#591 - Best Friends Murder - Hudson, Ohio

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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.

Welcome to Small Town Murder.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Small Town Murder.

Yay!

Oh, yay, indeed, Jimmy.

Yay, indeed.

My name is James Petrogallo.

I'm here with my co-host.

I'm Jimmy Wistman.

Thank you so much for joining us on another crazy edition of Small Town Murder.

It's been crazy lately.

Oh,

obviously, there's been a lot of

bodies being uncovered here on the show lately.

It's been a wild ride, and it's not going to change this week.

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.

But first, definitely head over to shutupandgivemeurder.com.

Get your tickets for live shows

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.

It was terrific.

It's the best one we've ever done, I think.

It's

really amazing.

Great story.

Very funny.

And we had some good times with the weed and everything else.

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.

Louis is sold out.

So get your tickets right now.

Shut up and givememurder.com.

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.

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.

Just a, oh my God, it's that's why I needed 10 parts.

He's so bad.

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

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.

Anybody $5 a month or above, you are going to get an entire back catalog, hundreds of bonus episodes.

You've never heard that you can binge immediately.

And then you get new ones every other week, one crime in sports, one small-town murder, and you get it all.

Just give it to you.

There you go.

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.

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.

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 choices because

it was incredible to watch, man.

I watched every second of it.

Patreon.com slash crimeinsports.

And you get a shout out at the end of the show, too.

Jimmy, I'll screw your name all up.

Don't you worry about that.

That said, disclaimer here.

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,

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.

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.

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.

No.

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.

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 you might.

Either way, no complaining later.

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.

Shut up

and give me murder.

Let's do this, everybody.

What do you say?

Let's go on a trip.

Here we go.

We are going to Ohio this week.

Oh, yeah.

We're going to,

that's the reaction Ohio garners.

Going to Ohio.

Uh-huh.

Not oh, or even ew.

It's just

northeastern Ohio, this is.

It is right outside Akron.

Yeah.

It's about 20 minutes outside Akron, Ohio.

About 40 minutes outside.

That's 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.

That was back in, I want to say, November or October of last year.

This is in Summit County, area code 330 and 234.

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.

They got two area codes for this place?

You know what?

You know what?

I think I come up.

I just came up with one.

You're 40 minutes from Cleveland.

I think it works.

Motto is, you don't have to root for the Browns.

No.

You come here.

You don't have to.

You know, the Bengals and Bounds are fine.

More area codes than we deserve.

More than we need.

The city is named, a little bit of history here.

City is named for its founder, David Hudson.

He was from Goshen, Connecticut.

And I'm surprised he didn't.

Henry Hudson?

No, no, not Henry Hudson.

That's 1600s, 1500s.

So he,

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 home place, yeah.

The village of Hudson is located in the middle of Hudson Township.

And that was the village here was incorporated in 1837

in Hudson, David Hudson,

built the first log house in Summit County, Ohio.

First house in the whole county he built made out of logs.

So

I guess there's a lot of

early influence here as all New Englanders because this guy came from Connecticut and then told other people people to come here.

So all the people were coming from Connecticut in that area.

So it's kind of interesting.

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.

Northeastern Ohio was the West back then, by the way.

It was just the wild west.

Not even Michigan yet.

No, no.

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.

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.

The whole west side.

From

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.

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

Another guy here,

a

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.

Jesus Christ.

Also, he refinanced the Western Reserve Academy

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

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.

Yeah.

It collapse and 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.

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

Little to none.

Little to none.

great schools a great big library and cute new shopping district that is the hot spot for a lot of outings oh it's a hot spot cute wow very family friendly although i wish to see some more involvement with the high school youth involvement in what i hope so too

more involvement

every time i'm anywhere i go this place could use a lot more high school youth

anybody that says that i am concerned about who they are

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.

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

There's some tight high school ass around you.

Yeah, that's gross.

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.

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

High schoolers.

High schoolers.

What are you kidding me?

Holy shit.

That's wild.

So a lot can happen, but it is easily

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.

I won't explain what or why or how.

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.

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.

Okay.

Three stars.

There isn't a lot of crime in the area at all.

Crime is not a problem.

Okay.

That just, 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.

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, 23,000 and one.

And one.

And one.

They got one extra here.

About 51% women, 49% men.

Median age here is about five years above the national average.

It's about 43.5%.

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.

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.

Family, 71% married, normally 50-50.

These people are too rich to get divorced.

Too much to lose.

Yeah.

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.

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

43% married with children.

Only 5.9% are single with children here, too.

This is

very

wealthy area.

Race of this town, 90% white, 1.8% black, 3.8% Asian, 2.9% Hispanic.

Religion, about 47%.

And it's a mixed bag.

It's Ohio, so you never know.

The most here is Catholic, actually.

Maybe that's the Northeast influence.

I don't know.

You know, Catholics, the Baptists of the far west, apparently, as Ohio is.

Great Lakes region?

There's no

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.

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

That's more than double the national average.

So not too bad.

Cost of living here, $100 is regular.

Here, it's $80,000.

Low cost of living.

The housing is not affordable, though.

Median home cost here, median $431,500.

Boy, they are going to cook you on housing, man.

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.

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

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

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 home or something like that.

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

Yeah.

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,

while you're playing the sprinklers or some shit type of thing when you're a kid.

It says, here's from the listing.

Step back in time and experience the timeless elegance of this exquisite historic Victorian farmhouse.

Sounds fucking nice.

That is $705,000.

That's a starter house.

That's your starter.

Yeah.

There's no trailer parks here.

Yeah, nothing.

That's the low one.

Here's a five-bedroom, four-bath, 4,421 square feet.

Big old house on 1.45 acres.

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.

Out of your fucking mind.

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.

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,

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.

Like somebody went gaudy on this thing.

Like it was ridiculous.

2,650,000 bucks.

Your ass.

It's not even desirable and nice.

No, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even want it.

Like, put it that way.

It's, I don't like it.

It's a weird house.

Here is things to do in this town.

Here we go.

Number one, Sausage Fest.

There we go.

Why would you call anything that?

Which, I mean, I guess I understand it.

Like, we had a comic friend of ours at a joke where he said, you know, it was a sausage fest.

That sounds delicious.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, it does sound delicious.

He goes,

why is that bad?

I love sausage.

So, and that's what they're saying here.

They're embracing it.

This is going to be a celebration of all sausages.

Best sausage fest ever.

No discrimination.

Bring your sausage dangling down in whatever state it's in.

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.

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

A fun day of polka music, belly dancers.

How the fuck do belly dancers and polka music go together?

Don't ask me.

I just

happened to live here.

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.

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

Right.

How many can you fit in your mouth?

Shit like that.

It's all bad.

Yeah.

How many inches?

How many holes can you fill at once?

You know.

Then there's also the Summer Music Festival.

Okay.

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.

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.

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

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.

They say lively roots rock.

Roots rock?

The fuck is that?

Cover Cover and original tunes.

Boy.

Sponsorship to be determined.

Nobody's sponsoring Wish Garden quite yet.

Otherwise, they have a sponsor for every other show.

Three Birds and the Wire

is on also.

They're a vocal trio eclectic repertoire

crossing over many genres.

Right.

Okay.

The Cleveland Jazz Orchestra will be there.

They got that.

Then there is the Western Reserve Big Band.

These are college bands now.

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.

Clock Tower will be there July 13th.

Let's all watch out for them.

Clock Tower.

Jesus.

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, yeah, that was Austin.

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?

It's the highest point in town, obviously.

Yeah.

So it had to have happened.

I don't know.

No, that was the National Guard.

Oh, whoops, killing Vietnam War protesters.

Totally different.

Yeah, that was

not that.

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

Blue Lunch, Blue Soul

New Orleans Rhythm and Jazz.

What is this?

La Flavour with a U.

La Flavour.

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...

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.

She wasn't there.

That's what 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.

It's crazy.

Jesus.

And then finally, they close it all out with the Bel Airs.

You know what they sing?

Sounds from the 50s.

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.

So very low, about 75% under it.

So low.

And 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

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.

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.

Here we go.

Wow.

Okay.

Now,

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.

Oh.

Nothing like George.

Yeah.

So, Linda Carlin, she's born in December 1952.

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.

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.

She's kind of his like personal assistant, I guess you could say now.

But back then.

Office manager.

They'd

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

By 1987, this Steele guy, the doctor, he owned and she managed a shitload of businesses.

There's a health spa called the Pro Body Shop,

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.

So he is really making an empire, this guy, basically.

Plenty of businesses, yeah.

Yeah, and she is managing these businesses for him.

This is in the Greenville area.

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.

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.

She likes animals.

She's got two Rottweilers, seven seven horses.

You know how expensive it is to keep seven horses?

You know how expensive it is to keep a horse?

One horse?

You have to put one of those down when it dies.

Oh, my God.

The upkeep is.

Well, they do it by the pound.

It's expensive.

They're fucking huge.

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 pony.

They got the horse.

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.

You can't bring home elephants and horses.

I mean, the kids really.

Livestock, just keeping anything like that alive is crazy.

Oh, shit.

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

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

in Burma.

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

38?

Where do you house a 38-foot snake?

Outside.

You can't house.

In the jungle.

She does.

She's got such a big house, she can somehow fit with a 38-foot.

Wow, that is crazy.

38?

38 feet.

I don't get it.

It's crazy.

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 in the mid-80s, which is great money in the mid-80s.

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

Especially if you don't have to pay for a house or car.

You're really crushing it.

That's really amazing.

You can afford jewelry and 38 feet of snake at that point.

38.

You can afford to put

two or 300,000 mice into the thing every year, not even dollars in mice.

I mean, you're feeding that thing rabbits, probably.

I would imagine so.

You're feeding that thing like villagers.

Yeah, toddlers.

Something big.

Someone from from like a Burmese village, I think you got to feed.

They have a very specific taste, you know?

You got like feeder chihuahuas or something for that.

Some like

jungle person from there that wears like a loincloth.

You got to stuff them.

I don't understand.

I guess at that point, you just have a contract with the Humane Society that whatever you're putting in.

Whatever you got.

Give me it.

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

Wow.

So that's what's going on.

Linda's life is at this point in the 80s.

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.

She had an antique jaguar also, 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.

So she also has a boyfriend.

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.

That's who she's going out with.

Yeah.

She is going out with

a guy named Ed Swager.

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 a cocky college kid.

Old Eddie.

Yep, Ed Swager.

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.

She's treating him like, you know, like mom you can fuck.

Weird.

Real weird.

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

Pimatuning Lake.

P-Y-M-A-T-U-N-I-N-G.

Sure.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Another was Stonegate, which was a posh home on Methodist Road in Greenville, where she lived later on with Swigger, as we'll talk about.

Yeah, as she brings him in.

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According to her assistant, because Linda had an assistant, a woman named Jodi Snodgrass.

That's not a good name.

Snodgrass?

That sounds terrible.

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 workout guy, weightlifter, kickboxer, guy like that.

And she, you know, runs the gym.

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.

She made it sound like that was odd for

very 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 that now

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

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

Yeah.

Toss over the cap.

Yeah, 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.

Put this hat on.

Come on.

So, yeah, that's Ed.

He's born in 66.

He's got a brother named Michael Swiger.

Old Mike here.

He's born two years later.

So two-year difference with his brother Mike.

Important to know about him, too.

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

which is, they call it midway between Steubenville and Wheeling, West Virginia.

Midway between two terrible places.

Yeah.

So that's not great.

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

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.

But the Swager family did pretty well for themselves.

Apparently, their dad owns a furniture store, and their father, Ed Swager Sr., is a Jefferson County Commissioner as well.

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

Connected 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 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.

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.

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?

There's lemonade in the fridge for you.

And dad would come home.

And the big problem would be like, you know, the Beave has a project due, but it's not quite done the next day.

So we got to teach the Beave.

The Beave broke a window.

About managing his time.

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 watched.

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,

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.

And Eddie Haskell is

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?

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.

Be like, are you seriously upset with me?

Are you full of shit right now?

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.

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.

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

he's like.

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

Now,

they said that, you know, Swiger is like a beefy Eddie Haskell.

Eddie Haskell, but that'll kick your ass.

Okay.

Now,

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

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.

Mayor.

Like, very formal, you know what I mean?

At school.

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

E.

Weird.

Yeah.

A briefcase.

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.

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

So that is wild.

Oh, no.

The whole football team jerked off in it.

Oh, Jesus.

On top of the turd.

Gross.

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.

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.

He's a leader.

He's known as a bit of a 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.

Known as a real kind of a tough guy.

Does everything masculine?

Does all sorts of shit.

Now, his brother Mike, two years younger,

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.

and he earned the school's prestigious Clark Hinkle award and we all know who the fuck is Clark when you're talking about Clark Hinkle you know you keep your 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 so he won that

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 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.

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.

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,

what is it?

The musical.

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.

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.

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

performance center.

It's all bricks.

It's uneven and rocky.

Every Uber driver is like, oh, shit, when they pull onto there, God damn it.

I'm like, sorry, man.

My bad.

I didn't put it here.

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

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,

she ends up raising two sons and a daughter, kind of as a single mom here.

So Butch is brother and a sister.

Roger, Butch, is the the youngest child of the three.

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.

Yeah.

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

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.

So he did that.

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

What?

Very unlikely, right?

That's fucking crazy.

That's like, what's his name had polio?

The president?

No, no, no.

Somebody else had it?

A famous professional athlete at polio.

I can't remember who the fuck it was.

OJ.

OJ 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.

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.

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.

Really?

Yeah, he was the big star.

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, ah, 44 or whatever.

You know the giant guys in front of them that are all kind of with their finger hands on the ground?

One of those guys.

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.

He's like legendarily strong.

And I would assume he'd keep himself that way.

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.

He said that, yeah, he remembers that

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.

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.

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 have done to wear it.

Yeah,

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 years.

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

And

he's been through it, though.

Thinking about putting a new lawn in this year, stuff like that.

It's what he looks like.

It's just weird.

He is a very good athlete, like we said.

He also was a good high school wrestler.

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.

So

successful, looking like going to be a successful kid here.

His mother said, quote, it was a pleasure to raise him.

Yeah.

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

He did sure 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

His parents, they're not, they're not, they don't have quite as much money as the swaggers, but they're not poor at all.

Father owns an extermination business and pays child support and all that.

And the mother works full-time as a registered nurse.

So they do okay.

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 solidly middle-class family he comes from.

Now,

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.

Swiger, no, no, uh, 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.

But

yeah, he's a football boy.

That's what what i mean he's and he's he's just a strong guy seems strong-willed it seems like he could you know get through that and be fine

if you had polio i think if you if you're the best athlete in high school i don't i think as long as you it's the physical so as long as you pass the physical it's fine

so uh 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Okay.

Okay.

And then once he got in, his dad said he never talked about quitting.

He was into it.

He loved it.

Um, 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.

How do we, 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.

More than the chicken probably cost back then.

Phone calls were expensive.

People don't realize that.

But before cell phones and like free long-distance,

it was expensive to call people.

So

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

he's like a 38-year-old man, basically.

This guy.

He's believable.

He knows how to build shit.

He is called by a lot of people beaver cleaver with muscles.

So

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.

It's not Butch's forte, his streetwiseness here.

Well,

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.

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.

Eddie and Butch.

Yep.

They're frat brothers, too.

They were in the same frat together.

I'm sure they did a lot of things.

It'll be on our Patreon of fraternity hazing.

They played football together.

They did everything together here.

So in the fall of 85, they were both sophomore classmates, fraternity brothers.

They lived across the hall from each other at the frat house, Delta Sigma Phi, or Pi, Phi, P-H-I, is that Phi?

That's Phi.

That's fine, right?

Okay, yeah.

So they both liked weightlifting.

They both liked computers.

Yeah.

They're both about 5'8.

Swigger's a lot heavier than him, a lot more kind of muscular, thicker than

Butch.

well butch had uh he had some issues getting bigger yeah yeah it's just he's just built different one 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 oh um they're both known as soft-spoken athletic very strong and flexible both of them like they're both athletes swigger 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 dance like that's insane your Your taint and nutsack are destroyed with that.

You need to put like a pad in there or something first.

Yeah.

It's wild.

Now, Butch wrestled.

He played baseball and football and that sort of thing.

While Swager was more into the martial arts at this point, Pratt's a big hunter, and so is Ed.

Eddie's into hunting, and he's also very fond of guns.

And Eddie sometimes carries a pistol as well.

Jesus.

Now,

the president of Delta Sigma Phi said they 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.

Okay.

So Beaver and Eddie has.

That's true.

Yep.

And that's, you know, as friends are a lot of times.

So, you know, Butch is just calm and quiet.

They said Eddie, a lot of people describe Eddie as kind of a two-sided personality.

It's one of those things.

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.

Now, Butch's mom said after he met Ed, he liked nice clothes all of a sudden.

Butch.

Oh, yeah.

She said

they had some kind of paperback book.

They knew what a businessman is supposed to wear.

I don't know if they had some kind of guide to like,

you know.

businessman fashion or what, but

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.

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.

And they,

for lack of it, and they are it, right?

Yeah.

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 do.

For Christ's sake, yeah.

Yeah, that's crazy shit.

And Eddie, you know, know, kind of the same thing.

He's a grown-up.

They're both grown-ups.

But

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, 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.

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

Oh.

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.

Now, they say in the fraternity house, Eddie would always keep his room locked and shit like that.

He was very private.

Sure.

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

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.

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.

So they end up living together.

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.

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.

I thought it was nice to have just one guy that I was worried about belonging.

Yeah, now it's much better.

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

he always seems like he wants to at least project this maturity.

That's the only thing up thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, this business I'm

important person type of deal.

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

And

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?

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.

Well, they got kicked out of the house is the point.

They got blackballed.

They got blackballed from the frat, both of them.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

So

now,

the thing is,

they did do it.

They did rob this frat house.

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,

which seems like

a stretch.

You know what I mean?

Eddie seems like the type that talks you into doing shit, not the other way around.

It's just not the way it is.

And

Butch said, he told other people that Eddie talked him into it.

So I believe that more.

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 honest.

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.

One person said you could tell that Butch respected him.

If Ed convinced him of something, then Butch would be fully convinced.

He 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.

But, you know, that's when they asked him, do you know anybody who could have done this?

Everybody's response was those two.

So

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 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.

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 see it.

Where do you get that from?

Like, why were you here?

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 she said.

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.

He only stole $3,500 worth of shit, and he's spent $700 in hush money?

$1,000 so far.

Jesus.

So, I mean, that's right away.

That's a lot of money going out.

He was gone.

Gone.

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

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,

or mid-1987 here,

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,

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

There you go.

And they hire on at Butch as well.

Butch, too.

Yeah.

So

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

Swiger met Linda at the local gym, pro body, like we said.

And um, so in she'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 you know assistant manager of the furniture store.

It's very involved and enmeshed very quickly here.

Um, so there's that, and uh, now Pratt

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

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.

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.

Two boys, Butch and Eddie, talked about moving to Pittsburgh after graduation.

But then plans for graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh fell through, 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,

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.

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.

Is he a lawyer?

He wants to be.

Yeah.

He wants to go to law school.

So

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

A law library.

Yeah, I was going to say, I don't even know how she knew what books to buy.

A library.

Give me your regular old lawyer collection, I suppose.

So May 15th, 1988 is Graduation Day

at Thiel College here.

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.

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

And they, you know, 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.

And they would pool their expertise and somehow turn this into a business.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

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,

this is Butch's brother said was very elegant.

They went out to a real nice restaurant, jacket required type of place.

Oh, yeah.

One of those kind of joints.

So

they said, this guy says he really liked Mike Swiger, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, he's the older brother kind of taking it.

So Butch is always the one doing the bunny ears and the camera and the pictures and that kind of shit.

And

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.

She had to have like a, be a little coddled for that, a little coddled for polio.

A little coddled for everything.

A little coddled for all of that.

But his brother said he was great.

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.

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.

I looked out for him.

Sure.

So that's nice anyway.

Three years older is old enough to respect, but also old enough to think is like really cool because you're kind of close in age.

So that's a good age difference.

Now,

on graduation day, when this is all going on,

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.

And they said, why?

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.

So the next night after the graduation party,

they, 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,

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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Now back to the show.

So they do.

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.

What?

An Uzi.

Yeah.

Not a regular gun, a fucking Uzi.

Big gun, yeah.

Well, a little gun, but shoots a lot of of bullets.

Yeah, it's generally

a nine millimeter, but that's a lot of shitload.

Yeah, shoots a lot.

A lot of volume there.

So Liz said that Swigger followed Pratt out the front door, then she heard a gunshot.

Oh, just

nobody was hurt or anything.

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

Okay.

Now, that's really interesting.

So the next night,

Liz,

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

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,

Butchie packed up and left.

He was gone.

Took the fuck off.

Gone.

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.

Real weird shit.

That is, 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.

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.

So, yeah, they suspect arson, obviously.

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

is that there was a phone call that came into the police department right before the fire started.

I mean, 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.

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

BP, Butch Pratt, they think.

So

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

Yeah.

So the guy said it was a strange twist of fate.

I don't know to this day who called.

Not sure.

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

And 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 was

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.

So May 27th, 1988.

All right.

The five days after the fire

here, Pratt is

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

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.

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.

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 Swager at his college.

They gave it all to him, and he sold it off there.

So they could, yeah, it's perfect crime, you know what I mean?

Except for that one of the people confessed to it.

Except for somebody talk.

Yeah, yeah.

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

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

So they went into both.

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

Now,

they said

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.

If he did anything wrong, I think he was led to it.

He'd just follow.

So everybody thinks that Butchy is just kind of weak and will follow.

Just come along, go along.

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 a bigger deal.

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

a little burglary.

Yeah.

So he denies any involvements 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.

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

or lost money.

They don't know which.

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.

That's the point of the fire.

So they said that

this is is both Linda and Dr.

John Steele filed court documents accusing unnamed former employees of embezzling more than $100,000 from the store.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

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

Sure.

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

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.

She sure had guts enough to come there and listen.

So maybe she was a spy.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So now, Butch is very worried.

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

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.

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.

And

Garshak, by the way, would say that he thought that Butchy was very not street-wise.

It was the words he used, too.

He said that Butch told him he'd overheard Linda and Ed Swiger planning the fire at the furniture store.

Also,

so

here's the fire story.

How did the fire happen?

Let's find out now.

This is what they told the insurance company or what they no, this is the real deal.

This is the real thing that happened.

Remember Mike Swager, Ed's little brother there?

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

So then when they were in college, Mike at Case and Ed at Thiel College, Ed tried to be friends with him.

He said, that's when Ed started, you know, being like friends with me, his brother, his little brother.

He said, it seemed like he was making a real attempt.

Right.

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.

So Michael took off and went to go see his brother.

Ed said said the furniture store where he worked needed a security system installed.

Will you come help me install it?

Sure.

So Mike said, sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Now, June 16th, 1988.

Okay, there's a woman named Teresa Walkle.

Oh, Walklechik.

Walklechick.

W-A-K-U-L-C-H-I-C, or K.

I'm sorry, last letter K.

Wocklechick.

Now, Teresa here,

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

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

saying he basically sent over flowers because he's going to go visit her the next day in Akron.

All right.

So he asked 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.

That day, June 16th, he's getting his shit together here.

And Teresa and her roommate, Caroline Luli, went driving around Akron that day with Linda Carlin.

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.

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.

This 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's

you get right back on the bus and just sit there.

I'll go wherever this fucking thing is headed.

I don't care.

This is worse than Sally Jesse and

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.

As long as there's no Jerry Springer or

Sally Jesse or any of those fucking talk show shits.

At the Greyhound Station, too, which is the ultimate.

That's the ultimate venue.

That's the ultimate venue for a relationship fucking throwdown as the

Greyhound Station in Akron.

Your girlfriend and your mistress are going to confront you in front of strangers at the Greyhound station.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus.

By the way,

you watched the Jerry Springer documentary, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, we talked about it.

I love how they have the Springer triangle, they called it,

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

They all came from.

It was so funny.

This is what we call the Springer Triangle.

So, anyway,

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.

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 got to figure all this out.

So,

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.

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

He's trying to save up for a car.

He doesn't have a car at this point.

So that's what he wants.

And he was trying to, he's been working his ass off.

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.

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.

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.

True.

Very nice.

Now, solid words.

Two weeks earlier, he had seen Teresa.

He drove, he rented a car

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.

He's, yeah.

He's trying to get in.

But he's 22.

I mean, this is what 22-year-olds do.

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

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.

So that is why he wanted to take the bus 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.

Just beautiful.

In his bag, he carried

some shit.

He had the thank-you note from his mother to Teresa's family

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.

His mom

packed him a thing there.

That's nice.

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

wipe that place out with his gas, man.

That is going to

be people

hanging out the windows of this fucking thing.

Holy shit.

The downtown, isn't that where I rented a car to go to COVID?

Yes.

We know exactly where the downtown bus station is.

This is not good.

No, that's why it's a lovely location.

And you didn't say anything.

I was like, we were there.

It was terrible.

Remember that?

It was ugly.

Shit is ugly.

I said to the guy,

I asked him, a lot of people rent cars from here.

And he goes, not really.

He's like, we usually just move them from here to the airport.

It's a bus station.

Oh, people probably drop them off there.

They wouldn't be on this fucking bus.

They probably drop him off there

to avoid having to wait at the airport.

I get it.

Okay.

Right.

And it's cheaper to drop it off, not at the airport.

There's an airport fee when you drop off a rental car.

Gotcha.

So this particular day, Mike Swiger was visiting his family.

I'm sorry, not Mike Swager, Mike Pratt, Butch's brother.

The brothers mixed up here.

He was visiting his family that day also and saw him.

packing up to go to Akron, saw Butchie packing up.

He said he and I were in the house alone.

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.

He is going to the station to catch a 1205

bus to Akron from Pittsburgh.

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.

You're supposed to pick him up Sunday night.

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.

So he 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.

His mom went to work for her shift at the Elder Crest nursing home.

Elder Crest.

Jesus.

Euphemistic.

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.

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

she says he never showed up.

He never, I waited at the bus station for him.

He never got here.

So Ed saw, didn't he 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.

And you pull away.

It's not your kid.

It's your friend.

You know what I mean?

So he said, I never saw him get on the bus, but

Teresa says.

He was at the station.

He never showed up in Akron, though, she said.

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.

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.

But it sounds like you'd remember the guy.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Type of deal.

So So that's how that goes.

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.

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, vanishing the thin air.

So, yeah, she said that.

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

and she said no he wasn't worried about it because his father got him a good lawyer and it's all it was all under control it's his first defense and the lawyer had told him it's your first defense your record is is perfect otherwise you have all these awards and everything you'll get probation you know what i mean you don't up again it'll it'll be gone sure

so yeah and the cop said

the smally is his name the investigator he said in this sort of situation he said quote they usually pop up alive so he's like oh wasn't wasn't too worried about him.

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.

Yeah.

What if he met a chick on the bus and went somewhere with her?

What if he 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, the guy who dropped him off at the bus station, and their friend Rich Baker, they go out

on looking for him, basically.

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.

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

And they said nobody at the college was more helpful than Ed Sweiger.

He was very helpful.

And also Linda Carlin, also very helpful.

They should be.

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.

They said, well, we didn't know he was missing.

So let's try to find him.

And everybody was helping.

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.

They went around to every single place and asked, have you seen Butch?

Have you seen Butch?

Got to look for him.

Couldn't find Butch.

Nowhere to be be found.

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.

Yeah.

Just a little too nice, a little weird.

So then

Baker and Were, they go home to Munhall and just join the Pratt family in waiting, basically.

Everybody waits.

So

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

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.

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.

So his friend Ed Wurrer 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.

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

We don't know.

which.

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.

Maybe he caught wind of these two broads about to

ambush him.

He's got to go down at the bus station.

Jesus Christ, man.

So that is, you know, the week it happens.

That's June 88.

And time goes by.

A year goes by.

What?

No butch.

No butch.

Wow.

Mid-1989, still no butch.

No idea where he's at.

No idea.

No one's heard from him.

They don't know.

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

Yeah.

He says that he thinks that he and Ed probably, quote, work something out.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

So we get to September of 1989.

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.

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.

Now,

she,

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

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.

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.

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.

that's it um but you know who knows um so the fire by the way 1217 Highland Road is the address one of the cops investigating said the fire quote brought it all to light 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 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.

So

she had just moved into this home a month earlier, by the way.

It was like a brand new house.

Yeah.

In Ohio?

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.

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

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, and they rule it arson.

Okay.

So what are Eddie and Mike up to at this time?

Let's find that out.

Where are they?

Because they're not with Linda.

They're not hanging out with Butch, obviously.

Well, Ed is a second-year law student at Temple University.

Doing great.

Doing great.

And Mike is a sophomore in the mechanical engineering department at Case Western Reserve University.

A couple fellas doing fine.

They're doing great for themselves.

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.

She is basically, for the past 15 months, has been doing nothing but investigating, writing letters.

She's writing letters to the blood banks.

Did this kid come in?

IRS, she writes letters to file his taxes.

Yeah.

If he's taxes are filed, he's alive.

So

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.

Even there, has he come in to donate anything or to buy anything?

Have you seen anything?

Yeah, that is the thing about disappearing people.

When they disappear, they continue donating to their charitable.

Well, usually, yeah,

they still have extra stuff they got to get rid of.

You know what I mean?

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.

Never going to wear these.

I'm telling you right now.

They're out of style.

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,

draining her cash and everything else.

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 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.

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.

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.

It's been some time.

He disappeared June 17th, 1988.

This is about 9 a.m.

The day before, at about 2.15 p.m.

at the Sharon, Pennsylvania police station, we had

Linda Carlin came there, and they said they sat her down because they're they're talking about her arson, the fire still.

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.

I guess your answer is, what do you know?

Yeah, let's hear it here.

Come on, lay it out.

Sweetheart.

What do you know?

My answer is going to depend.

tremendously on the information that the police already possess.

So, yeah,

what he had done to Butch.

Now,

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.

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

So

anyway,

Linda, they go, Well, how can you prove that this happened?

Yeah, what do you get?

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?

She said, Well, I'll show you where he's buried.

And they went, We'd love to see that.

Shut the fuck out.

Turns out he is buried 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.

Well, we'll talk a little about it.

How did they get him from the fuck.

Oh, don't worry.

Yeah.

From the bus station to a farmhouse in another place.

Oh, it's an interesting fucking tale.

It's, dude, it's so twisted and fucked up what they did to this kid.

So

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.

She knew the whole fucking time what happened here.

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.

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.

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

So, yeah,

this is what's going on here.

This is what prompted Linda.

Linda said she would have never came forward, except the fire at her house

made her come forward.

Expose.

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.

She thought that

fire was a warning.

So I got to get the fire.

Yeah, so she said, I'm turning them in.

They're going to kill me next.

So that's Arsene.

She picked them up.

Scared the shit out of her.

Yeah.

Scared her.

Wow.

Scared her.

Scared her good.

So that's why.

That's the opposite of what a fire would do in theory of doing it.

Yep.

The whole point was to shut her the fuck up, probably, and instead it made her scared and made her run to the cops.

Yeah.

Wow.

This is like in the mob when

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.

Fucking.

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.

He has

every bone in his face is fractured.

Every bone in his face.

He's been

beaten beyond recognition.

Then

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.

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.

They wanted to find him, not to save him or help him.

They wanted to find him.

That's the way I told you so.

Because he blew his arraignment.

He didn't come.

So he's a wanted man.

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

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

So the cop also said she felt it was Ed Swiger 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.

So that's what happened.

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.

She thought he was alive.

He was 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.

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

I brought you five grandkids.

I brought you, which I'd be really, but you got married and had kids and didn't fucking contact me?

What the fuck?

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.

Can you watch them tonight, by the way?

We're going to have a date night.

Is that cool?

yeah remember that

cool in there cool i like

jason robard's going cool

his name is cool it's so funny so um she said he was the all-american boy

so um another here reaction the police chief said at the time it was about the only thing anyone ever talked about 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

anybody seen Butch Pratt?

We can't find Butch Pratt.

So, October 6th, the next day,

Eddie and Mike are arrested.

Sure, yeah.

Both of them, both brothers are arrested.

Not Mike Pratt, Mike Swiggy, just to be clear here.

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.

He is also engaged to who?

Teresa Walkacek.

Oh,

yeah.

Yep.

He moved in on Butchie's Girl, too.

Oh, really?

Yep.

That's insane.

And they're living together.

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

Holy shit, the connections are connecting.

Dots are fucking

coming together.

We'll talk about it.

Maybe.

We'll talk about it.

That's terrible.

She's a terrible person.

She's a monster.

Wait till you hear exactly exactly what happened.

Oh, boy.

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

I think they shocked Jimmy with that, too.

Yeah.

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.

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

That is fucking wild.

And Teresa and her friend Carolyn, Lulie, had gotten

their student teaching and gotten their degrees.

So that's what they were doing.

They were working in the school district as teachers.

They're just going to have this disappear forever.

Yeah.

Law students, teachers, homeowning engineering students.

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.

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.

The chief said Ed was a very manipulative person and he always carried a gun.

So anything's possible with that, basically.

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.

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

Now,

Swiger,

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.

Okay.

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 on the passenger side on the end there, and they drove.

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

where

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

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

Yeah.

And I need to talk to him.

So just take him here so I can talk to him, basically.

I'll be hiding him.

Drop him off at a barn in the middle of nowhere.

Not even in a barn.

Off an old oil well access road.

Oh, for heaven's sake.

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.

Now, to get out of the car, Butch has to get out first to let her out because she's in the middle.

This carohan's driving.

The driver doesn't get out.

Butch got out.

They shut the door and fucking took off on him.

Bitches.

God damn it.

Left him fucking standing there going, what the fuck?

I sent you flowers yesterday.

My mom paid for those.

Holy shit.

That's fucked up.

They said they left him standing on the gravel service road to an oil well.

Awful.

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.

Here is Dorothy Voudrogovich, who taught American history to four different swaggers.

Really?

She said they're just not guilty.

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.

But

they didn't.

They didn't.

The lady, the teacher there, Vudrogovich, 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.

Current events.

Remember, those were so much fun.

Oh, yeah, that's fun shit.

I loved them.

Today they suck.

It's a miserable section.

It's a miserable section for a while.

So post-9-11 got to be kind of a,

that was fun.

So the newspaper there

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?

They just stopped using their names in the paper because it embarrassed the dad.

Yeah.

And

he's too powerful.

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.

So they are the talk of the town, though.

It doesn't matter.

There's a

Hodix nightclub in Tiltonsville where Commissioner Swiger drops by for a beer once in a while.

That's the dad.

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.

Yeah.

It's like, I grew up in the depression.

And these fucking kids, they had everything, these kids.

What are they doing?

The other one, the manager, the president of the fraternity said they were inseparable.

They were so close.

I didn't think that one would be capable of murdering the other one.

Talking about Adam Butch.

Now, Ed, they sit Ed down and they go, hey, listen, we got some people saying some shit.

What up?

And he said, it was an accident.

Just accident.

So that's going to be our defense's accident?

His story to the cops is

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.

You know, accident.

Yeah, you know how accidents happen.

That's what he said.

That was a good thing.

So we did this to him, and then what?

Now, Mike has a different story.

Mike is not...

Is his story that he accidentally suffocated?

No, no, no.

Mike is not quite as hardcore as Ed.

Ed ain't going to give shit up for the most part.

Mike's a little more pliable.

He's the younger brother.

Sure.

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.

Yeah, laughed.

That is fucked up.

Oh, my God.

He said that

Eddie lured Butch out there to the middle of fucking nowhere.

And

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.

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.

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

a little too hard.

He described Ed slamming Butch's head on the ground and

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

to like push him down.

Ha ha.

Wow.

Ed's a bad guy.

He's a bad,

he's a dangerous guy.

He's a dangerous, manipulative person that will just stop at nothing.

Everybody in his way is his friend.

Everybody in his way is expendable.

Yeah.

He has no loyalty to anybody.

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.

Right.

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 a

un 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.

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

So

they said that the,

by the way, remember the person who

was the

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

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, so that she was a spy.

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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

Butch had told his friends that he was avoiding Ed by using an answering machine to screen calls.

That's all.

I just screen him out, and it's fine.

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.

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,

it's all falling.

It's all falling over.

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.

It's about fucking time.

That's what I mean.

I don't know.

The body's buried on your property and you know where it is.

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

You pointed to it.

And then we found a body.

First fucking

inkling of high top I see.

You're in cuffs.

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

there.

That's her, and the other two are also going to be conspiracy, Teresa and Carolyn.

And they're both teachers.

Miss Welkachuck won't be in today because she's been arrested for conspiracy to commit murder.

So

we're going to learn indefinitely.

Yeah.

We're going to learn about the ABCs from somebody else today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She's playing go fish.

They're playing poker.

Totally.

Different games.

She's going to lose tremendously if she does.

Never mind checkers and chess.

Yeah.

This is go fish and lawn darts together.

I don't know what's going on here.

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.

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.

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.

They told Butch they were going to a party.

Uh-huh.

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.

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.

And then she said she saw Ed and Mike Swiger, too, in the rearview mirror.

And that was the last she saw of the whole thing.

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.

And the kid didn't expect it either.

So he kind of, it was out of nowhere.

He, you know, he didn't know he was in a fight.

So, yeah, best friend.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

At that place they lived at.

That's how he knew about it.

Now,

they basically put him in a large garbage bag and put him in the hatchback of a Pontiac Phoenix.

What even is that?

It's what I said.

What the fuck is a Pontiac Phoenix?

I'm thinking

like one of those sites.

Are you a firebird?

A Pontiac Phoenix.

They 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 app.

Look that up right now.

Pontiac Phoenix.

That's

a hatchback of some kind.

Really?

Yeah, and this newspaper reported it as a car.

So 1980s, I assume.

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.

They like the literation.

The Chevy Chevette, the Pontiac Phoenix.

They like that shit.

Total piece of shit is what it is.

Total piece of shit.

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.

They started making a Grand Am instead because it didn't sell.

Poor kid.

Jesus Christ.

That somehow makes it way worse.

Yeah.

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

and Michael Swiger's girlfriend, Christine Cassandra, who didn't know anything about anything.

She had no idea.

She thought they were just going out that night.

She didn't know there was a body in the truck.

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.

I'm sorry, dude.

Like, it's a Chevette.

You'd see it weighed down back there.

It's not

a tiny piece of shit.

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.

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

acted like nothing even happened.

Wow.

So Butch's mom is pissed off, obviously.

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 he was definitely trying to make it more yeah I don't send flowers to my friends that say miss you see you soon love you

this weekend yeah yeah I'm not that's you send that to a chick you're trying to hook up with

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 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.

Behind the back of the 30-something year-old successful galaxy.

Yeah, you know, behind her back.

Yeah.

So

she said that she, this is so sad, dude.

She keeps Butch's voice on her answering machine

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

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.

Jesus Christ.

This poor woman.

Oh, my God.

It's like people keeping 9-11 phones.

Fuck, man.

That's so brutal, man.

So sad.

That's so sad.

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

Haven't you?

Have you done that?

No.

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

had any friends that.

Actually, I did have friends who their mom left their voicemail up on and kept their phone active and we could call it to hear them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I called like twice and I was like, this is fucked up.

I can't do this.

This is creepy.

It's too deep.

I had a voicemail from Rod on my phone after he died and I had that phone long past when it 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 I didn't like, 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.

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.

Yeah, I would hope so.

Now, they decide the cases will stay in Ohio.

There's a big thing.

Are they going to be tried in Pennsylvania where the bodies were found?

In Ohio, where it happened?

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 under our jurisdiction laws, wherever the crime started.

So

Edward,

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 butcher.

Damn.

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.

Edward Swagger 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 gravesite.

Okay.

Now December 1989.

Trials are coming.

They're coming.

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.

So that is fucking crazy.

She also, Teresa, faces three counts of obstructing justice for protecting the identities.

And

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.

They're in there.

Yeah, they're fucking in there.

The Mercer County District Attorney said this is the most bizarre case he's ever been involved with.

Just at the whole thing, it's so, it's like a tooth.

It has roots that go way deeper than you think.

It's fascinating.

It really is.

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.

There's no heat of the moment.

There's no...

No, it's just cruel for the sake of being cool.

Yeah, and you couldn't even do it in a fucking easy way.

You couldn't have your gun on you and like, 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 you had to fucking beat the kid to death which was a horrifying way to die that's fucking disgusting um they said also the prosecutor said that linda carlin and edward swiger are sociopaths who lie with alacrity which

gusto um yeah alacrity is a good one there the uh supporting cast they said was equally as disturbing The guy said there's cruel and then there's extraordinary.

These people went on with their lives like nothing They knew Butch was dead and allowed his mother to wonder.

You don't find people who are this evil.

I agree.

And it's for what?

To cover their own asses?

So he wouldn't not get into law school.

I mean,

for some reason,

man.

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.

They caught me.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a good story.

Yeah.

It's not his fault.

And you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he talked to George.

But wouldn't you be helping him?

Yeah.

That's the other thing.

It'd be one thing if Butch was the mastermind talking Ed into do it, and he's like, oh, this asshole ruined my life.

It's all your idea.

You forced this guy to go along with you.

This is crazy.

You made choices, man.

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.

So

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.

That woman went back and reported back to

Linda.

They said that Linda enlisted the aid of Teresa by telling her that Butch was bad and that

he had knocked up one of her friends.

So this guy, because she's like, what do you mean?

And

she's telling her friend, oh, this is crazy.

You don't want to go out with him.

He's a scumbag.

He knocked up one of my friends and now he's trying to get with you and blah, blah, blah.

That's how they talk Teresa into doing this.

So

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.

Then it all changed.

Everything went downhill from there.

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.

They said that they called Ed Swager 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.

He made her do all this.

Absolutely.

At one point, she said that

Ed and Butch showed up

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.

Steele, the guy that owns all this.

Oh.

And she said that Linda, Linda's lawyer said that Linda begged Ed not to do it, and that Swagger told her,

either you burn the store or we kill him.

Take your pick.

Which would you rather?

And she said, well, I guess burn the store.

Fire or murder.

That's it.

And they said, okay, and they burnt that motherfucker to the ground.

Now,

her whole defense is based on fear of Ed.

That's it.

Fear of Ed Swagger.

It's her only defense.

She was forced to participate in everything, not only the kidnapping, but also the furniture store arson, forced into that also.

The prosecution, though, contends that she's a very willing 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.

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.

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.

Linda has 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, 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.

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.

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 there.

Through her whole testimony, she's sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.

I mean, just everything.

It's all sobbing.

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.

That's her quote, by the way, in an open court.

A horrible Eddie,

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.

The verdicts here, the jurors deliberate for about five hours on this one.

Oh.

Which seems like a long long time for someone who says she did shit.

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.

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.

So, they're going over that to make sure that what she said here matches up with that, basically.

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?

She'd be like, ham and cheese.

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.

So she is found guilty of conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

Oh.

That's what she was.

That's all she was up for.

Okay.

Now, then the sentencing, though, the judge sentences her to, you, ma'am, may fuck off 7 to 15 years in prison for the conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

Yeah.

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

Butch was kidnapped.

So I almost called him Billy like overboard.

Bad Billy Pratt.

It's so hard not to.

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.

Yeah, he looked more like a Butch than a Billy.

Butch Pratt, yeah.

That's what you could have called him Butch, and that would have been something.

Yeah.

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

for the furniture store.

Yeah.

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

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

other bullshit.

She's going to have to get her fire staff ways.

Yeah.

For her firebug action.

Sure.

Now, February 19, February 1990 is Ed's trial.

Yeah.

Now, is Linda going to testify against him?

No, she is not, actually.

Oh.

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.

Okay.

Because she's still trying to protect herself about shit.

So she's not going to exactly spill everything.

Ed testifies.

He has no choice.

Oh.

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.

This is going to be the death penalty is on the table.

So this is Jesus.

This could be the difference between this and that.

So he's got to get up there.

That he, by the way, does not change the tone of his voice at all through the entire testimony.

Every newspaper comments on how creepy it was that he was just monotone, like he was a robot reciting something, just no emotion, no

dead inside.

He said, quote, he was like a brother to me

about 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.

He said that, you know, 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.

He said that he and Michael got out of Michael's car, which had been concealed from view.

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.

Oh.

Once they shut the car doors, he was 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.

And ran at him and tackled him.

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 gonna fight them both.

I'm gonna start the fight too.

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.

Mike stood off to the side and watched all of this.

He helped with everything, but he did not get involved in the beating.

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.

Who can be sure in these trying times?

You know what I mean?

Asked when he knew that Pratt was seriously injured, he said, quote, I remember him not fighting back anymore.

That'll do it.

Questions about the role of his brother?

He said, he didn't do anything as far as I could tell.

So he said, while he lay injured on the ground, he and his brother talked, while Butch lay injured on the ground, Eddie and his brother Mike sat around and talked about what to do.

What do we do?

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.

So you didn't have this planned ahead of time?

I think you did.

So he decided to

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.

Wow, that's how much he likes.

It's a weird mom relationship.

I'm going to go ask my mom what to do with this body.

I don't know.

So

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.

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.

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.

But this way, it makes 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.

And that's so cruel.

So it is a 10-man or 10-woman, two-man jury.

And they begin deliberations at about 3 p.m., took a recess for dinner, and then did it for another two hours and then left for the day.

The next day, they come in with a verdict pretty quick, and they find him guilty of all murder-related.

Of everything, of everything.

Yeah.

You did it.

You fucking did it.

Now, the sentencing comes around, and

yeah, they said this is his friend Wurr there, who he built the deck for and all that kind of shit.

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.

There was going to be some day 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.

That's nice to say.

The judge, on the other hand, says, you, sir,

may fuck off, convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 30 years.

Oh, my God.

With a consecutive 10 to 25-year sentence for aggravated kidnapping and a consecutive three-year

sentence for gun specification as well.

Feels like they didn't believe anything he said.

You is what they said.

Yeah.

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.

That's wild.

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.

And then facing more time because of drug violations committed while in prison.

He fucking fell apart.

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.

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.

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.

Like the Lori Daybell case there, when they interviewed those jurors afterwards, it was the most interesting thing in the fucking world.

When they first said, when did you find out that she killed her kids too?

That's the best question.

They're like,

yeah, people were telling you, as soon as we left, everyone was shouting it out.

Google her, Google her.

And the one juror goes, I looked up and there's a Netflix documentary.

I think I know what I'm doing tonight.

And I I was like, that's.

You've been in Syria.

That's amazing.

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 because I don't really pay attention to that kind of thing.

It's fascinating how many people don't know anything about it.

Nothing.

I think, I mean,

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

forever.

A long, long time.

Fuck yeah.

Fucking pre-Amy Fisher, Joey Butta Fuco, man.

I mean, we're talking

fuck yeah, man.

Why Did Johnny Kill was a documentary I watched when I was a kid on HBO.

So interesting.

It was to, 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.

I thought you were putting it on your dick.

And I was like,

I was like, this is going to be disturbing.

I don't 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.

I'm going to 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

you were going for your dick.

My dick just started really.

I mean it was like a fucking missile down.

It was hard and tingly and I just had to rub it and keep watching.

This is just great.

Ever since then, I'm just I'm rock hard for three hours during these stories.

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

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.

This is in the middle of it.

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 next month.

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.

Ms.

Carlin was not accused of either abducting Roger Pratt or of beating him to death.

She was accused and convicted of being present, along with Ed Swager, Mike Swager, Carolyn Luli, Teresa Walkachuk at a meeting when plans were made to trick Roger into meeting with the Swagger brothers.

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.

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.

I spent many sleepless hours

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.

During the jury deliberations, I found the others had very similar feelings.

Judge Mary Spicer handled this case in a very fair and professional manner, and did defense lawyer, or as did defense lawyer Robert Baker, and prosecutors, whoever it doesn't matter.

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.

Carlin.

Sure.

I tend to agree.

I don't think they told Linda that murder was afoot.

You got to assume she didn't know that part.

I mean, but maybe not.

Would you, okay.

All right.

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?

Let's, I don't know.

I mean, I guess if you knew her real well,

I don't know that I'd want to be involving anybody.

I wouldn't want to tell anybody what's going to happen.

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.

That's possibly it.

I'm not sure.

So, March of 1990 is Mike Swagger's trial.

Yeah.

And it's a one-day trial.

Oh.

It's one that his lawyer later on says he's never heard of and is a disgrace.

Oh.

A one-day trial for a murder trial.

He's like, that's crazy.

You need some more.

Yeah.

Something.

So they said that he made a decision to give up a jury trial on the charges

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.

So once they decide that, Ed waives the jury trial and goes right to a judge instead.

I think it makes sense for Mike because a jury could get real over-emotional.

Yeah.

about stuff and blame him more than maybe he had culpability to be blamed.

Whereas a judge will look at it legally.

There won't be any emotions involved in it.

You know what I'm saying?

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 the hope, I assume.

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

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 from previous trials in the case.

It's pretty much it.

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.

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.

He is guilty.

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

stop him, yeah.

Or never stopped him ever?

Never stopped him.

You know what it is.

Helped bury the body.

You know what it is.

You know what you're doing here.

So he is sentenced to, you sir, may fuck off.

In grand total, 28 to 53 years.

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.

And Linda's going to fucking actually hope that she wished she did pretty soon.

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 our drivers.

They both pleaded guilty to single counts of conspiracy to kidnap and got you, young ladies.

May fuck off probation.

Probation.

She looked in the rear view and saw him doubled over.

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.

I don't know how much Carolyn knew, but Teresa was involved.

Yeah.

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.

Probation.

And so probation.

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.

You've been out on bond the whole time.

You come to court now.

You get probation.

No, no, no, no, no.

You're going to do sometime.

Every time you have a background check.

Yes, it has to be on there.

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.

Because that's fucked up.

It's not cool.

Yeah.

I need you to get out and have to work to get get back in shape.

Yeah, this is bad.

I want you to be all carb chuttered.

I'm just drawing it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Big time.

And with a, you know, a relationship going on with a 300-pound Hispanic woman.

I'd like that going on for you guys.

Keeping you safe and your hair braided.

Keeping you safe and you keeping her hair braided.

That's what I'd like for them.

Just, you know.

Holy shit, probation.

Probation.

That's the thing.

That's the most mind-blowing thing to me.

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?

That's crazy.

You, you, you delivered him.

You sandwiched a man in the back seat.

He might as well have had a bow on his head.

Like, just delivered gift wrap to these people to murder.

Probation.

Probation.

Wild.

I'm shocked at that.

So, 1997 comes around.

There is a TV movie

called What Happened to Bobby Earl.

What?

Who the fuck is Bobby Earl?

Who's 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 Bobby Earl at?

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.

They're not upset.

They're like, they actually got uh the mom got 500 for it oh cbs

gave them 500 bucks gave them 500 bucks for this we're gonna sell pepsi ads over your uh 500 bucks 500 bucks man that's wild but he did 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.

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 and, like,

saying it's the first time they've been able to laugh about it ever.

And it was the most complimentary thing we could possibly hear would be victim's 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.

Yeah.

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?

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.

There were a few things that have been changed, but for the most part, it's 90% true.

You know, like his name.

Yeah, what's what the fuck?

What's fucking eating Gilbert Grape over here is not the same

thing.

That's what we do every week from now on is just change names.

Change all the names.

Have some fun.

Yeah, fuck.

We could say, we could lie then.

But then nobody would listen.

They want the truth.

That's the difference.

Yeah.

We could make shit up.

It could be like, and then a dragon came out.

Oh, my God.

Bobby Earl.

Bobby Earle.

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.

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.

Those who watched the movie looking for local scenes were disappointed as it was filmed in Toronto.

I was

nothing like central Ohio or northern Ohio.

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.

Pratt said the screenplay was based on interviews with his family and transcripts from the trial of those convicted in Butch's murder.

So they go on to say the case.

We don't need to do that part.

So they said that, but they talked to everybody

in it.

He said today that shortly before, this is a 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.

So they have to get into that.

They say Strawer thought the movie also was reasonably accurate.

He said things were true, but out of sequence, he said, adding that he was surprised by the similarity of his own name to the name given to Squigger's character in the movie, Tom Stahl.

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.

Michael also, Michael said his mother Rose, this is Michael Pratt, by the way, Butch's brother,

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

Michael, 1998 comes around.

Michael's appealing.

He argues that the court, trial court, incorrectly denied his motion for relief from judgment and his petition for post-conviction relief.

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.

In other words, we don't really care about you.

Fuck off.

So 1999 comes around, and Linda's up for parole.

Oh.

Ohio parole.

Then she's got 10 years to do in Pennsylvania for arson.

They gave her 10 years for that.

Same.

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.

Now she's up for parole and the victim's family is here, the Pratt family is trying to keep her in prison.

Yeah.

So the Ohio Parole Board agreed to hear an appeal of its,

they basically, January 2nd, 1999, they stay parole Linda.

Really?

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.

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.

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 15 years in the Ohio Reformatory for Women at Marysville since her conviction.

They said two parole board members granted the parole.

I think it's a three-person board.

Yeah.

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.

So basically just, you know, if we can hand you right off to them, you can be paroled.

So instead, though,

the family finds out about this.

Michael Pratt, Rose Pratt, and they gathered more than 4,000 signatures on petitions,

which is more than, and also 100 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.

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.

Anyone want to hate her out loud?

Come on, O'Brien.

That's it.

And Pratt said, quote,

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

hat shoes, your hating pants.

Your over your

shirt.

Come on through.

Your ire overalls.

Yeah.

Put on your ire overalls and your fucking

Jesus Christ, man.

You're unbelievable underwear.

Get in here.

So she was granted, and now the parole is revoked, by the way.

Okay, good, good.

A Supreme Court decision that prohibits parole board members from considering other crimes committed means her case will be reheard.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, if she's released, she'll be turned over to Pennsylvania, where she'll serve five to ten years

on a guilty plea for arson.

2002, Mike is up for parole.

Oh.

It's his first parole hearing.

The parole board, rather than listen to him, just continues his sentence till 2008.

Oh,

no thanks.

We all got our hating pants on.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

I got my pissed-off pen.

I'm going to write this no on here.

Send you the fuck out.

You're gone.

So, yep, that continues his sentence till 2008.

2003, though, Mike has a big change of heart of everything.

Oh?

Mike

now wants to explain everything here.

He's like, this is,

he wants to do it.

He says that he and

that, you know, that he basically he said that he, 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.

And while Butch hadn't formally told on Ed for the crimes yet, Ed was worried and he wanted to go to law school.

And if Butch told all he knew, especially about the arson, Ed's future would be fucked, basically.

So Ed told Michael, hey, I need you.

He said they,

Michael says that fucking Ed told him that they're going to meet with Butch and bribe him to keep his mouth shut.

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 more, what's important to him.

So Michael said, I said I'd come.

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.

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,

nobody's going to cop to it because that makes him look bad.

Yeah, yeah.

It's hard to tell who knew what.

I know.

Everybody knew something was going to happen.

Everybody knew something.

Just the way Ed is.

He just seems such a manipulative fuck with it.

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.

That, whatever, you know, if you ask 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

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.

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.

God, Jesus.

Michael appeared.

He said,

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.

Turned into a different car.

Yeah.

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.

So he literally had to yell in his face to, let's go, motherfucker.

Yeah.

Dead body.

So that also tends to,

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,

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.

Hear that, though?

Linda didn't produce the handcuffed.

He was handcuffed, yeah.

Bound and handcuffed, getting into the trunk.

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.

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.

Michael went back for his sophomore year in engineering at Case, and he bought a house in Euclid and got engaged.

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 inside about the whole thing.

No.

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.

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.

And he also knew that if they got caught, that Ed would be facing the death penalty.

And he probably thought, I probably will be too, because I was fucking there.

And there's no proof I didn't do anything.

So 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 as him 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

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 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.

I think Ed is a bad guy.

I think everybody knows it.

If he didn't burn, think about the possibility of he doesn't burn that house down.

None of this shit comes out.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He waived his right to a jury trial, like they said.

He was charged with involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping.

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.

Michael said at first he was bitter.

and mad about this whole thing.

And in prison, he ignored his brother's letters

and everything.

He said, in hindsight, I felt manipulated in every sense.

Because you were.

You got treated like a fucking, like a dipshit, like a Patsy.

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.

So he said, it's a jailhouse cliche, but a church service changed him, he said.

Oh.

That was it.

He went originally because they have free candy at church.

Oh.

And you don't get candy in prison very often for free.

Is that why you go to church, though?

Free candy.

He said he didn't like the sermon at all.

A lot of guys just go because it's chill.

Yeah.

A lot of guys say it's just a chill place to go, so they go there because it's like no one will stab you while you're there usually.

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, sip, snaps.

No wine, but they're definitely

nice to you in there, too.

I think it's probably the only place in prison where people are nice to you.

Yeah, probably.

You know, like, I don't think anybody else is real kind or anything.

So

someone will 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.

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.

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.

They say don't eat shrimp like like seven times.

So

don't stomp on your friend's head till he dies and then laugh at him.

I think that should be in there somewhere.

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, he's going to argue 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.

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.

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.

You can sway this guy to do anything.

Anything.

Michael is real easygoing.

What?

Murder?

No problem.

Religion?

Great.

That sounds good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And he said,

I was a real productive citizen for 19 years.

For two months, everything went crazy, and here I am, 35 years old.

Right.

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.

Linda, 2003,

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.

I don't want to fight.

She said she's found new evidence that she's not guilty.

Oh,

interesting.

Why the fuck did you plead then?

Wow.

Okay.

She's serving 7 to 15 there and 5 to 10 here.

Authorities said that she,

obviously, the killing would happen there.

Karen entered,

they call it an Allen plea, but it sounds like an Alford plea.

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.

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.

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.

Auto-corrected.

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.

So they said it's treated as a guilty plea for sentencing, and Carlin was ordered to serve five to ten years.

She isn't scheduled to begin that Ohio prison term until she completes her Ohio sentence in January 2005.

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.

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.

Because now he's all Christiany and he wants to fucking make amends.

Right.

But

he never said she recruited him, though.

Ed recruited Mike.

That's never been the question.

The point is she recruited Ed.

That's the point.

Oh, okay.

Unless Ed says that she didn't recruit me, I don't think it matters here.

Because the chain of it was, I don't even know if Michael ever met Linda.

Like it was a matter of.

Yeah, they weren't in the same.

They probably met each other at some point.

Yeah, maybe.

I would think.

Yeah, probably.

Like

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.

So that's very interesting.

The judge,

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 because you can't be doctor president.

Stop doing that.

No, pick a title.

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.

Her petition mentions that she already has an attorney, but doesn't name that person.

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 um parole officials by the way say that she refuses to accept responsibility for the crime whatsoever oh

2000 which is the way you get out on parole to

2004 is the 15th anniversary of the murder here.

And Michael Pratt says he routinely visits Greenville, especially on the anniversary of his brother's murder, which is sad as fuck.

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.

He supposes a walk around with a big sign

that says, no parole, thank you.

Yeah.

On either side.

He said,

we would never be able to do all we have done without all the help we've got from everybody that helped.

That's a tough sentence.

There's also a student reward.

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

has no money to pay for college.

Wow.

So 14 have been given so far, and all have graduated college, they say.

What a great lady.

That's pretty fucking cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The pittance she got from CBS, she gave it to the kids.

She gave it away.

Yeah.

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,

Michael is released from prison.

What?

He's out parole.

He got almost 50 years.

He knew it it was up.

Wow.

He said

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 they eat that shit up in the parole board.

Wow.

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.

So he'd come in and minister to the other prisoners.

He's stuck with it, huh?

Or he's sneaking meth in.

We don't know.

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.

So he started the white sea with the razor blade.

With a razor blade.

And then he disappeared.

What thou snort?

Atop the temple of the nostril.

Yeah.

So 2012,

I don't remember what station airs this, but I killed my BFF, whatever show that is.

Whatever station that is.

It's 2012, so I don't think they didn't make shit.

Hulu didn't even exist.

Oh, no.

I mean, I've seen the thing on

now.

I don't know what it started on.

Discovery or something.

So one of those fucking AE or some shit, but this is episode season one, episode three.

So they got quick early on.

It was his best friend.

Their best fucking friends.

Best fucking friends.

Frat Brother Homicide is the name of it.

2012, October here.

Linda is released from prison.

Really?

Completely.

Free and clear in Pennsylvania, everywhere.

She's out.

She's the second to last one.

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 there.

She was there when he died.

I don't know if she's the second most responsible person.

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's weirdly enough, somehow I think it's Teresa is the second most responsible person because she lured him there.

She's the one who lured him there.

He wouldn't even have gone to fucking Akron if it wasn't for her.

But both, all the ladies left.

Yeah, that's crazy.

And that dude is still standing there.

His brothers left, but his brothers were

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.

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.

She was the one driving.

She doesn't know.

But they say that she will spend two years and two months on parole.

They said that essentially the parole board, board when discussing paroling her, they weren't going to parole her.

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 if we parole her now, we can keep an eye on her.

We can keep an eye on her, and if she fucks up, she's back in here for the rest of the sentence and more.

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.

Now, Butch's brother here, Michael, said about the whole thing.

We'll let him kind of wrap this up.

He said, I wonder how many kids you would have had.

What would they have looked like?

He said, he would have been such a good dad.

He said, he tries to picture what Butch would look like today.

This is 2018.

Yeah.

So, I mean, think about that, how long ago that was.

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?

Would he have a mustache or a beard?

Trying to picture.

He'd do whatever he wanted.

Yeah.

What would he look like?

Who knows?

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

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.

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.

He'll always look the same.

Yeah.

That's so sad.

That's some sad shit.

Of course.

That's bad.

Now, there's been several different productions made about this.

True Crime with Aphrodite Jones, Blood Brotherhood episode.

Frenemies, Shattered Bonds.

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.

I killed my BFF, rat brother, homicide, and most likely to dot dot dot, brotherly love.

Oh.

So I think that's probably like younger people.

Yeah, it's all got the twist and plot of best friend killing himself, killing his friends killing himself.

Now, Eddie, still in prison,

he is at the Grafton Correctional Institute here, where he was admitted on March 27th, 1990.

He

is all set for his first parole hearing in August of 2029.

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.

That's tough.

And I don't know.

I'm not going to get out at that point.

I mean, you're only 65.

He's only going to be 64, I think, if he gets out.

He doesn't know shit.

Oh, he doesn't know anything.

He can't do this.

To be gone from the 80s

until now,

2029, not 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.

Chevy dealers had Pontiac Phoenixes on their phone.

Phoenixes.

Give this guy an iPhone and be like, fuck around with that.

What the fuck is this shit?

I don't know what this is.

Holy shit.

Like, imagine that.

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.

He's never worked.

I don't know.

He's never paid in.

I don't know.

What do you do?

How do you help that guy?

I don't know.

Does that matter?

He needs no.

There's a minimum up to three 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 know.

There's a minimum wage.

He can go earn that.

I mean, yeah.

I know if, like, if, because I was 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?

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

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.

And Linda, 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.

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.

Yeah.

So damn.

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.

So thank you so much for listening to that.

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It took place April 19th, the 420 virtual live show.

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Get them now because we have like half of those shows after the summer are sold out already.

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So I think there's a few left in Irvine, the improv there.

Yeah.

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.

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We keep coming at you.

Jesus.

So

at you is a very important way to do it.

Not on you.

Not on you or in your direction.

That would be gross.

So definitely do that.

What you're going to get this week here for crime and sports,

which you'll get access to, we're going to talk about our second part of fraternity hazing accidents.

Yes.

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.

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.

Terrible.

That's everything we ever wanted.

Oh, just really not good at this at all.

Like Ted Bundy was terrible, but at least he, like, went to law school and knew something.

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 crimeinsports is where you get all of that.

And you get a shout-out at the end of the show, which is right now, 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.

This week's executive producer, Michelle Miller, who got a mortgage in the worst way.

I hope you're doing well, Michelle.

Congratulations.

Michelle, I remember you.

Thank you.

Yeah, she house got ruined in a storm.

That sucks.

Jordan Bennett in Jolly Old England.

Her New England gal.

Yeah.

She moved back.

She's complaining that Tim Horton sucks over there, I saw.

I was like, oh, that's good.

That's very good.

Fuck.

You know, different.

Kyle Norwick dipping his chicken in ketchup.

That's gross.

Kyle, knock that shit off.

Jesus.

Karen Vandenhendy.

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.

Thank you so much for

doing that.

Thank you.

Keep it up.

Keep it up.

Keep living right.

We love you too much.

Keep on this side of the grass.

You're the best.

Other producers this week: Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows, John Magnado.

Oh, I think we lost John.

God damn it.

Oh, no.

Yeah, he passed away.

That's what happened.

Fuck.

Well, I got John.

I'm saying your name.

Uh, speak your name.

I don't know.

I miss you already.

Yeah.

Gary Howard, happy hour.

Checking in at Freer, Texas.

Janice Hill, Catherine DeMont.

Domero.

Domero.

Chelsea Ingram.

Katie.

Nope, that's Kate.

Kate Kennedy.

Janelle Aquistapachi.

Aquistopachi.

Aquistapach.

Thank you.

Wayne Brown.

Jordan Webster.

Sarah

Elbadwi.

Tana?

Tana Krangle.

Alicia.

Furquar.

Farquhar.

What else do we got?

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 Keillor, Allison Bryant, Courtney Eads,

Iani with No last name,

Colonial Goat Banger

with no last name.

Old school.

Bewigged goat banger.

Yeah.

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,

Walter Butler, Christina with no last name, Vince with no last name, Jamie Rubio, Allison Woford,

Amber McCarty, Mindy Welch, Sarah Sparks, Linda Oldham, Oldham,

Oldham, that's gross.

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

Joneston, Johnston, obviously.

God damn it.

You don't pronounce the H.

Ray Charles

Ballos, Totes,

Tony Two Times, Melinda Fiddler.

Feidler.

It's probably Fiddler.

Deb with no last name.

Karen Fernicola.

Fernacola.

Yep.

Woody with no last name.

Anthony Rapacelli.

Yep.

Brandon DeHaas.

Tanya with no last name.

Misty Marshall.

Jence.

Jensi, maybe.

Bassett.

Bassett.

Gary Denault.

David Suntrom.

Jasmine Villanueva, Matt Christian, Reese H., Colleen Tanaka, Brian Beard, Robert Joyce, Edward with no last name, Jessica Spilly Hamham.

I don't think that's true.

I don't think that's real.

Molly Angle, Michaela M.

Josh fucking Moon, Christy, what is this?

Mammorello,

Cecilia Edwards, Zachary Mengels,

Danelle R., Aaron Spence, Josh.

Nope, that's Scott.

What?

Scott Berglund.

Why did I do that?

Veronica.

Veronica Bottellho.

But

Beth and Boston.

Jay Briz.

Schwabi.

Schwabi Schwab.

19.

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.

Michael Weeks.

Dylan Jessup.

M and K.

The letters M and K.

Mejin or Megan.

Majen?

Megan.

Tara Laporte.

Arabella with no last name.

Nessa Sauris with no last name.

Melissa Richards.

Jason.

Connie.

Konetska.

Konetska.

Connie.

What?

Conizka.

I don't know how to do that.

Heidi.

Heidi.

I don't know how to do yours either.

Arn Suzukla, Arsuzak, Arsuzlak.

Those are three completely different names you just said.

Or Zulak.

You guys can pick one that you want and figure it out.

Ashley Canton, Lizzie Palota, Palada, perhaps.

Alicia Clark, Michelle Ortiz or Ortez, Jenny Thiel, Stacey Frost, Shira Dawkins, Amanda Diller, Justin Justina, Manspeaker, Mary Kate Casenza, fucking shit.

Beth Rampley.

Christopher Tarjan.

Autumn Barrero.

Shannon DePatty.

Crystal Rucker.

Beth Williams.

Lynn Mood.

Stephanie Hafferty.

Icelander2733.

James Jackson.

Matthew Lear.

Amanda Prince.

Darkseid Dole.

Darkseid Dolls on Facebook.

That's what that is.

Carrie Frank.

Luke Rogers.

Carly Derd What?

Derdsinsky.

Sandra Rutherford.

Robin Chambers.

Marianne Keeswood Wells.

Dalton Durbin.

Dalton Durbin.

Whoa.

That's

an interesting name.

Jessica Christ.

Motorcycle jumper like Eva.

Yeah.

Dalton Durbin.

Christ.

I hope that's your last name.

Melissa Thomas, Ned White, Shannon

Panagonopoulos.

D.

Trammell.

Marlena Guadrama.

What?

Guadrama.

Stephanie Putman.

Putman.

Putman Putnam.

Jackie with no last name, Giraffe E, Giraffe, 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.

Honestly, you're the best, and we...

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.

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.

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.

And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure.

Bye.