#591 - Best Friends Murder - Hudson, Ohio

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Speaker 13 This week in Hudson, Ohio, after a body is found buried on a rural farm, a sinister plot comes to light involving multiple people, a brutal killing, and a betrayal that can only be described as senseless.

Speaker 13 Welcome to Small Town Murder.

Speaker 13 Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder. Yay!

Speaker 13 Oh, yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed.
My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you so much for joining us on another crazy edition of Small Town Murder.

Speaker 13 It's been crazy lately. Oh, there's been, obviously, there's been a lot of, lots of bodies being uncovered here on the show lately.
It's been a wild ride, and it's not going to change this week.

Speaker 13 We have a really twisted, really unnecessary murder today. Just a nasty, awful, mean, brutal, and not needed whatsoever.
It's really crazy. We'll talk all about it.

Speaker 13 But first, definitely head over to shutupandgivemeurder.com. Get your tickets for live shows

Speaker 13 and merchandise too. But the virtual live show, still available to buy if it's within the two-week window.
It was April 19th. So if you're within two weeks, April 19th, get in there and get it.

Speaker 13 It was terrific. It's the best one we've ever done, I think.
It was really so too. Really amazing.
Great story. Very funny.
And we had some good times with the weed and everything else.

Speaker 13 So it was really perfect. Get in there and check it out.
And then while you're there, get tickets for May the 17th at the Riviera in Chicago because we will be there the night before in St.

Speaker 13 Louis is sold out. So get your tickets right now.
ShutupandGiveMemurder.com.

Speaker 13 You also certainly want to listen to our other two shows, Crime and Sports, which we just finished up a 10-part Evil Knivil series. Wow.

Speaker 13 You don't have to know anything or care about sports whatsoever. You just like to have to hear a crazy story about an insane person, and you got yourself going there.
That guy. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Just a, oh my God.

Speaker 13 That's why I needed 10 parts. He's so bad.

Speaker 13 So then you definitely want to also listen to Your Stupid Opinions, our other show about where you look at reviews from all around the internet because that is hilarious.

Speaker 13 And then when you got all that, head over to Patreon, patreon.com slash crime in sports. That is where you get all the bonus material.
And it's the best value going.

Speaker 13 Anybody, $5 a month or above, you are going to get an entire back catalog, hundreds of bonus episodes. You've never heard heard that you can binge immediately.

Speaker 13 And then you get new ones every other week, one crime and sports, one small town murder, and you get it all. Just give it to you.
There you go.

Speaker 13 This week, what we're going to do for crime and sports, we're going to dip our toes back into the horrible fraternity waters here and do a part two of fraternity hazing and see maybe we'll figure out why the hell people would sign themselves up for that.

Speaker 13 And then maybe we'll figure it out this week. Who knows? Then for small town murder, we are going to talk about the Lori Vallo Daybell trial in Arizona, which just ended with a verdict.

Speaker 13 Won't spoil it if you haven't heard, but we'll talk all about that. She represented herself, and that's the hilarious part.
We'll go over some of her awful lawyering choices because it was

Speaker 13 incredible to watch, man. I watched every second of it.
Patreon.com/slash crime in sports. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, too.
Jimmy, he'll screw your name all up.

Speaker 13 Don't you worry about that. That said, disclaimer here.

Speaker 13 Listen, this is a comedy show, everybody. We're comedians.
We're definitely going to make jokes. The whole story is nothing is embellished or anything like that for comedic effect.
This is really,

Speaker 13 we try to do research that would put Dateline to shame and, you know, shows like that. That's what we do.
Honestly, we want to get every last little detail and then we figure out what is funny there.

Speaker 13 And there's usually plenty because there's usually someone going, I can get away with murder, I think, even though I don't know what I'm doing. And you can't.

Speaker 13 And then we're going to make fun of you for two hours. So that's how that works.
So that's how it is. Now, what we do is to avoid, you know, being bad people, we don't make fun of the victims

Speaker 13 or the victims' families. Why, James? Because we're assholes.
But, but we're not scumbags. See how that works? Now, if you think that sounds good to you, you're going to hear a wild story.

Speaker 13 If you think that true crime and comedy should never ever mix together here, I don't know, you might not like it, but I think it might, I think you might. Either way, no complaining later.

Speaker 13 There we go. That said, I think it's time everybody to sit back.
What do you say? Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout.

Speaker 13 Shut up

Speaker 13 and give me murder.

Speaker 13 Let's do this, everybody. What do you say?

Speaker 13 Let's go on a trip. Here we go.
We are going to Ohio this week.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah. We're going to,

Speaker 13 that's the reaction Ohio garners.

Speaker 13 Going to Ohio. Uh-huh.

Speaker 13 Not oh, or even ew. It's just, uh-huh.
Uh-oh. Uh-huh.

Speaker 13 Northeastern Ohio, this is. It is right outside Akron.
Yeah. It's about 20 minutes outside Akron, Ohio.
About 40 minutes.

Speaker 13 James Country. That's where we are right here.
About 40 minutes to Cleveland and about two hours to our last Ohio episode, Caldwell, Ohio, which was the Craigslist Killers.

Speaker 13 That was back in, I want to say November or October of last year. This is in Summit County, area code 330 and 234.

Speaker 13 They don't have a motto, but I feel like if you're in Ohio, so people just don't go, oh, you probably should get a motto. Maybe try to lure them in here.

Speaker 13 They got two area codes for this place. You know what? You know what? I think I came up with, I just came up with one.
You're 40 minutes from Cleveland. I think it works.

Speaker 13 Motto is: you don't have to root for the Browns. No.

Speaker 13 You come here. You don't have to.
You know, the Bengals and Bounds are fine.

Speaker 13 More area codes than we deserve. More than we need.

Speaker 13 The city is named, a little bit of history here. City's named for its founder, David Hudson.

Speaker 13 He was from Goshen, Connecticut, and I'm surprised he didn't. Henry Hudson? No, no, not Henry Hudson.
That's 1600s, 1500s.

Speaker 13 So he,

Speaker 13 this was 1799. He came from Goshen, Connecticut.
I'm surprised he didn't call it Goshen because they used to always just rename the town. That's his own place, yeah.

Speaker 13 The village of Hudson is located in the middle of Hudson Township. And that was the village here.
It was incorporated in 1837

Speaker 13 in Hudson. David Hudson

Speaker 13 built the first log house in Summit County, Ohio. First house in the whole county he built, made out of logs.
So

Speaker 13 I guess there's a lot of

Speaker 13 early influence here as all New Englanders because this guy came from Connecticut and then told other people to come here. So all the people were coming from Connecticut in that area.

Speaker 13 So it's kind of interesting.

Speaker 13 It was the home of the Western Reserve College and Preparatory School founded in 1826 by David Hudson and some others. It was called the, quote, Yale of the West.

Speaker 13 Northeastern Ohio was the West back then, by the way. Just the wild West.
Not even Michigan yet. No, no.

Speaker 13 The college moved to Cleveland in 1882 and later, as Western Reserve University, merged with Case Institute of Technology to form the modern Case Western Reserve University.

Speaker 13 This will come up later in the story, is why I'm telling you that. There was a fire on the west side of Hudson's Main Street in 1892.
As we know,

Speaker 13 from

Speaker 13 1885 1885 to 1915, about probably, what, 97% of the country was just on fire all the time. Crazy.
Constantly. The fire destroyed the buildings between Park Lane and Clinton Street, and even A.W.

Speaker 13 Lockhart's saloon and mansion hotel burned down as well.

Speaker 13 Another guy here,

Speaker 13 a

Speaker 13 Pennsylvania coal mine owner named James Ellsworth, assisted in the rebuilding of Main Street after the street had been destroyed by another fire in 1903.

Speaker 13 Jesus Christ. Also, he refinanced the Western Reserve Academy

Speaker 13 because it was closed from 1903 to 1916 because they had no money to operate the school.

Speaker 13 Now we don't learn our lessons. Yeah, that guy kind of came in and saved the town.
Untold miners dead by his hand. You know what I mean? A mine owner in the late 1800s.
Holy balls. I mean.
Monster.

Speaker 13 Yeah. It collapsed.
I go, well, I lost a few hundred down there. Moving on.
Like, they didn't give a shit about people back then. Reviews here.
Five stars.

Speaker 13 Tight-knit, safe community with little to none crime. Little to none.
Little to none.

Speaker 13 Great schools,

Speaker 13 big library, and cute new shopping district that is the hot spot for a lot of outings. Ooh, it's a hotspot.
It's so cute. Wow.
Very family-friendly.

Speaker 13 Although I wish to see some more involvement with the high school youth. Involvement in water.
I hope so, too.

Speaker 13 More involvement.

Speaker 13 If I go to them anywhere, I go, this place could use a lot more high school you.

Speaker 13 Anybody that says that, I am concerned about who they are.

Speaker 13 Anyone who doesn't want to fuck kids never wants high school youth around them unless they're like their own children. They don't even want their kids' friends over.

Speaker 13 You don't ever want to deal with these people.

Speaker 13 There's some tight high school ass around. Yeah, that's gross.

Speaker 13 I know that that's not me because I never want to be around children that aren't mine, ever. Not for five fucking minutes.
No interest.

Speaker 13 I have my nephews play with them for a little while.

Speaker 13 High schoolers. What are you kidding me?

Speaker 13 Holy shit, that's wild. So a lot can happen, but it is easily

Speaker 13 covered up or forgotten and not necessarily managed well. Yeah.
That's pretty vague. It's some conspiracy theory shit going on there.
A lot can happen and can be covered up easily.

Speaker 13 I won't explain what or why or how.

Speaker 13 Five stars. I absolutely love living in Hudson, Ohio.
My family moved here approximately three years ago. I wanted to get like a lifelong resident and then a new transplant.

Speaker 13 We relocated from the Chicagoland area. Hudson is a quaint, clean, and quiet town.
The culture is very relaxed and friendly. I highly recommend Hudson to anyone looking to move to Northeast Ohio.

Speaker 13 Okay. Three stars.
There isn't a lot of crime in the area at all. Crime is not a problem.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 That's the whole review. And then two stars.
The area is known for our downtown area. Too many areas.
But there is barely anything to do downtown.

Speaker 13 There are summer weekend events, but otherwise there is only restaurants and overpriced shopping. Right.
That's all there is. Okay.
People of this town, 23,001.

Speaker 13 And one. And one.
They got one extra here.

Speaker 13 About 51% women,

Speaker 13 49% men. Median age here is about five years above the national average.
It's about 43.5%.

Speaker 13 The 45 to 54 is very high. This is a place, and we'll find out it's an expensive place, too.
So you have to make a few bucks to move out here. It's one of those places.

Speaker 13 You're not going to move out here if you're just starting out and you're 24 and you just got out of college. Yeah.
So the young adults, very low. They can't afford to live here, basically.

Speaker 13 Family, 71% married. Normally 50-50.
These people are too rich to get divorced. Too much to lose.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 You get a big house and you stay on that side and I stay on that side. And we'll don't worry about it.
They got things. We'll stay together for tax purposes.

Speaker 13 So only 6% divorce rate, which is extremely low.

Speaker 13 43% married with children. Only 5.9% are single with children here, too.
This is

Speaker 13 very

Speaker 13 wealthy area. Race of this town, 90% white, 1.8% black, 3.8% Asian, 2.9% Hispanic.

Speaker 13 Religion, about 47%. And it's a mixed bag.
It's Ohio, so you never know. The most here is Catholic, actually.

Speaker 13 Maybe that's the Northeast influence. I don't know.
Catholics,

Speaker 13 Baptists of the far west, apparently, as Ohio is. The Great Lakes region?

Speaker 13 The Lake Erie region. The median household income here is $143,143, which is one of the highest median household incomes we've seen on this show.
Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 13 Maybe a couple places in Long Island were a little high or something like that.

Speaker 13 That's more than double the national average, so not too bad. Cost of living here, $100 is regular.
Here, it's $80,000.

Speaker 13 Low cost of living.

Speaker 13 The housing is not affordable, though. Median home cost here, median, $431,500.

Speaker 13 Boy. They are going to cook you on housing, man.

Speaker 13 Everything else is pretty cheap, but not that. So maybe we've convinced you, damn it.
Maybe you've had enough of the hustle and bustle and you want to move out to a leafy suburb.

Speaker 13 We have for you, and you can afford it, the Hudson, Ohio Real Estate Report.

Speaker 13 Average two-bedroom rental here goes for $1,400 a month, which is actually not that far above the national average.

Speaker 13 When you consider the housing prices, that seems like the only real affordable way to live here because here's house number one, which is normally like, you know, a manufactured manufactured home or something like that.

Speaker 13 Four-bedroom, two-bath, over 3,000 square feet on 2.63 acres. Yeah.

Speaker 13 It's a very nice house built in 1880. It's got a big giant porch with a porch swing, like total grandma coming out with cookies and an apron and like, you know,

Speaker 13 while you're playing the sprinklers or some shit type of thing when you're a kid. It says, here's from the listing:

Speaker 13 step back in time and experience the timeless elegance of this exquisite historic Victorian farmhouse.

Speaker 13 Sounds fucking nice. That is $705,000.

Speaker 13 That's a starter house. That's your starter.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 There's no trailer parks here.

Speaker 13 Nothing.

Speaker 13 That's the low one. Here's a five-bedroom, four-bath, 4,421 square feet.
Big old house on 1.45 acres.

Speaker 13 It's nice on the outside. Looks like a big, like older farmhouse, but the inside's got some questionable choices, but still a very nice house.
And it better be. $1,599,000 for that house.

Speaker 13 Out of your fucking mind.

Speaker 13 Here is a five-bedroom, six-bath, 5,500-square-foot house. This thing's a monster.
One T-bowl for all your B-holes and room for everybody on 5.48 acres. Yeah.
Huge. It's hideous looking, by the way.

Speaker 13 Hideous. It's like a big box and it's brick, which is nice, but then there's columns on it that don't go with the black and the brick.
It's just a weird,

Speaker 13 it's a real weird house. It's a strip, but inside, it's like ridiculous.
Like some, it's all, they say, come on in, and there's a hand-painted mural in the entrance, and it's kind of ugly.

Speaker 13 Like somebody went gaudy on this thing. Like it was ridiculous.
2,650,000 bucks. Your ass.

Speaker 13 And it's not even desirable and nice. No, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even want it.
Like, put it that way. I don't like it.
It's a weird house.

Speaker 13 Here is things to do in this town. Here we go.
Number one, Sausage Fest. There we go.

Speaker 13 Why would you call anything that?

Speaker 13 Which, I mean, I guess I understand it. Like, we had a comic friend of ours at a joke where he said, you know, sausage fest, that sounds delicious.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, it does sound delicious.

Speaker 13 He goes,

Speaker 13 why is that bad?

Speaker 13 I love sausage.

Speaker 13 So, and that's what they're saying here. They're embracing it.

Speaker 13 This is going to be a celebration of all sausages. Best sausage test ever.
No discrimination. Bring your sausage dangling down in whatever state it's in.

Speaker 13 Hot dogs and various other cylindrical meats. If it looks like a dick, we got it, and we're going to cook it for you.
Cylindrical meats.

Speaker 13 We got fucking cock-shaped food for you all weekend.

Speaker 13 A fun day of polka music, belly dancers.

Speaker 13 How the fuck do belly dancers and polka music go together? Don't ask me. I just, I just happened here.

Speaker 13 This is amazing. Eating, shopping, a sausage-eating contest, best sausage food vendor contest, a cruise-in-car show, and some pretty hilarious sausage-themed games and activities.

Speaker 13 I mean, they're all going to be winky-winky, that's a dick type of thing. Right.

Speaker 13 How many can you fit in your mouth? Shit like that. It's all that.
Yeah. How many inches?

Speaker 13 How many holes can you fill at once? You know.

Speaker 13 Then there's also the Summer Music Festival.

Speaker 13 And apparently it's held on the green in downtown Hudson. It's been going on since 1977.
And they got some people. Here we go.
Let's find out.

Speaker 13 Here we go. Let's find out who's going to be there this week.
Or not this week, but whatever. This year.
This year. The Hudson High School Jazz 1 and 2 will be there.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 The jazz bands, 1 and 2, which is probably not good.

Speaker 13 Then on the Sunday show, Wish Garden will be there. It's kind of like Sound Garden, but you have to really want it bad.
Hope for it.

Speaker 13 They say lively roots rock. Roots rock? The fuck is that? Cover and original tunes.

Speaker 13 Boy.

Speaker 13 Sponsorship to be determined. Nobody's sponsoring Wish Garden quite yet.
Otherwise, they have a sponsor for every other show.

Speaker 13 Three Birds and the Wire

Speaker 13 is on also. They're a vocal trio eclectic repertoire

Speaker 13 crossing over many genres. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 13 The Cleveland Jazz Orchestra will be there. They got that.

Speaker 13 Then there is the Western Reserve Big Band. These are college bands now.

Speaker 13 Then we got the Freedom Big Band. I don't know what that is, but it's okay because Sunday, July 6th, Hot Potatoes will be there.
Hot Potatoes. A mix of blues, swing, and originals.
Okay.

Speaker 13 Clock Tower will be there July 13th. Let's all watch out for them.

Speaker 13 Clock Tower. Jesus.

Speaker 13 just are you a big Back to the Future fan or are you going to start shooting people? Which one? And you can't. Wasn't that in Ohio? Oh, no, that was in Texas, huh? Yeah, that was Austin.

Speaker 13 That was universal. Didn't somebody climb a clock tower in fucking Ohio? No.
I'm sure that after that, people went, How come I never thought about climbing a clock tower?

Speaker 13 It's the highest point in town, obviously. Yeah.
So it had to have happened.

Speaker 13 I don't know. No, that was the National Guard.
Oh, whoopsie days. Killing Vietnam War protesters.
Totally different. Yeah, that was

Speaker 13 not that.

Speaker 13 So July 20th, the Neo Big Band, NEO, Big Band,

Speaker 13 Blue Lunch, Blue Soul

Speaker 13 New Orleans Rhythm and Jazz.

Speaker 13 What is this? La Flavour with a U.

Speaker 13 La Flavour.

Speaker 13 French-Canadian flavor guys. Doesn't say what they do.
And then the Jack Shantz jazz unit with Barbara Rosen will be there. Now, I wasn't going to go, but if Barbara's going to,

Speaker 13 that seals it. You know, I'll go for Jack Chance.
Obviously, I want to go, but I'm like, I don't know. I'm busy, but then Barbara's there.

Speaker 13 She wasn't there. That's what I mean.
You know, they might never perform together again. You know what I mean? This is like seeing the Beatles reunited in the 70s or something.
This is crazy.

Speaker 13 Jesus. And then finally, they close it all out with the Bel Airs.
You know what they sing? Sounds from the 50s.

Speaker 13 You knew that. Now, crime rate in this town.
What we, as small-town murder people, are interested in here, property crime is about one-quarter of the national average.

Speaker 13 So very low, about 75% under it, so low. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course assault, the Mount Rushmore of crime is about one-third of the national average.
So

Speaker 13 this place is safe. It's a very safe.
And I think, you know, big properties and everybody being rich, no reason to really fuck with each other, maybe. I don't know.
Very happy folks.

Speaker 13 That's all I can think is, yeah, or just shit to lose. I don't know what it is, but I don't know.
but that said let's talk about some murder that happened here we go wow okay now

Speaker 13 let's talk about some people first let's start out with a with a lady Linda Carlin not Carlin like George K-A-R-L-E-N

Speaker 13 oh nothing like George yeah

Speaker 13 so Linda Carlin she's born in December 1952

Speaker 13 all right now we'll catch up with her kind of in the 80s here in the 80s she's starting to really come into her own She was hired in 1980 by a very generous and successful orthopedic surgeon named John F.

Speaker 13 Steele. Now, this guy hired her to be his personal secretary and then also kind of oversee all of his other shit we'll talk about.
Like

Speaker 13 she's kind of his like personal assistant, I guess you could say now. But back then.
Office manager. They'd

Speaker 13 call her a personal secretary, but she's in charge of kind of everything here.

Speaker 13 By 1987, this steel guy, the doctor, he owned and she managed a shitload of businesses. There's a health spa called the Pro Body Shop,

Speaker 13 three-store retail furniture business called Old Town Furniture, a tavern, a construction company called Crown Construction, commercial buildings, the Steel Corporation, which is an umbrella company, all these different companies.

Speaker 13 So he is really making an empire of this guy, basically. Plenty of businesses, yeah.
Yeah, and she is managing these businesses for him. This is in the Greenville area.

Speaker 13 So she's kind of managing everything. She's just kind of his overseer of all the stuff here, you know, umbrella, umbrella job.
So by 1987, she is living in a big giant house that he owns. Right.

Speaker 13 She stays there. She has two Cadillacs and a Corvette.
Oh. She's got just all the multiple bedroom closets are full of expensive clothes that she has.
Fur coats, jewelry.

Speaker 13 She likes animals. She's got two Rottweilers, seven horses.
You know how expensive it is to keep seven horses?

Speaker 13 You know how expensive it is to keep a horse?

Speaker 13 One horse? You have to put one of those down when it dies. Oh, my God.

Speaker 13 The upkeep is a little bit more than that. Well, they do it by the pound.
It's expensive. They're fucking huge.

Speaker 13 That's the point. That's why people kill them and collect insurance money.
Yeah. Because it's big.
Remember on The Simpsons, they got the fucking pwn. They got the horse.

Speaker 13 Bart had the horse and it fucking, they couldn't afford it. It was eating them out of house and home, for Christ's sake.
They should have really known better.

Speaker 13 You can't bring home elephants and horses. I mean, the kids really.
Livestock, just keeping anything like that alive is crazy. Oh, shit.

Speaker 13 She also had two pet snakes, including a 38-foot Burmese python.

Speaker 13 38 feet, a four-story-tall fucking Burmese python. 38.
38-foot-long. Boy.
Imagine what that eats. I didn't even know those grow that big.
Maybe

Speaker 13 in Burma. Maybe in the fucking Myanmar jungles they grow that big, but in a fucking fish tank?

Speaker 13 38? Where do you house a 38-foot snack? Outside. You can't hit it.
In the jungle.

Speaker 13 She does. She's got such a big house,

Speaker 13 she can somehow fit with a 38-foot.

Speaker 13 Wow, that is crazy.

Speaker 13 38? 38 feet. I don't get it.
It's crazy.

Speaker 13 So in addition to pretty much getting a free house, she also gets a company car, which I believe is one of her Cadillacs, and $75,000 a year in the mid-80s, which is great money in the mid-80s.

Speaker 13 $75,000 a year in the mid-80s is crushing it.

Speaker 13 Especially if you don't have to pay for a house or car. You're really crushing it.

Speaker 13 That's really amazing. You can afford jewelry and 38 feet of snake at that point.
38.

Speaker 13 You can afford to put, you know, two, $300,000, $200,000,000 mice into the thing every year, not even dollars in mice. I mean, mean, you're feeding that thing rabbits, probably.
I would imagine so.

Speaker 13 You're feeding that thing like villagers.

Speaker 13 Yeah, toddlers. Something big.
Someone from like a Burmese village, I think you got to feed. They have a very specific taste, you know?

Speaker 13 You got like feeder chihuahuas or something for that.

Speaker 13 Some like, you know, jungle person from there that wears like a loincloth, you got to stuff them. And I don't understand.

Speaker 13 I guess at that point, you just have a contract with the Humane Society that whatever you're putting in the middle of the bottom. Whatever you got, give me it.

Speaker 13 Come on and stuff it in my snake's gullet here.

Speaker 13 Wow. So that's what's going on.
Linda's life is at this point in the 80s.

Speaker 13 You know, she's a businesswoman. She's got tailored suits.
She's got expensive jewelry, cars, animals, giant fucking snakes. You name it.
Just all sorts of shit. She's living it up.

Speaker 13 She had an antique jaguar also.

Speaker 13 An old one, a 60s jaguar. Not an animal, a car.
A car. Yeah, with her, you got to ask because you never know.
Yeah. The jaguar might be to feed to the snake.
We have no idea.

Speaker 13 So she also has a boyfriend.

Speaker 13 Now, we're talking in the, say, 87 when she's in her mid-30s. She's pushing, you know, mid-30s.
Her boyfriend is a college kid. Yeah, he is.
He's about 21, 22 years old.

Speaker 13 That's who she's going out with.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 She is going out with

Speaker 13 a guy named Ed Swiger. We'll talk a little bit about him, but that's who she's going out with.
He's a much younger guy, kind of of a cocky college kid. And

Speaker 13 old Eddie. Yep, Ed Swagger.
And Eddie, she put down $4,000 for a black and gold cheap Cherokee for him and co-signed the fucking loan for him. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 She's treating him like, you know, like mom you can fuck. Weird.
Real weird.

Speaker 13 Not like to. No.
She's doing it. Yeah.
So she's managing properties. One of the properties that she has access to is a farm near

Speaker 13 Pimatuning Lake. P-Y-M-A-T-U-N-I-N-G.

Speaker 13 Sure.

Speaker 13 You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't know.
Another was Stone Gate, which was a posh home on Methodist Road in Greenville, where she lived later on with Swiger, as we'll talk about.

Speaker 13 Yeah, as she brings him in.

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Speaker 13 According to her assistant, because Linda had an assistant, a woman named Jodi Snodgrass. That's not a good name.
Snodgrass? That sounds terrible.

Speaker 13 Linda met Ed when he was 21 and she was 35. They met at the pro body shop, the gym, because he's a big workout guy, weightlifter, kickboxer, guy like that.
And she runs the gym.

Speaker 13 And this friend said that she really liked him a lot. She said that they became, quote, like boyfriend and girlfriend.
You know, like people have relationships. Sure, sure.

Speaker 13 She made it sound like that was odd for

Speaker 13 normal. They became almost like a boyfriend and girlfriend.
Weird. Strange.
Like an item. Like an item.
Just two people that like to fuck each other. Yeah, that's what happens.
Yeah. So now

Speaker 13 Linda's described here as fair-skinned with a thick, full head of red hair.

Speaker 13 Swiger is described as dark and muscular, a bodybuilder and kickboxer. Now Linda describes him as 5'10 and 260 pounds, which he's not.
He's about, you know, 220.

Speaker 13 He's a big, muscular guy with like big, like thick thighs, that kind of guy, real sturdy kind of cat. And yeah, but she thinks that's 260 pounds, which is pretty funny.

Speaker 13 So soon here, she's so taken with Ed that she wants to help Eddie out even more than basically buying him jeeps and hires him to work for her in the furniture store that we talked about-the three-unit furniture store, where she made him assistant manager.

Speaker 13 There we go. Now, we got to find out a little about Ed.
Edward Swiger Jr. goes by Eddie.
He is born in 1966, so good 14 years younger. She's very generous to him,

Speaker 13 as we would say, even when she would often lend him cars, but sometimes he would say, I don't feel like driving, and would tell her to chauffeur me, and she would take him around wherever he needed to go.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Toss her the cap. There you go.
There you go. I'm going to sit in the back and, you know, I'm going to bring a chicken here, too.
I hope you don't mind.

Speaker 13 Put this hat off. Put this hat on.
Come on.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, that's Ed. He's born in 66.
He's got a brother named Michael Swager. Old Mike here.
He's born two years later. So two-year difference with his brother Mike.
Important to know about him, too.

Speaker 13 Now, about the family, the Swagger family, Mike and Eddie grew up in Tiltonsville, Ohio.

Speaker 13 They call it midway between Steubenville and Wheeling, West Virginia. Midway between two two terrible places.
Yeah. So that's not great.

Speaker 13 And the town that he comes from there lost a lot of its residents kind of over the course of the 80s.

Speaker 13 They went from 5,000 to about 2,500. Oh, boy.
So a dying Midwestern town. That's not good.
Yeah. The steel mills and coal mines shut down.
So that was that. Half the people left.

Speaker 13 But the Swager family did pretty well for themselves. Apparently, their dad owns a furniture store, and their father, Ed Swiger Sr., is a Jefferson County commissioner as well.

Speaker 13 So they do pretty well compared to other people in the area. Type

Speaker 13 a little bit, yeah. Yeah, connected and have a business and a job with the county as well.
So they're known as kind of a prominent Jefferson County, Ohio family because dad's a

Speaker 13 politician or whatever. Now, a little bit about Eddie.
Eddie is known as, and I'll use an old, old reference that was old when we were kids, he's known as a bit of an Eddie Haskell.

Speaker 13 Now, if you're young and you don't know what that is, there was a show called Leave It to Beaver. And I'm saying this because there's like four Leave It to Beaver references in this episode.

Speaker 13 So Leave It to Beaver was a show in the 50s that was about, you know, it was that bullshit. perfect family, you know, thing.
The two boys would come home. Oh, hey, mom.
Hey, kids, how you doing?

Speaker 13 There's lemonade in the fridge for you. And dad would come home.
And the big problem would be like, you know, the beeve has a project due, but it's not quite done the next day.

Speaker 13 So we got to teach the beef. The beef broke a window.
About managing his time.

Speaker 13 You know, he broke a neighbor's window, and you know, Beave, you got to go over there and, you know, work that debt off, like, stuff like that. And the older brother, Wally.

Speaker 13 You got to tell him you did it. You got to own up to it, Beave.
Yeah. You have to take responsibility.
Beaver was the younger brother. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And he was the one that, you know, they were always getting into, you know, scuffle scrapes and whatever. And then the older brother, Wally, had a friend.
His best friend was Eddie Haskell.

Speaker 13 And Eddie Haskell is

Speaker 13 down the street or some shit. Now, the actor who played Eddie Haskell ended up being an LAPD officer for like 25 years, which is what?

Speaker 13 Yes, he absolutely did because there was no work after Eddie Haskell because he was Eddie Haskell. Imagine getting arrested by Eddie Haskell.
By Eddie Haskell.

Speaker 13 Be like, are you seriously upset with me? Are you full of shit right now?

Speaker 13 So Eddie Haskell is the friend who comes over and you go, Hi, Mrs. Cleaver.
Oh, you look so lovely today. Oh, my goodness, your flowers in the garden are wonderful.

Speaker 13 And then they get outside and he's like, we're going to go finger these two broads. I got a 12-pack hidden under the bush.

Speaker 13 Yeah, here, unroll them cigarettes from my sleeve. Let's go smoke.
All right, well, let's hit the fucking, let's hit the fucking makeshift casino. That's kind of what

Speaker 13 he's like. So that's what Eddie is kind of known as, kind of appropriate that his name's Eddie, because he's kind of an Eddie Haskell.
Now,

Speaker 13 they said that, you know, Swiger is like a beefy Eddie Haskell. Eddie Haskell, but that'll kick your ass.
Okay.

Speaker 13 Now,

Speaker 13 people described him as a kid as unfailingly polite and respectful, but kind of phony.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 There's one guy here, Craig Klosser, who is the Jefferson County school superintendent and was also the mayor of Yorkville. And he said, quote, Eddie was the only person I knew who called me Mr.

Speaker 13 Mayor. Like very formal, you know what I mean? At school.

Speaker 13 And then the Clara Swiger said that he was, quote, the only first grader with an attaché case.

Speaker 13 E

Speaker 13 weird. Yeah.
A briefcase.

Speaker 13 And back then, too, in the early 70s, that is an invitation to get the shit kicked out of you back then. Fuck yeah.
With the attache case as they beat you over the head with it.

Speaker 13 And then shit in it and close it and hand it to you back.

Speaker 13 So that is wild.

Speaker 13 Oh, no. The whole football team jerked off in it.
Oh, Jesus. On top of the turd.
Gross.

Speaker 13 So Eddie is also, but he's known as studious and quiet in high school anyway. He was a lineman for the football team in high school.

Speaker 13 He ends up going to Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, where he is elected student body president. Wow.
So yeah, Eddie's got some charisma to him. He's that kind of guy.

Speaker 13 He's a leader. He's known as a bit of manipulator too.
He can manipulate people into doing things that he wants, basically. He's also a weightlifter, a kickboxer, and that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 Known as a real kind of a tough guy. Does everything masculine? Does all sorts of shit.
Now, his brother Mike, two years younger,

Speaker 13 is actually more outgoing of the pair, they say. He was the president of his senior class in high school, and he also was on the, he was a tailback on the football team, had a B-plus average.
Wow.

Speaker 13 And he earned the school's prestigious Clark Hinkle award. And we all know.
Who the fuck is Clark?

Speaker 13 When you're talking about Clark Hinkle, you know, you keep his name out your fucking mouth if you don't have respect on it. You know what I'm saying? That's Clark.
That's the Hinks right there.

Speaker 13 So he won that.

Speaker 13 One of his teachers, his chemistry teacher, said, quote, if I had to pick one person who would be a success in life, it would be Mike Swiger. He's as good as they come.
Really? Yeah.

Speaker 13 So this family is producing confident, successful young men. Right.
Now that's, so Eddie is going out with Linda Carlin. Mike's his younger brother.
A little background there.

Speaker 13 Now let's introduce another young man, same age as Eddie. This is Roger Pratt.
Everybody calls him Butch. Okay, Butch Pratt.
Butch Pratt. Now, Butch grew up a little bit differently here.

Speaker 13 His family isn't like royalty in the county or anything like that. He grew up in Munhall, Pennsylvania, which we know very well because we played the Munhall,

Speaker 13 what is it? The Music Hall. Music Hall.
I couldn't remember. I was going to say Center for the Performing Arts, but that's another place.
We've played there several times.

Speaker 13 It's a real, it looks like fucking coal miners live there, steel workers live there. I mean, it's a row houses kind of a thing or like apartment buildings, a lot of brick.

Speaker 13 Even the fucking roads aren't paved. The roads are bricks.
It's one of those places, you know, a lot of the roads, like the one when you turn on to get dropped off at the

Speaker 13 performance center. It's all bricks.

Speaker 13 Every Uber driver's like, oh, shit, when they pull onto there, God damn it. I'm like, sorry, man.
My bad. I didn't put it here.

Speaker 13 I didn't say, yeah, this isn't, I didn't pave this.

Speaker 13 So the mom here, his mom, Rose, who divorced his dad when they were kids, when the kids were kids. So when Butch was a kid here.

Speaker 13 She ends up raising two sons and a daughter, kind of as a single mom here. So Butch's brother and a sister.
Roger, Butch, is the youngest child of the three.

Speaker 13 Now, at age five, Butch had a bone disease in his right leg. Shit.
He had to limp around with a brace on for over two years.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Which, again, not the kindest, you know, children are cruel.

Speaker 13 And if you're the kid with a brace on one leg limping around, you're probably not socially, you know, you're going to have a hard time back then. It's hard.

Speaker 13 So he did that. Somehow, though, he ends up growing up to be Steele Valley High School's best male athlete of 1984.

Speaker 13 What? Very unlikely, right? That's fucking crazy. That's like, what's his name at Polio?

Speaker 13 The president? No, no, no. Somebody else had it? A famous professional athlete at polio.

Speaker 13 I can't remember who the fuck it was.

Speaker 13 OJ. O.J.
at polio. Yeah, thanks.
Oh, what? It was OJ. Or, no, he had rickets or something.
He had something else to fuck his legs up.

Speaker 13 But it's one of those scenarios where you're not expected to be a professional. I think there's a bunch of baseball players back in the day who had polio and ended up being pro-baseball players.

Speaker 13 People got it from what I'm told. A lot of people.
Now, when he's a junior in high school, he starred on the Steel Valley High School's undefeated football champion team.

Speaker 13 Really? Yeah, he was the big star.

Speaker 13 The next season, he made all-conference at guard, which is the offensive line, which, even if you don't know anything about football, you know how before they start when the quarterback's standing there and they're saying, 44 or whatever.

Speaker 13 You know, the giant guys in front of him that are all kind of with their finger hands on the ground? One of those guys.

Speaker 13 He's 5'8, 165 pounds, and an all-conference guard. Unbelievable.
A tenacious bastard is what he is. Who had polio and was in fucking braces? Apparently, he's known as being insanely strong.

Speaker 13 He's like legendarily strong. And I would assume he'd keep himself that way.

Speaker 13 Somebody here from the area remembers that he could do 40 dips on the parallel bars when he was a kid. I don't know if that's good or not.

Speaker 13 He said that, yeah, he remembers that

Speaker 13 one time he strode over to an 85-pound barbell and snapped it over his head one-handed. And it was a tiny guy, though, little guy, not expected out of him, not like a big giant guy.

Speaker 13 So they said that one friend of the family said that he called him a, quote, piece of rock, the toughest kid I ever met.

Speaker 13 Piece of rock. Piece of rock.
He kept the leather and steel brace in his bedroom propped up in the corner all the time. I would too.

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 that's his jam. He had to do it.
Now he's a blonde guy rocking a mustache at 18. Hell yeah.
And it looks, it's like a good mustache. It's not one of those wispy little 18-year-olds.

Speaker 13 He looks like his picture at 18 looks looks like a 42-year-old man with a mortgage and three kids, you know, and worried about a promotion.

Speaker 13 He's been through it, though. Thinking about putting a new lawn in this year, stuff like that.

Speaker 13 It's what he looks like. It's just weird.

Speaker 13 He is a very good athlete, like we said. He also was a good high school wrestler.

Speaker 13 He was voted the most valuable male athlete in the school, and he was also voted and given the Good Humanitarian Award as well. Oh, that's great.

Speaker 13 So So

Speaker 13 successful, looking like going to be a successful kid here. His mother said, quote, it was a pleasure to raise him.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 One time even, he confronted a boy who was chasing his sister, and apparently he had a broken hand.

Speaker 13 And he said, he did. He did.
He came home with a broken hand and he was like, fucking with my sister. That's all.
And the mom was like, all right, then, fair enough.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 His parents,

Speaker 13 they don't have quite as much money as the swaggers, but but they're not poor at all. Father owns an extermination business and pays child support and all that.

Speaker 13 And the mother works full-time as a registered nurse. So they do okay.

Speaker 13 Their house, like, you know, she owns her house and all that kind of thing. They don't rent or anything.
So, you know, kind of a solidly middle-class family he comes from. Now,

Speaker 13 when it's time for high school to be over and they're to start talking about college, he started thinking about going into the Marines.

Speaker 13 Swager? No, no, Butch. Butch.
So Butch started thinking about going into the Marines, and because I mean, physically, he's kind of cut out for it, you know?

Speaker 13 Yeah. He's a football boy.
That's what I mean.

Speaker 13 He's just a strong guy. He seems strong-willed.
It seems like he could, you know, get through that and be fine.

Speaker 13 I think

Speaker 13 if you're the best athlete in high school, I think, as long as you, it's a physical. So as long as you pass the physical, it's fine.

Speaker 13 So his dad, though, talked him out of it. His dad said, yeah, he said, quote, I talked him out of it.
I told him, you're the only one who's been able to go to college.

Speaker 13 You'd be the first person in the family to go to college. And you have an opportunity to go to college.
What are you doing? Basically. So, yeah, he said, we'll help you.
We'll get you through.

Speaker 13 We'll do whatever we can money-wise to pitch in. We'll make sure you can do it.
So, but, you know, they, and the parents remained co-parents, which is good.

Speaker 13 His dad didn't like go away and never talk to him or pay any money or anything like that.

Speaker 13 So they ended up coming up with about the $3,000 a year it would cost to send him to Thiel College. Okay.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 And then once he got in, his dad said he never talked about quitting. He was into it.
He loved it.

Speaker 13 He just did it every day. And his mom tells little stories about him.
Like one time he called her from college just to get a baked chicken recipe that she had. Oh.
That he liked her baked chicken.

Speaker 13 How do you make that? Back then, she said that was a big deal, too. A long-distance call for baked chicken recipe.
Just for a recipe. Oh, man.
You're spending some dough on that.

Speaker 13 More than the chicken probably cost back then it was phone calls were expensive people don't realize that but before cell phones and like free long distance great it was expensive to call people so um he also remodeled his mother's kitchen what a guy and built the guy who called him a piece of rock he built that guy a deck so yeah he's like a 38-year-old man basically this guy

Speaker 13 knows how to build shit um he is called by a lot of people beaver cleaver with muscles so

Speaker 13 okay we got a beaver and he's going to hang out with an Eddie Haskell. So that's the thing here.
They also said that he's very trusting, a bit naive and not very street-wise.

Speaker 13 It's not Butch's forte, his streetwiseness here. Well,

Speaker 13 some people have it, some don't. Yeah.
Either, yeah, that's what I mean. And who knows? So anyway, he goes to Thiel College.

Speaker 13 Eddie Swiger goes to Thiel College, and that's where they come together and meet. That's where they meet.
And they're best friends right off the bat, like immediately. Eddie and Butch.
Butch.

Speaker 13 Eddie and Butch. Yep.
They're frat brothers, too. They were in the same frat together.

Speaker 13 I'm sure they did a lot of things. It'll be on our Patreon of fraternity hazing.

Speaker 13 They played football together. They did everything together here.
So in the fall of 85, they were both sophomore classmates, fraternity brothers.

Speaker 13 They lived across the hall from each other at the frat house, Delta Sigma Phi.

Speaker 13 Pi, Phi, P-H-I. Is that Phi? That's Phi.
That's Phi, right? Okay, yeah.

Speaker 13 So they both liked weightlifting. They both liked computers.
Yeah. They're both about 5'8.

Speaker 13 Swiger's a lot heavier than him, a lot more kind of muscular, thicker than Butch. Well, Butch had some issues getting bigger.
Yeah, yeah. He's just built different.

Speaker 13 You know, some people are just built thicker. He's one of those guys that's got about 20 extra, 30 extra pounds of muscle on him than Butch.

Speaker 13 They're both known as soft-spoken, athletic, very strong and flexible, both of them. Like they're both athletes.

Speaker 13 Swiger could do like, he could like jump up and do a fucking come down in a split, like a cheerleader. Oh, which is crazy for a guy to do.
Like, that's insane.

Speaker 13 Your taint and nutsack are destroyed with that. You need to put like a pad in there or something first.
Yeah. It's wild.

Speaker 13 Now, Butch would, he wrestled. He played baseball and football and that sort of thing.
Well, Swiger was more into the martial arts at this point. Pratt's a big hunter, and so is Ed.

Speaker 13 Eddie's into hunting, and he's also very fond of guns. And Eddie sometimes carries a pistol as well.
Jesus. Now,

Speaker 13 the president of Delta Sigma Phi said he always saw them together, said Ed was definitely the leader, and Butch was more impressionable. Ed was really cocky and arrogant.
Butch was happy-go-lucky.

Speaker 13 Okay. So beaver and Eddie has.
That's tracked. Yeah.
Yep. And that's, you know, as friends are a lot of times.
So, you know, Butch is just calm and quiet.

Speaker 13 They said Eddie, a lot of people describe Eddie as kind of a two-sided personality. It's one of those things.

Speaker 13 The guy who was the president of the fraternity said, a good guy to get along with, but he did have his times when he was difficult. That's what he said.
One of those guys.

Speaker 13 Now, Butch's mom said after he met Ed, he liked nice clothes all of a sudden. Butch.
Oh, yeah. She said he had, they had some kind of paperback book.

Speaker 13 They knew what a businessman is supposed to wear i don't know if they had some kind of guide to like

Speaker 13 you know businessman fashion or what but

Speaker 13 they had the right some paperback reference book that they would look at and decide what to wear i don't know what that is or whatever but that's what they do um she said though butch didn't care about that expensive stuff he was happy if his stomach was full but he also was you know into looking they were trying to be grown-ups that's all it is i think yeah

Speaker 13 and they for for lack of it and they are it right Yeah.

Speaker 13 They're in college. They're grown-ups.
He's got a mustache and he's remodeling kitchens. That's a fucking grown-up.
That's what grown-ups are upstairs. For Christ's sake.
Yeah, that's crazy shit.

Speaker 13 And Eddie's, you know, kind of the same thing. He's a grown-up.
They're both grown-ups. But

Speaker 13 now, Eddie, by the way, it's kind of known as kind of an obsessive, compulsive, overachiever kind of a guy. He's not the smartest guy in the world, Eddie.

Speaker 13 but he does what he puts his mind to kind of thing. So he's kind of an average IQ kind of guy, but did really well in high school and in college at Thiel as well.
He majored in political science.

Speaker 13 At one point, Eddie is going to be president of the student government, too. Oh.

Speaker 13 And Pratt was a parliamentarian. So there you go.
Pratt was the interpreter of Roberts' Rules of Order, whatever the fuck that is. Don't know what that is.

Speaker 13 Now, they say in the fraternity house, Eddie would always keep his like room locked and shit like that. He was very private.
Sure.

Speaker 13 And he said he didn't want people stealing his shit, basically, which is understandable.

Speaker 13 He was a treasurer of one point of the fraternity and hatched a fundraising plan to repay the fraternity's debts. But after a while, he kind of pissed everybody off, put it that way.

Speaker 13 So in December of 86, which is the middle of both of their junior years, he moves out into an off-campus house and asks Butch if he wants to come with him. Yeah.
So Butch does.

Speaker 13 So they end up living together.

Speaker 13 And a person who was dating Butch, a woman named Vicki, said, I thought it was a good move. Well, yeah, now you don't have to jerk him off in a frat house.
Now you can do it in a regular house.

Speaker 13 A bunch of guys standing outside with the fucking glass up against the window or the door. You don't have to do that anymore.

Speaker 13 I thought it was nice to have just one guy that I was worried about belonging to. Yeah, now it's much better.

Speaker 13 She said that Eddie, quote, seemed to be more mature than the other guys as far as work was concerned. Which, I mean, he's a guy who brought an attaché case to the first grade.
So

Speaker 13 he's always seems like he wants to at least project this maturity. Yeah, I'm a big thing.
Yeah. Yeah, this business, I'm important person type of deal.

Speaker 13 And I don't know if that's growing up with a dad who had his ass kissed by people. And

Speaker 13 I think maybe that's part of it. He wanted to be like that, too.
I'm a big, important man. You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 So it's interesting. Now, why did they move out of their fraternity house in the middle of their junior year? Seems like if you're in a frat, you're there to party in the house.
That's the point.

Speaker 13 Well, they got kicked out of the house is the point. They got blackballed.
They got blackballed from the frat, both of them. Yeah.

Speaker 13 The frat brothers believed that the two of them were responsible for a 1987 burglary at this frat house and one right next door as well, which tons of electronic equipment was stolen.

Speaker 13 Stereos, VCRs, TV sets. Anything like that was taken.
Anything that could be sold, appliances, things of that nature. So that happened on March 3rd, 1987.

Speaker 13 And by halfway through the year, they're out of the frat house. They said about $3,500 worth of shit was taken in this robbery.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 now,

Speaker 13 the thing is,

Speaker 13 they did do it. They did rob this frat.
They did it? Yes. They both, yeah, it's these two that did it.
Now, Ed says that Butch instigated the burglaries as a way of getting some things he never had,

Speaker 13 which seems like

Speaker 13 a stretch. You know what I mean? Eddie seems like the type that talks you into doing shit, not the other way around.

Speaker 13 It's just not the way it is. And

Speaker 13 Butch said, he told other people that Eddie talked him into it. So I believe that more.

Speaker 13 They said the arguments that Eddie made to him was that the burglaries aren't going to hurt anybody except the insurance company. Yeah, they're not going to be a good person.

Speaker 13 They'll just file a claim. They'll get money for it.
Who cares? It's fine. We'll get helped out.
It's all good.

Speaker 13 um one person said you could tell that butch respected him if ed convinced him of something then butch would be fully convinced

Speaker 13 talked him into it now the police question both pratt and eddie here butch and eddie about the burglaries but file no charges they both deny it right but you know that's that when they They asked him, do you know anybody who could have done this?

Speaker 13 Everybody's response was those two.

Speaker 13 Sure.

Speaker 13 Now, there was somebody, an ex-girlfriend of Eddie's, came forward at one point and told police that she had seen goods stacked in the attic of his

Speaker 13 house that they rent. But then hours later, she came back to the police station and recanted it.
Said, no, I don't know what I'm talking about. Never mind.

Speaker 13 I didn't see it, which is a crazy thing to do. I seen it.
No, I didn't see it. No, I didn't seem to.
I don't, where do you get that from? Like, why were you here?

Speaker 13 I guess she could have said I was just mad at him because he's my ex-boyfriend and I wanted to fuck him over. So I don't know what he's, what she said.

Speaker 13 But either way, police also heard from two different fraternity brothers who lost equipment, but accepted $500 from Swiger to shut up. He paid them off.

Speaker 13 He only stole $3,500 worth of shit, and he's spent $700 in hush money? $1,000 so far.

Speaker 13 Jesus. So, I mean, that's right away.
That's a lot of money going out. He was gone.
Gone.

Speaker 13 So they said half the amount they think came from Pratt, who borrowed $500 from his family.

Speaker 13 So that's what it was. We need to pull in $500 a piece and pay these guys off, basically.
Jesus. So late 1987 here,

Speaker 13 or mid-1987 here,

Speaker 13 they're still very close. They live together.
They're hanging out together. They're still best friends, Butch and Eddie.
They both take work-study jobs at Old Town Furniture in Greenville,

Speaker 13 where Eddie is made assistant manager by Linda Carlin, his girlfriend/slash boss.

Speaker 13 There you go. And they hire on at Butch as well.
Butch, too. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 this enterprise, this furniture store, seems to be making some good money here.

Speaker 13 Swiger met Linda at the local gym, Pro Body, like we said. And so in,

Speaker 13 he's just like operating in her universe, basically. Yeah.
Going to her gym, meeting her, then living in her house after a while, hired by her as the

Speaker 13 assistant manager of the furniture store. It's very involved and enmeshed very quickly here.

Speaker 13 So there's that. And now Pratt,

Speaker 13 Butchie, ended up going out with Linda's roommate, who was also in her mid-30s.

Speaker 13 Look at these guys go. I'm telling you, they're just like, we're 35.
Do you understand? Look at our girlfriends. They're 35, and so are we.
Look at this mustache, 35.

Speaker 13 Singing 35-year-old successful women. Good for that.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
That's a woman named Liz Wertz. They were going out.

Speaker 13 The two boys, Butch and Eddie, talked about moving to Pittsburgh after graduation.

Speaker 13 But then plans for graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh fell through.

Speaker 13 And then they started talking about going to Philadelphia and starting a business together there after they go to graduate school. Now, spring of 1988 here.

Speaker 13 Linda is so into Eddie that at her house, a friend of hers said she came over and Ed showed this person a room that he said Linda had just set up for him before he came and moved in. What is that?

Speaker 13 And the guy, the person said it was set up, quote, as a law office, complete with leather top desk, chairs, files, and even law books.

Speaker 13 Is he a lawyer?

Speaker 13 He wants to be. Yeah.
He wants to go to law school. So

Speaker 13 she sets him up with a law office in her house.

Speaker 13 A law library. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't even know how she knew what books to buy.
Like, just

Speaker 13 library. Give me your regular old, you know, lawyer collection, I suppose.
So, May 15th, 1988 is Graduation Day

Speaker 13 at Thiel College here.

Speaker 13 And, you know, they end up having their graduation party together, even, Butch and Eddie. They have a cake.
They go out to dinner with the two families, the Pratts and the Swaggers.

Speaker 13 And Butch's mom makes a big cake for them. And

Speaker 13 they're all happy. They're making plans for the future.
They're saying that Swagger wants to get his law degree, and Butchy wants to get an MBA. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And they would pool their expertise and somehow turn this into a business. Oh, okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 One of their high school friends said Butch was very impressed with Ed as an intelligent, well-spoken person at that point. So the two families went out to dinner.
The restaurant was,

Speaker 13 this is Butch's brother said was very elegant. They went out to a real nice restaurant, jacket required type of place.

Speaker 13 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 13 One of those kind of joints. So

Speaker 13 they said, this guy says he really liked Mike Swager, the brother. He said, Mike Swagger was real cool.
He said he gave me his address and telephone number. We made plans to contact each other.

Speaker 13 They both even have a brother named Mike. It's Mike Pratt and Mike Swager.
We made plans to contact each other to go out sometime, socialize, or whatever.

Speaker 13 He seemed like a nice man to me and my family. So that's nice.
Mike is three years older than Butch, and he's known as the responsible brother.

Speaker 13 He's the guy, yeah, he would work after school to help out with the family while Butch would, you know, hang out with his buddies and play sports and that kind of shit.

Speaker 13 Yes, he's the older brother kind of taking it. So Butch is always the one, you know, doing the bunny ears and the camera and the pictures and that kind of shit.
And, you know, he's the silly.

Speaker 13 He's the silly one. He's the youngest, so he's got no worries.
It's one of those things. It's nice to be the youngest, I think, when it comes to shit.

Speaker 13 He's going to have like a, be a little coddled for that, a little coddled for polio. A little coddled for everything.
Yeah. A little coddled for all of that.
But his brother said he was great.

Speaker 13 He made everyone laugh all the time. Now, Mike is also very protective of his brother, which I bet he would be.
If your brother was sick when you were younger, too, you would be.

Speaker 13 He said when they were kids, when mom was working a lot, he said, I saw to it that he had something to eat, that he did his homework, that he wasn't hanging around with a bad crowd.

Speaker 13 I looked out for him. Sure.
So that's nice anyway to have a three years older is old enough to respect, but also old enough to think think is like really cool because you're kind of close in age.

Speaker 13 So that's that's a good age difference. Now,

Speaker 13 on graduation day, when this is all going on,

Speaker 13 Pratt here had expected to keep working at the furniture store, but that's what everybody expected. But that day he said, I'm not doing that anymore.
He said, I'm not working there.

Speaker 13 And they said, why?

Speaker 13 And he said, my plans have changed. And he said, I need to be, you need to pick me up in a few days.
I got to get out of here. So, like, that's weird.

Speaker 13 So, the next night after the graduation party,

Speaker 13 this is the night after graduation. This is Liz, his girlfriend, Linda's roommate, said that Linda woke her up about midnight and said, your boyfriend Butch is seeing another woman.
Oh,

Speaker 13 seeing another woman. And then, so Linda called Ed and said, bring Butch to my house.
We got to talk. Summons him.
Bring him here.

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Speaker 13 So they do.

Speaker 13 Wertz here, the woman, Liz and Butch talked, but on the way out of her room, he ran into Linda and Ed Swiger. Ed was carrying an Uzi.

Speaker 13 What?

Speaker 13 An Uzi.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Not a regular gun, a fucking Uzi.
Big gun, yeah. Well, a little gun, but shoots a lot of bullets.
Yeah, it's generally

Speaker 13 nine millimeter, but that's a

Speaker 13 shitload. Yeah, shoots a lot.
A lot of volume there.

Speaker 13 So Liz said that Swigger followed Pratt out the front door. Then she heard a gunshot.
Oh, just. But nobody was hurt or anything.

Speaker 13 Just, I don't know if he fired the gun up in the air, like, get the hell out of here or what. Okay.

Speaker 13 Now, that's really interesting. So the next night,

Speaker 13 Liz, Butch's girlfriend, said she drove over to their apartment. and said that they acted like nothing happened.

Speaker 13 It was Eddie and Butch just hanging out, like drinking a beer together, chilling, watching fucking, you know, football game or whatever. So they were like, that's weird.
But within 24 hours,

Speaker 13 Butchie packed up and left. He was gone.
Took the fuck off. Gone.

Speaker 13 Yeah. He didn't call anyone to do anything.
His father said, quote, he showed up with a U-Haul. That was that.
He just showed up. He was home all of a sudden.
We didn't know what the fuck happened.

Speaker 13 Real weird shit.

Speaker 13 So that's May 15th, 16th. May 22nd, 1988, there's a huge fire at Old Town Furniture's warehouse in Greenville, where they work.
Okay, giant fire.

Speaker 13 They said they found, they tried to put in a $300,000 insurance claim, and it was turned down due to the presence of an accelerant in the debris. In other words, arson.
Somebody burned it down.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, they suspect arson, obviously.

Speaker 13 And a big reason why they suspect arson, not only from the accelerant, but

Speaker 13 is that there was a phone call that that came into the police department right before the fire started. I mean,

Speaker 13 right before. One of the officers said a minute before the fire alarm came in, someone called and wanted to speak with an officer.
There wasn't an officer at the station.

Speaker 13 The caller left a message and just said to tell them that BP called.

Speaker 13 BP, Butch Pratt, they think.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 when interviewing somebody the next day, the cop learned that it was most likely Butch Pratt, Pratt, who was the BP that came to the

Speaker 13 police station. I don't know anybody else like that.
Pratt denied making the call, though. He said, I don't know what you're talking about.
Huh.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So the guy said it was a strange twist of fate.
I don't know to this day who called. Not sure.

Speaker 13 Now, the Old Town Furniture Warehouse had been burglarized four times in the previous two years, by the way.

Speaker 13 And the same name kept coming up in the police reports. And every single burglary, it was Ed Swiger.
Oh, Ed? Okay. Who's Ed? He's the assistant manager.
That's exciting.

Speaker 13 Over and over and over again. And Butch, because he works there too.
But Ed is the main guy that they're looking at here.

Speaker 13 So May 27th, 1988. All right.

Speaker 13 The five days after the fire

Speaker 13 here, Pratt is

Speaker 13 brought to the, this is Butchie, brought to the police station in Munhall and asked about the fire.

Speaker 13 Because he was, you know, he's worked there and he knows Ed and all that kind of thing. Instead of talking about the fire, he tells them about the burglaries.
Oh.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he spills it about the burglaries. He said, we did.
I don't talk about fire. I don't talk about the fire.
I don't know shit about fire, but we did do this, this, this, and that.

Speaker 13 We stole all this shit. And by the way, they involved Mike Swager as well because all the shit they stole, it was sold off by Mike Swagger at his college.
They gave it all to him, and he sold it off.

Speaker 13 There. So they could, yeah, it's perfect crime.
You know what I mean? Except for that one of the people confessed to it.

Speaker 13 Except for somebody to talk.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Yeah.
Butch confesses to two burglaries at Thiel College during Easter break, 1987.

Speaker 13 He said that he and Eddie had stolen about $3,500 worth of TV, stereos, and compact displayers from the Delta Sigma Phi house where they lived and the Phi Theta Phi house next door. Right.

Speaker 13 So they went into both.

Speaker 13 Then Mike sold the equipment at Case Western Reserve University where he went.

Speaker 13 Now,

Speaker 13 they said

Speaker 13 a lot of people that knew him, and even the cop said, one of the cops said that Butch was a shy, really nice kid, maybe a little naive. He was a follower type, kind of an all-American kid.

Speaker 13 If he did anything wrong, I think he was led to it. He'd just follow.

Speaker 13 So everybody thinks that Butchy is just kind of weak and will follow. Just come along.
Go along.

Speaker 13 Yeah, go along, get along type of guy. There it is.
There you go. But does he know about the fire? That's the main thing they want to know about.
That's not something. That's a bigger deal.

Speaker 13 We're talking about a warehouse and insurance fraud at this point and arson rather than, you know,

Speaker 13 a little burglary.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So he denies any involvement in the fire.
But he does say if somebody set a fire, I probably know what they're trying to get rid of, and that would be financial records.

Speaker 13 Because according to different court documents, this furniture store either made about $4,000 a week in profit

Speaker 13 or lost money. They don't know which.

Speaker 13 So we're pretty sure they think that Linda was embezzling, I think is allegedly the thought here, that she's been taking money or Ed's been stealing money or someone's been stealing a lot of money and they're trying to destroy financial records.

Speaker 13 That's the point of the fire.

Speaker 13 So they said that

Speaker 13 the, this is both Linda and Dr. John Steele filed court documents accusing unnamed former employees of embezzling embezzling more than $100,000 from the store.
Oh, boy. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So someone might want to destroy financial records if they were on the hook for that type of thing. Sure.

Speaker 13 So they said that there was some apprehension here at the District Justice's justice, yeah, District Justice's office when Butch talked to a young woman who was sitting on a bench in the hearing room.

Speaker 13 This person said later, when we came out of the office, I asked him who she was, and he said it was a spy,

Speaker 13 Someone sent to oversee what was going on. It was someone he knew.
This person said, I laughed and said, spy, huh? That's what it looked like. There was nobody else there.

Speaker 13 She sure had guts enough to come there and listen. So maybe she was a spy.

Speaker 13 This person said his concern grew when Butch told him that Ed Sweiger had been accepted at law school because Pratt just implicated him in burglaries, which will keep him out of law school.

Speaker 13 You don't get accepted to law school if you have any

Speaker 13 criminal shit. Yeah, they don't want any part of that.
Because it kind of contradicts itself. Yeah, law school and medical school, you have to be squeaky fucking clean to get into those things.

Speaker 13 So the one guy here said, I know how important that is. You can't get a traffic ticket if you're accepted at a law school.

Speaker 13 Based on our conversation and other things I told him, I told him you shouldn't go back there ever, meaning to Greenville where he is, because he might be pissed at you.

Speaker 13 You know, and he told him, I wouldn't go back without bringing a whole bunch of friends with you or something, people to watch your back, basically. Oh.

Speaker 13 So now Butch is very worried.

Speaker 13 His mom said that he found she found Butch alone and distraught in her house, basically.

Speaker 13 She said, I don't want to, he was telling her, I don't want to go to jail. I don't know what to do about the robbery.

Speaker 13 And then he told her what he told the police. She said, why don't you see the family attorney, Robert Garshak, who also will be around for the remainder of the story.

Speaker 13 And And Garshak, by the way, would say that he thought that Butchy was very not street-wise. It was the words he used, too.

Speaker 13 He said that Butch told him he'd overheard Linda and Ed Swager planning the fire at the furniture store. Also,

Speaker 13 so

Speaker 13 here's the fire story. How did the fire happen?

Speaker 13 Let's find out now.

Speaker 13 This is what they told the insurance company or what they told you. No, this is the real deal.
This is the real thing that happened. Remember Mike Swager, Ed's little brother there? Ed brother, yeah.

Speaker 13 Well, he just always, always wants to hang out with his brother and make his brother think he's cool. Yeah.
Always wants his brother to think he's cool.

Speaker 13 And he said that Ed was two years older and always bigger and seemed, always seemed more interested in beating Michael up than hanging out with him. One of those things.

Speaker 13 They're too close in age, you know? Two years is they're going to fight. He said, my whole life, I wanted him to like me.
That's what Mike says. That's all he was after.

Speaker 13 So then when they were in college, Mike at Case and Ed at Thiel College,

Speaker 13 Ed tried to be friends with him. He said, that's when Ed started being like friends with me, his brother, his little brother.
He said, it seemed like he was making a real attempt. Right.

Speaker 13 He's like, cool, this is good. I want to be friends with my brother.
So Ed called one day in the spring of 1988 and asked him to come to Pennsylvania.

Speaker 13 So Michael took off and went to go see his brother. Ed said the furniture store where he worked needed a security system installed.
Will you come help me install it? Sure. So Mike said, sure.

Speaker 13 He said, but when he arrived at the furniture store, he said that's when Ed's real plan started to crystallize.

Speaker 13 He said he wanted to torch the store so that his girlfriend, who partially owned it, could get some insurance money out of it.

Speaker 13 So Michael said he wanted to impress his brother and he helped.

Speaker 13 He said that Michael, he's the one who sprinkled the place with lighter fluid, trying to help his brother out.

Speaker 13 So that's how there's another person involved in it, too, but those two are the main culprits here.

Speaker 13 Now, June 16th, 1988.

Speaker 13 Okay, there's a woman named Teresa Waka

Speaker 13 Waklechik. W-A-K-U-L-C-H-I-C, or K.
I'm sorry. Last letter K.
Waklechick.

Speaker 13 Now, Teresa here,

Speaker 13 she is the young lady that Butch has been interested in that her girlfriend, his girlfriend Liz heard about.

Speaker 13 So on June 16th, 1988, he sent her flowers

Speaker 13 saying he basically sent over flowers because he's going to go visit her the next day in akron

Speaker 13 all right

Speaker 13 so he asks his mom because he was on the way into town he asked his mom would you have flowers sent i'll give you cash so he does that um that day june 16th he's getting his shit together here and theresa and her roommate caroline luli went driving around Akron that day with Linda Carlin.

Speaker 13 Oh. The day that she got the flowers.
They were planning on what would happen after Pratt arrived on the bus. So Pratt thinks he is going to see Teresa to hook up with her.

Speaker 13 Meanwhile, Linda is taking Teresa and Teresa's friend around talking about what are we going to do with this butch when he gets here. He's walking into a fucking ambush.
That is. Oh, my God.

Speaker 13 Oh, man. That is so ugly.
That is going to be ugly, dude. Ugly.
And now you're going out with her. And I told you.
And he said,

Speaker 13 You get right back on the bus and just sit there. I'll go wherever this fucking thing is headed.
I don't care.

Speaker 13 This is worse than Sally Jesse.

Speaker 13 All of them combined. Well, what is it? Where's it going? Charlotte? Great.
Take me there. I don't give a shit.
I'll figure out a way to get back once I get out of this goddamn place.

Speaker 13 As long as there's no Jerry Springer or

Speaker 13 Sally Jesse or any of those fucking talk show shits.

Speaker 13 At the Greyhound station, too, which is the ultimate. That's the ultimate venue.

Speaker 13 That's the ultimate venue for a relationship fucking throwdown is the

Speaker 13 Greyhound Station in Akron. Your girlfriend and your mistress are going to confront you in front of strangers at the Greyhound Station.
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 13 By the way,

Speaker 13 you watched the Jerry Springer documentary, right? Yeah. Yeah, we talked about it.
I love how they have the Springer Triangle, they called it,

Speaker 13 which was an area of the country where like 90% of the guests came from.

Speaker 13 It was so funny. This is what what we call the Springer triangle.

Speaker 13 So anyway,

Speaker 13 he's supposed to get there on the bus and they're going to ambush him. And the idea, though, is to allow Ed to have a chance to talk with him.

Speaker 13 They're going to ambush him and then say, Ed wants to talk to you because we need to work this out. He's got to go to law school.
We've got to figure all this out.

Speaker 13 So,

Speaker 13 yeah, apparently that Teresa is supposed to pick him up at the bus station and all of that kind of shit. So June 17th, this is when Butch is supposed to come to Akron.

Speaker 13 Butch had been working 12-hour days roofing and cement work and doing cement work that week.

Speaker 13 He's trying to save up for a car. He doesn't have a car at this point.

Speaker 13 So that's what he wants. And he was trying to, he's been working his ass off.

Speaker 13 And his brother said he came down from his upstairs bedroom, took out his pay envelope, and left $300 in cash for his mother to hold for him over the weekend.

Speaker 13 And then he took $100 and put it into his wallet. He said he was going to Akron to see Teresa, who, you know, he met her through Ed Swiger.
So Ed knows her too.

Speaker 13 The previous afternoon is when he sent the flowers. By the way, the flowers, the note said, miss you.
We'll see you on Friday. Love Butch.

Speaker 13 True. Very nice.

Speaker 13 Solid words. Two weeks earlier, he had seen Teresa.
He drove, he rented a car

Speaker 13 because he didn't have a car. He rented a car to go to a graduation party for Teresa's brother in Yorkville, Ohio.
This is a man in a relationship. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 He's trying to get in with. But he's 22.
I mean, this is what 22-year-olds do.

Speaker 13 This is why you shouldn't get married when you're 22 because

Speaker 13 it's just, that's not in your system yet. Yeah.
So he is trying to save money for a car. So he said a rental car, he didn't want to blow his budget on that.

Speaker 13 So that is why he wanted to take the bus there instead. So he called his friend Ed Wereher Werer, and Ed gave him a ride to the Greyhound station in downtown Pittsburgh.
A lovely, lovely location.

Speaker 13 Just beautiful.

Speaker 13 In his bag, he carried

Speaker 13 some shit. He had a thank-you note from his mother to Teresa's family

Speaker 13 because they sent something. So she sent a thank-you note.
So he's got all sorts of stuff like that. He also has two plastic containers with leftover fruit salad and stuffed cabbage for his trip.

Speaker 13 His mom

Speaker 13 packed him a thing there. That's nice.

Speaker 13 To go lunch. A fruit salad and stuffed cabbage is, and then you're going to put this kid on a bus? Jesus Christ, he's going to fucking

Speaker 13 wipe that place out with his gas, man. That is going to.
That's a lot of fiber. He's going to be people

Speaker 13 hanging out the windows of this fucking thing. Holy shit.

Speaker 13 The downtown. Isn't that where I rented a car to go to Cocoa? Yes.
We know exactly where the downtown bus station is. This is not good.
No, that's why I said lovely location.

Speaker 13 And you didn't say anything. I was like, we were there.
It was terrible. Remember that? It was ugly.

Speaker 13 Shit is ugly. I said to the guy,

Speaker 13 I asked him, a lot of people rent cars from here. And he goes, not really.

Speaker 13 He's like, we usually just move them from here to the airport. It's a bus station.

Speaker 13 Oh, people probably drop them off. They're not going to be afraid to be on this fucking bus.

Speaker 13 They probably drop them off there

Speaker 13 to avoid having to wait at the airport. I get it.
Okay.

Speaker 13 And it's cheaper to drop it off, not not at the airport. There's an airport fee when you drop off a rental car.
Gotcha.

Speaker 13 So this particular day, Mike Swiger was visiting his family. Oh, I'm sorry, not Mike Swagger, Mike Pratt, Butch's brother.

Speaker 13 The brother's mixed up here.

Speaker 13 He was visiting his family that day also and saw him. packing up to go to Akron, saw Butchy packing up.
He said he and I were in the house alone.

Speaker 13 I was there when Butch was packing a suitcase and I was there when he walked out the door. So he heads to the Greyhound station.
His friend Ed drove him there.

Speaker 13 He is going to the station to catch a 1205

Speaker 13 bus to Akron from Pittsburgh.

Speaker 13 And he said, last thing he said to me was, this is Ed talking about Butch. Last thing he said to me was, take it easy, boss.
I'll see you Sunday night because he was supposed to call him up.

Speaker 13 He was supposed to pick him up Sunday night.

Speaker 13 But Sunday night came and he said he never called. No, Butch.
Got no call from him. So he just went down to pick him up.
He said, I maybe couldn't get to a phone or he doesn't have a quarter.

Speaker 13 So he just, just be there. He went down there, never showed up on the bus he was supposed to come in on.
And then Monday, he's still not home.

Speaker 13 His mom went to work for her shift at the Elder Crest nursing home. Elder Crest.
Jesus, euphemistic.

Speaker 13 I know those greyhounds take a long time, but that's three days? That seems like a lot. Yeah, he's supposed to get back Sunday.
So now Teresa is the one who's supposed to pick him up.

Speaker 13 She goes to the University of Akron, and she's the one who invited him, but

Speaker 13 she says he never showed up.

Speaker 13 He never, I waited at the bus station for him. He never got here.

Speaker 13 So Ed saw, didn't he? Ed said he didn't see him get on the bus. He didn't sit there and wait for him to get on the bus.
He dropped him off. He said, take it easy.
He said, all right, later.

Speaker 13 And you pull away.

Speaker 13 It's not your kid. It's your friend.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 So he said, I never saw him get on the bus. But

Speaker 13 Teresa says

Speaker 13 he never showed up in Akron, though, she said.

Speaker 13 So, and they also asked around, and there were no reports of a 5'8, 180-pound kid with red hair, long-sleeved white t-shirt, light blue shorts, and new Nike high tops getting off the bus on Friday afternoon in Akron either.

Speaker 13 No reports of that. Nobody said, yeah, I saw that guy.
Very well-dressed fella jumping on a greyhound. That is some 80s fashion there.
He is killing it. He's killing it.

Speaker 13 But it sounds like you'd remember the guy. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Type of deal.

Speaker 13 So that's how that goes.

Speaker 13 Now, June 21st, 1988, this is four days later. Butch's mom reports him missing because she hasn't heard anything from him in four days.
She asks around. Teresa says, I don't know.
He didn't show up.

Speaker 13 Ed says, I didn't see him get on the bus, but I dropped him off. He just seemed to disappear somewhere between Pittsburgh and Akron, vanish into thin air.
So, yeah, she said that

Speaker 13 they said, maybe, do you think she ran, that he, the cops asked, do you think he ran away from this burglary thing that's dangling over him? Could that be?

Speaker 13 And she said, no, he wasn't worried about it because his father got him a good lawyer and it was all under control. It's his first defense.
And the lawyer had told him, it's your first defense.

Speaker 13 Your record is perfect. Otherwise, you have all these awards and everything.
You'll get probation. You know what I mean? You don't fuck up again.
It'll be gone.

Speaker 13 So, yeah. And the cop said,

Speaker 13 the Smalley is his name, the investigator. He said, in this sort of situation, he said, quote, they usually pop up alive.

Speaker 13 He's like, oh, wasn't too worried about him.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's a guy. He's all athletic and, you know, all that.
He said, he probably ran away. Then the cop was like, you know, the mothers don't know every girl the guy's seen

Speaker 13 everything yeah what if he met a chick on the bus and went somewhere with her what if he you never know what young guys do he has no responsibilities right now he doesn't have a job he's not like he was engaged to this teresa chick he could have done anything so a couple days after he's reported missing ed werer uh the guy who dropped him off at the bus station and their friend rich baker they go out on i'm looking for him basically.

Speaker 13 Yeah. They just look for him.
They drove all the way to Akron and talked to Teresa. They're doing like their own PI work here.

Speaker 13 They went to Thiel College as well, asked around there and all that kind of shit.

Speaker 13 And they said nobody at the college was more helpful than Ed Swiger. Yeah.
He was very helpful. And his also Linda Carlin, also very helpful.
They should be.

Speaker 13 They said that when they talked to them, they said that Linda went right to the phone and made a series of calls asking if anyone had seen him.

Speaker 13 They said, well, we didn't know he was missing, so let's try to find him. And everybody was helping.

Speaker 13 Ed then drove them around town, checking with people who'd played baseball or gone fishing with Butch or just anywhere that Butch would hang out or had friends.

Speaker 13 They went around to every single place and asked, have you seen Butch? Have you seen Butch? Got to look for him. Yeah.
Couldn't find Butch. Nowhere to be found.

Speaker 13 So Rich Baker said he knew something wasn't right. He's one of the friends that's looking for him.
He said they all seemed a little too nice.

Speaker 13 Yeah, just a little too nice, a little weird.

Speaker 13 So then

Speaker 13 Baker and Werer, they go home to Munhall and just join the Pratt family in waiting, basically. Everybody waits.
So

Speaker 13 several friends said they knew Butch had talks with police and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 They said that, but he didn't help set the fire, they don't think. So why would he worry about some small-time burglaries? That's not a big deal.
It doesn't make any sense why he would take off.

Speaker 13 But Werer said he might have taken off, though. They said they don't know.
Maybe he didn't want to go to jail. Maybe he didn't want to be forced to put Ed away either.
Right.

Speaker 13 So his friend Ed Werere said if anyone could go out and just live in the woods, it was butch. He was smart enough and tough enough, mentally tough enough.

Speaker 13 They said he might have just got off the bus and went and lived in the woods.

Speaker 13 We don't know.

Speaker 13 It's a wild.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he got off a bus somewhere in the midway point and just wandered off from the station for the first wooded patch he could find and decided to live there.

Speaker 13 Maybe he caught wind of these two broads about to

Speaker 13 ambush him. They're down at the bus station.
Jesus Christ, man.

Speaker 13 So that is, you know, the week it happens. That's June 88.

Speaker 13 And time goes by. A year goes by.
What? No butch. No butch.

Speaker 13 Wow. Mid-1989, still no butch.

Speaker 13 No idea where he's at. No idea.
No one's heard from him. They don't know.

Speaker 13 And now Rich Baker, he's one of the guys too that still thinks that he's hiding.

Speaker 13 He says that he thinks that he and Ed probably, quote, worked something out.

Speaker 13 And basically, you go away and don't tell on me until all this legal shit's over. And then I'll forget about what happened, that you told on me, type of thing.
Okay.

Speaker 13 So he said, that's what they think happened because they were best friends. And he thinks that's probably what would have happened.
They would have worked that shit out.

Speaker 13 Poor Rose Pratt, Butch's mom, this poor lady, she started sleeping on the living room couch just in case he came home.

Speaker 13 She wanted to jump off the couch as soon as the door opened to greet him, type of thing.

Speaker 13 She said she can't understand why he hadn't called. It's just, you know, it's been a year.
He's not calling me. I'm his mother.
And she's freaked out.

Speaker 13 So we get to September of 1989.

Speaker 13 What the hell? September 1989, September 18th, 1989, to be exact. Linda Carlin's home here, which is a new big brick home that she lives in.
It's a beautiful, big, giant property, gorgeous.

Speaker 13 She goes on vacation to Arizona to see a new boyfriend of hers. She's dating now.
Yeah. She's dating somebody else.
Yeah, because we'll talk about it, but Ed has moved on to somebody else as well. Oh.

Speaker 13 Now,

Speaker 13 she,

Speaker 13 while she's in Arizona, Linda, her house burns down.

Speaker 13 This lady, all her shit's on fire. Fire fucking follows her.
So stay out of Arizona. You'll burn the whole state down.
Jesus.

Speaker 13 So during the investigation, she said, well, the only person I can think, the only person I have any fear of, because they said it looks like it's been started. This is arson.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So they said, anybody want to set your house on fire that you might know? And she said, my ex-boyfriend, Ed Swiger, that's all I can think of.

Speaker 13 That's it.

Speaker 13 But, you know, who knows?

Speaker 13 So the fire, by the way, 1217 Highland Road is the the address. One of the cops investigating said the fire, quote, brought it all to light.

Speaker 13 If it had not been for the arson fire, I wouldn't have been looking at Mrs. Carlin and her dealings and her basic background because they're suspicious of her, obviously.

Speaker 13 So they go into her background and find out a bunch of shit that they didn't know before, like she's connected to Ed Swiger, who was their main suspect in the furniture store fire.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 she had just moved into this home a month earlier, by the way. It was like a brand new house.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 In Ohio?

Speaker 13 Yeah, no, this is across the border in Pennsylvania. Okay, got it.
This fire, which caused more than $100,000 in damage back then, think about it. It was a good one, yeah.

Speaker 13 Was set in a second-floor bedroom, and they said

Speaker 13 it was only set to cover a burglary. There had been a burglary, they figured out happened, and someone set a fire to cover that up.

Speaker 13 And they rule it arson. Okay.

Speaker 13 So what are Eddie and Mike up to at this time? Let's find that out. Where are they? Yeah.
Because they're not with Linda. They're not hanging out with Butch, obviously.

Speaker 13 Well, Ed is a second-year law student at Temple University. Doing great.
Doing great.

Speaker 13 And Mike is a sophomore in the mechanical engineering department at Case Western Reserve University. A couple of fellas doing fine.
They're doing great for themselves.

Speaker 13 Rose Pratt is not going to give up finding her son, by the way. She is.
You shouldn't. No.
She wants to find him. Yeah.

Speaker 13 She is basically, for the past 15 months, has been doing nothing but investigating, writing letters. She was writing letters to the blood banks.
Did this kid come in? IRS, she writes letters to.

Speaker 13 Did he file his taxes? Yeah. If his taxes are filed, he's alive.
So

Speaker 13 Social Security, they say, has he anything going on with that? Has he paid anything? Has he anything like that? Even the Salvation Army, where she knows he's donated things before.

Speaker 13 Even there, has he come in to donate anything or to buy anything? Have you seen that? Yeah, that is the thing about disappearing people.

Speaker 13 When they disappear, they continue donating to their charitable. Well, usually, yeah,

Speaker 13 they still have extra stuff they got to get rid of. You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 Like, I know I'm trying to stay low and lay low here, but I got like five pairs of pants. I'm never going to use.
I really got to send them.

Speaker 13 Never going to wear these. I'm telling you right now.
They're out of style.

Speaker 13 So basically, anywhere that he could have, may have, or has been in the past. Just, that's anything.
So she hired a private detective,

Speaker 13 draining her cash and everything else.

Speaker 13 She hand-lettered 50 posters that she mailed to Greenville to have put up. She, this is fucked up.
There was a crank call two days before Christmas in 1987 reporting that Butch was at an address.

Speaker 13 and the address didn't exist. What the fuck? That's fucked up.
Somebody, because it was in the paper a lot. Everybody knew who she was.

Speaker 13 So some fucking asshole on December 23rd decided to fuck with this poor lady. That's awful, man.
She even went downtown because the cops had discovered a severed head somewhere.

Speaker 13 So she went downtown to look at a severed head to see if it's her son. Jesus.
Turns out it has long hair and it's not red. So it's not butch.
So she's relieved by that, obviously. October 5th, 1989.

Speaker 13 It's been some time. He disappeared June 17th, 1988.
This is about 9 a.m.

Speaker 13 The day before, at about 2.15 p.m. at the Sharon, Pennsylvania police station, we had

Speaker 13 Linda Carlin came there, and they said they sat her down because they're talking about her arson.

Speaker 13 the fire still.

Speaker 13 This is because it happened less than a month ago. And this is from the prosecutor.
Quote, basically, she told us she was afraid of Ed Swiger. She told us about, quote, what he had done to butch.

Speaker 13 I guess your answer is, what do you know? Yeah, let's hear it here. Come on, lay it out, sweetheart.

Speaker 13 What do you know?

Speaker 13 My answer is going to depend tremendously on the information that the police already possess.

Speaker 13 So, yeah,

Speaker 13 what he had done to butch. Now,

Speaker 13 yeah. Yeah, she said that Linda claimed that she was just a player used by Swiger and wouldn't say why they did what they did to Butch.
So she just caves? She just caves and said, Ed killed Butch.

Speaker 13 I don't know anything about it. I was just a player used by him and I don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But she's going to say what happened here in a minute. We'll talk all about it.
But

Speaker 13 the cop said it's our theory that Butch was going to turn on Ed Swiger and Swiger didn't want him to testify against him in the Greenville burglaries and arson.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 anyway,

Speaker 13 Linda, they go, well, how can you prove that this happened? Yeah. What do you think?

Speaker 13 This is also your ex-boyfriend. So how do we know you're not just trying to set your ex-boyfriend up to get busted or get, you know, just have an inconvenience in his life?

Speaker 13 She said, well, I'll show you where he's buried.

Speaker 13 And they went, we'd love to see that. Kill the fuck out.
Turns out he is buried.

Speaker 13 On one of her properties, at her farmhouse. Stop it.
Yep. At her farmhouse, buried in the fucking ground.
How the fuck did they do that? It was one of the places she had.

Speaker 13 Well, we'll talk a little about it. How did they get him from the fucking story? Oh, don't worry.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 From the bus station to a farmhouse in another place.

Speaker 13 Oh, it's an interesting fucking tale. It's, dude, it's so twisted and fucked up what they did to this kid.
So

Speaker 13 she says he's right there. Exactly, gives an exact location.
Right where she said they dig, and that's exactly where they find him. She knew exactly the whole time.

Speaker 13 She knew the whole fucking time what happened here.

Speaker 13 His obviously decomposed body came up an hour and a half or an hour and a half, a year and a half in the ground.

Speaker 13 He was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and brand new high-white tennis shoes. Exactly what he left in.
Hands were cuffed behind his back. Oh, what the hell? And we'll talk about this too.

Speaker 13 He's also tied with a necktie that they're going to be able to trace, and we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So, yeah,

Speaker 13 this is what's going on here. This is what prompted Linda.

Speaker 13 Linda said she would have never came forward, except the fire at her house made her come forward. Why did you expose?

Speaker 13 Well, because she said this made her decide to, quote, blow the whistle on the swaggers because she assumed she was next on the hit list.

Speaker 13 She thought

Speaker 13 that fire was a warning. So I got to get the fuck.
Yeah, so she said, I'm turning them in.

Speaker 13 They're going to kill me next. So the person she picked them up.
Scared the shit out of her. Yeah, Scared her.
Wow. Scared her.
Scared her good. So that's.

Speaker 13 It did the opposite of what a fire would do in the theory of doing it. Yep.
The whole point was to shut her the fuck up, probably, and instead of

Speaker 13 scared and made her run to the cops. Yeah.
Wow. This is like in the mob when

Speaker 13 the FBI goes to somebody and they're like, we got a recording of your boss saying they're going to kill you. And then they go, all right, well, I guess I'm on your team now.
Fuck it.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, poor Butch had his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs were tied with what is identified later as Michael Swiger's necktie. Oh, shit.
Okay.

Speaker 13 He has every bone in his face is fractured. Every bone in his face.
He's been

Speaker 13 beaten beyond recognition.

Speaker 13 Then

Speaker 13 even worse because he could have suffocated as well. He's so decomposed.
They're having a hard time telling in 1989 what did it to him.

Speaker 13 But the cops here said the chief of police said if Lynn Carlin hadn't come forward, we'd still be under the assumption that Butch Pratt was still alive. They thought he was alive.

Speaker 13 They wanted to find him, not to save him or help him. They wanted to find him.
This is the way I told you so. Because he blew his arraignment.
He didn't come. So he's a wanted man.

Speaker 13 There's a warrant out for his arrest because he didn't come to his arraignment on the burglary.

Speaker 13 That was supposed to happen, and he didn't show up because he was dead.

Speaker 13 So the cop also said she felt it was Ed Sweiger who burned her house down. She thought she'd get Ed in trouble.
That was also part of it, too. A little bit of payback, they think, too.

Speaker 13 So that's what happened.

Speaker 13 Now, Butch's mom, they tell her about this, and she must be fucking devastated because I don't think she's, she didn't, she still didn't get to the point where she was like, he's dead, and I just want to know he's dead.

Speaker 13 She thought he was alive.

Speaker 13 On the couch, for Christ's sake. And the cops were telling her, he's alive.
He's alive. He's alive.
He's just scared. Don't worry about it.
He'll come back one of these days.

Speaker 13 She said, I tried to think positive that one day Butch would come home married with five kids kids behind him and say, look, mom, look what I brought you. I brought you five grandkids.

Speaker 13 I brought you, which I'd be really picked. You got married and had kids and didn't fucking contact me? What the fuck?

Speaker 13 What's wrong with you? I got no pictures of them. Yeah.
It's Christ. My mom would stab me if I did that.
You can't just come in and be like, hey, you got married, had five kids. Here they are.

Speaker 13 Can you watch them tonight, by the way? We're going to have a date night. Is that cool? Remember, Parenthood.
Yeah, remember that?

Speaker 13 What cool in there? Cool.

Speaker 13 Jason Robard's going, cool.

Speaker 13 His name is Cool. It's so funny.
So

Speaker 13 she said he was the all-American boy.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 another here reaction, the police chief said at the time, it was about the only thing anyone ever talked about.

Speaker 13 Two years running, and it was still the top story in the county that where the fuck is Butch? There's so many articles of where's Butch? Where's Butch?

Speaker 13 Anybody seen Butch Pratt? We can't find Butch Pratt.

Speaker 13 So October 6th, the next day,

Speaker 13 Eddie and Mike are arrested. Sure, yeah.
Both of them, both brothers are arrested. Not Mike Pratt, Mike Swig,

Speaker 13 just to be clear here.

Speaker 13 So yeah, at the time of his arrest, Eddie is a second-year law student. He's on academic probation.
He might flunk out, but he's there. He's second year.

Speaker 13 He is also engaged.

Speaker 13 To who? Teresa Walkichik. Oh,

Speaker 13 yeah.

Speaker 13 What?

Speaker 13 Yep. He moved in on Butchie's Girl, too.
Oh, really? Yep. That's insane.
And they're living together.

Speaker 13 When they found him, he was living with Teresa engaged, and they were like, oh, this is more connections.

Speaker 13 Holy shit, the connections are connecting. Dots are fucking

Speaker 13 coming together.

Speaker 13 We'll talk about it. Maybe.

Speaker 13 We'll talk about it. That's terrible.
She's a terrible person. She's a monster.
Wait till you hear exactly what happened.

Speaker 13 Oh, boy. The cops said they were surprised to find her engaged to Ed Swiger, living with him in Philadelphia.

Speaker 13 I think they shocked Jimmy with that too.

Speaker 13 So the cops said it was a strange twist when we found out that Teresa was with Ed in Philadelphia. Now, Michael was pursuing his engineering degree and had bought a house.
He's got a home.

Speaker 13 He's got a home and all that kind of thing.

Speaker 13 That is fucking wild. And Teresa and her friend Carolyn, Luli, had gotten

Speaker 13 their student teaching and gotten their degrees. So that's what they were doing.
They were working in the school district as teachers.

Speaker 13 They're just going to have this disappear forever. Yeah.
Law students, teachers, homeowning, engineering students.

Speaker 13 None of this shit. These people don't sound like they'd be involved in any kind of murder plot at all.
What the hell? Like, not one of the four. And somehow it's all four.

Speaker 13 So police contend that it was Mike, or I'm sorry, that was Eddie who masterminded the killing because he thought that obviously he'd get implicated in the burglaries and the arson.

Speaker 13 The chief said Ed was a very manipulative person and he always carried a gun. So anything's possible with that, basically.

Speaker 13 The Swiger brothers face two counts of aggravated murder, one count each of kidnapping. And if convicted of aggravated murder, they could get the death penalty because it's in the state of Ohio.

Speaker 13 It's going to be done, not in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 13 Now, Swiger,

Speaker 13 apparently, the deal is Swiger had learned that Butch was coming to Akron the day before and made plans to have Teresa and her roommate Carolyn pick him up and take him to Ed.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 So they picked him up at the bus station, and Carolyn was driving, and Teresa moved over to get in the middle of the bench seat in the front, and Ed got in on the passenger side, or not Ed, Butch got in the passenger side on the end there, and they drove.

Speaker 13 And apparently, they drove him to a secluded area in Hudson, Ohio,

Speaker 13 where

Speaker 13 basically they were told, the girls claim they were told that Ed told them,

Speaker 13 take Butch there, take Butch there, drop him off.

Speaker 13 And I need to talk to him. So just take him here so I can talk to him, basically.
I'll be hiding. Drop him off at a barn in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 13 Not even in a barn, off an old oil well access road. Oh, for heaven's sake.

Speaker 13 So what they did is They tricked him. As they were going, they pulled off down this road because Teresa said she had to pee.

Speaker 13 Now, to get out of the car, Butch has to get out first to let her out because she's in the middle. This Carohol's driving.
The driver doesn't get out.

Speaker 13 Butch got out. They shut the door and fucking took off on him.
Bitches. God damn it.

Speaker 13 Left him fucking standing there going, what the fuck? I sent you flowers yesterday.

Speaker 13 My mom paid for those. Holy shit.

Speaker 13 That's fucked up. They said they left him standing on the gravel service road to an oil well.

Speaker 13 Awful.

Speaker 13 That's awful. Now, some people don't believe it.
This is going around and they seem like upstanding people. There's a lot of people.

Speaker 13 Here is Dorothy Vudrogovich, who taught American history to four different swaggers. Really? She said they're just not guilty.

Speaker 13 They weren't into anything that would cause a problem. If you knew their father, you'd understand why.
He's the type of person that expected them to toe the line.

Speaker 13 But they

Speaker 13 didn't. They didn't.

Speaker 13 The lady, the teacher there, Vudragovich, says she has current events classes that she conducts each Friday morning and has avoided any mention of the Swagger murder case, even though it's the only thing that's in the fucking current events in the town.

Speaker 13 Current events. Remember, those were so much fun.
Oh, yeah, that's fun shit. I loved them.
Today they suck.

Speaker 13 It's a miserable section. It's a miserable section for a while.
So post-9-11 got to be kind of a not as fun.

Speaker 13 So the newspaper there

Speaker 13 showed basically also they showed deference to Ed's dad, Ed and Mike's dad, when they basically stopped identifying the alleged killers as his sons. Really?

Speaker 13 They just stopped using their names in the paper because it embarrassed the dad. Yeah.
And he's too powerful.

Speaker 13 A reporter for the Herald Star said he told me he appreciated it, meaning the father. Thank you.
Yeah. We appreciate you fucking not telling people the truth to keep me better.

Speaker 13 So they are the talk of the town, though. It doesn't matter.
There's a night, Hodix nightclub in Tiltonsville where Commissioner Swiger drops by for a beer once in a while. That's the dad.

Speaker 13 And the guy who owns this joint is about 80 years old. And he said, I don't know what the hell could have happened to those two boys.
They were sitting on top of the world.

Speaker 13 He's like,

Speaker 13 I grew up in the depression, and these fucking kids, they had everything, these kids. What are they doing?

Speaker 13 Um, the uh, the other one, the uh, man, the manager, the president of the fraternity, said they were inseparable, they were so close.

Speaker 13 I didn't think that one would be capable of murdering the other one. Yeah, talking about Adam Butch.
Um, now, Ed, they sit Ed down and they go, Hey, listen, we got some people saying some shit. Right.

Speaker 13 What up? And he said, It was an accident.

Speaker 13 Oh,

Speaker 13 just accident.

Speaker 13 So that's going to be our defense's accident. His His story to the cops is

Speaker 13 me and my brother handcuffed him, put a bag over his head and upper torso, and put him in the trunk of Michael's car.

Speaker 13 You know, accident. That's a joke.
Yeah. Yeah, you know how accidents happen.
That's what he said. That was.
So we did this to him, and then what? Now, Mike has a different story. Mike is not.

Speaker 13 Is his story that he accidentally suffocated? No, no, no. Mike is not quite as hardcore as Ed.
Ed is, Ed ain't going to give shit up for the most part.

Speaker 13 Mike's a little more pliable. He's the younger brother.

Speaker 13 Mike said that his brother, meaning Ed, laughed as he jumped up and down on the chest of Butch Pratt after he was already dead. Oh, my.

Speaker 13 Yeah, laughed. That is fucked up.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God. He said that

Speaker 13 Eddie lured. Butch

Speaker 13 out there to the middle of fucking nowhere. And

Speaker 13 he said that he tried to stop Ed from beating him to death. He said he thought we were only there to talk.
That's what Mike said.

Speaker 13 Mike's whole thing is: if I say we were only there to talk, then maybe I'm not going to be in trouble for this.

Speaker 13 And Mike says he didn't participate at all in the beating or anything like that. He said his brother got carried away by the momentum and magnitude of the whole thing and beat him to death

Speaker 13 a little too hard. He described Ed slamming Butch's head on the ground and

Speaker 13 recalling how his brother later laughed and jumped up and down on his body as they were burying him

Speaker 13 to like push him down. Ha ha.

Speaker 13 Wow. Ed's a bad guy.
He's a bad.

Speaker 13 He's a dangerous guy. He's a dangerous manipulative person that will just stop at nothing.

Speaker 13 Everybody in his way.

Speaker 13 Everybody in his way is expendable. Yeah.
He has no loyalty to anybody.

Speaker 13 He's just best friend, girlfriend, doesn't matter. He's a bad person.
He's just a bad guy. No fucking loyalty whatsoever.
Like at least Ted Bundy was nice to that lady he went out with

Speaker 13 for the most part. You know what I mean? Like whatever.
But this is like, he's just a dick to everybody. Yeah.
He's just an asshole. He's

Speaker 13 unhinged ambitious of just whatever he wants, he has to have and he'll crush anybody in his way. So the investigation helped unravel a lot of shit.

Speaker 13 Burglaries, arsons, embezzlements, murders, all this stuff that's been open for a long time is getting closed with these two idiots. So

Speaker 13 they said that the,

Speaker 13 by the way, remember the person who

Speaker 13 was the

Speaker 13 spy in the DA's office when Butch was talking about the burglary?

Speaker 13 Well, they said that unbeknownst to us, this is one of the cops, unbeknownst to us, she went back to let Linda Carlin and Ed Swiger know that Butch's preliminary hearing was going to happen, and it sounded like Butch was going to testify against Ed.

Speaker 13 so that she was a spy.

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Speaker 13 He was right. 100%.
He nailed it. Nailed it.
They said before Butch left town that day, we told him not to come back to town anymore. That's his friend.
We asked if he felt safe. And

Speaker 13 Butch had told his friends that he was avoiding Ed by using an answering machine to screen calls. That's all.

Speaker 13 I just screen him out and it's fine.

Speaker 13 So his friends said Roger disappeared a week later, meaning Butch. At the time, we thought he was running scared or got in touch with Ed and worked it all out and ran.

Speaker 13 So either way, we thought he was hiding. So October 25th, Carolyn Luli is arrested.
She's the driver. October 26th, Therese is arrested.
Oh, they're getting, it's all falling. It's all falling.

Speaker 13 It's all falling over.

Speaker 13 It's all going out. They drove him there, so part of the conspiracy.
October 31st, Linda's finally fucking arrested. She's the last one to finally get arrested.
And she's the one that's hold.

Speaker 13 It's about fucking time. Gets what I mean.
I don't know. The body's buried on your property and you know where it is.

Speaker 13 As soon as you, when you're digging, as soon as you hit Nike with your shovel, hands behind your back.

Speaker 13 You pointed to it. And then we found a body.

Speaker 13 First fucking

Speaker 13 inkling of high top I see. You're in cuffs.

Speaker 13 You knew about a body buried on your property. You're in cuffs.
Wow. She's going to be charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

Speaker 13 There. That's her.
And the other two are also going to be conspiracy, Teresa and Carolyn. And they're both teachers.

Speaker 13 Ms. Welkichuk won't be in today because she's been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder.
So

Speaker 13 we're going to learn indefinitely. Yeah.
We're going to learn about the ABCs from somebody else today.

Speaker 13 So I guess Carolyn was a childhood friend of Teresa, and she was teaching in the Field School District. She was an acquaintance of Butch's and went along for the ride.

Speaker 13 Carolyn said, without knowing anything, she didn't know what laid in store. She didn't know shit.
She was just told that, can you give me a ride to the bus station? We're going to pick my friend up.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 And also, neither woman witnessed the killing. They drove away.
Yeah. So they didn't witness him.
So Linda's going to spill the whole thing here. She's going to tell everything.

Speaker 13 She's going to tell her. She was the one who told him about the body.
So she's her only hope is, I'm on your side, guys. Yeah.
I was scared too.

Speaker 13 She's playing go fish. They're playing poker.

Speaker 13 Totally. Different games.
She's going to lose tremendously.

Speaker 13 Never mind checkers and chess. Yeah.

Speaker 13 This is a go fish and lawn darts together. I don't know what's going on here.

Speaker 13 So the police contend that Teresa met him at the Greyhound station, drove him to the wooded area in Hudson. It is near the haunted house, the Halloween haunted house.

Speaker 13 They buried him near where they were. No, no, that's where they killed him.
Oh. Out near the haunted house on Barlow Road between State Route 91 and Stowe Road in Hudson.
God.

Speaker 13 That's where the oil access road was. It's fucking ridiculous.
So out near a haunted house. So it's a prior arrangement, they said.
They sat in the back seat.

Speaker 13 They told Butch they were going to a party.

Speaker 13 We're going to a party. And they drove to Hudson.
That's where the party is in Hudson. But then they turned down the service road.
She said she had to pee. He got out.
They drove away.

Speaker 13 Carolyn told the police that she looked in the rearview mirror as they were down the road and saw Pratt, quote, doubled over on his knees.

Speaker 13 And then she said she saw Ed and Mike Swagger too in the rearview mirror. And that was the last she saw the whole thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Now, what happened was they, not they, Ed punched and kicked Butch until he stopped moving. Just beat the living shit out of him.
He's a kickboxer. He just beat the shit out of the kid.

Speaker 13 And the kid didn't expect it either. So he kind of, it was out of nowhere.
He, you know, he wasn't, didn't know he was in a fight. So, yeah, best friend.

Speaker 13 So then he handcuffed Butch behind his back and strapped his ankles with Mike's necktie

Speaker 13 and then put a bag over his head and the upper part of his body

Speaker 13 and threw him in the back of Mike's car in the hatchback trunk of it

Speaker 13 and took the car to Greenville where the body was buried by a creek on a farm where Ed used to live with Linda.

Speaker 13 At that place they lived at. That's how he knew about it.
Now,

Speaker 13 they basically put him in a large garbage bag and put them in the

Speaker 13 hatchback of a Pontiac Phoenix. What even is that? It's what I said.
What the fuck is a Pontiac Phoenix? I'm thinking it like

Speaker 13 one of those sites. A firebird?

Speaker 13 A Pontiac Phoenix.

Speaker 13 That's got to mean a firebird. That's like a Grand Theft Auto car.
Like, you know, the Phoenix. It's not a real car.
It doesn't exist with an apple. Look that up right now.
Pontiac Phoenix. That's

Speaker 13 a hatchback of some kind. Really? Yeah, and this newspaper reported it as a car.
So 1980s, I assume.

Speaker 13 Oh, boy, it's like a Chevette. It looks exactly like a Chevette.
That's why it's a Pontiac. Yep.
The Chevette sold better. Yeah.

Speaker 13 They like the literation. The Chevy Chevette, the Pontiac Phoenix.
They like that shit. That's a piece of shit is what it is.
Total piece of shit.

Speaker 13 That's a garbage car. Yep.
So that's what this poor kid had to ride in for his last ride. The trunk of a Chevette.
A knockoff Chevette. Not even a real Chevette.

Speaker 13 They started making a grand am instead because it didn't sell. That makes sense.
Poor kid. Jesus Christ.
That somehow makes it way worse. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Along the way, driving back to Pennsylvania, they stopped in Kent to pick up Linda

Speaker 13 and Michael Swiger's girlfriend, Christine Cassandra, who didn't know anything about anything. She had no idea.

Speaker 13 She thought they were just going out that night. She didn't know there was a body in the truck.

Speaker 13 I don't know how four people could be in a fucking Chevette and not know that there's a fifth person in the fucking hatchback.

Speaker 13 I'm sorry, dude. Like, it's a Chevette.
You'd see it weighed down back there. It's not

Speaker 13 a tiny piece of shit.

Speaker 13 From there, after picking up the ladies, they head out to the farmhouse near Paimatooning Lake or whatever the fuck it is that we talked about earlier. That's why we brought that up.

Speaker 13 And by noon the next day, everyone was home with their parents as if nothing happened. The swaggers went home and just went on with their lives, went to law school and just,

Speaker 13 wow, acted like nothing even happened.

Speaker 13 Wow.

Speaker 13 So Butch's mom is pissed off, obviously. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 She also said that, you know, that fucking harlot that lured my son out there, Teresa, she described her as her son's friend and nothing more, which isn't exactly true.

Speaker 13 He was definitely trying to make it more.

Speaker 13 I don't send flowers to my friends that say, miss you, see you soon, love

Speaker 13 this weekend. Yeah, yeah, I'm not, that's you send that to a chick you're trying to hook up with.

Speaker 13 Um, now the mom said he sent her flowers because he was coming to visit her and wanted her to know he was thinking of her. That's what's upsetting to me.
He was going to get some tail.

Speaker 13 What are we talking about? He can be a nice guy, 22 years old, going to try to fuck his 22-year-old sort of girlfriend that he's talking to. That's normal.
He's just being a normal guy.

Speaker 13 Behind the back of the 30-something-year-old successful gal that is. Yeah, you know, behind her back.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 she said that she, this is so sad, dude. She keeps Butch's voice on her answering machine

Speaker 13 as a reminder of him so she can remember his voice always.

Speaker 13 She said, it doesn't upset me. A lot of times when I work the night turn, I come home and put it on.
I say, hello, Butch. I miss you and love you.
And then I go in the corner and cry a little.

Speaker 13 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 13 This poor woman.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God. It's like people keeping 9-11 phones.
Fuck, man. That's so brutal, man.
That's so sad. It's so sad.

Speaker 13 I've saved voicemails from friends of mine that died.

Speaker 13 Haven't you? Have you done that? No.

Speaker 13 No, I had pages from them on my fucking pager, but I never fucking

Speaker 13 had any friends that

Speaker 13 actually, I did have friends who their mom left their voicemail up and kept their phone active, and we could call it to hear them. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 And I called like twice, and I was like, this is fucked up. I can't do this.
This is creepy. It's too too deep.
I had a voicemail from Rod on my phone after he died.

Speaker 13 And I had that phone long past when I should have had it because I didn't want to, I didn't, because once you got rid of it back then, it was gone. It's gone.
So

Speaker 13 I didn't want to get rid of it. I felt bad getting rid of it.
And then I finally got rid of it, though. I could see that.
Yeah, it's sad, though. I see it.
But I wouldn't play it and cry.

Speaker 13 I'd just like to know it was there. You know what I mean? So, in an attempt to find a motive, they pieced together the scenario that the chief of police called, quote, intriguing.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I I would hope so. Now, they decide the cases will stay in Ohio.
This is a big thing. Are they going to be tried in Pennsylvania where the bodies were found? In Ohio, where it happened?

Speaker 13 They said, this is from the district attorney, said the events that began in Akron ultimately led to Pratt's death. Whether he died here or died somewhere else is not an issue,

Speaker 13 is not an issue under our jurisdiction laws, wherever the crime started. Sure.
So

Speaker 13 Edward,

Speaker 13 I guess Edward, according to Linda, Eddie admitted to her that he kicked, punched, and beat him in the face until he was unable to move about butchy. Damn.

Speaker 13 He said that he continued, that Edward continued to Linda, that he and his brother handcuffed the victim, placed a bag over his head and upper torso, and placed him in the trunk of Michael's vehicle.

Speaker 13 Edward Swager contacted Ms. Carlin personally, and she had the occasion to observe him remove the body from the trunk of the vehicle while the vehicle was parked near the grave site.

Speaker 13 Okay. Now, December 1989.

Speaker 13 Trials are coming. They're coming.

Speaker 13 Ed and Teresa are engaged. That's cute.
They're going to have, I wonder where they're registered. Can't wait to see and find out.
I've got to get them a present.

Speaker 13 So that is fucking crazy. She also, Teresa faces three counts of obstructing justice.
for protecting the identities. And

Speaker 13 they all, by the way, Linda, Carolyn, Teresa, all out on bond. They all pled innocent out on bond.
Okay. Both the Swagger boys are on a million dollars bond.
They're not going anywhere.

Speaker 13 They're in there. Yeah, they're fucking in there.

Speaker 13 The Mercer County District Attorney said this is the most bizarre case he's ever been involved with. Just the whole thing.
It's so, it's like a tooth. It has roots that go way deeper than you think.

Speaker 13 It's fascinating. It really is.

Speaker 13 He said it's one of the few cases that he's ever covered that he could describe as just pure evil, just fucking nasty. It's nasty, it's disgusting, it's mean.

Speaker 13 It's there's no heat of the moment, there's no, it's just cruel for the sake of being cool, yeah.

Speaker 13 And you couldn't even do it in a fucking easy way, you couldn't have your gun on you and like go, No, let's go talk and wait till he turns around, shoot him in the back of the fucking head like a mob guy would do.

Speaker 13 You had to fucking beat the kid to death, which is a horrifying way to die. That's fucking disgusting.

Speaker 13 They said also, the prosecutor said, that Linda Carlin and Edward Swiger are sociopaths who lie with alacrity, which

Speaker 13 gusto.

Speaker 13 Yeah, alacrity is a good one there. The supporting cast, they said, was equally as disturbing.
The guy said, there's cruel and then there's extraordinary.

Speaker 13 These people went on with their lives like nothing happened. They knew Butch was dead and allowed his mother to wonder.
You don't find people who are this evil.

Speaker 13 I agree.

Speaker 13 And it's for what? To cover their own asses?

Speaker 13 So he wouldn't not get into law school.

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 13 for some reason he fucked up.

Speaker 13 That's what I'm saying. If I didn't do anything, I'd be like, oh, what the fuck? But if I did all this shit, I'd be like, well, chicken's fucking coming home to roost here.
I got caught.

Speaker 13 Yeah. I mean, that's a fucking story.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 It's not his fault.

Speaker 13 And you,

Speaker 13 and he's talking about it. Butch isn't helping him.
That's the other thing. It'd be one thing if Butch was the mastermind talking at him to do it.
And he's like, oh, this asshole ruined my life.

Speaker 13 It's all your idea. You forced this guy to go along with you.
This is crazy. You made choices, man.

Speaker 13 A lot of them. So January 1990 is Linda's trial.
Yeah. Here we go.
Linda's trial. She's the first up, by the way.
I mean, they found the body in October 89. She's on trial January 90.
It is quick.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 the prosecution said that they will demonstrate that Linda had wanted to prevent Butch from testifying to cover her role in the Old Town arson, the furniture arson, and that she's the one who sent the spy to the preliminary hearing on the burglary charges at the magistrate's office in Greenville, which is true.

Speaker 13 That woman went back and reported back to

Speaker 13 Linda. They said that Linda enlisted the aid of Teresa by telling her that Butch was bad and that

Speaker 13 he had knocked up one of her friends.

Speaker 13 So this guy, because she's like, what do you mean? And he's like, she's telling her friend, oh, this is crazy. You don't want to go out with him.
He's a scumbag.

Speaker 13 He knocked up one of my friends and now he's trying to get with you and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 13 That's how they talk Teresa into doing this. So

Speaker 13 for the defense, Linda tells jurors that basically that they tell jurors that Linda had worked her way up into a responsible position and that she had no problems in her life until she met Ed Swiger in May of 1987.

Speaker 13 Then it all changed. Everything went downhill from there.

Speaker 13 She said that Linda's motivation in the case began out of love for Swiger, but by the time of the fire, she was moved by fear of her own life. That's what it was.

Speaker 13 They said that they called Ed Swiger vicious and brutal and manipulative and told the court that Swiger had taken advantage of his relationship with her and drained her of money and burned her house down and forced her into a murder plot, you know, all those bad things.

Speaker 13 He made her do all this.

Speaker 13 Absolutely. At one point, she said that

Speaker 13 Ed and Butch showed up

Speaker 13 before the fire. This is her claim, before the Old Town furniture fire, that they showed up and Ed and Butch were in camouflage gear and Ed told her that they're going to kill Dr.

Speaker 13 Steele, the guy that owns all this. Oh.

Speaker 13 And she said that Linda, Linda's lawyer, said that Linda begged Ed not to do it and that Swagger told her,

Speaker 13 either you burn the store or we kill him. Take your pick.

Speaker 13 Which would you rather?

Speaker 13 And she said, well, I guess burn the store. Fire a murder.
That's it. And they said, okay, and they burnt that motherfucker to the ground.

Speaker 13 Now,

Speaker 13 her whole defense is based on fear of Ed. That's it.
Fear of Ed Swagger. That's her only defense.

Speaker 13 She was forced to participate in everything, not only the kidnapping, but also the furniture store arson, forced into that also.

Speaker 13 The prosecution, though, contends that she's a very willing participant participant who, you know, had blown the whistle on her co-defendants only when she believed it was to her benefit to get out from under another arson investigation.

Speaker 13 So they're like, she is the definition of a rat. You know what I mean? She is jumping off sinking ships left and right here.
Now, Carolyn testifies against her.

Speaker 13 She testifies that as she sped away, she looked in her rearview mirror and said Butch was on his knees and the swaggers were standing over him, just like she said to the cops.

Speaker 13 Linda has to to testify here. Here we go.
Because they're painting her as a manipulative monster who's trying to get out of her own shit.

Speaker 13 And she's painting herself as this horrified victim who is just scared of everything. So she's got to get up there and convince the jury that she's terrified of everything.

Speaker 13 So she said that there's, quote, two Eddie's, the good one I fell in love with and the horrible one. Oh, he's a Jekyll and Hyde here.

Speaker 13 She said that she did not know that Butch was in the trunk of the car until she was driving the vehicle back to Pennsylvania. So until I was already in the car, I didn't know

Speaker 13 there. Through her whole testimony, she's sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
I mean, just everything. It's all sobbing.

Speaker 13 And she said that, you know, she testified that she said it was just great fear of Edward Swiger, who is no longer the sweet Eddie I had fallen in love with, but a horrible Eddie.

Speaker 13 That's her quote, by the way, in an open court, a horrible Eddie,

Speaker 13 which is just fucking silly. So, in October 1989, upon discovering her house had been burned down, she said fear overcame her and she just went to the police.
So, that's why we're all here.

Speaker 13 The verdicts here, the jurors deliberate for about five hours on this one. Oh, which seems like a long time for someone who says she did shit.

Speaker 13 Five hours is a long time for somebody who pointed out where a body was located. Yeah, it's on her own property.
That's wild.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, at times, the jury could be heard in the jury room playing a two-hour-long tape-recorded statement that she made and had given Pennsylvania State Police in October. Wow.

Speaker 13 So, they're going over that to make sure that what she said here matches up with that, basically.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, now this is wild. While the verdict comes in, no emotion.
Sobbed all the way through her testimony, everything. You could ask her, what'd you have for lunch today?

Speaker 13 She'd be like, ham and cheese.

Speaker 13 Like, she's so sad. But then, when the verdict comes in, stone-faced, which makes me think she's acting on the stand.
Bullshitting. Yeah.
Bullshit.

Speaker 13 So she is found guilty of conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

Speaker 13 Oh.

Speaker 13 That's what she was. That's all she was up for.
Okay.

Speaker 13 Now, then the sentencing, though, the judge sentences her to, you, ma'am, may fuck off seven to 15 years in prison for the conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And also sentences her to a consecutive mandatory three-year prison term on a firearm specification that was based on the allegation that Edward was armed when

Speaker 13 Butch was kidnapped.

Speaker 13 So I almost called him Billy like overboard. Bad Billy Pratt.
It's so hard not to.

Speaker 13 This entire fucking show, I've been saying, don't say Billy, don't say Billy, don't say Billy. It's Butch, not Billy.
Which really, the guy in Overboard should have been called Butch.

Speaker 13 Yeah, he looked looked more like a Butch than a Billy. Butch Pratt? Yeah, that's what I could have called him Butch, and that would have been something.

Speaker 13 Butch Pratt. So she's also going to have more troubles because she's also going to be tried in Pennsylvania for arson.
Oh. As well, for the arson

Speaker 13 for the furniture store. Yeah.

Speaker 13 She's got at least 10 years right now to do over here. Oh, yeah.
She will be eligible for parole on just the kidnapping and whatever, the

Speaker 13 Ohio charges. She'll be eligible for parole in seven years, eight months.
Seven years, okay. So that's, you know, that's not that long, honestly.
But then she's going to get more for her

Speaker 13 or other bullshit. She's going to get a lot of ways for her firebug action.
Sure. Now, February 19, or February 1990 is Ed's trial.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Now, is Linda going to testify against him?

Speaker 13 Yeah. No, she is not, actually.
Oh.

Speaker 13 They said that she will not be used as a witness in the trial. She would be a hostile witness and is not necessary to prove the prosecution's case

Speaker 13 because she's still trying to protect herself about shit. So she's not going to exactly spill everything.

Speaker 13 Ed testifies. He has no choice.

Speaker 13 They have her statements. They have the girls.
They have his brother's statements to the cops. They have all this shit.
So he's got to explain his way out of this.

Speaker 13 This is going to be the death penalty is on the table.

Speaker 13 Oh, Jesus. This could be the difference between this and that.
So he's got to get up there.

Speaker 13 That he, by the the way, does not change the tone of his voice at all through the entire testimony. Like

Speaker 13 every newspaper comments on how creepy it was that he was just monotone. Like he was a robot reciting something.
Just no emotion, no

Speaker 13 dead inside.

Speaker 13 He said, quote, he was like a brother to me.

Speaker 13 And explain about

Speaker 13 Butch. He said, he was like a brother to me.
He said they were fraternity brothers. They shared an off-campus house.
And so they go, okay, yeah, we'll pick up where the murder part happened.

Speaker 13 He said that

Speaker 13 the women had tricked Butch into getting out of the car and had left him standing on the gravel service road to an oil well. So that's all true.

Speaker 13 He said that he and Michael got out of Michael's car, which had been concealed from view.

Speaker 13 Tucked away in the bushes. Tucked away in the bushes.
He said we shut the car doors. He heard the noise, turned around and saw us.

Speaker 13 Oh. Once they shut the car doors, he was like, like, oh, shit.
Then his story goes a little off the rails here. He said that Pratt cursed at him.
Yeah. Butch was like, you motherfucker

Speaker 13 and ran at him and tackled him.

Speaker 13 Okay. He said, you motherfucker, I'm going to fight a guy who's much bigger than me and his brother.
And his threat. Yeah.
All right. I'm going to fight them both.
I'm going to start the fight, too.

Speaker 13 He said he couldn't remember the exact details of the fight, but he said the two of them were rolling around on the ground. Michael never got involved, by the way.

Speaker 13 Mike stood off to the side and watched all of this. He helped with everything, but he did not get involved in the beating.

Speaker 13 So questioned by his lawyer, he said, in the course of wrestling, I may have picked him up and hit his head on a rock. May have.
I don't know. May have.
Can't recall.

Speaker 13 Who can be sure in these trying times? You know what I mean?

Speaker 13 Asked when he knew that Pratt was seriously injured, he said, quote, I remember him not fighting back anymore.

Speaker 13 That'll do it. Questions about the role of his brother? He said, he didn't do anything as far as I could tell.

Speaker 13 So he said, while he lay injured on the ground, he and his brother talked, well, Butch lay injured on the ground. Eddie and his brother Mike sat around and talked about what to do.
What do we do?

Speaker 13 Obviously, what else do we fucking do? You got to talk about what to do. He said they were unable to make a decision about what to do.

Speaker 13 So you didn't have this planned ahead of time? I think you did. So he decided to

Speaker 13 load him into the trunk and then drive to Kent to ask Linda what to do. Maybe she'll know what to do.
She must be experienced in murder type stuff, right? We'll ask her.

Speaker 13 Wow, that's how much he likes a weird mom relationship. I'm going to go ask my mom what to do with this body.
I don't know. So

Speaker 13 there, Linda advised them to take Butch back to Pennsylvania, but because she was afraid that he might regain consciousness on the trip, she insisted that he be tied up and produced handcuffs from her purse.

Speaker 13 Oh, my God. That's Swagger's story.
That's his story. I don't believe it.
I think he had the handcuffs. I don't think Linda.

Speaker 13 I think he was cuffed and tied up before he got put in the car, and they picked Linda up. That's what I would say.

Speaker 13 But this way, it makes it sound like it's a total accident, so I don't know what to do. And then Linda made it much crueler by taking out these handcuffs and said we should tie him up.

Speaker 13 And that's so cruel. So it is a 10-man or 10-woman two-man jury

Speaker 13 and they begin deliberations at about 3 p.m.

Speaker 13 took a recess for dinner and then did it for another two hours and then left for the day uh the next day they come in with a verdict pretty quick and they find him guilty of all murder related everything yeah of everything yeah he did it you fucking did it now the sentencing comes around and um yeah they said this is uh his friend wurrer there who he built the deck for and all that kind of shit.

Speaker 13 He said, You don't understand what kind of a person this was. What a loss this was.
He was going to be an impact person.

Speaker 13 There was going to be someday when Butch was 50 or 60 years old when they were going to have a ceremony and a dinner to toast the effect that he's made.

Speaker 13 That's nice to say. The judge, on the other hand, says, You, sir,

Speaker 13 may fuck off, convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 30 years. Oh my God.

Speaker 13 With a consecutive 10 to 25 year sentence for aggravated kidnapping and a consecutive three years sentence for gun specification as well. Feels like they didn't believe anything he said.

Speaker 13 You is what they said. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Get your ass out of here. He will have to serve almost 40 years before he's eligible for parole.
Holy. So even if you go in at 24, he's coming out collecting Social Security.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 That's wild.

Speaker 13 So in prison, yeah, he's got to serve his life sentence in Ohio. He's also serving seven to 18 years to be served consecutively for the arson, too.
That's another thing they try him on.

Speaker 13 And then facing more time because of drug violations committed while in prison. He fucking fell apart.

Speaker 13 He was an upstanding guy. Next thing you know, he's in prison.
He's doing drugs. He doesn't even, it's over, man.
He's just a mess.

Speaker 13 So February 22nd, 1990, right after this happens, apparently there was a lot of, there was some editorials, some people sending letters to the newspaper, the Akron Beacon Journal, about how Linda got off easy and that the jurors are fucking idiots and they don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 13 So there is an editorial written by a juror on the Linda Carlin case, which I find interesting. The most interesting thing is to find out what the jurors were thinking during the trial.

Speaker 13 Like the Lori Daybell case there, when they interviewed those jurors afterwards, it was the most interesting thing in the fucking world.

Speaker 13 When they first said, when did you find out that she killed her kids, too?

Speaker 13 That's the best question. They're like,

Speaker 13 yeah, people were telling you, as soon as we left, everyone was shouting it out, Google her, Google her. And the one juror goes,

Speaker 13 I looked up and there's a Netflix documentary. I think I know what I'm doing tonight.

Speaker 13 I was like, that's.

Speaker 13 No, she said, I just moved to the area like a year and a half ago. So I didn't hear about it when it happened.
And I just never heard about it. She goes, I don't really pay attention to that guy.

Speaker 13 It's fascinating how many many people don't know anything about it. Nothing.
I think, I mean,

Speaker 13 our whole business is true crime. Like, our whole life is this crime shit.
Whereas I don't think a lot of people even pay attention. They don't know what the fuck's going on.
I've been about it since

Speaker 13 forever. A long, long time.
Fuck yeah.

Speaker 13 Fucking some pre-Amy Fisher, Joey Buttafuco, man. I mean, we're talking

Speaker 13 back life shit. Fuck yeah, man.
Why Did Johnny Kill was a documentary I watched when I was a kid on HBO. So interesting.

Speaker 13 It was to me. I had a weird feeling in my stomach that I was like, I want to feel this more.
You put your hand down. I thought you put it.

Speaker 13 I thought you were putting it on your dick. And I was like,

Speaker 13 I was like, this is going to be disturbing. I don't.
I got this weird stirring in my balls. And I like, my dick got hard.
And I was like, I can't watch this shit ever again.

Speaker 13 I'm going to watch this all the time. Oh, my God.
Okay. Thank fuck you were going for your stomach.
You went like kind of a little low, and I really thought

Speaker 13 you were going for your dick.

Speaker 13 My dick just started really. I mean, mean, it was like a fucking muscle down.
It was hard and tingly, and I just had to rub it and keep watching. This is just great.
Ever since then,

Speaker 13 I'm rock hard for three hours during these stories.

Speaker 13 So this editorial is called The Verdict in the Linda Carlin Trial. And I will read it as from a man named Jack Bannis from Akron.
He's the juror. He says, as a juror in the

Speaker 13 Linda Carlin Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping Trial, I have refused to discuss with reporters the Roger Pratt murder case because Mike Swagger has yet to have his kidnapping and aggravated murder trial.

Speaker 13 This is in the middle of it.

Speaker 13 However, oh, no, this is at because Mike is after this. So Ed and Linda had already gone.
Mike is going to be tried later on next month.

Speaker 13 He said, however, I feel I must respond to the asinine letter by Kimberly Marie, Voice of the People, February 12th, in which she asked how a convicted murderer could be eligible for parole in seven years and eight months, because that's how long Linda is eligible for parole in Ohio.

Speaker 13 Ms. Carlin was not accused of either abducting Roger Pratt or of beating him to death.

Speaker 13 She was accused and convicted of being present along with Ed Swager, Mike Swager, Carolyn Luli, Teresa Walkachuck at a meeting when plans were made to trick Roger into meeting with the Swagger brothers.

Speaker 13 They were afraid that he was going to implicate the Swaggers in a burglary and Ms. Carlin and the Swaggers in an arson in Greenville.
Ms. Carlin was not present when Roger Pratt was beaten to death.

Speaker 13 I sat through two days of jury selection, six days of testimony, and one day of deliberation. One of the hardest things that a citizen can be called upon to do is to vote to send someone to prison.

Speaker 13 I spent many sleepless hours

Speaker 13 as this case really got to me. I wanted very desperately to discuss the case with someone, anyone, but I knew I couldn't tell anything about the trial.

Speaker 13 During the jury deliberations, I found the others had very similar feelings.

Speaker 13 Judge Mary Spicer handled this case in a very fair and professional manner, and did defense lawyer, as did defense lawyer Robert Baker, and prosecutors, whoever, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 13 We worked very hard, even bending over backward, to ensure that justice was done. I'm satisfied with the verdict, and I believe the sentence is very appropriate for the level of involvement of Ms.

Speaker 13 Carlin. Sure.
I tend to agree. I don't think they told Linda that murder was afoot.

Speaker 13 You can't, you got to assume she didn't know that part. I mean, but maybe not.
Would you, okay, all right.

Speaker 13 Would you just on spec kill a guy and then show up at her house and assume that she was going to help you rather than freak out and call the cops on you?

Speaker 13 I don't know. I mean, I guess if you knew her real well,

Speaker 13 I don't know that I'd want to be involving anybody. I wouldn't want to tell anybody what's going to happen.

Speaker 13 Maybe the arson kind of tied them together because it's like, you know, one of us goes down, we're all going down. Yeah.
We're already criminals together. We can just be criminals more.

Speaker 13 That's possibly it. I'm not sure.
So March of 1990 is Mike Swager's trial. Yeah.
And it's a one-day trial. Oh.

Speaker 13 It's one that his lawyer later on says he's never heard of and is a disgrace.

Speaker 13 A one-day trial for a murder trial. He's like, that's crazy.
You need some more

Speaker 13 something.

Speaker 13 So they said that he made a decision to give up a jury trial on the charges

Speaker 13 here after they announced that they would not seek the death penalty. They said they weren't going to seek the death penalty against Mike.
They sought it against Eddie, but not against Mike.

Speaker 13 So once they decide that, Ed waives the jury trial and goes right to a judge instead.

Speaker 13 I think it makes sense for Mike because a jury could get real over-emotional about stuff and blame him more than maybe he had culpability to be blamed. Whereas a judge will look at it legally.

Speaker 13 There won't be any emotions involved in it. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 13 And the idea is the judge has seen this a lot. He's seen it a lot, and he can parse legalities and parse what's what and do that.
So that's that's the hope, I assume.

Speaker 13 But I don't know if that's always true or not. I think a judge at that point might take it upon themselves to make an example if they can.
So

Speaker 13 the prosecution's only role in the trial was to formally agree with defense counsel to many of the findings of fact held over from previous trials in the case. It's pretty much it.

Speaker 13 It's just like we stipulate to all this info. Right.
And then what? It's a one-day trial. It's really weird.
Mike testifies to all the stuff he said earlier that we said.

Speaker 13 He just spilled that all in court and said it was his brother and he didn't know what was going on. And they find him guilty.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 He is guilty.

Speaker 13 Involuntary manslaughter with a gun specification and kidnapping, he is found guilty of. Yeah, I mean, even if he didn't know, as soon as his brother started beating,

Speaker 13 yeah. Or never stopped him ever.
Never stopped him.

Speaker 13 You know what it is. Helped bury the body.
You know what it is. You know what you're doing here.

Speaker 13 So he is sentenced to, you sir, may fuck off.

Speaker 13 In grand total, 28 to 53 years.

Speaker 13 God damn. He gets in there.
He's also given a one-year sentence for his role in the arson because he cooperated with authorities on that. Linda didn't and neither did Eddie.

Speaker 13 And Linda's going to fucking actually hope that she wished she did pretty soon.

Speaker 13 Both swaggers pled guilty in the furniture store arson and that faced the prison sentences. And obviously Mike got his and it was an extra year.
Carolyn and Teresa are drivers.

Speaker 13 They both pleaded guilty to single counts of conspiracy to kidnap and got you, young ladies.

Speaker 13 Hey, fuck off. Probation.

Speaker 13 Probation. She looked in the rear view and saw him doubled over.

Speaker 13 And two men beating him and said, that's cool, and kept driving and didn't ever go to the cops. Probation.
Probation. Till she was arrested, till they were arrested.
And Teresa knew a lot more too.

Speaker 13 I don't know how much Carolyn knew, but Teresa was involved.

Speaker 13 A man is missing. The last time I saw him, he was doubled over with two guys beating him.
Said nothing. Nothing.
And Teresa was the one who said, I have to pee, get out of the car, and then close.

Speaker 13 Probation. And so probation.

Speaker 13 Whew. I'd give Thelma and Louise three to five to think about this shit.
At least, right? You know, even if they get out in a year and a half, you're going to be inconvenienced for this shit.

Speaker 13 You've been out on bond the whole time. You come to court and now you get probation.
No, no, no, no, no. You're going to do sometime.

Speaker 13 Every time you have a background check. Yes, it has to be on there.

Speaker 13 I need you to do like a year where you come out and your hair is all fucked up and it's a mess and your skin looks like shit and you feel bad about yourself.

Speaker 13 Because that's fucked up. It's not cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 I need you to get out and have to work to get back in shape.

Speaker 13 Yeah, this is bad. I want you to do it all carb chubby.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Big time. Wow.
And with a you know, a relationship going on with a 300-pound Hispanic woman, I'd like that going on for you guys.

Speaker 13 Keeping you safe and your hair braided. Keeping you safe and you keeping her hair braided.

Speaker 13 That's what I'd like for them. Just, you know.

Speaker 13 Holy shit, probation. Probation.
That's the thing. That's the most mind-blowing thing to me.

Speaker 13 Like, Linda got off a little bit light because I feel like she was more involved in this than she's letting on. But probation?

Speaker 13 That's crazy.

Speaker 13 You delivered him. You sandwiched a man in the back seat.
He might as well have had a bow on his head.

Speaker 13 Like, just delivered gift wrap to these people. It's a murder.
Probation. Probation.

Speaker 13 Wild. I'm shocked at that.
So 1997 comes around. There is a TV movie

Speaker 13 called What Happened to Bobby Earl. What? Who the fuck is Bobby Earl?

Speaker 13 Bobby and Earl. I don't know who any of these people are.
And it makes it sound like they're like hicks or something. What happened to Bobby Earl? Where's Bob Earl at?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 So there's an article here about this movie. It's a CBS TV movie, and it says, for Roger Pratt's brother, movie on murder met goal.
So they're not even mad.

Speaker 13 They're not upset. They're like, they actually got, the mom got $500 for it.
Oh. CBS.

Speaker 13 Gave them $500. Gave him $500 for this.
We're going to sell Pepsi ads over your

Speaker 13 $500. bucks.
500 bucks, man. That's wild.

Speaker 13 But I guess they did a good job, which, by the way, I hope it felt good for the filmmakers because we got, if you don't know, we did that Powell, Wyoming case a few weeks back.

Speaker 13 And there's an article, a local article from Wyoming where the murder victim's family is not mad at us at all and is, in fact, really happy with us.

Speaker 13 Saying it's the first time they've been able to laugh about it ever.

Speaker 13 And it was the most complimentary thing we could possibly hear would be victims family saying they liked the show which was a comedy show about them he's been crying for 30 years about it and thankful to laugh about it for once yes fucking cool that feels great so i hope the filmmakers aren't complete pieces of shit and feel the same thing or else it's like fuck him who cares

Speaker 13 So they say, I'll read the article. Michael Pratt is pleased with Tuesday Night's CBS movie telling the story of the 1988 murder of his brother, Roger Butch Pratt.
I thought it was great, he said.

Speaker 13 There were a few things that have been changed, but for the most part, it's 90% true. You know, like his name.

Speaker 13 Yeah, what's what the fuck? What's fucking eating Gilbert Grape over here is not the same thing. Maybe that's what we do every week from now on, is just change names.

Speaker 13 Change all the names.

Speaker 13 Have some fun. Yeah, fuck.
We could say it. We could lie then.

Speaker 13 But then nobody would listen. They want the truth.
That's the difference. Yeah.
We could make shit up. We could be like, and then a dragon came out.
Oh, my God. Bobby Earl.
Bobby Earl.

Speaker 13 So he said it tells people what happened, Pratt says, explaining a lot of the people knew a lot of explaining a lot of people knew about the case, but many didn't know exactly what had happened.

Speaker 13 The names of the characters and what happened to Bobby Earl were changed for legal reasons, but the name of the Mercer County town of Greenville, where many of the depicted events occurred, wasn't.

Speaker 13 Those who watched the movie looking for local scenes were disappointed as it was filmed in Toronto.

Speaker 13 Which is

Speaker 13 nothing like central central Ohio or northern Ohio.

Speaker 13 The movie tells the story from the Pratt family's view, depicting Butch as an ambitious young man, the first in his family to go to college who fell in with a bad crowd, which is pretty much what happened.

Speaker 13 Pratt said the screenplay was based on interviews with his family and transcripts from the trial of those convicted in Butch's murder.

Speaker 13 So they go on to say the case, we don't need to do that part.

Speaker 13 So they said that, but they talked to to everybody

Speaker 13 in it.

Speaker 13 He said today that shortly before, this is the Sergeant Tom Strawler from the police department, said that shortly before Pratt disappeared, his attorney told police that Butch had information about the arson fire.

Speaker 13 So they have to get into that. They say Strawler thought the movie also was reasonably accurate.
He said things were true, but out of sequence.

Speaker 13 He said, adding that he was surprised by the similarity of his own name to the name given to Squiger's character in the movie, Tom Stahl.

Speaker 13 And his name is Strawler, and this is with an R, though, Strawler, and this is Stahl. But he's like, don't call the murderer close to my name.
That's fucked up.

Speaker 13 Michael also, Michael said his mother, Rose, this is Michael Pratt, by the way, Butch's brother,

Speaker 13 said that Rose also liked the movie, adding that the family has been deluged with phone calls from people who saw the film and they wanted to express support for them. So,

Speaker 13 Michael, 1998, comes around. Michael's appealing.
Really? He argues that the court, trial court, incorrectly denied his motion for relief from judgment and his petition for post-conviction relief.

Speaker 13 Now, the court affirms the judgments because, one, the defendant's motion failed to satisfy the requirements for relief, and the defendant's petition failed to demonstrate any substantive grounds for post-conviction relief.

Speaker 13 In other words, we don't really care about you. Fuck off.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So, 1999 comes around, and Linda's up for parole. Oh.

Speaker 13 Ohio parole. Then she's got 10 years to do in Pennsylvania for arson.
They gave her 10 years for that. Same.

Speaker 13 She got more time for that. Yes.
It was 7.5 to 15. She got fucking a hard 10 in Pennsylvania over that shit.
So that's interesting.

Speaker 13 Now she's up for parole, and the victim's families here, the Pratt family, is trying to keep her in prison. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So the Ohio Parole Board agreed to hear an appeal of its, they basically, January 2nd, 1999, they stay parole Linda. Really?

Speaker 13 She's not released right away as shit goes through, but then the Ohio Parole Board agreed to hear an appeal of its decision to release her. The family fucking petitioned them for an appeal.

Speaker 13 We're going to let you go after we hear whether or not we should let you go. Yeah, from the people who really hate you a lot, by the way.

Speaker 13 They're going to come in and say everything they hate about you. So they said she's been serving a sentence of 7 to to 15 years in the Ohio Reformatory for Women at Marysville since her conviction.

Speaker 13 They said two parole board members granted the parole. I think it's a three-person board.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Granted her parole after an August 26th hearing, agreeing to her release if the state of Pennsylvania is ready to lock her up for five to ten years on a guilty plea for an arson charge.

Speaker 13 So basically, just, you know, if we can hand you right off to them, you can be paroled.

Speaker 13 So instead, though,

Speaker 13 the the the the family founds it finds out about this michael pratt rose pratt and they gathered more than 4 000 signatures on petitions yeah and which is more than and also a hundred letters in opposition to granting the parole and presented them to the board before the hearing that's a lot of people yeah when michael pratt learned that parole was granted he said he would file an appeal of the case and seek a full parole board hearing on the matter he said his appeal was granted and the full parole board will hear the case December 14th in Columbus.

Speaker 13 And he said he hopes to enlist the support of the Summit County Prosecutor's Office, which handled the murder case, as well as law enforcement and whoever else wants to come talk shit about this lady.

Speaker 13 Anybody want to hate her out loud? Come on, okay.

Speaker 13 That's it. And Pratt said, quote,

Speaker 13 we still have one more chance. I got nothing to lose.
Put on your hating pants and come on down. That's it.
Anybody got hate pants to put on? Put on your fucking

Speaker 13 fucking overalls. Your hat shoes, your hating pants.
Your over your

Speaker 13 shirt. Come on through.

Speaker 13 Your ire overalls. Yeah.
Put on your iR overalls and your fucking.

Speaker 13 Jesus Christ, man. You're unbelievable underwear.
Get in here.

Speaker 13 So she was granted and now the parole is revoked, by the way. Okay, good, good.

Speaker 13 A Supreme Court decision that prohibits parole board members from considering other crimes committed means her case will be reheard. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 13 Now, if she's released, she'll be turned over to Pennsylvania, where she'll serve five to ten years

Speaker 13 on a guilty plea for arson. 2002, Mike is up for parole.
Oh, it's his first parole hearing.

Speaker 13 The parole board, rather than listen to him, just continues his sentence till 2008. Oh,

Speaker 13 no thanks.

Speaker 13 We all got our hating pants on. Goodbye.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 13 I got my pissed-off pen. I'm going to write this no on here.

Speaker 13 Send you the fuck out.

Speaker 13 You're gone. So, yep, that continues his sentence till 2008.
2003, though, Mike has a big change of heart of everything. Oh?

Speaker 13 Mike

Speaker 13 now wants to explain everything here. He's like, this is,

Speaker 13 he wants to do it.

Speaker 13 He says that he and

Speaker 13 that, you know, that he basically he said that he told Ed told him that him and Butch had swiped the stereo equipment from the fraternity brothers, and then they had a falling out, and Butch got caught.

Speaker 13 And while Butch hadn't formally told on Ed for the crimes yet, Ed was worried and he wanted to go to law school.

Speaker 13 And if Butch told all he knew, especially about the arson, Ed's future would be fucked, basically.

Speaker 13 So Ed told Michael, hey, I need you.

Speaker 13 He said they,

Speaker 13 Michael says that fucking Ed told him that they're going to meet with Butch and bribe him to keep his mouth shut.

Speaker 13 We're going to pay him off. That's all.
Which is fine. You could do that.
You want to pay the guy off. Then it's all on him.
He can decide what's important to him. So Michael said, I said I'd come.

Speaker 13 I'll go help. I'll go be moral support for you.
That's the other thing. I don't know if anybody except for Ed knew what was going to happen that day.
I really don't.

Speaker 13 I don't know if he told everybody because he's not that close to Michael. He just kind of grabs him when he needs him for something.
I mean,

Speaker 13 nobody's going to cop to it because that makes him look bad.

Speaker 13 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 13 It's hard to tell who knew what.

Speaker 13 Everybody knew something was going to happen. Everybody knew something.
Just the way Ed is. He just seems like such a manipulative fuck with it.

Speaker 13 With every little thing, it seems like he would tell everybody something different to get them there that day. You know what I mean? Whatever it took to get him to do it.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 13 That, whatever, you know, if you asked all of them why you're here, I think everybody have a different story of why they're here because Ed told them something different, it feels like. So

Speaker 13 they said, you know, obviously the two girls were enlisted. They promised they were going to a party and drove him to the remote spot.
Michael said he watched in horror as Ed attacked Butch.

Speaker 13 Butch never attacked him. He said he didn't come at him.
He said Ed attacked Butch first with his fists and then slamming his head into the ground and jumping up and down on his chest while laughing.

Speaker 13 God, Jesus. Michael appeared,

Speaker 13 he said,

Speaker 13 Ed later said that Michael appeared to have frozen up. I had to shout directly into his face to get him to snap out of it and retrieve the car.
God damn. Mike just went catatonic.

Speaker 13 Turned into a different guy. He turned into Cameron from Ferris Bueller there at the pool.
He was just fucking catatonic, just totally out. Couldn't believe it.
Couldn't believe it.

Speaker 13 So he literally had to yell in his face to, let's go, motherfucker. Yeah.
Dead body.

Speaker 13 So that also tends to,

Speaker 13 to me, I don't believe the original story that Ed said he was dead and then they stood around and talked about it. Yeah.
This doesn't seem like that's what would happen here. So,

Speaker 13 oh my God. At that point, though, he said Butch was motionless, and so Michael said, I helped load him into the truck, bound and handcuffed.

Speaker 13 Hear that, though? Linda didn't produce the handcuffed. He was handcuffed, yeah.
Bound and handcuffed, getting into the trunk.

Speaker 13 Ed brought that shit with him. Yep.
Knowing exactly what he was doing. He knew exactly what he was going to do.
Yeah. Exactly what he was doing.

Speaker 13 The brothers then picked up Linda Carlin, drove to a farm where they buried Butch. Ed went to Philadelphia, moved in with Teresa, started law school.

Speaker 13 Michael went back for his sophomore year in engineering at Case, and he bought a house in Euclid and got engaged.

Speaker 13 But he said he wasn't doing so well. He said it looked like we were doing great.
And he said, Ed was doing fine, but I wasn't doing too great inside about the whole thing. No.

Speaker 13 He said, quote, it was the most terrible 16 months of my life. I thought about it every day.
He said my blood pressure was up. My grades dropped.

Speaker 13 He said he was worried about the Pratts, and he was also worried about how an arrest would hurt his father, who's a Jefferson County commissioner. Sure would.

Speaker 13 And he also knew that if they got caught, that Ed would be facing the death penalty.

Speaker 13 And he probably thought I probably will be too, because I was fucking there, and there's no proof I didn't do anything.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 he's lucky enough that Ed said he didn't have anything to do with it, or else if Ed could have just wrangled him in there, and he would have been just as fucked as him.

Speaker 13 So he said that he was terrified his brother would come after him, too. So I didn't put that past him.
I was his best friend, Butch. Right.
He doesn't even like me, really. Like,

Speaker 13 he hung out with Butch way more than he hung out with me. Why would he not kill me? Yeah.
So he said he avoided family gatherings even because he didn't want to see Ed. Unbelievable.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 He said if Ed was going to be home for the holidays, I wouldn't go. I was so afraid he would show up there or show up here.
I lived in constant fear. His own brother.
Yeah, of his own brother.

Speaker 13 I think Ed is a bad guy. I think everybody knows it.
If he he didn't burn, think about the possibility of he doesn't burn that house down. None of this shit comes out.

Speaker 13 Yeah, nothing matters. He's going to do anything he has to for the rest of his fucking life.
He's going to kill somebody else. Oh, for sure.
He's going to rob people. He's going to embezzle.

Speaker 13 Yeah, if he gets away with it, yeah. If he figures out how to do a stock scam, he's going to do that.
He has no morals at all, this kid. Nothing.
Nothing at all. It's fucking sad.

Speaker 13 So he said that it was almost a relief when the case actually broke. He said police were in questioning Carlin, Linda, and all of that.

Speaker 13 And he said that led to the discovery of the body. And he said when the cops swarmed his driveway, he said, quote, I knew immediately what it was.
I knew exactly what it was.

Speaker 13 What the fuck else would it be? It was, yeah, he said, I've been waiting the whole fucking time. It was one of those, yeah, what took you so long type of deals.
Like, he totally knew.

Speaker 13 He waived his right to a jury trial, like they said. He was charged with involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping.

Speaker 13 By the way, the trial not lasting a day, his current lawyer, Mark Stanton, said it's the most pathetic thing I've ever seen in a murder trial. This just railroaded him right through it.

Speaker 13 Michael said at first he was bitter and mad about this whole thing. And in prison, he ignored his brother's letters.
Oh. And everything.
He said, in hindsight, I felt manipulated in every sense.

Speaker 13 Because you were. You got treated like a fucking, like a dipshit, like a Patsy.

Speaker 13 So he said, the other guys in the slam, or unlike other guys in the slam, he was an innocent man, he believed. My feeling was I shouldn't be here.
Interesting.

Speaker 13 So he said it's a jailhouse cliché, but a church service changed him, he said. Oh.

Speaker 13 That was it. He went originally because they have free candy at church.
Oh.

Speaker 13 And you don't get candy in prison very often for free.

Speaker 13 Is that why you go to church, though?

Speaker 13 Free candy. He said he didn't like the sermon at all.
A lot of guys just go because it's chill. Yeah.

Speaker 13 A lot of guys say it's just a chill place place to go so they go there because it's like no one will stab you while you're there usually i like it's just a cool place to be for an hour i like to go to mass for the snack and the sip of wine yeah snaps

Speaker 13 no wine but they're definitely they're nice to you in there too i think it's probably the only place in prison where people are nice to you yeah probably

Speaker 13 you know like i don't think anybody else is real kind or anything so they'll someone who'll buy your bullshit and listen to your sob story and all that shit too i'm sure so he said he didn't like the sermon the pastor said they were all sinners and Michael would have none of it.

Speaker 13 He said, he doesn't even know me, I thought to myself. How dare you call me a sinner? I don't know.
You stood by while somebody got murdered, Mike. That seems like some kind of sin.

Speaker 13 I don't know much about religion, but it seems like that should be frowned upon. If it's not, you guys should add it to your books.
Put that in the book.

Speaker 13 They say don't eat shrimp like seven times. So

Speaker 13 don't stomp on your friend's head till he dies and then laugh at him. I think that should be in there somewhere.

Speaker 13 So he said he returned to his cell, intent on looking up the Bible passage to find the sermon in order to refute it. Oh,

Speaker 13 he's going to argue. He used to do it now.
He used to be an altar boy, so he knows his way around the Bible. So he's like, I'm going to show this motherfucker what's up.

Speaker 13 He said he didn't know where it was, so he started at the beginning of the New Testament. By the time he'd found it in John 4, he'd read three gospels.
Wow.

Speaker 13 He said, I saw that not only had he been right about that, but there was a lot more he was right about. So he went back to church the next week with his attitude all changed.

Speaker 13 You can sway this guy to do anything. Anything.
Michael is real easy going. What? Murder? No problem.
Religion? Great. That sounds good.

Speaker 13 Sign me up. Like, wow.
And if I get a wild hare and I don't know something, I'll just read everything. Look it up.
I'll find it somewhere. I'll find it.

Speaker 13 He said, I started realizing my own influence on things. No matter what my brother did, I still had choices.
And I made the wrong choices each time.

Speaker 13 True. He said he eventually forgave his brother.
They still haven't talked because they're not allowed to, they're co-conspirators, but they can write letters and they do. Okay.

Speaker 13 So they said, after 14 years in prison, Michael Swager seems nothing, like nothing but a nice young man, this article says, complete with a bashful smile and an awkward politeness around women.

Speaker 13 Even in his beige scrubs, he looks more like an engineering student than a prisoner. Somehow, it doesn't seem ironic that his high school class voted him most caring.

Speaker 13 And he said,

Speaker 13 I was a real productive citizen for 19 years. For two months, everything went crazy, and here I am, 35 years old.
Right.

Speaker 13 Not just two months. I guess it is two months.
It's May, that's the fire, and then June is the murder. So, yeah, he went batshit for a couple of months there.

Speaker 13 Linda, 2003,

Speaker 13 she seeks to cancel her plea in the arson. She pled to the arson, and now she wants to cancel it.
I don't like doing time.

Speaker 13 I don't want to fight.

Speaker 13 She said she's found new evidence that she's not guilty. Oh,

Speaker 13 interesting. Why the fuck did you plead then?

Speaker 13 Wow. Okay.

Speaker 13 She's serving 7 to 15 there and 5 to 10 here. Authorities said that she,

Speaker 13 obviously, the killing happened there. Karen entered,

Speaker 13 they call it an Allen plea, but it sounds like an Alfred plea.

Speaker 13 I don't know. Different states might have different versions of this.
And it might be Allen is something in arson, whereas Alfred's in murder.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Well, it just means that she didn't actually plead guilty, but admitted the prosecution had sufficient evidence, which is no contest.
Different states, I think it's different.

Speaker 13 No contest, Alfred, Alan. I don't know.
Or maybe this person just doesn't know shit and put Alan instead of Alfred. I'm not sure.

Speaker 13 Autocorrected. Harold Gwynn is the guy who wrote it, so he should get his head out of his ass maybe or not.
Or I should, one of the two.

Speaker 13 So they said it's treated as a guilty plea for sentencing, and Carlin was ordered to serve five to ten years.

Speaker 13 She isn't scheduled to begin that Ohio prison term until she completes her Ohio sentence in January 2005.

Speaker 13 So they're saying no parole. She's going to get out there and then go right there.
She filed a post-conviction relief petition in Mercer County Common Pleas Court asking that it be overturned.

Speaker 13 Her petition claims that Michael Swiger, a co-defendant in both the arson cases, had recently informed her that he's willing to testify that she didn't recruit him to start the fire that destroyed the furniture store.

Speaker 13 Because now he's all Christian-y and he wants to fucking make amends. Right.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 he never said she recruited him, though. Ed recruited Mike.
That's never been the question.

Speaker 13 The point is she recruited Ed. That's the point.
Oh, okay. And unless Ed says that she didn't recruit me, I don't think it matters here.

Speaker 13 Because the chain of it was, I don't even know if Michael ever met Linda. Like, it was a matter of...

Speaker 13 Yeah, they weren't in the same... They probably met each other at some point.
Yeah, maybe. I would think.
Yeah, probably.

Speaker 13 Like, if you get a, if you get a guy to do something, no matter who he hires with him, that doesn't mean that you're not responsible for that person now. You got the ball rolling here.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So that's very interesting. The judge,

Speaker 13 president Judge Francis J. Fernelli.
President? President? President Judge. I have never heard of that before.
Didn't know. That's crazy.
I always hate it when doctors run for president.

Speaker 13 Because like, you can't be doctor president. Stop doing that.
No, pick a title. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So they said, noting that Carlin's new evidence is only hearsay at this point, and said that Carlin's petition also contained a request for a free court-appointed attorney, and they have denied that.

Speaker 13 Her petition mentions that she already has an attorney, but doesn't name that person.

Speaker 13 She'll have to explain who the attorney is and if the attorney was paid and by whom and why she's unable to retain her counsel now. And then they'll figure out if her shit has any fucking whatever.

Speaker 13 Parole officials, by the way, say that she refuses to accept responsibility for the crime whatsoever. Oh.

Speaker 13 2004, which is the way you get out on parole.

Speaker 13 2004 is the 15th anniversary of the murder here.

Speaker 13 And Michael Pratt says he routinely visits Greenville, especially on the anniversary of his brother's murder, which is sad as fuck.

Speaker 13 He planned to arrive at Central Park in Greenville at noon on Tuesday, armed with a sign emblazoned, no parole, and thank you for the support he receives in town.

Speaker 13 He's supposed to walk around with a big sign

Speaker 13 that says, no parole, thank you

Speaker 13 on either side. He said,

Speaker 13 we would never be able to do all we have done without all the help we've got from everybody that helped.

Speaker 13 That's a tough sentence.

Speaker 13 There's also a student reward.

Speaker 13 Rose Pratt took the $500 she got from the production, from CBS and set up an award in Butch's name at Steel Valley High School in Munhall, given to an honor student who's also active in two sports and doesn't and has no money to pay for college.

Speaker 13 Wow. So 14 have been given so far and all have graduated college, they said.
What a great lady. That's pretty fucking cool.
Yeah. Yeah.
The pittance she got from CBS, she gave it to the kids.

Speaker 13 She gave it away. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So she said, so I'm trying to help through Butch, trying to keep his memory alive. That's nice.
At least she's not sobbing to her answering machine anymore. Poor lady.
2006,

Speaker 13 Michael is released from prison. What?

Speaker 13 He's out parole. He got almost 50 years.

Speaker 13 He knew it was up. Wow.
He said

Speaker 13 way early, huh? They won't hear me. I'm going to get Christy real fucking fast.
Oh, my. I'm going to get me all Jesus-y real quick.
And that's going to help. And it did help that.

Speaker 13 They eat that shit up in the parole board. Wow.

Speaker 13 He's released from prison. He did go on, and it might be real too.
He did go on to work as a prison minister after that.

Speaker 13 So he'd come in and minister to the other prisoners. He's stuck with it, huh? Or he's sneaking methane.
We don't know.

Speaker 13 He's muleing something in. Yeah, he might just really have a lucrative business going on.
And then the Lord said, Here, take this. This is 30 bucks.
There you go.

Speaker 13 So he departed the white sea with the razor blade. With a razor blade.
and then he disappeared.

Speaker 13 What thou snort? Atop the temple of the nostril. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So 2012,

Speaker 13 I don't remember what station airs this, but I killed my BFF, whatever show that is. Yeah, whatever station that is.
Hulu or some shit. It's 2012, so I don't think they didn't make shit.

Speaker 13 Hulu didn't even exist.

Speaker 13 Oh, no. I mean, I've seen the thing on

Speaker 13 now.

Speaker 13 I don't know what it started on.

Speaker 13 So one of those fucking JE or some shit, but this is episode season one, episode three. So they got quick early on.
It was their best friend. Their best fucking friends.
Best fucking friends.

Speaker 13 Frat Brother Homicide is the name of it.

Speaker 13 2012, October here.

Speaker 13 Linda is released from prison. Really? Completely.
Free and clear in Pennsylvania, everywhere. She's out.
She's the second to last one.

Speaker 13 That's what I mean. Yeah, she is.
She, and it's funny too, because she wasn't. I don't know if she, I don't know if she's the one he died.
I don't know if she's the second most responsible person.

Speaker 13 Yeah. I don't know.

Speaker 13 It's weirdly enough, somehow I think it's Teresa as the second most responsible person because she lured him there. She's the one who lured him there.

Speaker 13 He wouldn't even have gone to fucking Akron if it wasn't for her. But both, all the ladies left.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that's crazy. And that dude is still standing there.
His brothers left, but his brother's

Speaker 13 scared of him. His brother's also watching him murder a man, so he's pretty responsible, too.
I think he's number two. And then Teresa.

Speaker 13 And then Linda, and then Carolyn, because we don't even know what they told Carolyn. They could have just told Carolyn, we're going to a party, pick this guy up.

Speaker 13 She was the one driving. She doesn't know.

Speaker 13 But they say that she will spend two years and two months on parole. They said that essentially the parole board, when discussing paroling her, they weren't going to parole her.

Speaker 13 They didn't want to parole her. But then one of them said, well, if we don't parole her, then she's going to have no supervision when she's out.
And that is. If we parole her now.

Speaker 13 you can keep an eye on her you can keep an eye on her and if she fucks up she's back in here for the rest of the sentence and more

Speaker 13 so they said that ms carlin will now have over two years to develop a life and contacts away from mercer county and the persons connected to her case hopefully at the end of her parole she will have no reason to return the fuck out of our county and stay out is what they said yeah now butch's brother here michael said about the whole thing.

Speaker 13 We'll let him kind of wrap this up. He said, I wonder how many kids he would have had.
What would they have looked like? He said, he would have been such a good dad.

Speaker 13 He said, he tries to picture what Butch would look like today. This is 2018.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 So, I mean, think about that, how long ago that was.

Speaker 13 30? What is that? How long is that? Shit, that is 30 years. Yeah.
That's 30 fucking years, man. He said, I wonder what he would look like today.
Would he be gray? Would he be bald?

Speaker 13 Would he have a mustache or a beard? Trying to picture what would be. He'd do whatever he wanted.
Yeah. What would he look like? Who knows?

Speaker 13 So he said, Butch, though, for him, Butch is forever frozen as he looked in 1998 or 1988. It's just.
That's terrible. Yeah.
He's like

Speaker 13 Andy Richter's character in 30 Rock who's gotten a skiing, gotten an accident and thinks it's 1985 every day. Like, that's how he thinks it.
That's terrible. Yeah.
That's awful.

Speaker 13 He said, I think of him as a handsome 22-year-old fresh out of college with a full head of red hair and a red mustache. He said, for the rest of my life, he'll never be older than 22.

Speaker 13 He'll always look the same. Yeah.
That's so sad. That's some sad shit.

Speaker 13 That's bad. Now, there's been several different productions made about this.
True Crime with Aphrodite Jones, Blood Brotherhood episode.

Speaker 13 Frenemies, Shattered Bonds.

Speaker 13 What happened to Bobby Earl, of course, aka Murder in a College Town, which is a much better name for a TV show than what happened to Bobby Earl.

Speaker 13 I killed my BFF rat brother homicide. homicide, and most likely to dot dot dot, brotherly love.

Speaker 13 Oh.

Speaker 13 So I think that's probably like younger people. Yeah, it's all got the twist and plot of best friend killing himself, killing himself.
Best friend killing himself. Now, Eddie, still in prison,

Speaker 13 he is at the Grafton Correctional Institute

Speaker 13 here, where he was admitted on March 27th, 1990. He

Speaker 13 is all set for his first parole hearing in August of 2029.

Speaker 13 Holy, really? Yeah. Still be 40 years.
He's going to be up for parole, though. And yeah, that's 40 years in the joint, man.

Speaker 13 That's tough. And I don't know.
That's the point of getting out at that point. I mean, you're only 65.
He's only going to be 64, I think, if he gets out. But he doesn't know shit.

Speaker 13 Oh, he doesn't know anything. He can't do this.
To be gone from the 80s

Speaker 13 until now,

Speaker 13 2029, not even even now, 2029. We're not even going to know what the fuck's going on in four years.
We're going to be like, what's this app? I don't know how to do this.

Speaker 13 Chevy dealers had Pontiac Phoenixes on their phone. Phoenixes.

Speaker 13 Give this guy an iPhone and be like, fuck around with that.

Speaker 13 What the fuck is this shit? I don't know what this is. Holy shit.
Like, imagine that.

Speaker 13 He has no idea what the world is, no idea how to operate in it. And I mean, he'll probably be happy that he'll at least, does he get Social Security? No.

Speaker 13 He's never worked.

Speaker 13 I don't know. He's never paid in.

Speaker 13 I don't know. What do you do? How do you help that guy? I don't know.
Does that matter?

Speaker 13 He needs 25 to 3 grand a month to survive. And he's got nothing.
Is there a minimum, like, you know, even if you didn't put in, you get, we'd give old people something? I would fucking help.

Speaker 13 There's a minimum wage. He can go earn that.
I mean, yeah.

Speaker 13 I know if, like, if, because I'm thinking, like, old-timey, like, back in the day, a housewife never worked at all, but then the husband died, would she just starve to death?

Speaker 13 No, I think she got her husband. He's entitled to his career, too.
Yeah. To his shit.
So I don't know how that works. But

Speaker 13 he's, I think he's going to have a hard time out there. Keep him in just because he can't make it out there.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 And Linda, I mean, Christ, she's in her 70s now. Yeah.
So, I mean, I don't know what's going on with her. I looked for an obituary.
Couldn't find one for someone with her date of birth.

Speaker 13 So I don't know. She's still alive, I guess, doing something out there.
Michael's hanging out out there. Everybody that I understand is still alive from this case, except for Butch, obviously.
So

Speaker 13 there you go, everybody. That is Hudson, Ohio.
At least the murder part is Hudson, Ohio. It's about six different places.
That's one of those we could have picked four different towns to do this in.

Speaker 13 So thank you so much for listening to that. If you like the show and if you liked how we tell these stories, please get on whatever app you're on and give us five stars.
It really helps out a lot.

Speaker 13 You might think it doesn't, but it really fucking does. It takes 10 seconds.
Hook it up. Thank you so much for doing that.
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Speaker 13 Get your tickets for live shows. The virtual live show is still available to buy.
It took place April 19th, the 420 virtual live show.

Speaker 13 And if you're within the two-week window of April 19th, you can still purchase it. And I think it's our best one that we've ever done.
It's so good. Yeah.
Fucking hilarious.

Speaker 13 And we've gotten great feedback on it. So thank you, everyone, who bought that.
And thank you, everyone, who's going to continue to get it for the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 13 We really, really appreciate that. Thank you.
Also, get your tickets for live shows in person live, which are Chicago at the Riviera, May the 17th. Well, the next one's St.
Louis, but that's sold out.

Speaker 13 You can't get Chicago.

Speaker 13 Right. The next one you can buy tickets.
You can get in Chicago. And I might advise you, if you want to come for any of the rest of the shows for the rest of the year, get them now.

Speaker 13 Get them now because we have about half of those shows after the summer are sold out already.

Speaker 13 Get in there and get them. Like Philly, D.C., Seattle, get those tickets now because Portland's sold out.
Grand Rapids sold sold out. They're all getting sold out.
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Speaker 13 So, I think there's a few left in Irvine, the improv there.

Speaker 13 Get in there, too. That'll be a fun one.
Come to the improv because we play theaters now. Yeah, and the improv is a real, it's a real kind of intimate venue.

Speaker 13 That one's deep. It's kind of long.

Speaker 13 It's one of the bigger improvs in the country.

Speaker 13 It's going to be so much fun. It's going to be great.
It's going to be a blast. So please come out and see us there and all that.
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Speaker 13 Also, certainly follow us on social media. We We are at Small Town Murder on Instagram, at Smalltown Pod on Facebook.
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Speaker 13 Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of your bonus materials. Holy shit, is there a lot to?

Speaker 13 Anybody, $5 a month or above, you're going to get hundreds and hundreds of episodes you've never heard before to binge immediately. So some people say, oh, I'm all caught up.
What do I do now?

Speaker 13 Hundreds of episodes to binge. We got you covered.
Get in there and do that. And then you get new ones every other week.
We're not done. We keep coming, man.
We're going to keep coming at you. Jesus.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 at you is a very important way to do it.

Speaker 13 Not on you. Not on you or in your direction.
That would be gross. Yeah.

Speaker 13 So definitely do that. What you're going to get this week here for crime and sports,

Speaker 13 which you'll get access to. We're going to talk about our second part of fraternity hazing accidents.
Yes.

Speaker 13 These are horrible things that happen to people who were doing something dumb that they shouldn't have done to begin with. It's real stupid.

Speaker 13 And then for Small Town Murder, we are going to talk all about the Lori Vallo Day Bell trial that just finished in Arizona, where she represented herself and it was all you could ask for from someone representing herself.

Speaker 13 Terrible. That's not everything we ever wanted.
Oh, just really not good at this at all. Like Ted Bundy was terrible, but at least he went to law school and knew something.

Speaker 13 She actually looks like she studied. We'll talk all about it, but she, oh boy, she, her crazy came out in court.
We'll put it that way. Patreon.com/slash crime in sports is where you get all of that.

Speaker 13 And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, which is right now.

Speaker 13 Jimmy, hit me with the names of the people who would never, ever, ever lure us into a car to take us to a rural location and murder us. Hit me with them right fucking now.

Speaker 13 This week's executive producers are Michelle Miller, who got a mortgage in the worst way. I hope you're doing well on the show.
Congratulations, Michelle. I remember you.
Thank you.

Speaker 13 Yeah, she house got ruined in a storm. That sucks.

Speaker 13 Jordan Bennett in Jolly Old England. Her New England gal.
Yeah. she moved back.

Speaker 13 She's complaining that Tim Horton sucks over there, I saw. I was like, oh, that's right.
Very good. Fuck.
You know, different. Kyle Norwick dipping his chicken in ketchup.
That's gross.

Speaker 13 Kyle, knock that shit off.

Speaker 13 Karen Vandenhendy.

Speaker 13 Vandenhendy, I think. Vandenhendy.
Latanya Willis and Maddoch Heren. I don't know how to say that.
I hope I got that right. Thank you.
You guys are the best.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much for everything you're doing. Thank you.

Speaker 13 Keep it up.

Speaker 13 Keep it up. Keep living right.

Speaker 13 We love you too much.

Speaker 13 Keep five. Keep five.

Speaker 13 Keep on this side of the grass.

Speaker 13 You're the best. Other producers this week.
Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, John Magnado.

Speaker 13 Oh, I think we lost John. God damn it.
Oh, no. Yeah, he passed away.
That's what happened. Fuck.
Well, I got John.

Speaker 13 I'm saying your name.

Speaker 13 Speak your name. I don't know.
I miss you already.

Speaker 13 Gary Howard, happy hour. Checking in at Freer, Texas.
Janice Hill, Catherine Domont, Domero, Domero.

Speaker 13 Chelsea Ingram, Katie. Nope, that's Kate.
Kate Kennedy. Janelle Aquistopachi.
Aquistopachi. Aquistopachie.
Thank you. Wayne Brown.
Jordan Webster. Sarah Elda Elbadwi.

Speaker 13 Tana? Tana Krangle. Alicia.

Speaker 13 Furquir. Farquhar.

Speaker 13 What else do we got?

Speaker 13 Lana Reed, Jacqueline Tireman, Ethan Martinez, Renee Taylor, Deborah Spencer, Chris with no last name, Emily Bolin Bright, Michelle Milner, Shara Shara, Brown, Blake Gibb, Aaron Goats, Samantha Keiller, Allison Bryant, Courtney Eads,

Speaker 13 Iani with no last name,

Speaker 13 Colonial goat banger

Speaker 13 with no last name, old school

Speaker 13 bewigged goat banger. Yeah,

Speaker 13 Christian Back, Michelle Montgomery, Angela McCormick, Ash with no last name, Adam Seale, Brett Marsh, Ron Davis, Ashley with no last name, Jennifer Heidkamp, Sherry Zaistra, Zilstra,

Speaker 13 Walter Butler, Christina with no last name, Vince with no last name, Jamie Rubio, Allison Woford,

Speaker 13 Amber McCarty, Mindy Welch, Sarah Sparks, Linda Oldham, Oldham,

Speaker 13 Oldham, that's gross.

Speaker 13 Allie with no last name, Shannon Spollin, Spolin, Jacqueline Lowe, Rebecca, Rebecca Goldsmith, Stephanie Lodisi, Elijah Mullins, David Powell, Janelle with no last name, Richard McAllister, Alexa Kessel, Christian Shade, Shoddy, perhaps, Kirk Barnett, Christy Pennington, Kevin with no last name, Riley

Speaker 13 Joneston, Johnston, obviously. God damn it.
You don't pronounce the H. Rachel

Speaker 13 Ballos, Tote.

Speaker 13 Tony Two Times, Melinda Fiddler. Feidler.
It's probably Fiddler. Deb with no last name.
Karen Fernicola. Fernicola.
Yep. Woody with no last name.
Anthony Rapacelli. Yep.
Brandon DeHaas.

Speaker 13 Tanya with no last name. Misty Marshall.
Jens. Jensi, maybe.
Bassett. Bassett.
Gary Denault. David Suntrom.
Jasmine Villanueva. Matt Christian.
Reese H. Colleen Tanaka.
Brian Beard. Robert Joyce.

Speaker 13 Edward with no last name. Jessica Spilly Hamham.
I don't think that's true. I don't think that's real.

Speaker 13 Molly Angle, Michaela M. Josh fucking Moon, Christy, what is this? Mammarello,

Speaker 13 Cecilia Edwards, Zachary Mengels,

Speaker 13 Danelle R. Aaron Spence, Josh.
Nope, that's Scott. What? Scott Berglund.
Why did I do that?

Speaker 13 Veronica Bottellho. But

Speaker 13 Beth and Boston. Jay Briz, Schwabi, Schwabi Schwab, 19.

Speaker 13 Jennifer G, Robin DeFranzo, Nikki Corbin, Sam Devine, Russell Payton, Cheryl Burnett, Sherry Patreon, Swan Alden, Aiden, Swan, Aiden, Kelly with no last name, Katie Nickel, Nickel, probably,

Speaker 13 Michael Weeks, Dylan Jessup, M and K. The letters M and K.
Mejin or Megan, Mejen,

Speaker 13 Megan,

Speaker 13 Tara Laporte,

Speaker 13 Arabella with no last name,

Speaker 13 Nessa Sauris with no last name. Melissa Richards.
Jason. Connie.

Speaker 13 Konetska. Konichezka.

Speaker 13 Connie. What? Konizka.
I don't know how to do that. Heidi.

Speaker 13 Heidi. I don't know how to do yours either.

Speaker 13 Arn Suzukula.

Speaker 13 Arsuzlak.

Speaker 13 Those are three completely different names you just said something.

Speaker 13 Or Zulak. You guys can pick one that you want and figure it out.

Speaker 13 Ashley Canton, Lizzie Palota, Pallada, perhaps.

Speaker 13 Alicia Clark, Michelle Ortiz or Ortez, Jenny Thiel, Stacey Frost, Shira Dawkins, Amanda Diller, Justin Justina, Manspeaker, Mary Kate Consenza, fucking shit. Beth Rampley, Christopher Tarjan,

Speaker 13 Autumn Barrero, Shannon DePatty, Crystal Rucker, Beth Williams, Lynn Mood, Stephanie Hafferty, Icelander2733, James Jackson, Matthew Lear,

Speaker 13 Amanda Prince,

Speaker 13 Darkseid Dolls on Facebook. That's what that is.
Carrie Frank, Luke Rogers, Carly Derd, what? Derdsinski. Sandra Rutherford.
Robin Chambers. Marianne Keeswood Wells.
Dalton Durbin. Dalton Durbin.

Speaker 13 Whoa. That's

Speaker 13 an interesting name.

Speaker 13 Jessica Christ. Motorcycle jumper like Evil.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Dalton Durbin.

Speaker 13 Christ. I hope that's your last name.
Melissa Thomas, Ned White, Shannon

Speaker 13 Panagonopoulos, D. Trammell, Marlena Guadrama.
What? Guadrama. Stephanie Putman.
Putman. Putman Putnam.
Jackie with no last name. Giraffe E,

Speaker 13 Giraffe with no last name. Don Jackson.
And all of our patrons. You guys are the best.
Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you for all that you do.

Speaker 13 Honestly, you're the best, and we couldn't do it without you. Thank you for everything.
Patreon, you're the heart and fucking soul of what we're doing here. So thank you for everything.

Speaker 13 We really appreciate it. You want to follow us on social media, head over to shutupandgivemeurder.com.
There's drop-down menus. You can't stop them.

Speaker 13 They'll take you everywhere you want to go, goddammit, and won't even lure you to a wooded area to have you murdered. So do that.
Keep coming back and hanging out with us.

Speaker 13 And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye.