Murder Is Life - Lancaster, Texas

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This week, in Lancaster, Texas, a cruel and bloody triple murder murder leads to a suspect with a long history of violence who has a lot to say about these murders and a few others too.

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 Petra Gallo.

I'm here with my co-host.

I'm Jimmy Wistman.

Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today on another absolutely insane edition of Small Town Murder.

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That's pretty wild.

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Sober up slash crime in sports.

And I don't care if you're sober or not.

Click on that and go ahead and do it.

I don't care what you got running through your brain.

You disarm yourself from the internet when you're that fucked up.

That's right.

That said, disclaimer time.

This here is a comedy show.

We're comedians.

We are going to make jokes and people are going to die.

But the thing is, we do it very tastefully.

What you do here is we never make jokes about the victims or the victims' families.

Why, James?

Because we're assholes.

But.

But we're not scumbags.

That's how it works.

It's real simple like that.

So, I mean,

I think if you give it a chance, you're going to find

we tell the craziest murder stories around, and nothing in the stories, in the best ways, nothing in the story is embellished for comedic effect or anything like that.

That's the sad part, is nothing has to be embellished.

The world is that messed up, so people are crazy out there.

So, yeah, that said, I think it's time, everybody.

Well, actually, if you think true crime and comedy shouldn't go together, maybe you shouldn't be here.

Maybe you should, but you might not.

You might like it.

You might not.

No complaining later.

That's all we have to say.

That said, I think it's time to sit back, clear the lungs.

Let's all shout.

Shut up.

Give me murder.

Let's do this, everybody.

Okay.

Let's go on a trip, shall we?

We have to.

Let's do it.

We are going to Texas this week.

Oh, do we have to?

Down to Texas.

We do.

We're going, it's hot.

Hot.

Well, it's, you know, I mean, Phoenix, it's a wash, probably, but it's

hard to.

Yeah, it's always hot and humid.

We're going to Lancaster, except in the winter when it's freezing.

It's, you know,

except in the mid winter when it still sucks.

That's right.

This is in Lancaster, Texas, which is just outside of Dallas, a Dallas suburb, which Dallas, again, extremely hot in the summer and pretty damn cold in the winter.

It's a

rough weather city, Dallas.

This is just outside Dallas, about 25 minutes to Dallas, and about three hours to San Saba, Texas, our last Texas episode, which was the the first family of murder and pecans, if you remember correctly.

That was a fun one.

This is in Dallas County.

There's a bunch of different area codes, so we won't even go into that.

There's like five different area codes for this place.

It's not that big of a town, but there's a lot of intersection here.

The nickname of this town, and we've heard, I think this is maybe the fifth town we've heard

this nickname, and that is the city of trees.

Is it?

We hear it all the time, city of trees.

How many trees down there?

I think they probably planted some trees at some point, and they were like, see that?

Imagine there's trees.

City of trees, everybody.

Look at us.

We're the ones with them.

We're the ones.

So a little bit of history about this joint here.

About 600 families originally settled here in what was known at the time as Peter's Colony.

This is 1841 through 1844.

Now, they advertised heavily in Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Tennessee.

So most of the people who came at first were from those areas.

Oh.

Because back then

you'd open up an area for

population.

You'd start a town.

There's no internet or anything.

No one knew about it.

So you'd have to literally send flyers back to civilization and distribute them.

You'd have salespeople and that sort of thing.

So that's what they did.

The first group to settle in the area was the Roderick Rawlins family here.

They came from Illinois and they arrived in 1844.

And they were kind of one of the founders of the town, basically, here, how that goes.

Now, apparently, they stake, there's a guy named Bledsoe here who moved in, had some business, had some business stuff for a while, and he ended up staking the original town of Lancaster in 1852.

He purchased 430 acres of land from Roderick Rollins'

widow, and he modeled it.

after his hometown in Kentucky.

Got it.

And then

he laid it out the same way.

And then he injured his knee and a guy named Lancaster came in and renamed the place.

I bet he's from Lancaster, Kentucky or something, probably.

So in 1934, this is the site of a Bonnie and Clyde bank robbery.

Also, that's fun.

February 27, 34, Bonnie waited in the getaway car while Clyde and Raymond Hamilton walked into the Lancaster, Texas Bank, walked out with over $6,000.

And that is equal to about $144,000 in 2025.

Real.

So not a bad haul for five minutes of work.

Reviews of this town.

Let's see here.

We have a few here.

Here's five stars.

They range too.

There's a big range in reviews here from I love it to get me out of here now before my head explodes.

It's really five stars.

Banks have lack security.

Great security at these banks.

Five stars.

I strongly believe that Lancaster is an excellent area for my family and me.

Adding new places in our area has created interest from more people to move here.

In the seven years I've lived here, everyone I have met has been incredibly friendly and peaceful, making it an ideal place to live.

Peaceful.

Utopia.

Lancaster is a utopia, everybody.

Peaceful people.

They just come up to you, they start say namaste, and then you all sing kumbaya together.

Peace offering of bread.

Usually.

Well, yeah, that's what you do.

Three stars.

Living in Lancaster has its ups and downs.

I love the town.

School system is good.

The major problem in my area is, I'll let you guess what you think of that.

The schools?

I don't know.

He just said the school system is good.

Oh, right.

Drunk drivers.

Well, close, I guess.

Alcohol is drugs.

How many drunk drivers are there where you would notice it?

Well, they haven't got an Uber here yet.

Like, imagine how it would have to be where you're like, there's just so many drunks on the road.

You wouldn't notice.

I would love to get the problem under control.

That would make the area safer for kids to play in the yard again.

Oh, we see the city.

Are the drunks out at two in the afternoon?

Yeah.

Three in the afternoon, the streets are just teeming with drunks crashing into kids, playing in yards.

Not even in the street.

In the yards, they're running them down.

In the grass.

Wow.

Now parents are afraid to allow kids to be kids because of that problem.

Stay in the house, little Stevie.

There's drunks outside.

That actually happens?

Wow.

I think that person's being a little overdramatic, probably.

Yeah, maybe exaggerating a bit.

I hope.

A little bit.

If it's not, wow, it's just bumper cars over there.

I mean, I've driven in Texas.

They stop you for speeding when you're not speeding.

When you're not speeding,

they did to us.

We've told that story a few times.

How do you get drunk driving just done?

You're going 87.

Well, my cruise control set on 75.

You were going 87.

Okay.

I guess I was going 87, even though I haven't touched the gas in

30 miles.

Yeah.

Two stars, the businesses lack good customer service.

The floors are always sticky.

The town's floors are sticky, everyone.

Hold down.

A whole town.

It's a sticky place.

There have been shootings at night, but I'm not sure if it's target practice or actually murder.

Well, we'll find out.

What?

I don't know what's that.

Drunks run kids down during the day, and people have target practice at night.

Or they're murdering.

Or there's obviously murdering.

But everyone's so peaceful.

I don't understand how there could be murder.

Then one star, there is absolutely nothing to do here.

I am always bored.

Well, start drunk driving and target practice.

It sounds like everybody else is doing that.

Shooting drunk.

That's a good time.

Jesus Christ, what a time.

I mean, if everyone's so drunk, maybe they're just bucking shots out the window of joy.

You know what I mean?

Like, yeehaw, pow, pow.

Maybe that's.

It's very happy people.

Yeah, who knows?

How many happy people are in this town?

41,057 happy people.

Good amount, yeah.

Yeah, it's grown a lot in the last like 30 years, like a lot of these suburbs of these kind of big cities.

This is a weird stat for so many.

Usually, when we get like out of whack stats, it's because there's like 400 people in the town.

Yeah.

For 41,000 people, everything kind of averages out around the averages.

There is 55.5% women here.

That's heavy.

That is the highest I've ever seen in a town over a thousand people.

So, guys, if you're, if you're, you know, where's all the women?

30,000 women here.

Lancaster, Texas.

That's where all the women are.

Knock yourselves out.

Median age here: 32.5.

It's about 45% married.

A lot more single with children people here.

So the divorce rate isn't that much different, though.

Race in this town: 10.1% white,

67.9% black, 0.3% Asian, 19% 19% Hispanic.

So there we go.

62.7% of the people here are religious, and Catholic, actually, is the highest.

Is that right?

Hispanic population is going to take the Catholicism up there.

19.6%

are Catholic with Baptists real close behind, nipping at the heels.

Unemployment here slightly above average, but nothing too crazy.

Median household income here is, well, in the rest of the country, it's about $69,000 and change.

Here it's $59,952.

So not too far off.

And the cost of living here, $100 is regular average in the United States.

Here it is $100.2.

So it is

exactly average.

$10,000 less cash every year, too.

That's not very good.

No, no, but exactly the same.

Now, the housing is a little bit cheaper than the median.

So median home cost here, $260,400.

So not

terrible.

And maybe we've convinced you.

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe.

All the peaceful, talk of peaceful people.

And maybe you're curious.

You want to see if it's target practice or murder.

You want to give it a shot and look into it.

We have for you the Lancaster, Texas Real Estate Report.

Average two-bedroom rental here is pricey, actually, which the housing is a little bit cheaper, but the rental, two-bedroom, two-bedroom, $1,530, which is well above the national average.

That's a lot.

Here is a one-bedroom, one-bath, 724-square-foot house.

Nothing.

I will turn nothing.

Monitor towards it.

Geez.

It's just

a little box.

It's like an easy up with walls.

Yep.

I think it could be technically a tiny home, I think.

Yeah.

Built in 1945.

It would be considered like a bungalow if it was in L.A., you know what I mean?

Yeah,

a cabin if it's in like a mountaineer.

The Northwoods in Wisconsin or some shit.

Yeah.

Not a big lot either.

$174,000 for that.

Okay.

I mean, it's like clean and stuff and nice on the inside, but that's a tiny little place, man, for any kind of money.

Here is a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,158-square-foot house.

Now, this, from the outside, looks pretty nice because it's like a brick house, see?

that's nice, but inside, it's fascinating.

Those little houses, when you put a two-car garage on them, they look like usable.

And then you get inside and you're like, oh, 1,100 square feet ain't shit.

Yeah, this house is half-garage.

Shit.

Inside, it could use some updating for sure, as you can see.

The cabinets.

Backyard, nice swing set in the backyard.

It's cute.

A lot of grass.

This house, $210,000.

Fucking wow.

So, yeah, I mean, it's a, you could put your kids in there, but it's going to be small.

And then here's a three-bedroom, three-bath, a 1,991-square-foot house here,

but comes with 10 acres.

Oh, yeah.

There's the house, and here's the acreage that you own.

All of that is yours, leading up to such a nice tree line over there.

Not too bad here.

It looks like there's a horse thing here, too.

One of those.

There's a corral of some sort.

Yeah, where it used to be.

Fenced in.

Is it fenced still?

Is that a fence?

That's a fence around the horse thing, the horse area there.

This house, $1.4 million, though.

What?

Yeah, that's a little...

I didn't expect that.

That was like...

How do you figure that out?

$600,000, maybe?

Nope.

That acreage of really what looks like just flat nothing land is expensive as shit.

That's not a lot going on.

It's going to take a lot of fucking work, too.

You got to make that shit.

And I guess if you have horses, you need it.

So there you go.

Things to do here.

This town, for being like right outside outside Dallas and things like that, you would imagine this town would have a lot popping off.

There is extremely surprising little

to do in this town.

It's so weird, dude.

You weren't kidding.

It's strange.

We got Sparks in the Park,

which is the 4th of July celebration.

Oh, okay.

Get your asses out there.

Yeah.

I thought maybe it was where you drink a bunch of those old Sparks drinks from 2004 and then you drive your car.

Drive your car.

Try to hit kids playing in the park.

Sparks in the park.

Did you ever drink those things?

Those sparks?

No, no.

Oh, they were vile.

No, I'm not an alcoholic.

I didn't drink that.

Yeah, that's who they're for.

That's who they're for.

Yeah.

They're so gross.

I don't like.

When I was a teenager, I drank like 40s and drink, you know, gross shit.

But like, outside of that, as an adult, I'll only, you know, I don't need to drink that bad.

So if that's not really good, something really good that I like, I don't need to drink it.

I'm good.

It was a disgusting drink.

It was like

a faco at the beginning of the Forloco.

It looked like an energy drink.

It didn't even look like a beer.

It looked like an alcohol.

And calling it Sparks made it seem like that's what it was.

And I think the orbit has some sort of

energy tinge to it.

I think there was something with that.

It was fucking vile.

And it was like 9% booze.

It was crazy on it.

Jesus,

that's a lot of booze.

I almost said that's expensive.

It's going to be expensive to pay for what you damage out of that.

You should put it right next to that energy drink that had the little balls in it.

Remember the little fucking...

Balls?

They had little fucking balls.

They looked like little plastic balls.

You like both of them in it.

Yeah, they had like that.

It was a weird looking drink.

So Sparks in the Park here.

Get ready for an unforgettable Independence Day experience at Sparks in the Park on July 4th in Lancaster Community Park.

It's a family-friendly event, of course.

No, it's only adults.

Hey, we're having a fireworks show, but keep them fucking kids at home.

We don't want none of them running around here.

Out of adults' mouths.

That's it.

We know how to get out of the way of a drunk, okay?

They don't.

So

we have a lineup of entertainment, including live performances by Neo-Soul artist Music with a Q, Music Soul Child.

What's a Neo, Neo what?

Neo Soul.

I don't know.

Soul would be

like Isaac Hayes and shit like that from the early 70s, late 60s.

I guess just the new version of that.

Whatever.

I don't know.

And R ⁇ B Powerhouse 7-Streeter.

Powerhouse.

Powerhouse.

Wow.

Must be some Dallas shit.

Food trucks, a dedicated kids zone where, you know, they have walls around it so no one can hit them with cars.

Yeah.

Stunning fireworks display at 9.30.

It's going to be wonderful.

Okay.

Then they also have sirens and smiles.

This is literally the only thing going on in this town.

What is the 4th of July?

Yeah.

It is, you bring your kids in and they get to look at fire trucks and shit.

It's a touch-a-truck thing that they do.

Yeah.

My little brother has to take his kids to all that shit because they're obsessed with them.

Anytime there's a

touch anything with an engine, he's got to get up at seven o'clock in the morning and load his kids into fucking booster seats and drive over to it so they can ask questions about it.

I love that the has to was in my life.

No, it's not a choice.

He has to do that.

It's not a choice.

No, he has to on his day off do that.

So they're going to.

Of course, he can't do it when he's working.

He's going to do that on his day off.

He doesn't have to go down to the city at 4 o'clock in the morning.

It's not appealing at all.

Having little children is awful.

It's an awful, awful thing.

It's bad.

Touch a drink.

It's hard.

My brother has to do this.

He has to.

On its day off.

That's how it breaks down, my friend.

Put tiny asses in booster seats and fucking smile up.

Head over to a fire department a half hour away to go fucking stare at a truck.

No weed, no booths.

Just go do this sober.

Just do it.

Crime rate in this town, what we are interested in here, property crime about 25% above the average.

So pretty crimey in terms of property crime.

Then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course assault.

The Mount Rushmore of crime is about 25% above the average.

So

there's definitely a violent overtone here.

Now, when we're going to go back to this town, it's going to be back when there was like maybe 8,000, 10,000 people here.

There was a very different town back when we're going to talk about it.

And that's only in the 80s.

It really has blown up since the mid-90s, as a lot of places have.

So, that said, let's talk about a murder.

Let's do it.

Let's get into this.

Okay, here we go.

Let's talk about a man first here.

A man born into some not great situations.

David Martin Long, all regular spellings.

It's a real standard name here.

Now, David is born on July 15th, 1953.

He is from San Angelo, Texas.

And he's born right into just a cauldron of shit, basically.

Sure.

He's got a lot of older siblings.

From what I can gather, at least two older brothers and an older sister.

And the closest one to him seems to be about four years away from him.

Four years older.

His sister's like seven years older and so there's a bunch of kids and that i think there's more by the way those are the only ones i could confirm so there's at least four kids and both parents are drug addicts and alcoholics fantastic great right and this is in the 50s you had to work to be a drug addict in the 50s like you had to really work at it it was hard of the curve yeah yeah you had to work like yeah it was not easy you had to be like in the jazz scene or something to be able to be a drug addict otherwise you would just wouldn't know anybody who had drugs so

um although i bet you you could get a doctor to prescribe you anything back then, probably, yeah.

Anything at all?

What do you feel?

Yeah, sure.

Let's give you some of these.

Yeah, they'll make you feel better.

Something real hard.

Yeah, real hard.

So

obviously, if both of your parents, it's bad enough if one of your parents is a drug addict and an alcoholic and the other one's just a codependent or whatever.

This is both parents are a complete disaster.

And

that's tough.

So that leads to him suffering a lot of neglect,

plenty of abuse by the way lots of abuse lots of neglect lots of being you know this person's watching them and who knows what they did to him and

yeah the more hands you pass a kid in the worse the better the chances of something bad happening to them are essentially when they're little so no stability in his life at all for anybody yeah it's weird but i it seems like the kids rather than kind of kind of

team up kind of voltron themselves up to be able to withstand the storm, you know what I'm saying?

If they all huddle up together, maybe the body warmth will keep them all through the night.

A seven-year-old, a 12-year-old, a six-year-old, and a five-year-old.

That's a 26-year-old, right?

Yeah,

all together.

You could form them together in a ball.

They

seem to kind of go their own ways instead and handle this however they can handle it.

It's every man for themselves kind of a thing.

So that's what it seems like.

Now, his mother dies when he's 10 years old as well, 1963, his mom dies.

And that further absolutely, whatever little string and thread of stability that was in the house is just blown apart by his mother dying.

Because, dad, if you're a drug addict and an alcoholic anyway, and now your wife dies.

Oh, boy.

I mean, that's going to send you into a spiral, I would assume, of being worse.

And you've also got double the drugs.

Double the drugs.

Yeah, you're hooking.

You're drugging for two now, also, is the problem.

That's tough because there's

four kids to deal with.

You're right.

Because I think the oldest one was like 17 at this point.

So

you have a lot of kids going on, at least four kids.

So at this point, he's going to end up being shipped through a series of reform schools and foster homes.

Oh.

Which we all know how that works out for kids a lot of times.

They're very good.

When they're shipped around, it's a great result.

Reform schools and, you know, multiple foster homes right

really always the best thing for a kid obviously you know so yeah that's terrible that's not good and especially back then this is before this is before like the uh like in the late 60s actually geraldo rivera did a bunch of exposés on when he was like a real reporter still he did a bunch of exposés yeah i mean before he was like digging in al capone's vaults and all that shit like right he was he was going into all of these like mental institutions and and like where they would house like severely handicapped people.

And he was exposing these.

Exposing the mistreatment.

Yeah.

He helped change that entire system, which is really, really impressive.

And along with that, kind of the ripple effect was the foster care system and the reform school system is also kind of in that wave of shit.

But this is well before that.

This is in like the early to mid-60s when it was just you threw a kid in there and God knows what the fuck happened to him.

So

I've only seen that one documentary on Netflix.

Was it Cropsy or whatever the Cropsy?

Yeah.

Yeah, there you go.

So fucked up.

Picture that in every state and every city all over the place.

That's what they had.

There's a man that was just,

they misdiagnosed him, and he just, he knew everything they were doing to him.

And he's just inside himself, just screaming, God damn it, this is fucked up.

Dude, that shit was the

tariff.

That's the most terrifying thing ever to be thrown into a place like that.

That's insane.

That makes prison look good.

Zero opportunity to fight back or

nothing.

Scream for help.

They just drug you and let you wander around.

I mean, that's what they did back then.

So

David's brother, Gary, who's four years older than David here,

and his sister's name is Linda.

She's seven years older.

They both say that

David himself changed after their mother died.

Like whatever little scrap of innocence was left in him was gone at that point by 10.

So that's not wonderful.

They said that their father's alcohol abuse got much worse after that.

And the neglect of the two younger boys got

much worse.

Much worse.

And that's when they started putting him in institutions and foster homes because they'd just be like wandering the streets at night and shit.

So back then, they'd just pick you up and throw you in a room.

So they also said when their mom became sick, even before she died, their father would go out drinking and leave the children alone.

Mom's in the hospital, and dad would still go out drinking and leave all the kids alone.

One time, their father brought a woman home from the bar.

You see where this is going?

Yeah.

And had sex with her in front of the children.

Oh, Jesus.

In front of the children.

Let dad show you some technique now.

Yeah, we'll visit mom in the morning.

Don't worry about it.

I mean, I've been drunk and horny.

Not that drunk and not that horny.

If there's eyes, any eyes, regardless of how old they are, I don't want to do it.

Your Your erection should disappear magically if a child walks in the room.

Like, because it's, oh, this is all over with, damn it.

I mean,

I've never seen anyone like, you got your notebook out, son?

Watch this now.

Yeah.

See, there's an angle you really want to hit now.

Come on.

There's too many heartbeats in this room.

Wow.

Now I just pictured it dark in there with four sets of eyes just staring

and him shouting out like, you know, things that he's done and instructions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Horrible, horrible day.

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So

now, by the time he's 12, David's a mess.

Of course.

From 10 to 12,

everything falls apart because he's also in foster homes and things like that.

He's pretty much an alcoholic by 12.

Yeah.

Drinking all the time,

displaying some real weird behavior that, you know, nowadays we know we should, you know, if a kid displays this behavior, there needs to be some intervention.

Start talking to him.

Yeah.

Somebody needs to talk to this kid, like, including he would kill small animals.

What?

Not in a hunting way, just in a

classies.

Yes, just in a

hey, it's cool to kill things and see what's inside of them.

And he even, this is when he's 12, strangled a fellow student to unconsciousness.

David thought he was dead.

He thought he killed him.

Once he went unconscious, he was like, There you go.

In the movies, that's how it works.

He's like,

they struggle, then they go, ah, and then they're dead.

Well, this kid passed out, so he let him go, but he was only unconscious.

But he tried to murder him.

Thought he finished.

Thought he murdered him.

How long it takes?

Yeah.

So he ends up in reform school around 12.

And

basically, in reform school, they believed that he had serious mental problems and a substance abuse problem.

This is at 12.

Fantastic.

Mental problems coming out of his ass and substances.

It doesn't take long to fuck a kid up.

Oh, no, it doesn't.

You could fuck a kid up with one instance of something, but if it's years of steady bullshit, that gets worse.

So things do not get better during his teen years,

shockingly enough.

He's going to all sorts of different institutions,

jails, reform schools, this place, that place.

He also has to battle several other addictions, including alcohol.

There's also addictions to methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin as well.

Oh, okay.

So basically, whatever he can get his hands on, he does and gets into.

So he's constantly juggling.

I picture like spinning plates, like all these different drugs and alcohol and all this type of shit.

Youthfully getting after it.

Absolutely.

And he would end up just going between Texas and California all the time.

Just back and forth.

He'd live in California for a minute.

He'd go back to Texas.

He'd go back to California.

Tons of petty crimes, thefts and things of that nature, vandalisms and stealing and whatever the fuck.

Tons of shit like that going on.

But he starts to become increasingly violent the older he gets.

Again, not surprising.

So by the 70s, he is

a powder keg.

I mean, he's just a mess.

He's on every drug you can imagine.

He's a drunk.

He's angry.

He's all shit and has reason to be.

Completely unaware that he's this far gone?

At this point, I'm sure.

Yeah.

When he's a young man, probably, because we're going to jump to 1978.

He's only 25.

He's not had a minute to sit and think about what the hell's going on and just kind of figure out, get a consensus of what's happening to himself and what he's doing and how to figure out.

Yeah, sure doesn't know who he is.

Yep.

They said his pattern would always be the same.

There would be a small attempt at stabilizing.

I'm with a girlfriend.

We're going to get a place.

I got a job now.

I'm settling down.

And he would be fine for a month.

And then he would just spin out.

He'd start drinking.

He'd start doing drugs.

And then he'd start being violent.

He'd get fired from his job.

And next thing you know, here we go.

And now he's drifting again and going back to Texas or back to California.

Yeah.

Well,

normal life.

I'm not putting jail.

I mean,

you have a goal of having that successful normal life, but then once you get it, sometimes it's like, this isn't the one that I wanted.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But I mean, that's if you've worked for something and achieved it and then realized, nah, that wasn't even what I wanted.

Yeah.

This is like a three-week attempt at getting a shit together.

You know what I mean?

Like, well, now everything's going to be fine.

Even though I'm a hardcore drug addict and alcoholic, I can just quit and be fine.

And I'm moving in with this chick and I got a job.

And so we're going to be, you know, we're going to be Ozzie and Harriet now.

Everything's going to be great.

Wow.

Not really like that.

Then he'd end up doing something dumb, beat the girl up or something, and he'd end up in jail.

So that's how it worked.

November 28th, 1978, he is in San Bernardino, California at this point.

He's living in California.

He's out driving shit face that day.

That's nice, which, by the way, he's always driving shit face.

Yeah, I assume.

Like, I grab a water before I get in the car just in case I get thirsty.

He's like, oh, I forgot my roadie.

And just like, he's getting booted.

I imagine he's probably just fucked up all the time.

And fucked up.

Sometimes he has to drive.

I think it's like, I don't drive well unless I'm fucked up.

I think he's one of those guys.

It's like, I drive much better when I'm drunk.

I have no idea.

So while he's doing this, he jumped a median,

not on purpose,

and

flattened two of his tires.

Yeah.

So.

He goes to a gas station.

This is fucking crazy.

He goes to a gas station where a gas station attendant named James Carnell, who is 54 years old, was working.

Now, Carnell repairs the tires,

fixes them up and says, okay, let's settle up the bill.

And he charges David $16.

Wow.

Right?

Pretty great deal.

Even in 78,

not a bad deal, right?

Yeah.

David is apoplectic furious over this.

Over $16.

That's a ripoff.

You ripped me off.

You didn't charge me.

That's not $16 worth of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So they get in a fucking argument, okay?

All right.

Well, you know what?

Let me let him explain it in his own words of exactly what happened.

He said, quote, in approximately 1978, I had been at a party to celebrate a wedding.

You know, a wedding reception.

That's what we're saying.

Usually is what they are called, but that's fine.

A party to celebrate a wedding in San Bernardino, California.

I was run off from this party for smoking marijuana.

I was asked to leave.

He got kicked out of a wedding reception.

That takes a lot.

He was too much fun at a wedding reception.

That's crazy.

My first marriage, the maid of honor, was projectile vomiting all over the place, and we didn't ask her to leave.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

This is like eight minutes after the ceremony.

She was done for the night.

I had three kegs and giant vats of mojitos and some other.

These people drank everything

and then left, and I never heard from them again.

It was like

everybody was fine.

Animals.

I think they were still sober.

They drank it all and left.

That's hilarious.

So he said, I was drunk.

I decided to go to a bar.

As you do when you're drunk already.

And hi.

And hi.

I went in a bar called Clyde's on the southeast corner of Waterman Avenue and I-10.

I left the bar very intoxicated and jumped a median with my car, which resulted in two tires being blown out.

I went ahead and went to the Union 76 gas station on the northwest corner of Waterman and I-10.

So he was lucky.

At least he just had to go to the other side of the intersection.

I had the flats repaired.

I was already feeling angry about what had happened at the party, and the gas station attendant overcharged me for the tire repair, which I still don't think that's overcharging.

That's That's a tire?

Any kind of auto repair, if it's less than $20, I feel like you're making out, even in the 70s.

I mean, when I was a kid,

look, late 80s, I vividly remember four tires for $100

at the tire place.

They were terrible tires, but they were not.

No, not the tires.

No, no, no, no, no.

Well, actually,

BFGs were $300 for all four.

I remember that very well.

For a good, decent tire.

For good tires.

$16 to

repair two of them would be a dream, rather than $300?

Yeah, fucking fantastic.

So this guy, $16.

So he's already feeling angry.

He said, I went to the car and took out a tire iron from the back.

Wow.

And followed the attendant into the parts room

where I proceeded to beat him all over the head with the tire iron.

Attempted murdered him.

Not attempted.

What?

I then took a broom and stuffed the handle of it down his throat to be sure he was dead.

He was dead.

He beat a man to death over $16.

Not even.

No, because he said he was overstrained.

He's got to get

to pay.

$6 maybe?

Expected to pay $10?

Four?

I don't know.

Four?

Less than $10.

Less than $10 he killed this man for.

Wow.

And that's it.

He's in jail forever for that.

No, he's not.

That's not definitely.

And thank you very much, everybody.

That's been this episode of Small Town Murder.

49's have a great day.

Yeah.

Stuck a broom handle down his throat to make sure he was dead.

Think about how cold that is.

Can't imagine.

I mean, to make sure that you didn't.

What the fuck?

And imagine who finds that.

A broom sticking out of him.

That's horrifying.

That's some horror movie shit.

That's how Jason Voorhees would leave you.

Yeah.

So for someone to find.

So he's done this, and then he says a car pulled up to get gas.

Uh-oh.

Oh, no.

I acted as the attendant and pumped the gas.

He said to How you doing, sir?

Can I check your fluids?

David Mitch blood-green.

He says he blood-greened him.

He's like, I'll just work here now.

And I'm sure he pocketed the cash for the gas.

I mean, he's not going to go put it in the register and then wait for another customer to come by.

The customer produced a credit card, but I did not know how to work the machine.

So I told him we didn't take credit cards after 10 o'clock and to come back tomorrow, to come back tomorrow and pay.

So he didn't even take any money.

No, no, he just pumped the guy's gas.

He's like, just get me back tomorrow.

It's fine.

Settle up then.

It's on your credit.

He left and then I left.

Wow.

He said the only thing I took from the attendant was his keychain to make change for a customer, meaning the little one with the little pumpy change thing on it.

After I left, I threw the keychain in a field.

I killed him because I was pissed about him overcharging me.

This is who we're dealing with.

This is a live wire who's capable of literally anything at any time.

I mean, if he'll kill a man for $4,

presumably,

it's got to be.

And in this cruel way, too.

Right, right.

And not just the kill, it's not just the murder of a man.

It's the

celebration of the murder.

And to make sure of

cold as ice.

That's cold as celebration of a man.

Yeah, to do all of that.

And then two seconds later to have the wherewithal to go, how you doing today, sir?

Pump your your gas.

Welcome.

Yeah.

Five gallons of leaded, no problem.

Like, that's fucking crazy.

Premium irregular.

Whoa, that is, um, we're dealing with a dangerous, dangerous person here.

Certainly.

So December 20th, 1983.

So five years later, he never gets caught.

He takes off.

That's that.

Yeah.

There's no security cameras or anything.

In 78, if no one saw you do it and you didn't leave anything behind,

you get away with a gas station robbery.

Yeah.

But December 20th, 1983, there's a man named Bob Neal Rogers, Bob and Neal, which is

Andrew Dice Clay joke.

That's terrible.

That's what I mean.

You have to tell your comedic brain, I'm sitting here telling my brain, no,

no,

no, that's not where we are.

No,

Bob Neal Rogers,

37 years old.

This is in Bay City, Texas, outside of Houston.

Okay.

Now, Bob is

David's boss at a cable television company.

So they're installing cable, and this is when cable was really blowing up.

So these companies had a lot of work to give, so much so they'll even hire this asset.

Anybody.

Anybody they'll hire, literally.

Can you hold a clipboard?

Great.

Let's go.

Can you separate some dykes or clines?

Get in here.

Get in.

So Bob accuses David of misusing a company vehicle, and he fires him.

Okay.

Which is worth well more than $4 to $6.

So you can imagine how upset David is.

He's pretty upset.

Yeah.

So he's super mad.

And oh, by the way, he is under the influence of heroin at this point.

At the time.

At the time.

You would imagine, by the way, a guy on heroin would be a little more chill, just a little more chill.

You know what I'm saying?

You know, junkies are a little calmer usually.

It's one of the more chill drugs.

Yeah, I would say.

And also some other drug, too.

Phenmetrazine, which is a stimulant he's on as well, which is an overhead.

Meaning, yeah, there's some fast, going to speed your shit up.

Yeah.

So

that has been on the market at the time since 53.

So I think you can get that like in a store.

Wow.

So

he's on like trucker speed and heroin at this point.

It's not like Suda Fed, where you got to mix it with like a car milk.

No, no, no.

This is already mixed.

It's ready to go.

Back then, the doctor just give it to you and go, you'll be driving all night if you take that.

Don't you worry about it.

20 hours straight on through to Long Beach.

Yeah.

So, David visits Bob Neal Rogers'

trailer.

Okay.

Comes over, I don't know, if to plead for the boss's trailer.

We don't know if it's because he's pissed off, if it's to try to get his job back, whatever it is, he shows up at the trailer.

Okay.

Now, he finds his boss, Bob Neal, over here, Rogers, passed out drunk.

He's shit-faced and passed out.

So, David says here, he describes this as the way he puts it, snapping.

He said he just snapped.

So angry that he saw him.

Seems like he snapped before he came over.

Yeah.

So what he does is he sets the mobile home ablaze.

What?

Oh, yeah.

While the guy's passed out drunk inside of it, which burns him alive inside, or

asphyxiates him and then burns him, however the whatever the order of shit went.

and he also stole his money but he stole he said he stole all but $20 because he didn't want it to look like a robbery so if he left $20 it wouldn't look like a robbery I don't think that I don't think that wallet's gonna stick around when you light a fucking mobile home on fire crispy fucking mobile home you're gonna find a 20 in it so that is fucking crazy he's arrested actually for this David but the Matagorda County grand jury said there was insufficient evidence for an indictment.

What?

Yes.

Do you have fingerprints on a gas can or something?

Don't know.

I don't know what insufficient evidence there is.

Don't worry.

Later on, we'll hear all about it.

Yeah.

Okay, let's head to June 11th.

So this man's murdered two people.

At least.

Wow.

Oh, at least.

I mean, if you'll snap that easily, do you think there was nothing going on in that five years between those two murders?

That's real interesting.

So now let's jump to June 11th, 1986.

Oh, shit, gets even weirder.

This is in, I guess, Iran, Texas.

Yeah.

I-R-A-A-N, Texas.

Okay, just an extra A, but probably this is.

Extra A, probably, I would think.

Or Iran, Texas.

There's two ways.

You really got to stretch it out.

Iran, Texas.

So there's a house here.

Inside of this house are four people:

Gail Allison, who's 25 years old, Elizabeth Ballou,

B-E-L-U-E, who's 24 years old.

And then there is Bill Willis and Ernest Ray Willis.

Okay.

They're all in this house together.

Now,

a little bit about Ernest here.

A little background on Ernest.

Now, Ernest, trust me, this all ties in.

You're like, who the fuck are these people now?

Believe me.

So Ernest here, or Ernie, as he went, he's a big six foot three guy.

He is called a soft-spoken, hard-headed, good-looking roughneck.

Okay.

Which sounds like a movie character.

A soft-spoken, hard-headed, good-looking roughneck heads into the wilderness to find his true love who's been kidnapped by bears and held hostage in a cave.

So he would,

I guess, he would, he worked in the oil fields of eastern New Mexico and West Texas.

That's what he did during the day.

And then at night, he was Mr.

Party Time.

Let's tie one on.

Let's find me a lady.

I mean, he's a real kind of

an old-timey guy that there's not a lot of these guys exist anymore.

Go out in the fields and I'll work all day in the oil fields and then

party all night and meet the ladies.

So

that's his kind of deal.

Now, he got in trouble sometimes, but only because he's a drunk.

Okay.

He's a real drunk.

I mean, he likes to party, he likes to drink, and he's Matthew McConaughey in

Dallas Buyers Club.

Except working hard in the Texas sun all day.

Yeah, before, yeah.

Before

before the that one part before that problem yeah that little problem he encountered

so he had as an he had three du uh three d uh dwis i kept calling them duis but in texas they're dwishing right and then other places it's oui and some other places it's some other acronym but it's a dui god damn it it's a dui it's a dwi you're driving fucked up either way

So he also got in trouble for making a couple of obscene phone calls for some reason.

He got arrested for that.

What?

That's a lot of phone calls to get arrested.

And he got arrested for, and I don't know if this is aggressive or just if you, if, okay, if you're 16, this is like good, clean, teenage fun.

If you're 33 and drunk, this is aggressive and scary to whoever's on the other side of the drive-through window.

But he

was naked, showed up naked at the drive-through window of a fast food restaurant.

Oh, sir.

Just came to the window, knocked on it, and was like, huh?

Yeah.

So, obscene phone calls, naked drive-through fast food visits.

Like I said, if a 16-year-old did that, it would be on a dare from his friends, and they'd go, You little bastard, get out of here, and there'd be kids laughing.

But if it's a drunk oil-field roughneck, I think it's a different connotation, right?

Well, if he's handsome, it's uh, I mean, you never know.

Go on and stick that thing through the window.

Let me take a good look at it.

So, that's what he's doing here.

So, by the time he gets to Odessa, Texas in 1986, when this whole thing takes place, he's 40 years old.

He's an alcoholic with six ex-wives.

That is what his life has

brought for him.

40 years old, six ex-wives.

I mean,

I know a guy.

I know you do.

I feel like he's on track for nine.

He's going to beat, yeah, he's going to beat my dad at that point.

My dad was 67, and he had nine, and this last one he had for fucking seven years so

that's like a seven that's like a 10 what is that a tenth of his life that's pretty good this guy's averaging we'll say even if he started getting married at 16 yeah he's averaging a wife every four years that's incredible that's insane think about that's from 16.

you piss somebody off enough to make them leave every four years wow and then you find someone else Well,

he doesn't have half his shit.

We didn't take half his booze.

He had half of nothing.

Jesus.

One of my boots?

I don't think so.

You get the left one, I get the right one.

Fuck you.

Plus, half a toilet, baby.

Yeah, it can't do it, my friend.

That's funny.

Every four years, you've got to meet somebody, make them love you enough to marry you, and then piss them off enough to leave.

Meet, marry, divorce, and then start cycle over again every four years.

In like 12 full moons.

That's amazing.

That's impressive, man.

That's very good.

Yeah.

So by 86, he's a 40-year-old alcoholic with six ex-wives and a really fucked-up back as well.

Fuck, man.

So he's a mess.

Now, the fucked up back isn't just from having six ex-wives.

It's actually, it's not like psychosomatic where he's just like, oh, God, my life.

Throwing young.

No.

He got in a car accident in 1970 and had four back surgeries.

And these are 70s back surgeries, too.

So there's no lasers or anything.

There's no chisel.

Yeah, there's actual,

there's like nails in there now.

You know what I mean?

Not even screws.

We didn't even do that yet.

They just like masonry nails they just put in them.

Attack hammer,

beating up your back.

So by June 10th, 1986, he's living in a trailer with his cousin Billy Willis.

And the two of them, this is wonderful.

What they do for a living at this point is they make and sell the manufacture and sales of, quote, bathtub speed.

Okay, meth.

Meth.

Yeah.

But like worse.

Bathtub speed.

Bathtub speed.

I'm picturing these two fucking hillbillies just over there making bathtub speed.

This here's a good batch.

Oh, yeah, it is.

Like that ore that's

my mom used.

The whole time you're talking, I've been stirring with two hands

like a witch with a big ore.

I'm about to add Eye of Newt to this fucking batch of bathtub speed anymore one of them one of them opens pseudo-fed caplets with his teeth yep and spits it in and sprinkles them on in there pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop from the bottom yeah jesus

that one was in the back of my throat

nasty so they found themselves at a party yeah in iran with two women they just met Yeah, I'm sure they're selling bathtub speed.

And if you get some women who like speed and you got speed, you're going to make fast friends.

I mean that.

They might be kind about it.

Yeah.

Yep.

So at some point, Ernie claims he took off his eel skin boots.

Eel skin.

Eel skin.

Yeah.

Which

from the water?

Who makes boots out of shit from the water?

That's just weird.

I mean, I've seen fish skin, but I've never seen

those like diamond ones or squares.

I don't know.

They put them on the boot to where it's like a diamond.

It's fish skin.

I just remember in Suicide Kings, the guy tells tells him what they're made of, and the guy goes, You got fish boots?

Which I thought was very funny.

Yeah,

it's not like a fucking trout, it's some other big

shot.

It's not a mackerel,

they don't skip 300 mackerels and fucking

put them on Raymond.

Rainbow trout boots might look fucking

pretty sharp.

That's shark skin.

That's what they'd be different in different lights.

That'd be pretty good.

So he said he took off his eel skins and he passed out on the couch.

Yeah.

Now, early the next morning, the house catches on fire.

Oh.

And

Ernie and

Billy here, the cousins, are going to make it out alive, but both women are going to die in the house from the fire.

Oh, no.

Okay.

It engulfed the homes.

And

Allison and Balou are both killed.

Well, the Wilson cousins, they're cousins, the Wilsons, they managed to escape.

Now, the authorities

right away suspect arson.

They cite burn patterns and they say that suggests the use of some sort of accelerant, a flammable liquid of some kind here.

Now, they also said that Ernie was the first to exit the burning house and was the least injured.

Okay.

And therefore became the prime suspect for starting this fire, obviously.

Now, he first raised suspicions, not only because he was less injured than everyone else, but his behavior at the fire fire scene everyone else is like you know coughing and like you know they're being treated for burns and stuff like oh not everyone else it's just billy his cousin the other other two aren't being treated for anything because they're dead they said that while this is all going on and while the firefighters are still extinguishing the fire he's just standing there next to him smoking a cigarette having a smoke they were like can you not smoke where we're trying to put out a major blaze just you know this one's under control y'all

i'd I'd love to see him turn around and hit him with the hose while he's doing that.

Sir, it's smoke in these parts.

Yeah.

I always get mad at when it's places where you're not allowed to smoke that don't make any sense.

This makes perfect sense.

Don't smoke while we're putting out a fire.

You know, things are dry.

Let's just keep fire away from fire is all we're saying here.

So he also said they didn't seem to have inhaled very much smoke.

And his,

yeah, he's just except for with nicotine in it.

And his feet weren't as burned as they thought they should have been.

Oh, yeah.

It should have been a big, much more rager by the time he was trying to get out of there.

Because he didn't have his shoes on.

So, like, how'd your feet not get burned?

You must have got out of there pretty quick, huh?

That's weird.

Now, Ernest's story is that he awoke to the smell of smoke around 4 a.m.

on June 11th, and he and Billy were able to get out of the house, but the flames had pushed them back when they tried to rescue the other two, the girls, the women, tried to rescue them.

They said the flames pushed us back.

We couldn't get back in, and they just died in the fire.

I don't know what happened.

So they went, okay, that sounds good.

Well, why don't you come in for a polygraph examination?

And he says, no problem.

And he fails it miserably.

Not good.

So he's arrested on October the 22nd, 1986, and charged with capital murder.

Of the two women.

Two women charged with capital murder up for the death penalty.

Oh, my God.

Now, during the trial, he's portrayed as a remorseless killer.

And they were emphasizing that he had a very emotionless demeanor during the trial.

Say, look at him.

He won't even fucking look over here.

Nothing.

You saw autopsy photos of burned corpses and he didn't even flinch.

You see this?

See this guy smoking.

Sat there just, and it's the 80s.

He probably was.

He probably was smoking in court.

He just sat there smoking away.

See this?

He's still smoking.

Yeah.

So there was no physical evidence against him, obviously, but the prosecution's theory was that he set the fire.

The pore patterns on the show, on the floor, showed he used some kind of accelerant.

Now, while he sat in jail, he was given high doses of two different antipsychotic medications,

Haldol and, whoa,

perfenazine.

Both sound amazing.

Haldol.

I mean, he's getting Haldol.

Imagine those with a glass of wine.

Oh, baby.

What a Sunday.

Oh, man.

Let me tell you something.

I can already hear fucking

that blonde lady singing Sunday night football.

Let's go.

Totally, let's do it.

Because I don't even know if it's Sunday, but I hear her singing it.

That's how I know.

I'll tell you that.

There she is.

I don't even know.

It could be Thursday, but Wednesday, but she's singing it.

Sing it, lady.

I hear her singing.

This is going to be good.

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Yeah, definitely.

That's any drugs that say, you know, do not take with alcohol.

That means that'll be, you'll get really fucking, you'll feel great if you take that with a little bit of alcohol.

Try a beer.

Try a trick.

Just a glass of Cabernet.

Nothing crazy.

Go somewhere.

Shit face.

So that is once the trial started, the prosecutors used that to their advantage because they said that's what gave him the doped-up look where he just sat there staring because he was on two heavy antipsychotic drugs.

They referred to him as having cold fish eyes.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, his

not feeling.

I don't know.

Well, fish eyes don't show emotion.

Yeah.

It's the eyeball you see in the fish case.

Yeah, just staring dead at you.

Now, Ernie,

you know, trying to mount a defense here, he's got a defense attorney who has four years of legal experience, which is that is a really new lawyer to be doing a capital murder case.

He's got more experience in school than he does in

the courtroom.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like you have to get, like, I know now you have to be like death penalty qualified to be a lawyer in a death penalty case.

They have to qualify the lawyers, too, for this shit.

So I don't know how the hell that happened, but he never tried a death penalty case before.

He's like, this will be my first, but I'm feeling good about it.

I read a lot of books in the,

and I just got out of law school, so it's fresh.

I passed a cigar.

Don't worry.

Don't sweat it.

He rarely objected to anything, by the way.

And neither the DA's office nor the jail officials ever gave an explanation for why they drugged him so much.

Oh, I think we know why, so he would look like that in court.

So he is found guilty of capital murder, and it took the jury one hour to come back and sentence Ernie to you, sir, may fuck off death penalty.

Goodbye, sir.

So Ernie is in deep shit here.

It's August the 4th, 1987.

He is sentenced to death

here.

And like I said,

he said he didn't even know he was being given the antipsychotic medication,

which I don't know if they were putting it in his food or what, but.

Seems like you would have to know something about it, right?

At least something, yeah.

I mean, they're giving you something.

Did they tell you it was Tylenol?

I mean, what were they telling you exactly?

Do they just say eat this?

It's, I don't know.

Did they put it in his food?

That's who knows, whatever it is.

But he said it was without his knowledge.

So that's why they were trying to, in the penalty phase, they were trying to say, like, he was given drugs without his knowledge.

So, and then a lot of that's distributed.

Eat it or else.

But no.

So he is going to prison.

Okay.

So that was June of 86.

That fire happened.

That's good.

Now, late summer 1986.

All right.

While the, you know, while Ernie is failing polygraph tests and all that kind of thing.

David here, David Long, our original fucking jerk off here, he is at a low point in his life, which is saying something for him.

Yeah.

For him.

That's low.

He has just

gotten out of a voluntary alcohol treatment program at Serenity House in Little Rock, Arkansas,

gets out of rehab and just begins hitchhiking because he has nothing else going on.

Now, during this time, by the way, we find out a little bit about his previous mental problems.

In all of the hospitals, reformatories, jails he's been in, he's had quite a few psych evaluations.

And

he's been previously diagnosed with, here we go, toxic psychosis superimposed residual schizophrenia.

What is that?

I think that is like drug psychosis, basically.

You have fried your brain with drugs.

Say it again.

Toxic psychosis.

So right away, that's a drug thing.

Superimposed residual schizophrenia.

Superimposed.

I don't know what the maybe that made the schizophrenia become a permanent thing, not just schizophrenic while he's on drugs.

I'm not positive, but

I think it's drug-induced.

Sounds, yeah, like a photo, but it's like,

I think it might mean induced, basically.

Right, right.

And then a medical thing.

Something is forcing this on him.

Exactly.

He was not born this way.

This is chemically altered.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that results from drug or alcohol ingestion.

So that makes sense.

There it is.

And catatonic schizophrenia,

like Cameron, I guess, from Ferris Bueller, when his fucking dad's car crashes.

I assume.

He just fucking deadface it and stares.

Oh, my God.

Once in a while, you get to see a broad stitch like that.

You never know.

You know what I mean?

Didn't he get to see her change or something?

Because he was catatonic.

Yeah.

Okay.

So,

which they say that's a severe condition manifested by almost total withdrawal from reality, borderline delusional thinking, and paranoid ideations.

So

he has been diagnosed with some serious mental illness.

Those are shit.

Those are no shit.

Take them seriously.

You can't walk off that catatonic schizophrenia.

I don't think you walk that off.

No.

not good at all here.

He's described, though, this is the thing.

When he is not on drugs, which is very rare, he's definitely described as a completely different kind of guy.

And he's also described as strikingly handsome by every woman that encounters him.

Even the guys will go, he's a real handsome guy, ladies, man.

Fucking guy.

Yeah, which is so weird.

He's got like real blue, blue eyes, like ice blue eyes.

And, you know, it is fascinating what what blue eyes can do for a man anybody really but for a man specifically because you could be a handsome eye we don't care about eyes have blue eyes and people are like oh he's so handsome oh yeah yeah yeah or green eyes you see criminals they got green eyes and women are like oh that mug shot he's speaking to me no he's just got green eyes you fucking idiot if he closed those you're talking

yeah you'd be terrified let me hey close your eyes now let me tell you what he did tell me if you're still yeah tell me if you're still fucking wet over here or what so

he's described

by a former coworker on one of his many, many, many, many, many jobs that he's had.

He said he has a dangerous drug habit.

That's his main problem.

He said he had a habit of doing speed,

which becomes a habit.

This is when he worked in, this is the cable television company that he worked for in Bay City, where he burned his boss's trailer and killed him.

He said, when he wasn't on that stuff, he was okay.

But when he was on that stuff, he was a terror.

No matter what you did, it wasn't right.

He was on that stuff.

He gets meth grumpy.

Women said, oh, man.

One woman said he's six foot tall, 180 pounds.

Okay.

Sexy.

The one woman said, quote, I remember his ice blue eyes and said he was, quote, real good looking.

And another woman said, if you ever saw Dave, you'd remember him.

It was the way he carried himself.

Right.

You know, a fucking asshole.

The way he carried himself.

But he's the bad boy, and some women, that's what they're looking for.

Now, so he's just got out of this rehab.

It's September 2nd, 1986.

And he is hitchhiking along a Texas highway.

He has, by the way, is not hitchhiking with any particular destination in mind.

It just says anywhere else but and but or bust.

That's it.

Whatever.

Gone or bust.

That's all.

Not here or or bust.

It's almost like a guy, like back in the day, like people would just like if they could afford a subway token and they were homeless, they just ride the train all night.

Yeah.

Because it was like safer than being on the street and less cold and hot or whatever.

That's almost like what he's doing.

He has nowhere to go.

So he's just like hitchhiking until he comes across something.

He doesn't even know.

Otherwise, he'll just stay on the road.

So he's got nowhere to go.

And a woman

pulls over to pick him up.

Her name is Donna Sue Jester.

And that's with a J, Jester.

She's 37 years old, and her whole entire life, pretty much, is being a Good Samaritan.

That's what she does.

In her house, she has a constant, like

rotating lineup of people she found on the street, people who are down on their luck.

She's a collector.

Yeah, she comes in, they move in for a couple months, they get their shit together, she gets them out.

She just has this thing where she loves helping people and will help anybody.

Literally, if you're on on the side of the road, she'll pick you up and go, you need a place to stay?

Jesus.

So a really, really kind woman here.

Like I said, 37 years old, and she's well-liked as well.

She worked for 17 years at the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company until she retired in March of 86.

She's 37.

Retired.

Retired at 37.

I'm just going to help people from now on.

Yeah, I don't know if she got a job at 17, worked 20 years, and was eligible for some kind of pension or what, but holy shit, 37 and retired.

So she opened her home up to strangers.

She'd give shelter to homeless people or people who are just passing through or whatever it was.

She was known throughout town.

The Lancaster police chief said that she was well known in town for bringing in stray dogs and had a habit of picking up, quote, down and outers.

Wow.

The old down and outers.

So

she finds David and he's a fucking mess when she picks him him up.

I mean, he's been on the road for days.

He's a down and outer.

He's as down and out as it gets.

Like she sees him, must have seen

halos and glowing around him.

Like, oh, that's the down and outer I need right here.

So she heard, she picks him up.

He looks like shit and he looks like he's been living on the road.

She hears about his horrible circumstances.

He just got out of rehab and he's trying to make a go of his life.

So she said, I'll tell you what, you can stay at my house if you just do household chores for me.

Okay.

Fix shit, you know, do stuff.

He said, I'm pretty handy.

And she said, well, great.

You're in.

It should be a down and outer at my joint.

That's all.

Sweep the floors and fix a fucking, you know, fix an electrical socket when it needs it.

That's it.

There it is.

So now at her house already is her mother, adoptive mother.

That's the other thing.

She was adopted.

Oh.

Donna, which a lot of times will make people want, and she was raised by a good mother who treated her well, so she's trying to pay it forward or pay it backward or whatever the fuck, pay it somewhere.

Make the world the place that she wants it to be.

Yeah.

Wishes hers was.

She lives with her 64-year-old adoptive mother, Dalpha Lorene Jester.

She's 64 years old.

She is completely blind

and bedridden.

requiring constant care and

the aid of a walker just to get to the bathroom.

Of course.

And she's bumping to the wall still because she's blind.

That's not good.

Yeah.

There's one other person living at the house, too.

Who is that?

Nothing like

any of the other three.

Laura Lee Owens, a 20-year-old, pretty young lady.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

She was homeless as well.

That's why Donna took her ring.

Oh, fuck.

I don't know.

During the time there,

you know, this, she was, Laura was a runaway, basically, not even a homeless.

She ran away and she worked at a fast food restaurant in Lancaster.

And

her family has been looking for her.

She ran away when she was younger, but she has been looking for her mother, which is a mess.

This is what she's doing.

She's out looking for her mother

who took off on her.

And her family is looking for her.

So she's just going around the country looking for her mother.

Well, people are showing up as she leaves looking for her.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It's what it is.

They said, and she's always been like this.

They said for years she hitchhiked.

She ran away from home and did whatever she wanted to do.

That's what her father said.

Her father said she started running away from home when she was 16, 15 or 16 years old.

And not just running away, gone for two days and come back.

You'd have to go find her ass and drag her back.

She was gone.

She said that the daughter, he said, his daughter could never accept his strict discipline and resented authority, which is interesting because really, the only

99% of the time, the only time kids run away and try to stay away is when they've been abused.

That's it.

When they've gotten eliquid

beaten, it's abuse.

Yeah.

Yes.

And so him saying she couldn't handle my strict discipline means he beat the shit out of his daughter probably and she ran away.

I mean, we don't know if that's true, but it sounds like it.

The proof is in the pudding.

And if she's hitchhiking, moving in with strangers in Texas or something, it doesn't sound like,

you know, sounds like that's what happened.

He said, I couldn't really control her he said he was often awakened by calls from the cops because she'd been brought to the station for wandering on the beach in florida that's where she's from she's oh she's not even local she's from florida she would be wandering on the naples beach in the middle of the night when she was 15 so the cops would pick her up so he said that she was hard to control but she was never involved in drugs or alcohol she just took off outside of running away he said she never did any wrong she never like when the cops would call, it was just because she was out, not because she like did something to get in trouble.

So he said that

she would often talk about, and this is what everybody that knew her said, that she would often talk about searching for her natural mother with her father and her stepmother.

She wanted them to help her search.

And

the father said, it always bothered me that her mother

didn't want to have anything to do with the kids.

And she never found her mother.

She's 20 years old.

She's still looking for her mother.

So this is.

She's fucking sad.

Yeah.

This is very sad.

So she moved into this house in the end of August.

So she's only been there, you know, a couple of few weeks anyway, but she got a job at a fast food joint and she's living here.

Now, David moves in.

to the house,

but not into the house initially.

Initially, he sleeps outside in Donna's car like a dog.

Not even a dog.

You build a dog a little house.

You don't tell him to go sleep in the car.

This one's already built.

I'll still.

Wow.

And this is in September in Texas.

It's hot.

Oh, Jesus.

It's fucking hot outside of Dallas in September.

It's early September, mid-September.

It doesn't cool off there until goddamn Halloween, I don't think.

So anyway, he would sleep outside in the car, and then after a little while, after a few days, he ends up moving into the house with the three ladies.

Okay.

And he immediately starts up from what Donna says in her journals,

a loving and sexual relationship with Laura.

With the 20-year-old.

Who's, yeah, 17 years or whatever.

No, he 13, yeah, he's about 13, 14 years younger than him, which is fine, I guess.

I mean, she's an adult.

She's 20.

Yeah, it's certainly legal and perfectly fine, but not fine because she's got a lot of problems and you're not going to be able to do it.

She's got problems.

You know it.

Yeah.

And she's looking for a guy like him.

Yeah.

Somebody to take care of her.

Not even someone to take care of her, someone to be an abusive asshole.

Or that, yeah.

I mean, she doesn't know that's what she's looking for, but if she's running away from her dad because he's an abusive asshole, she's probably going to go find another abusive asshole without even knowing that's what she's doing, you know?

So this is how the arrangement works here.

Okay.

And it works for a minute.

David repaired work,

did repair work around the property, began a romantic relationship with Laura for a guy who was on the side of the road with nothing.

He really stepped in some shit here.

Yeah.

He got picked up and she said, Would you like a place to live in a 20-year-old to have sex with?

Come on.

And she's pretty too, Laura.

I've seen a picture.

She's pretty.

Like, it's weird as shit.

So

David and Laura are, you know, they're both happy that Donna's doing this and being generous.

And basically, they have a real weird kind of a family unit going on for a couple of weeks.

It's very strange.

Donna kind of treats them like they're her kids, even though David's her age.

Okay.

And they have the blind grandma there and all this type of shit.

So it's a little family unit, though.

Now,

Donna also agreed.

This is also part of the deal.

Not only like room and board, but

part of the board is she agreed, Donna, to supply David with, if he does all these repairs, cigarettes

and Mad Dog 2020.

No shit.

Mad Dog.

Now, if you don't know, if you're not complete trash, if you weren't like a street urchin when you were a 16-year-old, Mad Dog 2020 is terrible wine that comes in fruit flavors and it comes in a bottle that looks like a flask.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is the crazy part.

The shape of it.

Yeah.

Because I had a friend that, I mean, he was all about, he loved the grape.

We used to drink that shit like crazy.

It was gross.

It was actually, MD didn't even stand for Mad Dog.

It was Mogan

David.

I think it's the maker of the drink.

And we just all called it Mad Dog.

It's fucking gross.

Everyone knows of it as Mad Dog 2020.

Yeah.

So in court records, they say MD 2020, known as Mad Dog, which is hilarious.

It's Mad Dog.

And it was 20 ounces of 20% alcohol.

That's why it was the 2020.

Fuck you.

It was 20 ounces, you guys, of 20%.

Tall boy, 24-ounce beer, that's 5-6%.

And people consider that person gross.

This is 20%.

it's 8.7 percent this is 20 percent wine is like 12 14 percent 12 to 14 regular wine none of it's 20 percent 20 percent is strong 18 is the highest wine content i've ever had and that's too stout it's strong that's fucking strong so that's what he that's what he's working for

everybody's working for the mad dog including him so he's working for the mad dog he's working for

the mad dog that's exactly where i was going with that it's crazy.

And

it is eerily shaped like a flask.

It does look just like a flask, like a big flask, like a giant flask.

Yeah, a taller, skinnier flask.

Man, so shit is going on.

Now, in Donna's journal, she wrote that Laura and David here,

by the way,

she describes him as strikingly handsome.

And she said that they hit it off, the two of them.

Donna, or not Donna, Laura and David, hit it off now david's mental state through all this remember all of his diagnoses yeah all that forced uh yeah yeah you can't just ignore that shit no is a serious problem so it's lingering and it makes things awful and his mental state starts to to deteriorate a bit here where he becomes a little disturbed um he started saying that then later on he'll say the house had a foul smell that agitated him

and this is why it's fucked up and it's just a delusion in his head.

He said it, it's, it made him, it's the same smell that was around when his mother died, he said.

Oh, that's the worst.

When you, when a, when a smell creates a, brings back a memory and that memory is not positive.

Yeah.

I don't know what that smell is, though.

They got running corpse in the house.

When is that, I mean, it's just, it's, this is not.

This is like a, you know, this is a delusion, I believe.

I don't think this is, this is real.

Yeah, because it's the, only the death, not like, you know, I could see if this is what my mother's hospital room smelled like.

She was in there for two months or this is whatever.

It's not that.

She's just got a weird thing.

So he also said the home was filthy,

which I mean, well, clean it, motherfucker.

That's why you're here.

That's your job.

You don't have to pay for this.

No, drink your mad dog and mop the floors, asshole.

Like, that's your job.

Good day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And your job is to do housework.

So do it.

Get cracking, big guy.

So he said the home was filthy and smelled of dog hair and feces

from several dogs who roam freely through the home.

Remember, she takes in strays.

So during this week in September, he starts to think that

his thoughts turn a little different to where he says, oh, my God, I know what Donna's doing and I know what that smell is.

That smell is rotting flesh.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy is right.

She said that Donna,

this lady, she pretends she's nice.

She picks people up and then she takes them here and kills them and buries them in the backyard.

That's what I'm smelling.

The backyard is full of hitchhikers.

It's a whole graveyard.

Hitchhiker graveyard.

Full of hitchhikers.

And he said, I'm fucking next.

She's going to get like, I'm going to repair everything.

And the next thing you know, I'm going to be planted in the yard.

Wow.

So that is very, very interesting here.

He also said that there was a lot of bickering in the house.

A lot of bickering.

Donna would complain about him drinking Mad Dog.

and that caused him to, quote, cut it down to about two-fifths a night.

Oh, my.

Cut it down to two-fifths.

Cut it down to two mad dogs.

Think about that.

Cut it down to 40 ounces of 20% wine.

Think about that.

That's a lot.

That's a cut down.

Oh, my.

Now, he's also sharing a bed with Laura.

Yeah.

And being drunk, he said the bickering continued.

Later on, he'll say, bickering bickering about my sex with Laura and about my drinking.

So that's mainly the bickering.

How loud are they fucking in there?

Also, keep it down.

There's a blind lady.

She can hear everything.

Her sense of hearing is really enhanced.

It's heightened, yeah.

May as well have a fucking bullhorn to her ear.

Yeah.

Might as well, may as well be shouting into a hostage negotiator's bullhorn.

Just into a sick blind old lady's ear.

Fuck me harder.

Fuck me harder.

Open your mouth

on my face

so um as of september 27th he's sitting around being angry drinking mad dog

okay

monday september 29th comes around all right donna's boss at work comes looking for because she had gotten another some part-time thing that she was doing yeah but she didn't show up on monday which is she never not shows up and she didn't show up

This lady came over to the house looking for her

and noticed the front door was open.

So she called the cops to do a wellness check.

Thought that was weird.

So police arrive and they're called in, and a sergeant here arrives for the wellness check.

And his quote is: The front door was open.

There was about three steps down from the front door to the round,

to the round,

and laying there was what I thought was a bundle of clothing.

As I got closer, I realized

it wasn't about a little clothing.

It was a human being.

Whole thing.

Whole thing.

She had a very large gash on the back of her head.

Of course, I called for backup right away.

I didn't know if the perpetrator was still in the house, and I had no idea that I had no idea, and the hair was standing up on the back of my neck, he says.

So another cop comes in,

and they said, we notified the dispatch that we were entering the building or

where you could see to the last living room and to the bedroom where the door was open.

So in the front yard, they find Laura's body outside.

What?

In the front of the body.

Multiple bodies.

Let's get into this here.

Jesus.

Laura, the young woman, the 20-year-old,

she's in the front yard where Donna and Dalpha, mother and daughter there, are found lying on the bed in the back bedroom of the house.

They have been brutalized.

Why?

And in the sink, they find both a steak knife and a hatchet.

What?

Both rinsed off and wrapped in a towel in the bathroom sink.

Okay.

Now, mother and daughter there, Donna and Dalpha were found in a room, wow, inside the house where, I'm sorry, Laura was found on the back porch, not the front yard.

So the cops didn't see her when they came at first.

All victims had suffered multiple knife and or hatchet wounds to the head and neck.

This is just a scene of butchery.

Yeah.

I mean, a hand hatchet just going to work on people.

They said, we feel like the steak knife was used first and that the hatchet was used as a weapon of convenience.

Yeah.

They speculated.

Yeah.

They speculated that three women were killed between 6 and 10 p.m.

on Saturday, the 27th,

and are here now.

Probably,

yeah, they said, we feel like Laura was not at the house at the time and that only Donna Sue and Ms.

Jester were there.

We believe that Laura was coming into the house after they were killed and was confronted and confronted the killer and that she turned to escape and was caught outside.

Because Laura, they find out, got off work at a fast food restaurant at 5 p.m.

So they think it happened right after that because they think she got off work, came home, and it happened.

Never even got really in the house enough to even put her purse down.

So

they were attacked with a camping hatchet that had a three-inch wide blade.

Jesus, the wounds on Donna's hands indicate she was also stabbed with a steak knife.

And like I said, both weapons are found.

In total, Donna suffers 14 blows.

What?

14 blows.

We're calling stabbings, hatchetings, everything a blow.

Everything is an injury.

14 blows.

Dalpha had five wounds to the head and neck.

Jesus Christ.

And Laura had 21 blows to the head, neck, and hands.

Why were they so mad?

This is

overkill.

This is like years of shit and an explosion.

This is crazy.

So

in the investigation here, there's no one else in the house, just the three of them.

What the fuck?

So they're like, we don't know what the hell happened here.

So police find her journal, Donna's journal, which she is a meticulous journaler, meticulous.

So they start trying to piece this together and figure it out.

Now, they discover her diary, and in it, they documented all of her nice things that she's done, pick this person up, this person moved out.

She talks about eight days ago picking up a hitchhiker named David Martin Long and letting him stay there.

So they're like, okay, we'd love to talk to this guy.

I mean, he could have left the next day, but she didn't write it down.

So usually she writes it.

So they said,

Donna said in the diary, too, that Laura and David hit it off and were sleeping together and everything like that.

So this gives them some kind of lead here, something.

By the way, they said the journals, they were a collection of notebooks, all the same size and brand and everything like that, numerically organized by year.

Wow.

Meticulous with her journaling.

That is

impressive, right?

That's really impressive.

They said they were concentrating on the five notebooks written in 1986.

She's gone through five notebooks.

It's only September.

Yeah.

Wow.

So they said initially

the diary leads them to another man, the last name of Thomas, who had broken up with Donna a few weeks earlier.

And she referred to him in her diary as her common-law husband.

So they were like, let's find that fucking guy.

But they later found out that he was in Georgia when the murders occurred and had a dead rock-solid alibi.

So he's probably in jail in Georgia, I'm sure, or something.

So

no, he was at a military base, actually.

So they know where those guys are anyway.

And so this was corroborated by base command.

No way he could have done it.

Not a chance in hell.

So

they're like, what the fuck happened here?

Then they realize that, oh, we have fucked up huge.

Why is that?

The cops have fucked up huge because we remember David, our friend David Long there.

Well, he was arrested Saturday night, September 27th, the same night the murders happened.

He was arrested on the night of the murders for driving while intoxicated.

What?

He was driving Donna Sue's stolen wood-paneled station wagon.

Sure.

And he was, but it hadn't been reported stolen because they're dead.

He was found heading

north in a southbound lane on the I-45.

In the family truckster?

He's taking the truckster on the wrong way.

The wrong way fucking lane.

Wow.

That will stand out.

A wood-paneled station wagon going 80 miles an hour the wrong way up and on-ramp is

fucking scary.

Did you fall asleep behind the wheel?

Holy shit.

This is about 100 miles miles south of Lancaster, by the way.

Officers reported

seeing David run several cars off the road.

Then, when they finally pulled him over, he was, quote, ranting and raving about God or Jesus or something.

And in Texas, that's usually welcome.

So you really got to be doing some weird shit for them to be like, it was strange.

We just didn't recognize the passages all.

Yeah, we were like, I mean, I speak in tongues, but this is real weird.

What is that?

Fucking shit.

I don't even know what the hell.

Matthew, maybe?

I don't even know.

Then he gets arrested, and he is banging his head on the inside of the police car as well.

So they said he was possibly high on drugs and definitely very drunk.

Possibly drugs, too.

Possibly drugs.

Here is

police.

This is in Buffalo, Texas, by the way.

Of course they got one.

Of course they have one.

Police officer Jerry Broadhead said, quote, he seemed crazed.

He was cussing and ranting and raving about Jesus and God or something.

He kept banging his head against my squad car until he cut his head

while screaming about Jesus.

Now, they also, in the car, the car contains property that belongs to Donna Sue.

Oh, yeah.

They have her car, but they don't know that it's stolen.

They don't know that anybody's been killed.

They take him to the police station, and

during all of this, basically, basically he says they put him in a jail cell and he starts telling the jailer i killed three women up in oh up in lancaster you know

that's the point that's why i was driving because i killed three women up in lancaster and starts saying i think this woman was killing hitchhikers burying them in her backyard

i saved lives all this time i'm just for the future for the young

young drifter out there to be safe

He said that, yeah, the filth in the house

and the smell hurt me.

The adversely affected me.

He said he did repairs on the house that day and didn't consume any alcohol until Donna and Laura arrived home from their jobs.

He said that night, Donna and Laura went into the back bedroom to talk with Dalpha, and he said, I know what they were doing back there.

They were conspiring against me.

Conspiring.

They're again me, and I know it.

That's what he said.

He said he became convinced that these dead bodies were buried behind the house and that these three women were conspiring first to destroy his relationship with Laura and then to get Laura on their side to kill him and bury him in the backyard.

Yeah, obviously.

So

on that day, he said he did repairs, like we said.

Now, Dalpha stays in her home confined to the bed, and the other two came home from work and he said there was bickering.

He said he heard bickering and he couldn't stand that anymore.

So he said he was drinking, drinking, and the women's complaints about his alcohol consumption made him matter, made him resentful.

And he said, I've got something in my head that just clicks sometimes.

It just goes off.

What is that?

I think that's when you burn a man to death for firing you.

I think that's the thing that clicks.

It just goes off.

When someone charges you six extra dollars for a

two tires.

When I'm overcharged, not just charged.

Overcharged.

It's amazing.

Wow, that's crazy.

So, yeah, he said he was establishing this romantic relationships.

And he said there was a series of complicated reactions and interactions between me and them.

What?

You're a drunk drug addict.

There wasn't nothing as complicated.

Yeah.

I just got tired of hearing all the bickering.

He said.

Yeah, he said that the only scream was from the old lady.

The other two didn't know what hit them.

I'm not into torture, so I got it over with pretty quick.

This is what he tells the fucking jailers.

Yeah.

So you assume they're like, where is this?

Let's go into investigation mode.

Give me an address.

Where did this happen?

What are their names?

Well, not really, actually, because, again, the women's bodies have not been discovered yet, not till Monday evening, and the fact that they don't know the car is stolen or anything else.

So his confession was dismissed as the drunken ramblings of

a drifter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Drunken ramblings.

A jailer heard it and woke up the sheriff, actually.

Had the sheriff woken up, Sheriff Royce Wilson.

Got to know his name because he's a fucking dummy in this story.

The sheriff said, nah, forget about it.

Forget, don't even worry about it.

He's a drunk.

Don't sweat it.

Now, the sheriff will later deny he was told about any murder confession.

I don't hear it.

So they release him from jail on Monday morning.

They have him in jail.

He confessed to the murders.

They release him from jail.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, which is crazy.

They said he told inmates about it.

He told the jailers about it.

He told everybody about it.

Bob Gresham Jr., a Leon County sheriff's dispatcher, said the jailer said that some guy out there was talking about killing somebody in a past tense, but people say that sort of thing all the time.

All the time.

They're talking about when I killed people.

Y'all need to know.

Just making confessions.

Is that what they do?

Also, the inmates who he told are telling the jailer, dude, that guy's serious.

There was blood on his boots when he came in here, man.

There was blood all in his fucking boots.

Yeah.

Check this dude out.

And they were like,

They do it all the time.

They're trying to get drunk and not fuck with them in here.

That's what he's doing it for.

It's probably ketchup, y'all.

Don't worry about it.

He sprayed that, so y'all leave him alone.

So Monday morning, he is fined $589,

but released without paying it or posting bond or anything.

Oh, boy.

Without anything, which, by the way, is a violation of state law, that he's released with no anything.

Yeah, he's supposed to pay a bond at least.

So he's despite he didn't have enough money to retrieve his impounded vehicle as well or post the bail.

The DUI charge was, by the way, his second, making it a felony.

Nice.

But they never checked his records even.

They just thought he was some drunk.

What is going on?

They don't check to see if if he's had other DYs.

They don't check to see if his murderous tales are true.

Get him in, get him out.

And they said, well, there's only eight cells in this, so we got to get people in and out.

We got people to arrest because they're driving

a Cadillac with

Pennsylvania plates.

Wow.

The one police chief, Lancaster police chief, said they released this individual on his own recognizance.

His own.

He also said they bought him a bus ticket to Houston.

Then he got out on the highway and hitchhiked after cashing in the ticket.

He took the cash.

He took the cash.

He went down to the bus station, turned his ticket.

The sheriff, who, by the way, denies that he ever heard about the murders, even though the dispatcher also said that this cop was basically that he was patched through to the dispatcher to the sheriff.

He also denies giving him a bus ticket to Houston, which we know is true.

Yeah.

Which is hilarious.

This guy said, well, I didn't ignore a murder confession and buy a murder or a bus ticket.

Hell no.

We didn't do nothing.

So, yeah, later on, once they release him,

then Wilson said, my understanding, Wilson is the sheriff who's obviously not very good at his job.

My understanding is that he told some prisoners in the jail that he killed some people.

Yeah.

He said that

the Lancaster County police came down or the Lancaster town police came down and talked to inmates about the confession.

But Wilson denies reports that a sheriff's employee heard the confession and shrugged it off as ranting, or that he didn't, you know, that he ignored it here.

They said they released him.

The investigators say they believe the suspect here, whom they describe as a transient, was welcomed into this home and that he killed the women in a weekend rampage that grew out of a, quote, fight or fuss with one of the victims.

Just a little fuss created murder.

Don't use the word,

Don't use the word fuss.

That's like when OJ would talk about beating up Nicole and he'd say, we tussled.

Yeah.

That's not a, you beat the shit out of her.

That's not a tussle.

She had black eyes.

She was black and blue.

Her face looked like Mitch Green after he encountered Tyson in the street, and you're like, we had a tussle.

I don't think so, OJ.

Did you see that Ahmad Rashad had him and

yes, yes, that's been out for years.

Yes.

That's been out for years and years.

Oh my God.

That's hilarious.

No, that's been out for years.

That's unbelievable.

As soon as Bill Cosby got in trouble, that was like the first thing that surfaced.

Like, Ahmad, dude.

Damn, Ahmad.

The worst judge of character in history.

In history.

So

this is fucking funny.

They said, yeah, they released this individual on his own recognizance.

He didn't pay nothing.

They even bought him a breast ticket to Houston.

So the Sheriff Whitehead from Lancaster there, or police chief Whitehead, said he was angry with the way the Leon County authorities handled the case.

He said, this dipshit had a DUI or DWI already.

The second offense should have been treated as a felony, and he should have remained in jail until he posted a bond.

Yeah.

Which we would have come down, picked him up, taken him here for murder, and the fucking story's over.

But now he's out there, who knows where, in hitchhiking again.

So they said the station wagon driven by him was stolen, contained property that belonged to her.

One of the cops said a lady's purse was found in the front floorboard of the car, and it did have one of the victims' names on the medicine bottles.

Oh my.

They couldn't have had more to go on at all of it.

Than to just check on this stuff real quick.

Oh my.

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So now there's a manhunt, of course.

Yeah.

And the cops say they believe that

Long sped south on the I-45 where he was jailed about 100 miles away.

I'm there.

They said that he got out 36 hours later.

And they said they put out an all-points bulletin with his description and the description of the stolen car, which, by the way, they released to him even though he couldn't pay for the

to get it out of impound.

The man had been released from jail.

They describe him as six foot 190 pounds with a mustache and described as a, you know, a murder suspect, basically.

And they said his driver's license shows a Bay City address.

Now,

the cops said he was seen, he's spotted in a Houston employment office where he once worked as a laborer.

Okay.

But so the cops came back there and did several stakeouts, but he never came back to there again.

Okay.

Now, by October 5th, an article here says police scaled down search for slaying suspect.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They said that scaled down after police decided that a reported sighting of the man was incorrect.

They're like, okay, we're running in every direction.

Someone said to us, he's not here.

He done left.

We can scale it back.

He said people make mistakes, and at this time we believe the sighting was erroneous yeah so they thought they had him but then they didn't have him okay october 24th 1986 yeah imagine if you're that sheriff in leon county you should feel so fucking stupid as every day goes by that this guy's out there possibly murdering his way across the southland

Wow.

This time he's in Austin.

David's in Austin, Texas, and he's arrested for public intoxication.

Really?

Yeah.

In that place?

In Austin, Texas.

Yep.

He'd been hitchhiking when he passed out in someone's vehicle, causing the driver to call the police.

That's what happened.

The driver's like, I want this guy out of my car.

There's a driver asleep.

I was just giving him a ride

here where I told him we were going, and he's still asleep.

They said, sure.

Get him.

And then he passed out.

So he's arrested for public intoxication.

That's the charge here.

17-year-old 17-year-old Lonnie Daniel Manning picked him up somewhere between Austin and Houston.

When he got to Austin, he pulled into a gas station and called police because the guy wouldn't wake up.

Now, they wake Long up and Long tells cops, they say, What's your name, pal?

And he said, Aaron Sanders.

And they went, oh,

I thought you were David Martin Long.

And he said, I'm Aaron Sanders.

Pulls out a birth certificate to prove it.

Oh, he has a birth certificate.

So he has a birth certificate for Aaron Sanders.

So they were about to release him.

They were like, okay, well, he's just a drunk.

Literally, they were like, well, all right.

And they took the cuffs off him and everything.

And then he said, my ankle's sore.

Oh.

Got a sore ankle right now.

It's real sore.

So they went, okay, since you're technically still in our custody, would you like to see medical personnel?

So he said, yeah, yeah, my ankle's sore.

So they took him to Breckenridge Hospital and left instructions with the hospital police that he's free to go after he receives medical treatment.

And they left.

Wow.

Dropped him off and said, have a good one, Aaron.

Bye.

That was that.

So, meanwhile, Charles Dermody, who's a police identification technician, was doing a routine check of fingerprints when he discovered,

because this idiot stuck around the hospital, gave them hours.

He discovered that Aaron Sanders' prints matched David Martin Long's prints, actually.

He got the same ones.

Same ones.

He's at the hospital going, I don't know, it's just a little sore when I move it around like that.

You know, can you put weight on it?

I mean, yeah, but it feels bruised or something.

Rather than just going off into the night,

this fucking idiot stayed around and they matched up his prince and the cops rushed back to the hospital and arrested him for capital murder.

So

that's wild.

So good job by the fingerprint tech there.

Not bad.

Transferred back to face charges.

So

they said that was all he's been doing the last few weeks, because he's ready to talk too.

He doesn't give a fuck.

Sure.

He said he's been consuming large amounts of cheap wine and hitchhiking from town to town, trying to figure out a way to buy a car.

Figure out a way.

It's usually with money.

Can I buy it with mad dog vomit?

Is that possible?

I got a lot of that.

I got these bottles.

They're empty.

Wow.

Mad Dog.

Holy shit.

He said, quote,

had I had things come together like I had wished they would have, I was going to finalize a few more vendettas.

Oh.

Yeah.

He said, I felt, he said, there's about five other people out there who he wanted to kill who he, quote, I felt have crossed me up.

Crossed me up.

He told not only the investigators that, he told the newspaper that.

Crossed me up.

Done crossed me up.

And he said, I had five more more people to kill.

About Alan Iron

and Gary Bay.

Yeah.

Oh, Tim Hardaway crossed me up good, buddy.

I'll tell you what.

That baby Jordan.

Harold Miner.

Oh, Harold Minor.

He crossed you right up.

Boy, Rod Strickland done crossed me up.

My hammies are sore.

White chocolate done crossed me up good.

Crossed me up.

Who talks like that?

Him, this fucking guy, drunken maniac fucking schizophrenics, apparently.

So during the interrogation, he's going to provide all the details.

All the details.

He said there was a series of complicated reactions and interactions, like I said before.

He just got tired of hearing all the bickering.

He said something snapped in his mind.

Something snapped here.

He said that, you know, Laura returned to the living room area to watch TV after she was conspiring against him.

He told her to go outside because he needed to talk to her, but instead, he attacked her with a hatchet.

Oh, boy.

And he'll give a blow by blow.

No pun intended or pun intended, whatever.

So

anyway,

yeah, he said that Donna Suzu, but he said he killed Donna Sue first, and then he killed Dalpha,

who screamed,

and then he killed Owen when she returned from the house from work.

That's what the cop said.

But we don't know about that.

He said, he does tell the newspaper, quote, it doesn't really affect me.

It's just like watching a movie or something, meaning killing people.

They say, do they bother him?

And he said this in his confession, quote, I'm a cold-hearted son of a bitch, and I killed them because they threatened my relationship with Laura Lee.

I killed Daphla, a Dalpha Jester, because she knew my name, and I felt

she was the living dead anyway.

Okay.

The blind, bedridden woman.

Because that's that's awkward to see.

If you needed a clarification,

yeah.

Wow.

My relationship with Laura Lee.

But you destroyed Laura, too.

Why would you do that?

That's what I mean.

He said that.

She didn't approve of it.

I don't know.

I guess she didn't approve of hacking up an old blind woman maybe with a hatchet.

She was like, hey, that's not cool.

So they said he's completely emotionally detached.

He felt like he was watching a movie, completely disconnected with it.

He said he calmly rinsed the blood from the hatchet in the bathroom sink.

Wow.

That's that.

He said he ransacked the house, stole some money, took off in the station wagon, drinking Mad Dog 2020 as he sped down the highway.

He brought

this episode of Small Town Murder brought to you by Mad Dog 2020.

And strawberries, grape,

many, many awful flavors that'll make you do terrible things

that you definitely shouldn't be doing.

Yeah, he's held without bond on these charges.

He said, quote, I'm a criminal.

This is what he tells the press.

I'm a criminal.

I thought maybe I'd get better, but it appears to be getting worse, and I'm pretty much ready to call it a day with my demented personality.

Call it a day.

Call it a day.

He's got some

real chill

euphemisms for what he needs to do.

I'm David Martin, room 666, checking out.

I'm going to call it a day.

Demented personality.

I'm not liking it.

My personality.

I'm going to leave the demented personality in there and

head on down the road.

During his confession, he says, and if you don't think I am a cold-blooded motherfucker, let me tell you about a couple more people I killed.

Oh, dear Christ.

There's a guy named James Carnell, an old gas station attendant backing San Bernardino, killed him.

They said, why?

He goes, tried to cheat me out of $16.

That's why.

So, wow, at the time, San Bernardino police, and even now, even though he confesses, San Bernardino police said they lack a murder weapon or a motive for the murder.

And they said his statement was literally the first lead they've ever had in that case.

Is that right?

He like disappeared like a phantom, never had another lead.

And if the fucked up part is, if he would have known how to run that guy's credit card,

they would have went and talked to that guy who would have given a description of him, and they would have had a lead.

Holy.

He just told him, come back tomorrow, and the guy never thought twice about it.

So they said that if they do decide to to indict him, it could be up to two years before he's extradited to California

to be tried for that.

Sure.

Also, remember Bob Neal Rogers?

I remember him.

Yeah, the guy who was burned to death in his own trailer.

He says this about that case, quote,

on 12,208, December 20th, 1983, at about 9 p.m., I went over to see Bob Rogers at his trailer because he'd not been to work earlier that day.

He had sent me out earlier in the day when I went to buy him a bottle of whiskey.

I had noticed that he had several hundred dollars in his bill fold.

I, at that time, had been shooting heroin on a regular basis, along with preludin.

I don't know what the fuck preludin is, but oh, that's that, that's the speed jug.

No, that's the speed jugs.

That's the over-the-counter shape

that he buys.

Besides that, I had a grudge against him.

He had fired me and made a small matter a big matter when I had driven a company vehicle to my girlfriend's house.

That's what it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Though he had rehired me.

He brought you back.

He brought you back.

He said I still held the grudge against him.

Even though he,

what the fuck, dude?

What do you do?

He's going to be mad at everybody forever.

Forever.

That's what I mean.

He's not rational or reasonable.

When I got to his trailer that night, he passed out while sitting in a chair in the living room.

I had not been there more than five minutes.

Seeing him sitting there, I snapped and first I went outside and tried to light the underside of the trailer on fire with no success.

I then went into the trailer and proceeded to pour whiskey around where he was sitting.

He did the old cowboy trick.

Yeah, he said, ever clearing whiskey.

He uses.

He said, I then lit the drapes on fire with a Bic lighter.

Then I took the money, a few hundred dollars, out of his bill fold.

I left a $20 bill in the bill fold to make it not look like a robbery.

The fire at the time was beginning to engulf the drapes, and I went to drug connections house, to a drug connections house and shot hundreds of dollars worth of heroin.

I killed him because I hated that son of a bitch.

What the hell, man?

Whoa, yeah.

You hated him because you got caught in his truck fucking your girlfriend?

You hate him?

You hate him.

And he even forgave you, rehired you.

Yeah.

So you really got nothing.

You lost nothing except this guy said some stuff to you you don't like, and now you've got to murder him.

The confession was corroborated by several witnesses, an undercover law enforcement officer who, after hearing a dispatch regarding a fire at a local trailer,

observed David arrive at a drug house, which was also under surveillance.

Unbelievable.

A neighbor of Rogers, the man who's been killed, identified Long from a photographic lineup and as the man he had seen running from the trailer home immediately after he'd seen the curtains in the trailer burning and heard the smoke alarm going off.

That's him.

Another law enforcement officer stated that after he located Rogers' badly burned body in the trailer, he found his wallet and bill fold and the bill fold contained

you don't even need to know one $20 bill.

Wow, that

they found it.

Because it's leather.

It takes a while to burn.

That's tough.

A wallet will protect some shit.

And yeah, so that, wow, wow, that is

exactly what he said.

It's all corroborated.

Exactly what he said.

The weird part is

the grand jury at this point said there's insufficient evidence for an indictment as well.

They don't have evidence, so they're not going to indict him for that.

Again, he gets away with that one.

He does an interview with the newspaper at that point and says that he's pretty much ready to call it a day with his demented personality.

He also said, I think I need to go ahead and leave.

I like to call it being put to sleep, kind of like they do to animals.

He said, put me to sleep.

I'm a dog that bit too many people, man.

You know what I mean?

Wow.

So they're going to bring him to trial, obviously.

And

here are some psych evaluations for him because he's got quite a few psych evaluations here.

Okay.

His defense team, they put together an insanity plea based on his documented history of fucking insanity.

Let's be honest here.

Um, head injuries, schizophrenia.

They paint a picture of a man whose traumatic childhood and substance abuse have created a psychotic individual incapable of understanding right from wrong.

Yeah.

I don't know if he's incapable of understanding it.

He knows what's wrong.

He just likes doing the wrong part.

Doesn't care.

He's just like, I don't care.

Put me to sleep then if you don't like it.

Like, it's crazy.

Defense psychologist Dr.

William Hester Hester says in court here that David had an unstable childhood accompanied by over-discipline or physical abuse as well as sexual abuse by a family member.

Oh.

Which, like I said, you're passing someone around that much and not supervising them.

Someone's going to diddle that fucking kid.

There's people out there just drooling looking for that scenario, that open door of an unsupervised child who's had some bad shit happen to him and won't tell.

It's fucking disgusting.

So sixth sense those predators have.

So,

this Hester diagnosed Long with an extreme antisocial personality disorder, which came in the form of the label of psychopath, he said.

He opined that Long may have been operating under an alcoholic hallucination due to alcohol withdrawal at the time of the murders, and that there was a reasonable probability that Long committed the murders in a psychotic episode and did not know his conduct was wrong.

However, he stated that Long also was malingering on one of the tests he was administered.

So he caught him faking it.

Faking what part?

Psychologists have ways of trying, there's little catches in their testing to catch you faking it.

Remember, we did a thing about the Hillside Stranglers.

But what is this fucker faking?

One of the tests he administered.

So we don't know which one.

So he said he is capable of malingering because I caught him doing it.

I know he does it.

Yeah.

So he can be malingering and also insane at the same time, though.

Sure.

That's the thing.

In addition, Long said in a second interview that perhaps he was possessed by demons.

No.

Okay,

that's a theory.

When Hester confronted him with the fact that he had not mentioned demons during the first interview, Long just dropped it and never brought it up again.

Yeah.

He was like, demons?

He's just like fishing hook.

Demons bite?

No?

Okay.

Just reel it in.

Recast.

There we go.

So Hester also admitted that he previously concluded in one of his reports that there was no evidence to support insanity obtained in any of my interactions or testing of the defendant.

Ultimately, Hester said that he could not render an opinion whether Long was legally sane when he committed the murders.

No opinion.

That's not good for him.

What the fuck?

Next up, the state psychologist or forensic psychiatrist, actually, Dr.

James Grigson, he's the psychiatrist called by the state.

He said that he met with Long, reviewed his medical records and previous hospitalizations, and met with with the defense expert as well.

Now, Grigson, this guy,

is famous for testifying for the prosecution in capital murder trials.

Really?

Yes.

Famous for it?

His nickname is Dr.

Death.

Very famous for it.

Because, yeah, his testimony often leads to death penalty sentences,

even for mentally retarded people.

He'll go, no, they're fine.

They know what they're doing.

IQ is like 63, but that's okay.

You know, he still knows what's up.

Also, he is known for declaring defendants, quote, 100% certain,

100% certain to be future dangers to society.

Okay.

A lot of times without ever personally examining them.

Really?

Kind of rule of psychiatry 101 is you don't diagnose anyone and that you don't examine no matter what.

You know, you'll always hear that on TV, a politician or this person or that person.

What are they about?

Well, I can't diagnose someone without looking at them.

So also, his role in capital punishment and wrongful convictions has been documented many times, including, and if you haven't seen this documentary, you have not seen the grandfather of all true crime documentaries.

And that's the thin blue line.

1988

Errol Morris, who does...

to this day amazing documentaries always.

But this is on a guy named Randall Dale Adams.

This was a police officer in Texas who was killed during a traffic stop.

And they blamed a guy and put him in prison a lot based on this doctor's testimony.

And it turns out, as we find out from the documentary, he didn't fucking do that shit.

So it's very, that's a great documentary.

It's incredible.

Have you ever seen it?

I believe I have.

Oh, it's so fucking good.

And also

Innocence Project cases where his testimony was later debunked as well.

So

now, Grigson said he tried to examine Long, but he wasn't successful.

Couldn't really

do it.

Wouldn't talk to him.

But based on a hypothetical question encompassing the facts and evidence, he testified that he would diagnose Long with severe sociopathic personality disorder based on everybody else and what they say, not my own eyes.

He said such diagnosis coincided with Dr.

Hester's diagnosis as well as test results from previous hospitalizations.

Antisocial personality disorder is not a disease or defect, and there's no evidence of organic damage in his medical records.

So, according according to Grigson, Long is not insane or suffering from a mental disease or defect and understood the difference between right and wrong.

He also said that it was not unusual for an individual to exhibit behaviors fitting a wide range of diagnoses and that a sociopath sometimes does this to manipulate his doctors.

Oh.

He believes that Long may have done this because the later medical records reveal no evidence of schizophrenia, and he said schizophrenia doesn't come and go.

No, it does not.

No, it's there for the long haul.

That's what that's a defect in the break.

Yeah.

That shit's in there.

Yeah, that's baked in.

You know, once it's in, it's in.

David himself claimed on the witness stand that he believed that he was demon-possessed at the time of the killings, he'll say later on, and described his actions as being influenced by Satan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

However, the state's expert, Grigson,

said, nope, severe sociopathic personality disorder.

And he insisted David understood the difference between right and wrong and is legally sane.

Fuck out of here.

Okay.

David meets with the prosecutor beforehand.

They do a meeting.

It's a three to four minute meeting between Long and the prosecutor talking about the death.

The prosecutor wants to talk to him before he files for the death penalty.

Okay, fine.

So

Long here, David asks the prosecutor, how do you feel about the death penalty?

How do you feel about it

and the prosecutor said do you mean in this case or just are we just talking general what are we talking about and long said yes this case and the prosecutor said I think it's a good death penalty case meaning I think I can get it yeah and Long said good that's what I want

golly and the guy said the prosecutor said if that's what you want we're gonna try our best to get it for you yeah and then long said that's what I deserve because I can't live in this society man I just can't do it

I'm checking out out.

Remember, I said that?

There's a trial court decides, and this is a big, contentious issue, that he will be shackled throughout the proceedings.

Throughout the proceedings?

Throughout his trial.

This is a big fucking deal because how you look to the jury has been covered by the Supreme Court a million times, and you're not supposed to look like you're already a criminal.

So usually you're in street clothes, no cuffs, no anything like that, unless you're shabbiziness and you attacked your own lawyer and you need need to be putting a

Hannibal Elector fucking thing.

So, this is a different thing.

Like in the Lori Vallodabel case, she was her own attorney, but she had to wear a shock vest throughout the whole trial, but wore it under the clothes in a way where the jury wasn't allowed to see it.

They even had a separate hearing about whether the jury saw it one time or not.

Oh, really?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And whether they should throw the jury out because someone in the jury saw it so they could have told the other jurors about it.

Yeah.

Do you think they saw it?

No, they said they didn't see it, they didn't know what they wouldn't even know what the hell they were looking at anyway.

So they said you wouldn't see it.

Never even heard of a shock vest.

Yeah, she had a shock vest on.

They literally had a sheriff in the back with his finger on the button.

Where if Lori like turned and tried to attack the prosecutor, they'd have hit her with the shock vest and she'd have been like a taser.

She would have gone and fell on the ground.

That's why it looked like that.

Yeah, that's why she looks so bulky because she's real skinny.

She's got a shock vest.

Shock vest.

And the whole time we're watching that, I'm like, please do something crazy.

Please do something crazy.

I want to see you writhe.

Or I just want to see the guy be like,

sorry.

Whoops, sorry.

And she's

on the ground fucking dying or whatever.

Jump and be like, what the fuck, man?

I'm sorry.

I just leaned.

I bumped her.

Dude, that lady blaming her fucking dead daughter for killing her son and then killing herself, even though the daughter was dead a week earlier, is disgusting.

She's the worst.

She's a piece of shit.

She's the worst person.

The worst person.

I'd rather fucking sit down and hang out with Charles Manson than her.

I really would.

She's a bad man.

I know he's dead, but just looking for whatever.

I'd hang out with his corpse.

Yeah.

Me and Chuck's corpse are going to drop some LSD together and talk about the fucking beach points.

I'll do it.

I'll do it.

Don't put it past me.

Yeah, I'd vote.

We're going to drop a tap after a while.

After a while, I might start listening to him, even if he's dead.

You know what, Chuck?

You're right.

Man.

So the defense counsel objected before jury selection, arguing that the shackling was inflammatory and prejudicial.

The judge overrules the objection, instructing the bailiffs to use whatever you feel is in the interest of safety required for security.

Really?

Yep.

The defense counsel objected again before the pretrial hearing, noting that Long has been well-behaved.

And the trial judge acknowledged, yes, he has, but cited the seriousness of the charge and the type of trial this is as justification.

Which that's extra justification for him to not have shackles on because he's up for the death penalty.

So let's make this as fair as humanly possible, I feel like.

They said that later on, they said appeals courts have applied established precedent requiring that shackling be justified by exceptional circumstances or a manifest need for such restraint,

neither of which exist here.

A regular murder trial is not exceptional circumstances because it happens all the time.

And a manifest need for such restraint would be like shabiziness attacking her defense attorney or someone someone or something.

A shock test.

Yeah.

They said the trial judge must make specific findings supporting their decision, which are then reviewed for abuse of discretion.

They said the court distinguished in one case, this is the Supreme Court, where defendants had demonstrated actual violence or threats.

In one case, the defendant carried weapons in prison, attacked inmates, and threatened officers.

In the other case, there was evidence of escape attempts and an expressed wish to die rather than face life imprisonment.

So he wanted to try to go get shot.

Neither of which existed in this case.

Yeah.

So during the testimony in the trial,

February 4th, 1987, this is fucking crazy.

David stands up during the proceedings out of nowhere, looks at the jury and shouts, I'm guilty as hell.

Yeah, we know.

Wow.

Imagine the jury like, huh?

What'd you say?

I'm guilty as hell.

He then said that I never wanted to do this stupid insanity defense.

And to tell you another thing, the axe murders that I did didn't even bother me very much.

Give me the death penalty.

He's saying shit to try to get him to be pissed off.

So the defense strategy completely gone at that point.

They're trying to figure out if they're going to even have a trial now anymore, if this is a goddamn mistrial.

So David asked the judge if he was allowed to change his plea from not guilty to no contest.

And then, against his attorney's

advice, he requested to enter a guilty plea.

So the judge went, I don't know what the fuck's going on here.

Hold on a minute.

Everybody calm down.

And the lawyer said, he's saying he's not crazy, but he's been wearing the same jeans and shirt for six straight fucking days of trial.

This guy is not.

right in the fucking head.

Look at him.

You know what I mean?

So the judge noted the request, but didn't rule on whether or not to instruct the jury to automatically find David guilty.

Yeah, you had to say, don't automatically find him guilty.

They said prosecutors continued to build their case,

and

he wanted to plead no contest and all that.

It's fucking insane.

So they said, because of the matter in which Mr.

Long has been working or not working with his lawyers, both sides, defense and prosecution, decided to proceed with the testimony with the punishment phase of the trial to come later.

Everyone in this case is being extremely cautious.

So they decided to just let it go.

Yeah?

Just let it go.

We'll just keep having the trial.

Now, in the defense counsel's closing argument here, the defense said, I don't know what David Martin Long's mental state was in 1978 in San Bernardino, California.

I don't know what his mental state was in 1983 in Bay City, Texas.

I wasn't there and we weren't there, and we have not had the benefit of what you have had for the last eight days.

He said, you haven't heard all the details about San Bernardino.

So that's the prosecutor says that.

So the prosecutor says, excuse me, judge, we're going to object to the counsel's remark about the evidence brought in this trial.

They had a fair opportunity and a time of punishment hearing to present anything they wanted to.

I think it's illegal and unfair to the state for counsel to be allowed to argue about the facts outside the record.

So he says, I haven't argued one fact outside the record.

And the court said, I overruled the objection.

So defense said, I think you realize that before the lawyers talked with you on Saturday, you heard five or four days of testimony.

That wasn't true of San Bernardino or Bay City.

And as I said, I don't know what David's mental state was at the time.

I do know, and you know, that he's been in and out of mental institutions.

So

the prosecutor, the defense counsel suggests that, and the prosecutor

starts arguing.

They have a big kind of back and forth, basically, about that.

The defense

counsel then objects to the argument from the prosecutor, and

it's so small legal words that they're using going back and forth.

They said, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if there was something out there about those offenses that was important outside of those statements that were offered in evidence, you would have heard them.

You would have heard them.

Issue number one.

The trial judge then interrupts the prosecutor without objection from the defense

and instructs the jury, members of the jury, just in an overabundance of caution, the defendant has no obligation in the punishment portion of the trial to bring you any evidence one way or the other, regardless of the case the state brought to you with regard to the other killings.

He had no obligation and is under no obligations.

The prosecutor's argument characterized him, by the way, as less than human

and as less of a human than any person any of you on the jury will ever have contact with.

You've never seen that.

This has never seen less of a human.

And will never see yet less of a human, ever.

The trial court sustained the objection and instructed the jury to disregard the comment of him not being human at all.

Please never think of that again.

That is incredibly

difficult.

That's super wrong.

Yeah, that is to dehumanize a fucking defendant is not going to really work here.

Verdict, two hours of deliberations.

He's found guilty, obviously.

I'm guilty as a lot.

Yeah.

I'm guilty as hell.

Now, during the sentencing, this is when shit gets interesting, too.

The defense attorney argues that he's insane.

He describes

this is amazing.

This is his defense attorney.

He's insane.

He's nuttier than a fruitcake.

He described his own client as nuttier than a fruitcake,

then said, this sucker was mean.

This sucker.

That's like a fruitcake, a sucker.

That's what you say when you reel in

a big fish.

That sucker was a fighter, huh?

Woo-wee, sucker.

He was mean.

So this guy was far more lethal than Ted Bundy.

He says this, this is his defense attorney.

Y'all got him.

Wow.

We tried to pull the wool over your eyes, but you

say it.

He talks about a lieutenant who remembered sitting in the back of the car with Long as authorities drove him back to Dallas County.

They talked about cars and other things not related to the killings.

What?

They just had a chit-chat.

He just sat here.

Well, you can't.

He said, y'all got any old cars or anything?

Y'all got hobbies?

And I was like, you know, I got this old El Kamena.

My dad had an El Kamena.

Oh, that's Purdue 64.

Wow, that's a good year.

Boy, I'll tell you what.

Look better than that 64.

Well, you can't question him about the killings.

No.

No.

That's something else.

We're talking about small talk or else not talk at all.

That's all you can say.

So they chose cars.

All right.

And the lieutenant had said, quote, you looked in his eyes and there was nothing there.

Nothing.

Nothing.

So the authorities authorities determined that he'd received care from eight to ten different mental institutions.

God damn.

They said one thing consistently showing up was that David Martin Long would, this is the prosecutor, would feign mental illness successfully enough to get doctors to prescribe drugs.

Apparently he was getting off on them.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

Don't say that.

He was getting off on them.

Getting off on him.

Yeah, getting off on him.

Mmm, it's all over his pants.

Jesus.

Disgusting, sticky.

Just takes a pill and then shoots it everywhere.

Everywhere.

Unbelievable, man.

So he, this is a fucking disaster.

So

they say all that.

David wants the death penalty.

At his own request, his attorneys presented no evidence during the punishment phase of the trial, which is a weird thing to do.

Jury.

Here, he also says

to the jury, he says that, I want the death penalty penalty because i'll kill again okay he said i don't belong in society i'm too dangerous um he said i'll tell you what i don't want to die but i don't see it any other way i don't see any other options left open to me i need more than want i need it more than i want the death penalty He also said, Satan is partly responsible.

And he said, I'm afraid that given similar circumstances, it might happen again.

I'm afraid I'll kill again.

He said, that's why I pled guilty.

And then he also said, if you give me a life sentence, someday there's going to be, they're going to put an 18-year-old crew-cut boy in my cell down there for auto theft, and I'm going to go into one of my little snits and I'll kill him.

Why has it got to be that?

I'm going to kill somebody, goddammit.

Took them, obviously, you know, they're...

No time.

No, because I mean, they're...

It's fucking crazy.

He said, I look back now and, you know, I couldn't have worried about anything physical happening to me.

I had a real dirty, ugly feeling, a fear that would overcome me.

He said that

the visions would begin with him losing all perception of colors.

He said, everything turns black and white.

And there was a big picture with blackness in the background.

And I just raised the hatchet and hit Laura with it, and the picture cracked.

Oh, boy.

He said, with each of the other two killings, the picture cracked a little bit more.

He said he had taken, planned to take the hatchet with him when he left the house because he said, quote, I thought there was others.

Sure.

But finally, the picture exploded, and so then he could take off.

And he was like, okay, my work is done here.

He said that the Pentecostal religion that he believes in has led him to believe that people can become demon-possessed rather than mentally ill.

And so that's my thing.

I'm not mentally ill.

I'm demon-possessed.

Only way to stop that, kill my ass.

You got to destroy it.

Yeah.

About 40 minutes, the jury says, You, sir,

may fuck off death penalty for you.

Oblige.

I mean, he begged for it.

So

it's crazy.

His defense attorney described him as an intelligent, charming, handsome man, but also one of the most vicious killers he's ever seen.

He said,

he threatened to kill me once.

Really?

Yeah.

He said he's the most dangerous, cold-blooded killer I've seen.

Yeah.

Now, remember Ernest Willis?

I do from the

Zeal Boots?

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, he's on death row.

Right.

And he said that he figured out when he got to death row, he couldn't let his anger rule him.

He said, I knew if I didn't let it go, I couldn't survive.

He said, I let all of that go.

He said that he would look around at his cells, a five by nine cell, by the way.

Terrible place.

And he'd get depressed.

And then he said he'd stop going outside and playing basketball.

He ate compulsively.

He blew up to 300 pounds.

Really?

The trial courts kept setting and resetting execution dates, which made made everything worse.

He said, living with the knowledge that you didn't do it when other people think you did do it, that was the hardest part.

But when in 1991, I was a few days away, the thing that went through my head was, I'm innocent.

A lot of people believe I am.

I'm ready for it.

I built myself up.

I knew my chances were slim in Texas.

I made my mind up.

If they were going to execute me, I was just going to lay down and go to sleep.

So luckily for him, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals grants him a stay at that point.

That's good.

In 91.

A year later, a commercial law firm from New York took on his appeals pro bono.

Okay.

This firm sent five lawyers, a private eye, and an arson investigator to look into the case.

They found records of the jailhouse doping, so he looked all drugged out.

They located a former drug partner of him as well, who had some shit to say.

They also located a psychologist report that found Ernie was not a future danger to anyone.

No.

Unlike the one asshole said in court, Dr.

Death there, and also found an arson expert who said the forensic evidence used at trial was absolutely bogus.

So, what does that mean?

Then, there is a woman who's a,

check this out, Verilyn Harbin, who goes right into our Patreon this week, right along with that, the sister of Ernie's friend and fellow death row inmate, Ricky McGinn.

Okay.

He introduced his sister and

Ernie Willis through letters.

Verilyn, the sister who was from Mississippi, and Ernie hit it off and started writing each other, and soon she was visiting him, and then they fell in love and got married.

Yes, they did.

Of course, they did.

They had never touched

at all.

They had to get married through a proxy, and they talked, and they only see each other through plexiglass.

So they've never touched, but they're married.

Which is crazy.

She said he's the most loving person I ever met.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

so 1990, he's on David's on death row.

And remember Ernie Willis's fire?

Well, David gives investigators a three-hour videotaped confession

in which he admits to starting the house fire in the West Texas town of Iran that killed the two women.

He claimed he set the fire because he was angry at Billy Willis,

the cousin, Ernie's cousin.

And that's fucking wild.

He said he was mad at Billy Willis for some drug thing.

That's why he did it.

Wow.

So Ernie goes to appeals courts attempting to call David as a witness during the trial, but David refuses to testify.

Really?

So they're like, now what the fuck do we do?

Well, they have a videotaped confession of him saying it, and they admit that into court, and the judge rules that his attorneys needed to present corroborating evidence before the confession could be a significant impact on the case.

His confession was found to lack credibility, but it sparked renewed interest in the fires.

So the lawyer spent several years investigating Long's story and found that David knew Billy Willis because the two had engaged in criminal activity for many years together.

Right.

His confession included specific details, and

it was a lot.

I mean, yeah, he said that he used Everclear and Wild Turkey to start the fire.

Nice.

And such a, they did subsequent experiments showing a mixture could be used as an accelerant there.

Yeah.

And it was also...

Also, because of the Everclear, not the Wild Turkey.

Yeah, it's the Everclear there.

So 1991, David Appeals.

Okay, appeals, and there's a lot of different things here.

Death penalty, oppositional excuses, which is juror stuff.

You know, people talking about that guilt phase arguments.

He has seven instances of improper

prosecutorial argument during the guilt phase.

The appeals court applied the standard that reversible error results only when an argument is extreme, manifestly improper, or injects new or harmful facts, or violates a mandatory statutory provision and is thus so inflammatory that it's prejudicial,

the effect cannot reasonably be cured by judicial instruction.

So they said for instances, the trial judge sustained defense objections and instructed the jury to disregard the remarks.

They found these instructions sufficient to cure harm.

In two cases where objections were overruled, the court found that either the trial judge's general instructions were adequate or that the prosecutor's argument were such as using a metaphor about looking for a black cat in a dark room to describe psychological diagnoses were proper summations.

Interesting.

Yeah, they also talk about

different states' evidence.

They said, I think that you know that the state didn't call everybody, that they could have been called as a witness.

And the defense objected because it can't argue facts that aren't in court.

So you can't say you have more people.

If you have more people, call them.

You can't just say, I could have put on so much more.

I have all the evidence.

That's crazy.

So the judge, so they responded, Judge, I think the record reflects that the defense called certain witnesses that the state didn't.

So the trial judge says that to the jury, recall the evidence as you heard it.

What the lawyers say is not evidence.

So just whatever you remember is fine.

Sure.

Which is interesting here.

Then they talk about the dark, the black cat in a dark room,

talking about

that shit, punishment phase stuff.

They said defense counsel suggests to you that there are facts that you didn't hear that are real critical.

Who knows what those facts are?

Who could perceive these lawyers with the means of compelling that evidence and having brought it before you?

David Martin Long.

So it's his fault.

Photographic evidence as well.

They describe, because they always say the pictures were inflammatory that they let in there.

What they let in, detailed confession describing the murders, his admission of guilt before the jury being guilty as hell, his testimony about wanting to avoid the trial and believing he was irreparable and should die, and the bizarre facts and circumstances of this case.

Jesus, testimony from family members about his extensive mental health issues, and they said any impact of the trial court's error in admitting these autopsy photographs were dissipated by the bizarre facts and circumstances of this case and this other evidence.

The trial, the appellate appellate court actually agrees

that he

they shouldn't have shown the photos.

They said they were showing not just photos, they were showing close-ups of the women's heads shaved with the gashes and shit like that.

And they said that was actually

inflammatory,

which that, I mean, that kind of is inflammatory, let's be honest here.

I mean, you don't need to see it to know that

they're pretty bad.

Yeah, it's just, come on, man, you know what you're doing.

So that

you gotta look, I mean, I get that we want to make guilty people guilty and want them to go, but it's so much better when it's fair.

You know, it's just so much better.

And then you don't have all the, you know, the appeals don't go on the same way, and it's just a lot better if it's fair.

So, yeah, these appeals go on.

The confession, the voluntariness of his confession is also a big deal.

They talk about that.

Was it voluntary?

Was it not voluntary?

Seemed pretty goddamn voluntary.

Sure.

To me, anyway.

Holy shit.

So

this is such a lot of shit with him.

So

he keeps trying to get.

He wants out?

No, he doesn't.

But his lawyers, it's mandatory appeals, and his lawyers want the appeals.

He doesn't really give a shit is the thing.

So that's...

What the weird part is, is that he doesn't even really fucking care.

So it's strange when someone wants to die.

Yeah.

And

they want to die.

And apparently

the state wants them to die.

Yeah, everybody wants him dead.

Everybody wants him dead, but like.

We work hard to not kill him.

It's real fucking weird, right?

Why do we do that?

I mean, I guess.

Am I out of my mind here?

I think it's because we don't want the guilt of knowing that we did that or we rushed it.

I guess.

I think it's just

not guilty people wanting to not be guilty.

Yeah.

The not guilty thing going.

Yeah, I'm sorry to go off on a little tangent on that.

That's just one of those things where we're going to be able to do that.

It probably hurts normal people to be like, I can't just fucking rush

another murder.

And I guess, too, once you're, if you're on death row, you might just be like, yeah, yeah, great, kill me.

I don't want to be here.

So

anyway, they do hold that the trial judge erred in admitting photos and

other different records that were of little probative value and were very prejudicial considering their gruesomeness, quote unquote.

So it is affirmed here in 91, the death penalty.

1992, U.S.

Supreme Court denies his

request for a writ as well.

September 15, 1992, two days till execution, he receives a stay of execution to

pursue further appeals.

December 6th, 1999, by the way.

Execution set for December 8th.

We got a day.

Yeah.

He sends a letter, by the way, to the victim's sister.

Oh, Jesus, that's kind of.

Yeah, it's right there

during this week.

He said the slayings were the result of a dream he'd had years earlier in the letter.

Read this.

Quote, I was consumed by a revelation from God that what had happened was a manifestation of the dream I'd had five years before.

Consumed with guilt, self-loathing, and utter despair, I only knew one thing for sure.

I deserved death and desired death.

He said, God warned me in many forms, many ways and forms to leave Donna's house, but alcohol blinded me.

He says that he regrets the murders to this woman.

This is Donna's half-sister, Janice.

And she said the letter only renewed the horror of the murders for her.

She said, why now?

She said, I was devastated.

It totally reopened the wound like it happened yesterday.

That was literally half of my family he took.

She said she did not plan to witness the execution, but then changed her mind after receiving the letter.

Really?

Yeah, and another relative who corresponded through another relative who corresponds with him.

So this wasn't, it wasn't sent directly to her.

He sent a letter to somebody else who then passed it on to her.

One of the cops here, Lieutenant Turner, said he, too, wants to witness the execution because it's the only guarantee that Long will never harm anyone again.

He said he's a monster and he will tell you he's a monster and he's truthful about it.

He ain't kidding.

So this is December 6th.

Not so fast, execution people.

Why?

Fucking David is found unresponsive in his

after taking an overdose of antipsychotic medication.

What the fuck?

He's been storing it up for this very purpose.

Yep.

He was rushed to the hospital.

He was rushed to the hospital in Galveston, Texas, where he was placed on life support and intensive care.

Damn it.

The medical staff said this is fucking weird.

First of all, they asked, how the fuck did he have too many drugs?

And one of the people said, inmates can be devious.

They'll hide it.

They'll hide it any way they can, and they store it up and kill themselves.

Happens all the time in mental hospitals.

So this is crazy.

So now,

imagine being the medical personnel.

What are we doing?

Working our asses off to save this guy so we can hand him over to be executed?

What the fuck are we doing here exactly?

Just don't put your mouth on his mouth.

Yeah.

He runs out of oxygen.

Just, I mean, just let it go, I guess.

He said that they find themselves in the odd situation of trying to restore to to good health a man with only two days left to live.

What are we doing?

So they said the ethical implications are staggering, basically.

This is crazy.

Yeah, that is fucked up.

Yeah.

I'm trying to heal this person just so I can give them to you so you can kill him.

That's not what I'm doing here.

But then, again, I have to give him care.

So

his condition gradually improved, and by December 7th, his breathing tube was removed, although he remained on oxygen.

The morning of his scheduled execution, December 8th, his condition was upgraded from critical to serious.

So an intensive care physician was asked to sign an affidavit stating it was safe to transport him to Huntsville for execution today.

God damn it.

The doctor refused.

Yeah.

He said, under no normal circumstances would this man be allowed to leave intensive care even for another day or two.

Never mind go anywhere else without any constant continual medical supervision.

It's crazy to go kill him.

Yeah.

They said he was removed from the ventilator, but his condition has only improved from serious to critical or whatever.

So he said that he still requires oxygen and care.

But

this puts, at the time, George W.

Bush, who's the governor running for president at the time, in a real sticky situation.

And he was out campaigning at the time.

And they said, get him out of intensive care.

Bring him here and execute.

We're going to kill him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

They could have just brought the needle over to the hospital at this point.

Put it in his IV.

What are we doing?

Yeah.

So

the Supreme Court rejects his final petition for a delay, which is crazy.

So Texas officials took him to the death chamber in Huntsville via airplane.

They had to fly him there because

he had to be in a hospital bed.

We used aviation fuel for this man.

Yep.

Because the doctor deemed the move very risky, state officials used an airplane staffed by medical personnel to ensure that he arrived in good health.

The amount amount of money they're throwing out the window for this shit.

Wow.

So

on that same day, by the way, a scheduled execution of another convicted murderer whose accuser had recanted

and whose original lawyer now admits he had a conflict of interest was still put to death that day.

Yeah.

Oh, by the way, he was a juvenile when he committed the crime as well.

So

strike one, strike two, strike three.

They still stuck him.

Same month, Johnny Penry, a convicted murderer who's considered mentally retarded, is scheduled for lethal injection as well.

Very nice.

Very nice.

That was crazy.

I remember that.

They did it.

Oh, yeah, they did it.

I remember the David Cross joke about it.

It was fucking hilariously dark.

Seatbelt for my arms.

Yeah.

David's.

That's a comedian's favorite joke, something like that, that's dark and just real nasty and crazy.

It's It's not making fun of the person, it's making fun of the reason why he's sitting there.

That's the point.

Don't get upset.

He's making fun of the system that's about to murder a man who says seatbelt for my arm.

Exactly.

That's the point.

So then his lawyers, David's lawyers, argue, Jesus, man, that's wild, before a state court judge that their client is no longer competent to be executed.

Look at him.

He's half dead, for fuck's sake.

He's not half dead.

Lawyers for the state, Attorney General General John Cornyn, who I think is a senator now,

argued the opposite.

He's perfectly fine.

He said, Toubla.

Look at him.

What the fuck?

He said, true love.

No, he didn't.

No, he didn't.

That's great.

The rejections

by the Supreme Court, six to three vote, and that Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, four to three vote.

His appeals are all but exhausted.

The state board of pardons and parole had rejected his clemency

application.

So his last chance was with the governor.

Bush was in New Hampshire campaigning.

So Rick Perry, that fucking genius, if you remember that guy, and that's not political, he stood up on stage and they were like,

what three?

Because he said, I want to eliminate three different departments.

They said, which ones?

And he went,

and couldn't fucking remember them.

That's

firesome shit.

And then the best was when the other candidates were trying to help him.

It was during the primary.

They're like, that one?

And he goes, no.

No, that just say yes, except take the lifeline, dummy.

I like that one.

That's the one I like.

Yeah, that was crazy.

So they said, under Texas law, when the board rejects clemency, the governor has two options, reject clemency or grant a 30-day stay.

Yeah.

Now,

Rick Perry's spokesman said Mr.

Long has been convicted of these murders.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice determined that transporting him from Galveston to Huntsville is not life-threatening, even though the doctor said it was.

He's He's received his court appeals and barring any additional court actions.

We expect the execution to go forward.

It shall go forward.

One of his lawyers here, David's lawyers, said, it seems like a pretty sick process when you jerk a guy out of intensive care on a ventilator.

What's the huge rush here?

What are you doing?

Yeah, we can't delay this a month.

Who cares?

But, nope, they refused to stay the execution on December 8th, 1999.

He is flown to Huntsville, brought into the death chamber.

We have no absolutely zero word on a last meal here.

Really?

You know me, dude.

I searched.

What do you want about it?

If it was insure or something they put in a feeding tube.

Yeah, I don't even know if he can eat.

That's the other thing.

Right.

That's probably what he did.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

He gave him an IV.

That's his fucking meal.

He had a last meal of clear liquids and vitamins.

He does give a last

statement.

Really?

He gives a final statement.

He says, quote,

just ah, sorry, y'all.

Sorry, y'all.

That's a funny way to start it.

I think I've tried everything I could to get in touch with y'all to express how sorry I am.

I think he's talking about the victims' families because he did.

He was doing that.

I never was right after that incident happened.

I sent a letter to someone, you know, a letter outlining what I feel about everything.

But anyway, I just wanted,

right after that, apologize to you.

I'm real sorry for it.

I was raised by the California Youth Authority.

I can't really pinpoint where it started, what happened, but really believe that that's just the bottom line.

What happened to me was in California.

I was in their reformatory schools and penitentiary, but they create monsters in there.

That's it.

I have nothing else to say.

Thanks for coming, Jack.

Who's his lawyer?

Hey, Jack.

Hey, Jack.

Thanks for coming, brother.

All right.

So good to see you.

Shit.

I thought I'd never see you again.

Hi, y'all.

Sorry.

Hey, y'all.

So they put him to death.

God dang.

And his sister, Linda Long, later wrote an obituary that painted the picture of a man whose life of violence stemmed from a childhood of abuse and neglect.

In her words, she said it should have been their abusive father strapped into that gurney that day.

Yeah, but it wasn't.

It wasn't.

But no,

it's his fault, probably.

You know what I mean?

But still, I mean, at this point, it doesn't matter.

Once you're 35, it doesn't matter what created it.

Here it is.

Yeah, my life certainly could have gone a much different way had I allowed it.

So let's end on something half decent anyway.

Remember Ernie Willis?

Yeah, in the trailer.

No.

2004.

Yeah.

Oh, what do you, how far?

What?

2004.

How far did this go?

17 years this man spent on death fucking row.

No.

Before in 2004, the district attorney finally acknowledged that he had been wrongfully convicted, stating that he simply did not commit the crime.

Unbelievable.

They didn't even try to screw him and say it was a legal thing and blah, blah, blah, like they did with the trial four guy, that document.

No, they said he's innocent, factually innocent.

His case, wow, his case then became a significant example of wrongful conviction and the flaws in forensic fire investigations.

Modern arson investigation techniques eventually determined that there was no evidence of arson.

The fire could have been caused by an electrical issue.

Oh.

So they have an electrical issue and a guy admitting to doing it, yet this guy spent 17 fucking years on death row.

Dang it.

They said that his convention was probably, or his confession, they said.

The prosecutor said, while Wong's confession may have been untrue, it was the catalyst that precipitated the massive investigation that resulted in this exoneration.

The DA said that new investigators labeled the fire's cause as undetermined and could not find any evidence to substantiate an arson case.

He was finally, finally released from prison in October of 2004.

Really?

He was the eighth Texas death row inmate exonerated since the state resumed

executions in 82 and was thought to have served the longest sentence on death row among that group.

Oh, boy.

After his release from prison, he and his wife, remember his wife that never got to touch him?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They finally got to be together.

She stuck with him that whole fucking time.

Yeah.

They moved to Mississippi, where they kind of just kept a low profile.

He started his own business, hauling houses and boats across the U.S.

Nice.

He considered writing a book about his experience, but never did.

He and his wife separated in 2007.

Isn't that funny?

17 years of that shit they could be together.

But three years together, can't handle it.

Isn't that amazing?

It's the Nelson Mandela thing.

It is.

It's so rare for those prison relationships to work out outside of prison.

They don't work.

Yeah, they're based on someone wanting someone else who's captive and

wanting

an idea of somebody in that behind bars and in the letters and stuff.

They fit that.

Then they get out and they're not that guy.

No, and the fucked up part is the people in prison then end up resenting the people who've been helping them because they've been helping them and now they owe them something.

And so they end up presenting.

It's a crazy thing.

Real weird.

I know that from research about our Patreon.

So anyway, never did.

They separated in 2007.

He moved to Midland, Texas.

They said that in 2012, the family of executed Texas inmate Cameron Todd Willingham announced that they would attempt to have Willingham posthumously pardoned.

Willis attended the press conference in Austin.

By that time, he got back together with his wife, and they were living in Mississippi.

See, some time where they couldn't touch each other and they couldn't resist each other, they needed to be back together.

Willis ends up dying on January 7th, 2021, but not in prison and not from state-sanctioned means.

So that's a win for him.

So there's some good news in this anyway.

That's Lancaster, Texas, everybody.

A fucking crazy goddamn story.

That's a crazy story.

Just from start to finish.

That's wild shit, man.

I don't even know what to say about that, except

it's something.

Wow.

That's a lot, man.

That's just a lot.

He just kept, I did it.

I guess I did.

And he killed so many people.

So many people.

I think he did it, by the way.

That fire that they said probably wasn't him.

Yeah.

Everything else he fucking admitted to he did.

Why would he start doing that one?

Doesn't even make sense unless he did it.

And that was like, I got, he came with a three-hour confession about it.

I think he did it.

You know what I mean?

So anyway, there you go.

That is Lancaster, Texas.

If you enjoy this show at all, get on whatever app you're listening on and give us five stars.

It helps drive the show up the charts and that helps us a lot.

I'm going to start.

i usually wait to talk about patreon but i'm going to talk about it right now because it's a huge announcement yeah patreon.com slash crime in sports that is where five dollars a month five dollars a month yeah that is not a lot of money right nowadays that is nothing for five dollars a month you get not only bonus episodes hundreds of them in a back catalog and new ones every other week one crime in sports one small town murder by the way this week jeff alm for crime and sports a football player who had a spectacular, crazy, weird death.

Then for small-town murder, people who marry prisoners, people who marry serial killers,

prisoners, all that kind of shit.

Not only are you going to get those two episodes, not only are you going to get hundreds and hundreds of back catalog episodes, you're also going to get all of the small-town murders, all of the crime and sports, and all your stupid opinions.

Ad-free, everyone.

Ad-free.

Ad-free.

So people have been upset about no ad-free option.

This is an ad-free option.

And you get bonus episodes.

And to be honest with you, you get to

support the show.

Yeah.

Jay.

Plus.

Yeah, both of us, damn it.

We got a mortgage.

So

we think this is the best option because we know that before we had Wondery was our network.

And Wondery,

they wanted our ad-free so they could try to drive everybody to the Amazon app because Amazon owns Wondery.

So that's why they wanted everybody's ad-free content.

And that Amazon, the Wondery app, cost you $5.

Now, you could also back in the day listen on Amazon Prime ad-free.

We're not hooked up with Amazon anymore, so that's not an option.

Otherwise, we'd do it for you.

I mean, we really would.

So we took much less money in this deal to be able to offer the ad-free in a different way because we wanted to, rather than that, and here, subscribe to Wondery and have a bunch of shows you don't want to hear.

Throw your money at them.

Yeah, give us your money right to the source, and you get to hear the bonus episodes.

You get to hear the ad-free episodes.

Now, in the ad-free, you might hear some of the early episodes might have a couple ads in them here and there that are baked in that I'm absolutely not going to go through and fucking cut edit that shit out.

But that's it.

Just that.

You're not going to get now all the ads and all the new ones will be ad-free and it's going to be fantastic.

So maybe some ones from the first couple years will have a few ads in them.

But that's just about it.

So do that.

Patreon.com slash crimeinsports.

You wanted it.

You got it.

You happy, smokers?

No, we know you're happy.

Thank you for sticking sticking with us and hanging with us through the transition of networks.

Hopefully that makes everybody real happy.

So there's that.

And you get a shout out at the end of the show, which comes in a minute.

Shut up and givememurder.com.

Get your tickets for live shows, people.

Holy shit, they're out there.

Philly and D.C.

in December.

Those have some tickets left.

We also have Seattle running out of tickets, but there's still some there in Seattle the day after Portland, which is sold out.

And then I think Irvine sold out.

So I think all we have, we released a few for Grand Rapids.

There might be a couple of those left.

That's it.

Get your tickets right

now.

Get your merchandise.

Wear it to the show.

Come hang out with us.

Shut up and givememurder.com.

Follow on social media at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Small Town Pod on Facebook.

That said, Jimmy, hit me with the names of the people, the wonderful people, who not only are going to hear bonus shit, but also get ad-free episodes.

Hit me with the names of the people who would never, ever, ever set our trailer on fire while we were inside passed out drunk.

Hit me with them right now.

This week's executive producers are Destely Sassman, Gary Howard,

Carrie Clark, and Holly Davidson.

Thank you all so much.

So much

amazing.

Spectacular bastions.

We love you.

Other producers this week: Peyton Meadows, Jeff Adamski,

Adamski, Janice Hill, Claire with no last name, Devon Messerosh, Dustin Wilson, Alexis Snow, Devin Grisson, Crystal LaFontaine, Celine Bray, Cody Hinkle, Adam Mears, Jenny Urbanski, Knox Aris, Brooke Jacobson, Ray with no last name, Jennifer Gott, Leslie Smize, Cassie Reddington, Lisa Ann Bloser, oh my God.

Scott with no last name, Ryan Alvaro, Elizabeth Kazad Calhoun, Stephen Morehouse, Sean Scott, Kieran Jameson, Gus Rupp, Mackenzie Collins, Edward Grabau, Angela Venegas, Dustin Wilkinson, Rebecca Wright, Chloe, 1462, Terry with no last name, Carrie Isaacson, Samantha with no last name, Ashley Herring, Coach Smitty, Heather German, or Herman, German, probably.

Nick Berg,

Iona with no last name, Patty Green, Brandon Goldsbury, Jill Bone, Jonathan Dunlap, Kevin with no last name, Teresa Reeves, Lauren Chatnick, Brendan Mathays, Mathis, Mathias, Gabriel Latori, Latour, Stephen Miller, oh, it's Steph Miller, Steph Miller, Jennifer P, Stacey Morton, Cornelia Gustafson, Gustafson,

Cornelia, that's a good name, Jennifer, Novoselich, Ashley Dietrich, Matt Dorr, or perhaps Dory, probably Dorr, Eric Lazowski,

Paula Dunson, Paul Clark, Pat Newton, Christopher Mentz, David with no last name, Dan with no last name, Catherine Cook, Kurt with no last name, Frank Spagnulo.

Spagnolo.

Hey, Spagnualo.

Cody.

Cody Champlin.

Ryan would know last name.

Seth Powers.

Lynn Donnaruma.

K with no last name.

Just the letter K.

Taylor Apple.

Megan.

Shealy.

Haley would know last name.

Jeffrey Reed.

Megan Keys.

Amanda Johnson.

Billy Smith.

Trevor would know last name.

Vincent Santano.

Jordan Grant.

Brandon Hilton.

Kevin Steele.

Mary Lawton.

Olivia Gifford Edmiston,

Sahar Arafat Ray, Marco Yolo.

That's fun.

Amy Dickey, Jordan H., Katie Riferif,

Jill Anderson, Amanda Mills, Robert with no last name, XO Rachel, Chucky Wilson, Chris Lampley,

Executrix 85.

I don't know what that is.

Kristen Miller, Andrew David, Stephanie Rice, Jim Slicer, Luda Kay, Bobby Wright, Kelly Ruby, Amanda Schuckert, Schuckert, Jessica Crabtree, Darth Finn, Julianne Wright, Jeremy Schreppel, Lenisha, Lanisha, Lanisha Chisholm, Allie Kay,

Melissa Hick, Dusty with no last name, Aaron Shanahan, Carl Glover, Dina Leister, Abby Haley, Nick Durbin, Matthew Harris, Erica Rummel, Rommel, it's probably Rummel, Reeves Campbell, Anthony Hines, Frank Benson, Lonnie Thomas, Bridget with no last name, William with no last name, and all of our patrons.

You're amazing.

Thank you, everybody, so goddamn much.

Thank you.

You keep this show going, and we are, we're beholden to you because you keep the show going, and now it's even more with this whole Patreon with the ad-free.

We hope a lot of you will sign up for that.

That's great.

Great stuff.

So thank you.

Thank you for all that you do for us.

You want to follow us on social media, head over to shutupandgivemeurder.com.

And there's drop-down menus that'll take you anywhere you want to go.

Keep coming back.

Keep hanging out with us.

Keep doing it.

And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure.

Bye.

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