linda Madison. Melinda Chapman.
Zach Goodwin. Odie.
Odie Bitch. Odie Bitch.
What is that? I think Odie was a boy. I don't know what you're trying to get me to say.
I did my best. Wasn't Odie a boy? Brett B.
That may be Odie Bitch. Zach with no last name.
Brenda with no last name. Serena Emery.
Anissa C. Alicia with no last name.
Dana with no last name. Natalie Nagin.
Crystal Canning. Sean with no last name.
Amy Pritchard Sweeney. Abigail Udy.
Abby Masager. Masager.
Masager. Masager.
Rose Ambrose. That can't be right.
But that's fun. No one would do that to you, would they? Sandwiching.
Melissa Burke. Rosie Bookends.
Susan Davis. Krista Yanko.
Maribeth Gandy. Natalie would know last name.
Robin Bucci-Kruska. Matthew Larson.
Leaves would know last name. Hannah would know last name.
Tammy H. Steven Persons.
Sandra Ertman.

Dustin Snyder.

Squid would know last name.

Squid!

Would you have for dinner squid?

Have you seen that chick that screams at her friend and calls her squid?

Yes. And she just wants Wingstop.

It's the greatest.

I can't get enough of it.

Would you eat squid?

Thomas Dilg.

Connor N.

Big Miss Steak. Oh, got you.
All right. Izale.
Izale. Isho.
And that's no last name. Trish Mystic.
Andrea Stack. Bella Turnip.
Turchiano. Hey.
Kathleen Bowley. Nicole Schoenfeldt.
Maisie Leach. Leanna Ledbetter.
Fucking shit. Griff with no last name.
Nick Sanderson, Gina Bean, 5713. April Deese, Kale Raymond, Ruby Soho, Shannon Lamothe, Jamie Carman, Nick Carliton, Christian Perez, your kind Canadian kin.
Dylan with no last name. Sam Richardson, Kevin with no last name, Courtney Enrich, Lori Taylor, Melissa with no last name, Edward Chandler, Nicolette Primley, Jim Bradford, Katie Kavanaugh, Kaylin Sandvig or Caitlin? Is that a T? I don't know.
It's one of those two, Caitlin or Caitlin Sandvig. That's who it is, James.
Allison Combs, Sharon Schneider, Dylan Kormanic, Jesse Joy, and all of our patrons. You guys are the best.
Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody.
We cannot tell you what you mean to us and the people that do that. You are the core of the fucking show.
You're everything to us.

We don't,

I mean,

it's one thing we got ads and all that kind of shit.

Patreon is it,

man.

We give a fuck about that.

So thank you for being part of our little crew and our demented little,

our demented little circus that we put on here every week,

multiple times.

So thank you for everything you do.

If you want to follow us on social media,

shut up and give me murder.com drop down menus,

take you everywhere you want to go. That said,

thank you so much, everybody, and until next week,

it's been our pleasure. Bye!

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