Killer Cookie Conspiracy - McHenry, Illinois

It's that time of year again, back to school season.

And Instacart knows that the only thing harder than getting back into the swing of things is getting all the back-to-school supplies, snacks, and essentials you need.

So here's your reminder to make your life a little easier this season.

Shop favorites from Staples, Best Buy, and Costco all delivered through Instacart so that you can get some time back and do whatever it is that you need to get your life back on track.

Instacart, we're here.

If you thought goldenly breaded Madonna's chicken couldn't get more golden, think colder, because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

I participate in McDonald's for a limited time.

This week, in McHenry, Illinois, multiple healthy people in one extended family begin to randomly become sick and even drop dead of very strange illnesses.

But an investigation reveals it's actually a horrifying plot to wipe the whole family off the face of the earth.

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

This is a wild episode.

Again, I shouldn't even say that anymore.

They're all crazy.

This is also crazy.

Fits right in with what we're doing here.

Before we start, very quickly, head over to shutupandgivemeurder.com.

Get your tickets for live shows.

Seattle, you are up here next.

Our next two shows are sold out.

Then we have Portland.

It's also sold out.

Then Seattle in October.

Get your tickets right now.

They're selling fast.

And then that's it, pretty much.

Everything else is pretty sold out for the rest of the year.

So thank you for doing that.

Shut up and givememurder.com is where you get all those tickets and every bit of info and merchandise and everything else you could possibly want here.

You also for sure want to get Patreon.

My goodness.

Patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of the bonus episodes.

I'm talking everything to everybody $5 a month or above.

You're going to get hundreds of back episodes you've never heard before, bonus stuff immediately upon subscription.

Then new ones every other week: one crime in sports, one small town murder, and you get it all.

This week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, you're going to get, we're going to talk about athletes that have made tens of millions of dollars and now don't have anything.

So, that's a fun one.

Then, for small town murder, we are going to talk about part two of Ted Bundy, and I'm putting this in quotes, trying to help find the Green River killer, trying to keep himself alive, but man is it to save his own ass.

It is fascinating, though.

So fascinating, we had to do a second part.

So, that is for small town murder.

So that's patreon.com slash crime in sports.

Yes.

And on top of that, you get everything,

all our shows we make, crime and sports, your stupid opinions, and both small town murder episodes per week, all ad-free with your Patreon as well.

Ad-free.

We'll give you that too.

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

So

it's literally all we have to give.

So please sign up for that.

And on top of that, we definitely have to do the disclaimer.

It's a comedy show, everybody.

We are comedians.

This is a murder show, and people are going to die.

That's one thing that's going to happen here.

Now, you might go, How's that funny?

It can be very funny.

It's a funny thing when someone says, I'll get away with murder.

Yeah.

That's a pretty silly thought, and we're going to make fun of that person for it.

There's a lot of crazy things to make fun of around the murder, but what we never do, what we don't do, is we don't make fun of the victims or the victims' families.

Why is that, James?

Because we're assholes.

What?

But we're not scumbags.

There you go.

See how that works?

That's very simple.

It's very easy to do.

And it's going to, boy, do you have a crazy episode in front of you?

But if you think true crime and comedy should never, ever mix,

maybe we're not for you.

I don't know.

Maybe we're not.

But I think possibly we are.

Either way, no complaining later.

That said, I think it's time, everybody,

to sit back.

What do you say here?

Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout.

Shut up

and give me murder.

Let's do this, everybody, shall we?

Let's go on a trip here.

Okay.

We're going to Illinois this week.

And we were in Illinois a few months ago.

We're doing it a little sooner than we normally do, but the case is just one of these cases we had to do.

It's kind of relates to a case that's in the news that's big right now, but this has nothing to do with that.

It's just, you'll see what we're talking about here.

Let's go on a trip here.

Let's go to McHenry, Illinois.

Yeah.

McHenry, Little C, Big H is how that works.

This is in northern Illinois.

You said, yeah, like you were born there.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, McHenry.

Yeah, we've all been there.

Yeah.

We all know McHenry.

It's in northern Illinois.

It's about an hour outside Chicago.

Okay.

So it's still technically out in the burbs there.

About an hour and 15 to Milwaukee.

So technically you could go, do I want to work in Chicago or Milwaukee, really?

It's pretty great.

You can commute there.

It's about five hours to Quincy, Illinois, which is our last Illinois episode, episode 595, More Than a Family Feud.

That was the one with the people who are on Family Feud.

Oh, that's right.

That was wild.

That was so crazy.

That's down in like down by St.

Louis down there.

This is in McHenry County, area codes 815 and 779.

The motto of this town, the heart of the Fox River.

Yeah.

Very proud of this Fox River over here.

A little bit of history here.

In the 1830s, settlers started arriving from different areas and created kind of the kind of a little settlement of where McHenry would be

here.

Now, a guy named George Gage came in 1835, purchased a big plot of land west of the Fox River, and that became Gage Town.

And then Gage Town was called West McHenry after that.

So that's how that all went.

They built a dam in 1851.

Very exciting.

We love it.

In 1860, the Count's House was completed.

Like a big...

Yeah, it's a big house.

A number of owners, but the most notable was Count Oscar Bop von Oberstadt, who was an Austrian count.

It's a hell of a name.

I'm

a bat, also.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A count just sounds like somebody rich from Europe who's not

actually royalty, but you needed a title.

You're so rich you had to have a title.

Yeah, like a baron.

But a count

feels bad every time.

Well, yeah, we've never heard of someone being a great count.

It's either Dracula or Chocola.

Those are the only ones we know of.

It's the only one.

Now, reviews of this town.

We've never been here.

We don't know what the hell's going on here.

Let's find out.

Here's five stars.

I like McHenry because it still has that small town feeling.

It does, yeah.

Yeah.

The streets are not filled with traffic, and you can still see farms and farm animals along the road.

It has nice neighborhoods and great parks making it a nice place to raise a family.

It still has an outdoor theater which brings more of that small town feeling.

So the nice and small are used a lot in that review.

It's nice and it's small.

When they say theater do they mean like a movie theater or I think so like an outdoor

play.

I'm not sure actually if it's the theater movie or a regular theater.

I do like when you drive down the road somewhere and they have that like old theater with like the old marquee that comes out over the side.

Oh, yeah, it's great.

They only have two screens or whatever, but it's so fucking rad.

We love playing like theater theaters like that.

They're cool as hell in some of these places.

Here's three stars.

Okay, a little less enthusiastic.

McHenry's a small town, great for families who enjoy the outdoors and attending local events.

As a kid, I remember going to the farmers' markets and fairs.

So we're getting a feel.

It's got a real - it doesn't feel like

major city Chicago type action here.

Very, yeah, very

soda shop, 57 Chevy.

Yeah.

Yeah, very five and dime, this place is.

Yeah.

Three stars.

It appears to petty.

This review, by the way, I don't know what their, I don't know if English is not their first language or what it is, but

it appears to petty theft incidents in the stores.

It appears to.

It appears to.

High unemployment gives way to this.

Vandalism is relatively high because

of the lack of entertainment facilities.

Yeah.

Nothing to do.

I guess I'll just make something.

I'll go ruin something because there's not a movie I want to see playing.

I've got a train.

I'm so bored around here.

That's interesting.

Two stars.

And this person...

Makes it sound like there's like a crime wave here, but when we give you the stats on the crime, it's

not exactly the way it is here.

Here's two stars.

The spring and summer are beautiful with the occasional thunderstorm, but winters are bitter.

Cold temperatures and snow make winter here horrible.

I mean, pretty well anywhere that

anywhere that has snow, and yeah, it sucks.

Thanks for explaining weather.

That's excellent.

The spring and summer have occasional thunderstorms, but are beautiful.

And then finally, two stars.

This person has very specific complaints, and a lot of them don't make sense.

Okay.

Two stars doesn't have a white castle.

Okay.

That's a bummer.

And isn't anywhere near the ocean.

Also,

you're in the Midwest, sir.

That's,

wow.

McHenry.

San Diego and L.A.

being near the ocean, I get it again.

Every time I go away from it, I'm like, the ocean's great.

Then you get near it and you're like, oh, yeah, this is.

This is fantastic.

I see.

McHenry is about a 19-hour drive to Florida.

Okay.

Is that bad?

How is that?

Sorry, it's it's not closer to Florida for you.

The neighborhoods are nice, just don't wander into the wrong ones.

Same as anywhere else.

Yeah, and I haven't really looking, doing some research, I haven't really found a lot of bad neighborhoods around here either.

The library and skate park are very nice.

If you need to fix your car, there's an auto shop every five feet.

Okay.

The town will go downhill and dig when the dig the when the dig the pit.

I think they mean when they dig the pit.

I don't know what the pit is, but I'm terrified of it already.

The police are okay, but they pulled me over for being at a stop sign for too long.

Yeah, you got to come, Florida.

Let's go.

You can't block a thoroughfare, dip shit.

That's anywhere.

Keep rolling, Tallahassee.

Let's move it.

That's called a Jacksonville stop

when you don't roll through it.

You just sit there for 10 minutes.

You're going to go around for a prostitute.

You sit there and do three lines of meth.

That's called a Jacksonville stop.

People in this town, 27 237 so a decent sized town it's pretty pretty good size uh women are 51.1 percent men are 48.9 percent of the population more married people than the usual it's 55 percent married uh everybody's like the the married with children rate is like way higher than the national average yeah very few single with children it's just very much you know we're moving out to the burbs and we're staying together because we have a mortgage damn it, and we're not, we can't afford to break up.

Race in this town, 82.2% white, 0.3% black, 2.5% Asian, 14.3% Hispanic.

The religion here, 54% religious, which is above the national average.

And the highest 35.5% of the people here are Catholic.

As we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the North.

And that's just because there's a lot of Baptists in the South and a lot of Catholics in the North.

So

average unemployment here, not this high unemployment rate this person was touting.

The median household income here is above the national average too.

Oh, they're doing fine.

They're doing fine.

$76,858 a year.

And cost of living, $100 is average.

Here it's $102.

And the housing is low, actually.

Median home cost here, $238,000, which is

pretty nice.

That's almost $25,000.

Somebody needs to get out of their bubble and go see the rest of the world.

Yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's

people seem to be doing okay around here.

And since they are, maybe you want to live there.

And if you do, we have for you the McHenry, Illinois Real Estate Report.

The average two-bedroom rental here goes for $1,550 a month, which is above the national average.

It's a little bit steep, which is funny because the housing is not, it's pretty inexpensive to buy a house, but to rent a place, you're going to pay.

Here's a one-bedroom, one bath, I guess a T-bowl for your one B-hole there.

768 square feet.

And it's a house.

It's not a trailer.

It's not a condo.

It's just a

768 square feet.

It's a small gray box is the best way to describe it.

If you'd like to live in, it looks like if you had a giant hamster, you'd put put it in here

and put a wheel in there, maybe get it going.

Large field and woods behind the home.

So it's not that big of a property, but there's just a huge field and ton of woods behind you.

So if you have kids, they have room to roam anyway.

$240,000 for that.

No land either.

This is like a third of an acre.

This is nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Here's a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,998 square feet.

It's on 0.31 acres.

It is a, I'd like to call it a split-level vinyl siding wonder.

We all know that house.

Split-level vinyl siding.

Wonder.

You know exactly what it is.

The same amount of windows in the front, the basement windows in the bottom.

Not the most updated inside.

Could use some help in there.

It's got some old stuff.

$289,900 for that, though.

Good bones, not bad.

And here's a five-bedroom, three-bath, 4,000-square feet house.

And plus a 1,700 square foot basement as well.

Nice.

Which means they either haven't redone it or they did redo it but without permit, so they can't count the square footage.

Either one, I'm not sure.

It's on an acre of land.

It's got a nice in-ground pool.

Real nice out there.

A little too much carpet for my taste, but nice hardwood floors and the rest of it.

$769,000 for that, though.

Oh, boy.

In Phoenix, that would be, you know,

$1.6 million, I would say.

It's steep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a 6,000 square foot house.

That's what I'm doing.

4,000 with that 2,000.

That's a lot.

It's a lot of house.

It really is.

It's a nice looking house, too.

Things to do in this town.

Okay.

Let's find out what they're doing here.

The McHenry Music Festival.

Sure.

Let's do it.

It says, get ready to experience an unforgettable musical journey from September 12th to September 14th.

Three days of this shit.

It's happening.

This weekend, it's going on.

That's right.

As we bring the heat with three days of electrifying performances featuring over 12 national acts that I probably haven't heard of one of them.

And Jimmy knows all of them.

I'm going to take a stab.

Whether you're a die-hard music fan or just looking for a fantastic time with friends and family, the McHenry Music Festival has something.

What do you think they have for everyone?

That's right, Jimmy.

Here we go.

James.

Except me.

Let's see.

Maybe they do.

Maybe so.

Here we go.

Friday night's lineup is Sam Hunt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sounds pretty random.

Hey, guess what?

Get a stage name.

That's not a good stage name.

Yeah, Sam Hunt.

That's a real common two-word.

It's real common.

They're all doing that now, where it's just like,

I can't wait for somebody to just be like

Willie Haggard.

That's what it is.

It's all names of another country star somewhere.

Mashed together.

Hey, and if James Petrogallo tells you you need a stage name, you really need a stage name.

Zach Bryan is just Luke Bryan and Zach Brown.

It's getting annoying.

See, that's the thing, and I don't know any of these country people, so when I hear that, I think they're all the same person.

Everyone named Zach and Brian, and

they're all the same guy.

I think there's one guy named Zach Brian Brown, and he does all the country songs.

That's in my head.

That's all there is out there.

I have no idea.

Yeah,

it's coming.

We're almost there.

Merle Cash.

Merle Cash.

I like that shit.

Merle Cash.

Willie Christopherson.

I like Conway Robbins, too.

He's a good one.

He's my favorite.

Dustin Lynch will be there.

He's terrible.

God.

We've talked about him before.

He's the fucking worst.

I think I remembered his name.

Red Ferron, one word.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

Something.

Ingrid Andrus.

I don't know her.

No, Zach Miller.

See, there's a Zach.

There he is.

There's always a Zach.

Saturday, Slightly Stupid.

Yeah, those guys are great.

You know those.

I do.

That's actually something that you might like.

How would I know them?

I figure you'd know.

I can't think of a song that they sing, but they're

not country music.

No, no, it's not country.

It's not country at all.

Oh, it's like

kind of like, oh, fuck.

It's like fucking, it's skate music.

And I'm gone.

I'm fucking dying.

I think there's horns in it.

I can't

think of it.

Like Scotch shit you're talking?

Yeah, they have a very popular song that you've absolutely heard.

Okay.

Dirty Heads.

Nope.

The LOVE LOVARTERS.

Not Elevators.

Elevators.

The Expendables.

So Jean-Claude Van Damme and

Schwarzenegger will be there.

That's nice.

The Sly Stallon's going to be in.

Oh, it's going to be great.

That would be the ultimate.

I want to hear those guys all sing a song in all their accents.

Fucking Schwarzenegger with his, Van Damme with the Belgian accent.

And then, of course, Sly comes in for the chorus.

I'm living on a prayer.

I'm living on a prayer.

Sunday, Bailey Zimmerman.

Jesus.

And then I'll save the last one because it's so funny because it's so many of these.

Brian Martin.

See?

Brian Martin.

Zach, Brian Martin.

Brian Martin.

Zach.

Brian Martin, Zachary.

It's all the same thing.

It's all bro country here.

This sucks.

I hate this already.

Bella Kane.

And then finally, Flo Rida will be there, of course.

Why not headline?

It's a local festival.

He's like, fuck, Nelly and fucking Ludacris are busy, and then I have to be there.

That is funny.

Bailey Zimmerman's headlining giant fucking arenas, and he's opening for Flo Rida here.

Oh, shit.

There's also the McHenry Fiesta is another festival they have there.

It's 11 days of fun.

God damn.

Jesus Christ.

They have a cask and barrel night, a car show, all sorts of bullshit, but performances also.

They're going to have Shady, a live tribute band, a live tribute to the music of Eminem.

Yes.

So that's what I want to hear.

Karaoke Eminem.

That'll be great.

White people singing Eminem.

Wow.

Pet Sounds Live, which is a Beach Boys tribute, like Pet Sounds is their album.

5184, which is a Van Halen tribute.

5184.

5184, 1984 was their one.

5150, and they did not.

So they just combined two other.

What else do we have?

The next day we have Southern Jack, who plays classic rock.

Yep.

Material Girl.

I'll give you a few.

Yeah.

You know what I think that does.

That's a Madonna tribute, of course.

Jimmy Nick and Don't Tell Mama will be there.

And then close it all out with Fearless.

Jimmy and Nick are going to come out in front of the audience.

Jimmy Nick.

It's one word.

Jimmy Nick.

Oh, is it?

It's not one name.

It's not two people.

It's Jimmy Nick.

That's his name.

Jimmy Zach Nick, I think.

Zach Brian Nick is his name.

And then Fearless, a Taylor Swift tribute will be after that.

And they also have a big wheel race.

Adults on them?

That would be fun.

I hope so.

I want to run a big wheel.

That sounds great.

Remember when you could just do burnouts in them?

Those things are so much fun.

God, I love it.

Yeah.

Especially on the carpet.

You could really

burn a hole in that carpet.

And then when you get that front tire wet, you throw it sideways and fucking slide.

It's so much fun.

No shit.

Crime rate in this town.

What we are interested in here, property crime is about one-third under the national average.

So not really stealing much.

And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault.

The Mount Rushmore of crime is also about half the national average.

So

it's pretty safe.

Seems like a pretty safe little kind of small town USA.

Yeah, people are making decent money.

You can live there.

This sounds fine.

Seems fine.

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

A bunch of shitty, horrible murders.

Okay.

Now, I have to say, too, some of these murders take place in different towns.

So

there's

multiple murders here.

So,

all right, let's first talk about a man here, an older man, definitely.

He's going to be the patriarch of a family that we'll talk about here, Michael Joseph Albanese.

And later on, he'll be Michael Joseph Albanese Sr.

Oh,

he's going to give himself a junior.

Well, at this moment, he's a junior, and then he'll have another one.

And rather than making him the third, he'll make him a junior, and he's a senior now, which is kind of a cool trick.

If you're a junior,

you can have a kid, right?

And then you make him a junior rather than of the third, and now you're not a junior, or you're not, now you're a senior rather than of the second or a junior, which is much better.

That's an upgrade for him.

Can you do that?

Yeah.

Obviously, he did it.

I'm telling you about it right now.

He's still a third, whether he says junior or not, isn't he?

I guess, but you can call yourself junior if you're after your dad.

We're starting over with me.

Yeah.

Never mind.

Everyone before me does not exist.

I'm now senior.

You're junior.

Fuck my dad and my grandfather.

I don't think that's how it works.

I think you can call yourself whatever the hell you want.

You can do that.

Yeah.

Yeah, so why not?

Maybe he just named him Michael Joseph Jr.

There, that's his name now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you put it in the middle of it.

Put it in paperwork, that's what it is.

It is, yeah.

You can name your kid just about anything, I think.

So he's born in 1911, July 24th, 1911, in Chicago.

So, I mean, Christ still rebuilding from the fire when he was born, for Christ's sake.

This is, I believe, pre-Wrigley Field opening he was born.

No kidding.

So that's back there.

He's one of 10 kids.

He's seen it all.

Oh, yeah.

One of 10 kids.

That's some old school

shit back then.

And he's married.

He's a matter of some shit.

Oh, for sure.

He's like an entrepreneur.

He's a real go-getter, this guy.

Now, he's got a wife named Clara Marion

Kolosinski.

Wow.

She'll be Albanese.

She'll change her name.

She's about two years younger.

Now, they're going to start out.

They're going to raise a family here.

They start a company in the 60s as well called Allied Die and Casting,

which is, they make trophies and things like that.

That's kind of their deal.

They're going to have two sons.

First, they're going to have Charles Michael Albanese.

This is a weird thing, by the way.

They juniored up their second kid rather than the first kid, which is always a weird.

I always feel like, what would that first kid feel like?

Oh, I...

Not me, huh?

You skipped over me for another junior?

Well, maybe they didn't expect to do this and they named him after somebody else in the family.

That's what I think too is you have like a, we're going to name him after my father or we're going to name him after, you know.

Wouldn't you rather be named after that guy than fucking me?

And then they just, then they didn't have any ideas by the second one.

They're like, we'll just call him me, me again.

So they have Charles Michael Albanese.

That's their first son, Chuck.

He goes by.

Sure.

Chuck's born June 13th, 1937.

And

he is known by everybody that knows him as a kid.

I mean, there's like 10 different quotes that all have pretty much the same words in different order.

It's just the same thing.

He's called, quote, a spoiled brat who always wanted to be a big shot.

The family does well.

They have a decent amount of money.

And this kid thinks he's the ultimate born on third and thought he hit a triple guy.

Just

really spoiled, wants to be something he's not.

Wants to be his dad, but his dad had to like work hard to do that.

Yeah, he's just like, just give me your stuff.

That's better, right?

Jesus.

So he always wanted to, basically, he's described as, and this is everybody, I would think, quote, an ambitious young man who wanted to earn as much money doing as little work as possible.

Yes, sir.

Yes.

Salute, sir.

You've just told the story of my life and Jimmy's life and every other comedian who's ever lived.

How do I

get paid?

How do I get paid the most money with doing as little work, like an hour or less per day work?

Can I do that?

Is that possible?

I mean,

that business plan is the whole reason OnlyFans exist.

Yeah,

exactly.

And a lot of other things.

Oh, God, YouTube, so many things.

Everything.

Fucking everything.

You name it.

I wish podcasting was like that, but unfortunately.

It's only

some.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If we were just dicking around just having conversations, that'd be great.

But like, this is like

the three hours or whatever we're doing this show is like a little tiny tip of an iceberg and there's a giant block under the water of work and research

that goes into it.

Yeah.

Running into them, fucking giant, giant Titanic-sized life ships going down.

This is Michael Albanese Jr.

is the younger brother.

Yeah.

So 1958 comes along.

Chuck, the first son, gets married.

He gets married.

So that's pretty young.

He's 18, 19 when he gets married, which is normal in the 50s.

Graduate high school, you marry your high school sweetheart, and

out of my house.

Yep, and you do what

they do: they pump out three kids pretty much immediately.

Right away.

Three daughters in the next five years he's going to have.

Wow, that's that's

something.

Now, night.

Dress shopping.

That's a lot, especially back then.

You had to have dresses.

All the time.

Yeah.

That's all it is is dressing.

It's early 60s.

Hey, everybody.

Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you a better way to shop with Stitch Fix.

StitchFix.com.

You know it.

Let's be honest here.

Shopping is not as fun as it sounds.

It really isn't.

I just want someone to tell me what to wear.

We talk about this all the time.

Tell us.

Just put clothes on me.

I don't know what I'm doing.

That's what it is.

We have no idea.

We're just too busy to shop too.

And I need to look decent.

We have to go do live shows and all this stuff.

That's why Stitch Fix is a lifesaver and I love Stitch Fix.

Your stylist sends you the clothes that fit your vibe and your body and your budget.

So shopping without the hassle.

Bring it on.

Let's do this.

I'm telling you right now, here's how it works.

Stitch Fix is great.

You take a quick style quiz, share your size, your style, your budget, and get matched with a real human stylist that gets your vibe.

Not an AI person, a real human.

It is really good.

And I really like it.

I have some cool stuff that they sent me that I've been wearing pants that I've completely replaced my whole wardrobe with the pants that they got me from Stitch Fix.

They're doing me up right at Stitch Fix, and I really like it.

It's no risk, all style.

You get a personalized fix box straight to your door and try it on all in the comfort of your own home.

Shipping and returns are always free, and there's no subscription required.

Plus, get a free try on for your first fix.

You can do it.

Get started today at stitchfix.com/slash STM and get 20% off your first order when you buy five or more items.

That's stitchfix.com/slash stm.

Now back to the show.

Hey everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you how to get wines in a better way with Naked Wines.

Nakedwines.com.

Absolutely.

Sometimes you walk into a store, you look at all the wines, and there's a whole aisle of it.

You don't know what to get.

Yeah, don't waste your time at the grocery store staring at a giant wall of wine and not knowing what you're picking.

Some people just like to drink wine.

They don't need to be a wine expert.

That's why we love our next sponsor here, Naked Wines.

This podcast is sponsored by Naked Wines.

Naked is a wine club that directly connects you to the world's best independent winemakers so you can get world-class wine delivered straight to your door.

Use code Smalltown Murder for the code and password at nakedwines.com and get six bottles for just $39.99.

We did it.

I got six lovely Pinot Noirs.

They sent me from different areas.

I got Willamette Valley ones.

I got all these good Pinot Noirs.

And I'm almost ready for a new box.

I'll tell you that right now.

I'm going to, it's really good.

I love it, and you break it out.

Other people have enjoyed it with me, and everyone said, where'd you get this wine?

Nakedwines.com.

How do they do it?

They bring you amazing wines straight from the winery at up to a 60% discount than what you pay in a store.

By cutting out the extra costs, like the middleman markups, winemakers can pass those savings on to you without skimping on any of the quality.

They're so good, and I love having these wines in my house.

Naked Wines has been around for over 15 years and backs over 90 independent winemakers around the world to make the wine you love to drink.

Now is the time to join the Naked Wines community.

Head to nakedwines.com slash small town murder.

Click enter voucher and just put in our code small town murder for both the code and password for six bottles of wine for just $39.99 with shipping included.

That's $100 off your first six bottles of wine at nakedwines.com slash small town murder.

And use the code and password smalltown murder for six bottles of wine for $39.99.

Now back to the show.

1965, Chuck goes to work as a car salesman for Norwood Motors Inc.

Okay.

This is cars.

I don't know what kind of cars.

Different ones.

I don't know if it's used cars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Usually if there's no brand name on it,

probably it would be like, you know, Norwood Chevrolet or some shit otherwise.

Whatever the fuck.

Yeah.

So this is out of Morton Grove he works at

out of.

So he has some troubles, though.

Apparently, the salary and commission structure of a car salesman is not to Chuck's liking.

No, it's a very ebbs and flows, yeah, feast or famine thing.

His work-to-cash ratio is a little off for his, how he would like it as well.

So he decides to make some more money doing something way quicker, which is robbery.

He says, we can do that.

So on February 1st, 1965, he and an accomplice posed as detectives

and

pushed their way into the home of a 61-year-old bus driver.

While he's home.

While he's home.

Home invaded a bus driver.

Oh, my God.

Emmett Farrell was his name, and they steal $160 from him,

which was a decent amount of money in 1965, but I don't think it's worth bum rushing a bus driver over.

It's, you know.

Yeah, I don't think it's.

Not going to retire on it or anything.

Not the last score.

Yeah.

Changing a man's life forever, too.

That guy's never going to feel safe at home ever again.

No.

Well, it was him and his wife, too.

So in the newspaper, it said that

robbery detectives sought the second man implicated in a home invasion robbery.

But apparently, Charles never gave him up.

Chuck never gave up that second guy.

And years later, it's Chuck and an unidentified second man.

Fascinating.

Which is very, very interesting, I would say.

Now, this poor Emmett Farrell here and his wife, Florence, and their daughter was home as well, who's 30 years old.

It's not like she's an eight-year-old, but an adult.

She should have her own place.

There's no developmental problems.

There might be

kinds of things there that you could fuck her up worse.

Back then, 30, they'd just be like, well, old maid.

Yeah, that was it.

Yeah, she's

just cash in, learn how to play Canasta with your grandmother.

That's all.

You two can hang out together.

So, Albanese, though, Chuck was traced through

a partial license plate that a neighbor jotted down.

Oh.

Who became suspicious when he saw two men run out of the home?

He just grabbed a pen and wrote part of a license plate down.

They ended up recovering the gun and the car that they used in the robbery also.

At gunpoint.

Jesus.

Oh, yeah.

No, they pretended to be detectives.

That's serious.

That is interesting.

So he's positively identified by Florence, the wife.

She positively IDs Chuck.

He is indicted by a grand jury for armed robbery and several counts of auto theft as well.

He's been stealing from work and other places as well.

Now, he had an alias of Charles Romain for the

favorite lettuce, too.

Oh, I was going to say, that Romaine, he knows what's up.

It was Charles.

It was almost Charles Butterleaf, and he was like, I can't.

I'm going to go romaine on this one.

I can't just can't do it.

Charles Arugula.

No, that's not going to work.

So

he is convicted of these crimes and sentenced to five years' probation.

That's a pretty light sentence.

It is, but he's a young man that doesn't have a record, and he's got a wife and three kids and all that.

And he's the breadwinner of the home.

So they said it's a drain on society if they put him in jail.

You straighten yourself out, mister, and don't make me talk to you again.

So now 1966, fortuitously for the whole family, Allied Die and Casting opens, the business that Michael Sr.

started.

And they manufacture trophies and loving cups.

I heard that and I was like, that sounds gross.

That sounds like the first flashlight.

Yeah, that sounds like something bodily fluids end up in, a loving cup.

You know what I mean?

Some sort of euphemism for like a period supply or some shit.

But I really thought that's what it was.

I was like, man, back then they didn't use disposable ones.

A chick would just strap a like a metal hunk on to her and just go from there.

So a loving cup is a large cup with two arching handles.

It's one of those trophies.

A trophy

handles.

It can describe a shared drinking container traditionally used at Christian love feasts as well as at weddings and banquets, often made of silver.

This is from Wikipedia of a loving cup.

Loving cups are also given as trophies to winners of games or competitions.

I think if you put handles on the Stanley Cup, I think that's what you get pretty much.

It's that one that goes, I mean, it's the cup that's on top of a trophy usually.

Yeah, it's just handles on a trophy is all it is.

It's two handles.

I've always wondered that too.

Because to drink out of, because it's also ceremonial, like drinking cups.

So you have to handle it.

It said two people, but only one mouth can get on it at a time.

You know what I mean?

That's true.

That is, that's a good point.

Now, following his conviction, his first wife divorces him.

Yeah, she's not getting married to a criminal.

In the mid-60s, that's a big deal.

That's when divorce really kind of became a,

you could do it.

Because before that, you had to go to like Reno and establish residency for six months before you could file for divorce.

Yeah, states had.

Yeah, Reno had

Nevada had laws, and people would go to Reno and do this.

Nevada had laws where if you established residency in Nevada for six months, then you could file divorce under Nevada's divorce laws.

And then all the other states adopted the no-fault divorce, which is that's the most,

yes, that's the, that's so you can actually leave without a reason and all that shit.

Hilarious.

And probably how Nevada planned to populate their shit state.

Yeah, people will come, but they had so many people that would go there for six months.

Yeah.

And or six weeks.

It wasn't six months.

It was six weeks, I think.

Six weeks residency.

So you'd go for six weeks.

You could file for divorce, even if it was from another state, and that's how you could do it.

So um, so he gets divorced here after six years, and his wife takes their three daughters and moves to Wisconsin, and he doesn't see them anymore, really.

Dang, and that's another thing back then when people got divorced, there wasn't a lot of this.

Some families, there wasn't this, like, oh, dad gets you on the weekends, or all that.

It was just you go and you start another family, and you start a new family.

That was it.

Once the family broke up,

they were broken up.

Yeah.

Now, sometime in the late 60s, Charles gets married again, 68, 69, somewhere in there.

Then November, or some sorry, September of 1972.

This is fucking crazy.

There's a woman named Virginia Mueller, M-U-E-L-L-E-R.

Virginia and Charles apparently start a bit of a romance

while Charles is still married.

Oh.

So Charles and Virginia on Labor Day weekend of 1972 drive to Las Vegas and get married.

He's already married still?

He's already married.

So now you can add being a bigamist to the list of shit that he's doing.

The divorce with his second wife was finalized the next year.

Wow.

So, I mean, this guy is impetuous.

Really has to be married?

He needs to be married and he's going to jump right on that shit.

He starts working for Charles in the 70s.

Or I'm sorry, he starts working for his dad, for Michael, in the family business, the ally die-casting, after he gets fired from another job in the mid-70s.

So so far, he's not caught on anywhere.

Everything he does is just kind of spinning his wheels.

Yeah, and then he supplements what he can't make with fucking criminal activity.

Exactly.

Well, he did before, so hopefully he'll cut that shit out.

But I mean, getting a job with the family helps because that pays him a decent salary

and he can afford things, and we'll talk about exactly how much he's making.

He's doing pretty well.

Now, Charles' second wife in 1977, the one he married Virginia while he was still married to,

files a complaint against him, and this is for failure to pay $1,475 in child support in 1977.

Yeah, you got to pay that.

You do, and that's a good amount for back then.

So like he must have.

He had once, or is that like all...

No, no, that's a, he hasn't paid in a while.

Okay.

That's what he owes.

So that's, he's, he's doing a lot here.

Yeah.

Um, so he seems happily married to Virginia, though.

That seems to be going well.

Um, you know, he's, he's working.

He's an executive in his dad's company.

So the family seems pretty happy at this point.

He's making very good money.

Um, by the late 70s, he's going to be for a while the president of Allied diecasting.

Um, in the late 70s, 77, 78, he was earning $60,000 a year.

That's pretty good.

Adjusted for inflation, that's $340,648.

Five times the money.

Jeez.

So he's making, you know, if you make $340,000 right now,

you should be able to live pretty comfortably and not really worry about cash that much.

So

1978, due to his exalted new position and wonderful new salary, he decides we're moving on up, baby.

I'm getting out of here.

We're moving to a nice house.

So he moves his family to Spring Grove,

which is kind of an upscale neighborhood here.

There's a lot of groves and

Elk Grove, we did.

Yeah, a lot of groves.

They like that over there.

They like that.

Michigan has townships.

There's townships, there's groves, there's all things like that.

Jersey loves townships, too.

They do.

A lot of townships.

So he earned a reputation amongst his neighbors as a guy who's a show-off.

That's what everybody says.

All of his neighbors say, Yeah, that guy's a fucking show-off.

He just likes to flaunt his wealth and flaunt his importance and everything like that.

Just like he was when he was a kid.

Spoiled brat who, you know, thinks very highly of himself.

Doesn't want to work.

Doesn't want to work, but he wants money.

He owned a bunch of different cars, including a brand new Cadillac and all kinds of shit like that.

All the status symbols of the late 70s.

You know, yeah.

They have two daughters, he and his wife, now over him in Virginia, have made a family of their own.

They take vacations every year

to Marco Island or Jamaica or the Bahamas or something like that.

That's what they do.

He's got three daughters elsewhere, and he's just lavished Bahamas with these kids.

Five daughters, yeah, three of them in Wisconsin, not going anywhere near the Bahamas here.

So that's his lifestyle.

He's doing...

His thing.

Yeah, I mean, he seems to be happy.

And also, he's living up to his ideal of wanting to make a lot of money and not wanting to do a lot of work.

That's the most important thing.

American dream, James.

That's right.

So in 1980, that comes along.

Charles, for a while, here is president of the company.

And he's married.

He lives in a large home.

He's got...

wife and daughters and everybody seems thrilled and all is going well.

He's got, they put a swimming pool in in 1980, an in-ground baby.

Yeah, not messing around.

They have two Cadillacs at this point

leased by the company for his family's use.

So that's part of his salary is he gets free Cadillacs.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

And they took all sorts of vacations, like we said.

By this time,

he's very upset, though, that he's not getting paid enough.

Yeah.

By 1980, he's making $110,000 a year.

Holy shit.

$431,253.20 today.

To make trophies, man.

Not even to make them.

No.

To sell people to make them.

To order products for other people to make them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Order raw materials for people to make shit.

He said that he spent everything he earned and wasn't able to even live on that salary.

That pittance.

What?

$431,000 adjusted for inflation.

A pittance.

Can't live on that.

How are you supposed to survive on that, Jimmy?

How can you possibly survive?

How can you get by?

That's unbelievable.

I mean, you could scrape if you really had to, you know, eat ramen every day.

$10,000 a month, man.

Yeah, it's pretty goddamn good money.

So I don't know what he's thinking.

He said, though, that he couldn't live on those things.

He couldn't live on that little amount of money, quote unquote,

and still, quote, do some of the things I want to do.

There's still some, yeah, I'd love to have a private jet, but I don't have one.

Lots of of shit I can't afford, too.

And you know what you do?

You go, oh, well, I can't get that.

So that's that.

This guy goes, this is bullshit.

He's upset about it.

Wow.

He starts, him and his wife, Virginia, they are really close to Virginia's mom and grandma.

Okay.

They lived, Virginia's mom and grandma live together, and

they go over all the time to help them out, to have dinner with them.

They invite them over for dinner.

They're very close to them.

These are Marion's, I'm sorry, Virginia's mom is Marion Mueller.

She's 69 years old in 1980.

And then she worked at a bank in Chicago for 30 years.

She's retired.

And then Virginia's grandma as well, who's Mary Lambert is her name.

She's 89 years old.

Wow.

And she still works outdoors and does all kinds of shit like that.

Yeah, she's a tough old lady.

Now they live in a condo at Leisure leisure village which is a retirement complex in fox lake and apparently it's like a they have guard gates and it's a yeah it's one of these like up upper upper crust upscale retirement communities that you know no one's allowed in and yeah in fox lake the town of fox lake okay all right is where this is if these old biddies hang on long enough they might see bailey uh uh

god damn it i can't think of his last name now

they might see him yeah So, um, yeah, they live there and,

yeah, they're both healthy.

Mom and grandma are both healthy.

They both take part in, like, the village has, like, a bunch of, like, physical activities that people do and dancing and, you know, whatever the hell.

Who knows what they're doing.

But they both participate in all that shit.

Even 89-year-old grandma is out there shaking her ass when she needs to.

So

they

now Virginia and Chuck would visit them every week.

You know, they're older and getting up there.

And Virginia was extremely devoted to her mother and grandmother.

And they also regularly would go pick them up and bring them to Spring Grove to have dinner over there and take them home.

And, you know, just trying to make sure they stay in the loop.

Now, Chuck here,

he's got kind of ulterior motives also of why he wants to be so kind to these two older ladies here.

Mary, the grandmother, he,

after some time of working on her, convinces her to change the provisions in her will.

Boy, oh boy.

Leaving her property to Virginia, all to Virginia, bypassing Virginia's brother, Francis.

Okay, that's how this works.

And Virginia's sister, Elizabeth, as well.

So that, they're saying that you should let Virginia control everything.

Yeah.

You know, make him like her the executive.

Don't worry.

Just trust her to divvy this up the right way.

yeah and they say because she's who's over here taking care of you and who's you know who cares about you it's it's virginia so what are we doing here you're gonna let these people who don't even come over and see you you're gonna cut them in equally that's kind of crazy we're here all the time we're doing our part yeah and eventually she says yeah you're right actually yeah yeah she is here every every week all the time trying to help us out so why the hell are we giving this to somebody else so they decide or mary decides you're right i should change the will and just give everything to virginia she can be it yeah she can divvy it if the divvying needs done.

So July of 1980, Charles's ex-wife, remember her, the bigamy victim there?

Right, right.

She files another complaint for non-support again.

I think a guy making $430,000 a year in today's money would be able to pay a little child support.

You better be careful, too, because if these family members die, they'll put a lien on him.

He'll have to pay out of inheritance.

Something.

Yeah, that's true, actually.

So

Chuck started having some problems here.

He's also behind in his mortgage payment six months.

What is he spending this money on?

Outside of a monster Coke habit, I can't imagine how you could even spend that much money.

I'd have to have a boat on several properties.

That's right.

Or he's like just

goes.

I could see if he was like going to like exotic locations by himself to like pick up women or something.

this makes no sense.

Does he have golf outings every day with like

have to be?

Like with PGA-rated courses and shit?

They'd have to be.

Purchasing sexual favors.

That's what I mean.

Sexual favors and cocaine is the only way you could spend this much money.

It's just crazy.

So six months behind and like, you know, a filable amount of court of child support behind as well.

So he's a mess.

He also owed $15,000 at the State Bank of Richmond, which was due on August 14, 1980, as well.

So

he's got six months of mortgage,

child support, and a $15,000 loan due, all at the same time, pretty much.

So in July of 1980, his ex-wife's lawyer filed a petition requiring him to appear in court to show cause and all that kind of thing.

Now, he doesn't show up.

No.

So he gets a judgment against him on that.

So he's not doing great here at all.

This is a lot of pressure on him.

And we don't know if Virginia is aware of all of these,

of everything that's going on.

We are not sure if she knows about the mortgage or the child support.

I assume he complained about his ex-wife with the child support, but the mortgage he probably kept to himself.

We tend to do that.

Yeah.

So August 3rd, 1980.

Mary and Marion, mom and grandma of Virginia, they're going to come over to the house in Spring Grove for dinner.

Only visit.

Go see Chuck and Ginny here and see what they got going on.

They have a nice Sunday dinner together.

Just a family Sunday dinner.

They ate Polish sausage and sauerkraut.

Yeah, I think so.

All f family style.

Big bladder, and you take your, you know, take your, your Polish sausage and your sauerkraut.

And Charles

will and everybody says later on, or Charles will say that both Ginny and Mary, or I'm not Ginny's the wife, I'm sorry, both both Marion and Mary,

neither of them had anything to drink, he said, but they ate Polish sausage and sauerkraut, which you need to wash that down, it seems like.

They didn't have anything to drink or any boots.

Anything to drink.

No, any, anything.

So just ingested.

Just dry?

Just dry,

just dry swallowed some Polish sausage.

That would better be some wet fucking kraut to get that down.

You'd need the kraut just to get it down.

So he insisted, too, that it was weird that Mary didn't have any because Mary was 89 years old and had worked in the yard all day and it was a hot day that day.

Yeah.

You know, mid-August or early August.

So for and she had been working outside for several hours.

So he's like, she should have been thirsty, but nobody ate.

Not even some sweet tea.

Nothing.

Now, after dinner, Mary gets sick.

Oh.

Which, I mean, maybe all that.

Kraut on a dehydrated stomach, but

she gets diarrhea and begins vomiting after dinner.

Okay.

Jesus.

So

something's wrong here.

And Marion also gets a little bit sick, but not as severely ill as mom does.

But she doesn't feel good either.

So now August 4th, 1980, the next day,

the very next day, Charles sends his ex-wife's lawyer a post-dated check.

for $3,648, which is the exact amount that he is behind in child support, along with a note that informed the attorney that the check was dated for August 15th because a deposit would be made into his account around August 13th.

Charles also sent him a post-dated check for $500.

I don't know if that's like the next installment or what.

But now August...

Hey, take this for yourself.

You know what I mean?

Or maybe that's next month's child support, or who knows.

So August 5th, 1980.

So the third was the dinner.

The fourth is the post-dated check.

And August 5th here, Mary Lambert is admitted to the emergency room at McHenry Hospital with vomiting and diarrhea for the last 48 hours.

Dang, two days of it.

She's not doing well.

The next day, August 6th, 1980, Mary Lambert dies.

Whoa.

Yeah, dies in the hospital.

Dies.

Nausea and diarrhea.

Yes.

And now they didn't.

She is 89 years old.

So they looked at this as also those are symptoms of heart attack sometimes, and she's 89 years old.

And the fact that she was working all day out in the yard the day she got sick, they think

maybe she aggravated her heart.

And

they officially attribute her a death to cardiac arrest.

It's a heart attack.

Poor lady had a heart attack.

That's terrible.

And before that, three days earlier, she was super healthy doing all sorts of stuff.

But I mean, when you're 89, you can go downhill like that.

Come on.

Yeah.

You just drop dead when you're 89.

Yeah, Yeah.

My sister's uncle at 83 was fishing, had a heart attack while he was fishing, didn't know it until he got home.

He was out of breath, went to the hospital, and fucking flatlined.

Yeah.

My grandmother, past about 85, used to just sit up terrified all night, waiting to die.

She didn't want to go to sleep.

She didn't want to go to sleep because she thought she'd never wake up.

So she never liked to go to sleep.

So now that is interesting.

Now, this, they end up, I guess, she leaves everything to

Marion of Virginia.

Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like we had said, they cut the one out.

So it's just Marion, the mom, and Virginia, the daughter.

So

Virginia closes out grandma's checking account and transfers $3,600

to Virginia and Chuck's bank account.

That amount, by the way, is just about exactly what they needed to cover $3,648 in post-dated checks.

Pretty fortuitous, right?

Thank God.

Came into the exact amount of money they need.

August 8th, 1980 is the funeral day for Mary.

Very sad.

Charles, this day, is arrested for child support payments not being made yet.

Well, don't worry, guys.

It's already mailed.

No, it's already mailed, but you couldn't apparently post-date the check.

That's not part of it.

They didn't have an agreement to post-date.

That is a weird.

He was ordered to pay.

Period.

Anytime the words post-dated check comes around, it's like, what scam is this?

I'm not getting this money, am I?

Might as well slap third party on there in that, too.

Post-dated third party and just make

uncachable.

Yeah.

Ridiculous.

Hey, everybody.

Just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you a little bit about Live It Up.

Oh, let'sliveitUp.com.

You betcha.

Mom's out there.

You do everything for everyone.

And somehow your own wellness, it's going to get bumped to the bottom of the list.

You're just, you're busy.

That's where it is.

That's where Live It Up Super Greens come in.

It's a daily habit that actually works.

No hassle, no fuss, just scoop, mix, and go.

Whether you're tackling school drop-off, conference calls, mountains of laundry, this is one easy win that supports digestion, energy, and immune health all in just 30 seconds.

Live It Up Super Greens is an all-natural blend of over 20 superfoods formulated with organic vegetables, probiotics, digestive enzymes, and naturally derived ingredients.

Just a scoop a day, one scoop, can promote gut health, support your immune system, and give you that feel-good energy that you can count on.

It's designed by nutritionists, third-party tested for purity, and made to be easy on your stomach.

No grassy taste or chalky texture, nothing gross like that.

You're going to want this.

Mix it in water, milk, or a smoothie and make it a healthy habit.

You'll look forward to.

You'd never believe.

a green drink could taste so good if you haven't mixed super greens into your routine live it up as a must-add It tastes so much better than the others and it's way more affordable.

Live It Up Super Greens offers premium quality without the premium price.

It's one of the most affordable ways you can support your health daily.

It's a small habit, but it has a ripple effect.

96% of people who take super greens daily say it helped them increase their daily intake of vegetables and makes them feel healthier.

You're going to love it.

Get in there.

feel healthier.

And because it's free from sugar, dairy, gluten, and anything artificial, it's something you can feel good about taking every day.

You're juggling work, kids, or you're just trying to feel a little bit more like yourself.

Live it up Super Greens are a small step that can make a big difference.

Live It Up is offering you 15% off your first order, including subscriptions with code Small Town Murder.

Plus, shipping's always free.

Head to let'sliveitup.com slash Smalltown Murder and use the code SmallTown Murder for 15% off your first Super Greens order.

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Now back to the show.

Hey, everybody, just going to tell you how to get better trees with Fast GrowingTrees.com.

FastgrowingTrees.com.

Absolutely.

It's the best.

We order these all the time.

Fast growing trees is fantastic and fall is planting season.

Oh yeah.

Did you know many plants and trees actually do better when planted this time of year, but you have to know where to start.

That's why we love fastgrowingtrees.com.

Doesn't matter if you live down south in the sun or if it's starting to get chilly in the fall up where you live, their plant experts can help you find the perfect fit for your space.

They have all the plants your yard needs, fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more.

It's really, really cool.

They make it easy to get your dream yard.

You order online.

Your plants are delivered directly to your door in just a few days.

You never have to leave your house.

They have an alive and thrive guarantee, ensuring your plants alive, happy, and healthy.

All plants and trees are grown locally in the U.S., ensuring they're going to thrive in your yard.

I love fast-growing trees.

We got apple trees.

We got peach trees.

We got so many trees.

I can't even tell you how many trees we got from them.

We planted them all over the place.

And I just love having the fruit trees.

And I can't wait to get delicious peaches off my tree.

It's going to be awesome.

Doesn't matter if you have a big yard, a small yard.

They have got you covered.

6,000 plants to fit any space from indoor plants to fruit trees to full-size privacy trees.

They have a 14-point quality checklist that ensures you're getting the best quality plants possible.

Wanting to get into plants and gardening, but you don't have experience, their website has all the information you need along with every plant that comes with instructions and tips to care for.

They're great.

You really want this.

This fall, they have the best deals for your yard, up to half off on select plants and other deals.

And listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code Smalltown Murder at Checkout.

That's 15% off at fastgrowingtrees.com using the code smalltown murder at checkout.

Now's the perfect time to plant.

Use small town murder to save today.

Offer is valid for a limited time.

Terms and conditions may apply.

Check out the link in the show notes and support the show.

Now back to the show.

Hey everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show and tell you how to get some better food for your cat with Smalls.

smalls.com absolutely my cat is awesome brand's cool she's a cool cat she likes to try to hang out with the dogs which is hilarious because they're all huge and she's tiny but she doesn't care she'll go in there and to do that she needs energy she needs good food to play with these giant dogs and the best food that she could get is smalls and our next partner has made an important impact on my cat loves it she loves it and maybe your cat's having digestive issues maybe they throw up their food maybe they need a diet upgrade We've all been there.

You should check out Smalls.

I'm telling you right now, you got to try Smalls.

Smalls cat food is protein-packed recipes made with preservative-free ingredients you'd find in your fridge, and it's delivered right to your door.

That's why cats.com named Smalls, their best overall cat food.

To get 60% off your first order plus free shipping, head to smalls.com slash STM for a limited time only.

I'm telling you, my cat, she loves all the different bird ones.

Yeah.

All the bird, oh my god, the bird variety.

She loves the pastes they have that you can put on top of it.

I could put that on anything and she would eat it.

She loves it.

I'm telling you, my cat likes Smalls more than any other food she could possibly have.

Smalls was started back in 2017.

A couple of guys making small batch cat food for their friends.

And now millions and millions of cats can enjoy this wonderful goodness.

After switching to Smalls, 88% of cat owners reported overall health improvements.

That's a big deal.

You got to do that.

The team at Smalls is so confident your cat will love their product that they want to give it to you and to try risk-free.

That means they will refund you if your cat won't eat their food.

For a limited time only, because you're a small-town murder listener, you can get 60% off your first Smalls order plus free shipping when you head to smalls.com/slash STM.

That's 60% off when you head to smalls.com/slash STM plus free shipping.

Again, that's smalls.com/slash STM.

Now, back to the show.

So this, he was on the way to the funeral in the suit and a tie, and he got pulled over and arrested.

Yeah.

He was released when it was made clear that he had,

that the funds were now available and they could actually cash the check now and whatever.

So he was finally released from jail when they showed he could pay.

August 16th, 1980.

Eight days later,

Marion goes to the hospital.

Oh.

Virginia's mom.

She's experiencing, been experiencing vomiting and diarrhea.

It's contagious.

Since August 3rd.

Oh, my God.

From the, since the same day.

So she's hospitalized at St.

Teresa's Hospital in

Waukegan, Waukegan.

Waukegan.

Waukegan.

On August 16th, 1980.

Now, August 18th, 1980, Marion's getting sicker and sicker.

Dang.

She's getting sicker and sicker.

And by the end of the day, on August 18th, 1980, Marion dies in the hospital, too.

Oh, my God, there's a rabid monkey somewhere.

Fucking five.

This is crazy.

The Ebola is on the loose here.

This is wild.

Call Dustin Hoffman.

We're in trouble.

Oh, shit.

This is terrible.

So everybody put on your hazmat suits now.

Rubber suits.

You need them.

So she had many of the same symptoms as her mom.

No, no one suspects any foul play here.

Instead, the residents of Leisure Village, they think it's really unusual that both of these healthy women that they've been seeing out doing activities and everything died within 12 days of each other.

But one's 69 and one's 89.

People die.

It happens.

But they urge the officials to check local restaurants for botulism.

They're like, what if it's something like that?

They also have the community's water supply tested.

Wow.

Yeah, they have all of that.

And

now Charles, Chuck, and Virginia request that they investigate even further.

They say, do more.

They said, you know, hey, he said, my wife just lost her mother and her grandmother in two weeks.

There's something going on in here.

Like, you know, are you built on a fucking ancient Indian burial ground or something?

What are we doing?

Also, we're still here.

So

whatever got them gets us.

And what about all the other fine old folks in this community?

So,

yeah,

eventually, though, he said he was satisfied that it just happened to be a horrible coincidence.

And, you know, after all these tests, come, I mean, they tested everything in the neighborhood, the air quality, the soil they were testing, and anything to see what was going on.

And they couldn't find anything.

So what are you going to do?

August 20th, 1980, now two days later, money held in a joint account with Virginia and Marion, her and her mom, is now transferred because Marion's dead now, is now transferred to the joint account of Chuck and Virginia.

So they're stacking some cash out of this anyway.

Under the terms of the will, her property passes to Virginia, and basically so Mary's stuff passed to her daughter, Marian, and then Marion's stuff all goes to Virginia.

And Mary's stuff, yeah.

And Mary's stuff.

So yeah, this combined in cash or whatever is about $150,000.

Not on property.

Wow.

Not on property because

after they died, they quickly sell the Leisure Village home for way less than its market value.

What?

For cash.

Just a movie.

i guess so so there was 150 grand and then 95 000 from the sale of the home as well my word so about 250 grand they come into here yeah

so that's august that was august 20th um now

they decide by the way um on august 14th a week before this happened the state bank of richmond granted charles albanese two extensions on that money he was needed to pay back in full 15 grand yeah yeah because he told the bank that he had some real estate he was trying to sell and give him a month, basically.

So they did.

Now,

they end up deciding to exhume the ladies to see if they would figure out Mary and Marion to figure out what the hell's going on here.

See what virus is in there.

Yeah.

It turns out that Mary

has approximately eight times the normal amount of arsenic in her body than she should.

Oh, no.

Everybody keeps some amount of arsenic just in low levels in their bloodstream.

Everything has arsenic in it.

All sorts of foods you eat have arsenic, but they're very, very, very low levels that your body is used to and can tolerate.

Really?

Absolutely.

But this she has eight times the normal amount, which

they're even unsure if that's enough to kill her or not, but it's more than there should be.

So they decide, well, let's exhume Marion and see what's up with her.

See how many arsenics she has.

Yeah, she has five times the normal concentration of arsenic.

Again,

a lot.

Crazy high.

But not crazy high.

Not high enough.

So they think that's odd, but a forensic chemist still says that he thinks they died of arsenic, period.

That's way more than you should have.

And

you're not going to run into that much arsenic unless there's a lot of arsenic around.

Yeah, by accident.

So it's really, really strange here.

So they find the traces of the poisons and they're trying to figure out what the is going on.

They suspect they were killed by repeated arsenic poisonings, by the way.

They think these are built up over time.

So they've been coming in contact with it a lot.

Yeah, they said they've been given fatal doses at different times.

So that's an interesting thing there.

So

this is the deaths of two very active women.

So it's very, very odd here.

They thought it was, like I said, botulism at first and then everything else.

But no, they end up here.

They said an analysis of the drinking water, the community sewage disposal system, all thoroughly checked out.

They checked the food supply, examined kitchens in all the area restaurants.

Everything came back negative.

They don't know where the hell this arsenic came from.

They can't tell.

They have no idea.

Now, there's also life insurance.

Virginia receives $6,000 in life insurance proceeds and pension fund proceeds from Marion Mueller's death, and the money was used to make delinquent payments on the mortgage.

So, I mean, these people are dying just in time.

My word, I mean, sometimes, you know, they say everything happens for a reason.

You know, you're

just

the luck of some people.

Yeah.

And, you know,

if you're behind in child support, don't worry.

A family member's going to die and save you.

They're going to

ask you.

Tell me there's no God.

Come on.

That's my, come on now.

Tell me there's no God.

What are we talking about here?

What's your kraut breath?

Yeah.

I ate the same Polish sausage they did, and I got nothing.

I'm fine.

So October of 1980,

that is

when the everything goes through with the condo sale and everything like that.

$20,000 of the condo sale was deposited into the joint account of Charles and Virginia, and that was used to pay the $15,000 note from the bank that he had to pay off.

Now, the company, back to this, back to his other life here, Allied Die and Casting, is owned by three stockholders.

It is owned by Chuck,

Michael, Charles' dad, and Michael, Charles' brother, Michael Jr.

They made up the board of directors and each had an executive office.

Charles here, Chuck is president of the corporation.

Michael Jr.

is vice president, and Michael Sr.

is secretary treasurer.

So

basically, I'm going to let my sons run it.

I'll keep an eye on the purse strings is what he's doing here.

Yeah, I'll make sure they're not fucking this up monetarily.

So the shareholder agreement approved by the board of directors gave special powers to dad because he started the whole thing.

He has absolute power to control and manage the company, including the power to veto or negate the decision of the other two.

So the sons can decide anything they want and he can go, I don't think so, and completely

poo-poo the whole thing.

So

I guess that's kind of how he started the business.

It's his business.

So

yeah.

Now, Chuck does not have a great relationship with his brother, Michael.

That is one thing.

They say that he has a decent relationship with his dad, but him and his brother fight a lot.

Chuck seems like the type of guy who can't share.

that sort of thing.

Yeah,

he wants to be the boss, and as soon as dad dad dies, we're going to fight about it, and I'm probably going to win.

That's what I mean.

He probably fought his little brother as kids a lot.

He'd probably just run up and go, you stole my mommy and start punching him.

You know what I mean?

He's that kind of guy.

You know, they have to pay attention to you too now.

Bullshit.

So September 4th, 1980, A.

Donald Fishbean.

Okay.

Yeah.

A.

Donald Fishbean's an attorney for Allied Dying Casting.

He says he attended a corporate meeting that day, and this had Fishbean, Michael, Chuck, Michael Sr.,

and Clara, who is Michael Sr.'s wife and Chuck and Mike's mom.

Okay.

Now, the purpose of this meeting was to terminate the employment of Chuck.

We're going to fire Chuck.

He is being removed.

He's being fired.

Chuck would later say that that didn't happen at all, but the lawyer and everybody else said it did.

It definitely happened.

In this meeting, Michael Sr.

was made president.

Oh.

Michael Jr.

was made secretary and vice president.

And Chuck, I guess, saved his own job.

No, he was made treasurer.

Oh.

Which is the, they kind of flipped the structure, basically, and made him treasurer.

And Clara, mom, was to become a stockholder and given equal stock to have equal ownership with the three of them.

So now it's four people equally owned.

That's not good.

That's interesting here.

September 8th, 1980, because that was September 4th, okay?

September 8th,

1980, Michael Jr.

eats his lunch at work.

He had brought in a sandwich from home.

You know, as you do sometimes.

And he left his sandwich in his office.

And, you know, he went about his business and did everything.

Then he ate his sandwich.

And about an hour after lunch, he started vomiting.

Uh-oh.

Started vomiting.

Actually had to go to the hospital that day and stay there for five days.

Violent vomiting.

Violent vomiting, retching,

cramps, terrible, terrible sickness.

Then on November, then he recovers throughout September.

Then on November 14th, 1980, so two months later, he gets sick again.

Oh, no.

Vomiting, diarrhea, two hours after eating lunch at work.

And he sought medical attention.

He was not hospitalized, but basically his daughter said, or his daughter, his doctor said, you have an ulcer.

Oh.

You're an executive.

You got a lot of stress with your family.

You got all this shit going on.

You have an ulcer.

You got to chill out.

Stop drinking Coke, man.

That's, yeah, we said he put him on a bland diet.

Just you have to eat rice.

Chicken, rice, no crazy.

Nothing crazy, exactly.

So his wife, Michael Jr.'s wife, started making his lunches at home for him to take into work that conformed with his diet and all that kind of thing.

So it became a big deal.

He said that he would get sick after he had eaten or had coffee at work all the time.

Yeah, that coffee will do it, man.

That'll tear your stomach up.

So they said, yeah, stop drinking coffee.

Stop doing that, which, you know, makes sense.

So some time goes by here.

And

late 1980 into

February of 81,

Chuck started trying to, it seems like trying to get in better with his father and brother, trying to be a family guy here.

He starts always taking his coffee break with them, at least, so they could all talk together.

That's what he does.

Do the business together.

And he even often was nice enough to bring homemade cookies and donuts from home, especially donuts.

Love bringing in homemade donuts.

And who doesn't want to?

That sounds great.

I'd love a homemade donut.

Never had a homemade donut, but I bet it's delicious because I love any donut.

Yeah, most of it's made in oil, though, and you got to fucking heat oil.

That's crazy.

People fry everything else at home, I think.

Yeah, a little deep fryer, but I mean, that sounds lovely.

Did you guys have a deep fryer when you were a kid?

We had one, and I accidentally put the plastic lid inside it.

Oh, my God.

My mom was livid.

Just melted to shit.

That's the end of that.

Deep fried the lid.

Was it delicious?

Was it crunchy afterwards?

Nice coating on it, real nice.

It stunk so bad in that house for like three weeks.

You could smell burnt plastic.

I bet.

Jesus Christ.

That's disgusting.

No, I never had a deep fryer when I was a kid, but later on.

They're dangerous as fuck to have in the house, especially in 1987 one.

Yeah.

Come on.

It was not good.

No, like grandma would, she'd fry things, but it would just be a big pot of oil.

Just a big pot of oil she'd put shit in.

And that was it.

There was no way.

It was like an open flame.

Yeah, there was no special device for it.

It was just, here's a bunch of oil.

I'm going to fry some shit.

So he would bring these homemade cookies and donuts, which again, who doesn't want homemade desserts of any kind?

So now after one of these coffee breaks, both Mike Sr.

and Jr.

became violently ill.

Oh, no, dad, too.

Daddy's got ulcers too.

Yeah.

Now, Michael Sr.

recovered pretty quickly and was released from the hospital, but he said, you know, every time he would try to eat some snacks at work, he would always get sick and end up back in the hospital,

which is pretty goddamn interesting.

Real weird.

And Michael Jr.

kept getting ill as well.

February 21st, 1981.

Okay.

Michaels Jr.'s wife heated a can of pea soup and placed it in a thermos for him to take to her.

These are executives.

He makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Why are you making him a can of pea soup?

Yeah, post.

What the fuck are you doing?

What's the movie where they spit?

Where it spits pea soup?

Post that movie.

Post-exercise.

Yeah, yeah.

Nobody wants that shit.

But this is like, this is like a

can.

A can of, what are you, a hobo?

What are you doing?

Does he get that out of your bindle and heat it up on the side of the train tracks?

What the hell are you talking about?

Why are we living so frugal?

We're doing fine.

I've been in that position many times, but I wasn't the president of a company making over 100 grand a year.

He shouldn't have food.

That's normal.

I was taking sleeves of lentils with me.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's great.

Oh, yeah.

I've been in those days before.

So

she put it in a thermos and told him to take it to work with him so he you know he went to his doctor's appointment and came back and then returned around lunchtime uh back to the office where dr.

miller had told him that his ulcer was now under control he's doing it he could stop the bland diet and start eating normally again oh yeah

so what did he do had himself a can of pea soup

He didn't celebrate by going, fuck that, we're going to Chili's or something.

He said, I'm going to drink, well, I still have my pea soup for lunch, so I obviously need that.

So he began eating his pea soup that day while dad Michael Sr.

was talking to him.

Now, Chuck was urging his father, leave Michael alone until he stops eating his pea soup.

He got to break his balls with business stuff.

The guy can't eat even at a can of pea soup in peace for Christ's sake, dad.

Jesus, leave him alone.

Let him eat his hobo lunch for Christ's sake.

Let him eat it.

He's got a can of beans he's going to put on next.

What are we doing here?

Let's see how far he goes with this.

He's got a hot plate at his desk, for Christ's sake.

Jesus Christ.

So

now Michael Jr.

ate about half the soup, though, because he said it tasted funny.

You know, it's canned pea soup.

I can taste the aluminum.

I can taste metal in it, and it's not great.

So he said it tasted kind of funny, and he was like, that.

And then he went into the computer room and started working.

Okay.

Because people didn't have computers at their desks in 1981.

He went to the computer room.

The room with the computer.

Yeah.

Just like houses in the 90s.

Except the entire room.

Yeah.

Like a house in 1997.

That's the computer room.

You can use our Earthlink account.

Go ahead.

So he started working.

In a little while, though, he's in there a little bit and he starts throwing up again.

Yeah.

Fucking peace soup.

Jesus.

Exorcist style.

He's exercising.

I was going to say, he's exercising the pea soup from his system.

Wow.

And he became so ill he had to leave the office.

Yeah, head spinning and everything.

Well, Well, that was a problem.

He tried to drive home, and he said, Jesus Christ, it's hard to keep your direction when your head's spinning.

He's two-lane in it.

He had to stop his car on the side of the road in order to vomit several times before he got home.

Poor bad.

That's a bad day.

A real bad day.

He went to bed, but kept having vomiting and diarrhea and just couldn't.

keep it together.

So he called his doctor again, Dr.

Miller.

He goes into the doctor's office.

He was just there that morning getting told he's fine.

And now he's like, I ate pea soup and I can't keep it down.

The alkalinity is crazy.

It's wild.

So he does a bunch of tests and they order him to be hospitalized to figure out what the hell is going on with him.

So March 13th, that was February 21st, mind you.

March 13th is when Michael's finally discharged from the hospital.

He's in the hospital for three weeks.

Three weeks of hospital.

That's insane.

His condition was still not great either.

He was still not doing well.

He had gastrointestinal difficulties.

And in addition to that, he began experiencing numbness in his hands and feet.

Shit, nerve damage.

Nerve damage.

So they're thinking, Jesus, does he have like a tumor that's leaning on something?

This is like a serious illness.

Oxygen, something's wrong.

The nerve damage was so bad, he was unable to walk or dress himself.

Whoa.

He couldn't like do a button.

He couldn't do anything.

He had to

if he wanted to go anywhere.

Nope.

They rented a wheelchair for him

because there's nothing else he could do.

He couldn't sleep at night because he was in intense pain.

He's just horrifying.

Now

they didn't know what's going on here.

Then Michael Sr.,

he starts having problems in March of 81.

Now, he kept a cookie jar on his desk

at work, Michael Sr., and he often ate cookies while he worked at his desk, which sounds great.

Who doesn't want cookies while he eats cookies?

In March of 81, he started vomiting and experiencing severe diarrhea as well at work.

The symptoms were so similar to Michael Jr.

that Michael Jr.'s doctor suspected that

Michael Sr.

wasn't even actually sick.

He sat Michael Sr.

down and said, look, I think this is what's going on here.

You're under a lot of stress, right?

From work and everything else.

He said, I think this is a psychosomatic thing caused by the illness of your son and the stress that that's putting on you too, because that's also putting more work stress on you because Michael can't work right now.

So he said, I think crazy talk.

He said, I think this is a psych.

Well, I mean, half of the shit, not half, but a lot of things that people go to the doctor for are psychosomatic.

They're not real.

You know what I mean?

That happens all the time.

That means vomiting and diarrhea.

Right.

That's a, that's a very,

I mean, that's really presenting.

You're

expelling things from your body in a crazy way.

But that also is symptoms of severe stress as well, though.

Sure.

Yeah.

So that's what they're saying.

So I think your brain is just taking you on a fucking ride, man.

It's really taking you on a trip.

You got to calm down.

Just pureeing your food and shooting it out of you in liquid form.

Here's some volume.

You know what I mean?

Shit.

Now,

tests come back.

Yeah.

And they reveal that Michael Jr.

did not have an ulcer.

What did he have?

He had received sublethal doses, so not quite deadly, but

doses of arsenic over a period of several months.

Him too.

Him too.

And they say this, the arsenic poisoning is what caused the nerve damage.

Oh, really?

The nerve damage is why they're looking into this so severely, because stomach problems happen all the time, and it's almost like a back problem.

Sometimes they don't really have an exact diagnosis.

It's just, you know, one of those things.

It's very hard to nail down because a lot of things will give you diarrhea and heartburn and vomiting.

All that shit.

But the nerve damage is such a specific symptom that they needed to really figure out the cause of it.

That's your body dying.

Quickly, yeah.

So Michael's condition slowly improves and he's actually able to return to work as long as he uses leg braces to walk.

This poor guy has to gump his way into the building every day.

It's like he's got polio.

Yeah, pretty much.

So

April 21st, 1981.

It's been an eventful year so far.

Oh, shit.

Michael Sr.

is so ill he has to be taken to the emergency room and he's hospitalized.

Okay.

He was released after a few days, but his condition never improved.

Really?

So, yeah, they just released him anyway.

He complained of numbness in his hands and feet and was referred to a neurologist for tests which demonstrated some sensory nerve deficit.

Okay.

So he's having some problems.

And he's an older guy, too.

So they're like, you know, who knows if he's got like a

disc fucked up or something.

Degenerative disc, sure.

May 9th, 1981.

Dad is back in the hospital, Michael Sr., complaining of vomiting, pain, more numbness in his hands and feet than he's had ever.

And he said he's just gradually falling apart.

Yeah.

While he's in the hospital,

both Charles and Virginia both visit him, Michael Sr., frequently in the hospital.

The doctor says, quote, the one I remember most being there, always hovering every day, was Charles.

Charles is there for his dad every day.

Now,

he just has to kind of sit there.

He can't really eat much, Michael Sr.

All he has is a glass of skim milk always by his bedside,

which is there just to alleviate dehydration and get some other forms of something into him.

Skim.

Skim so it won't make him sick, but it'll get some kind of vitamins in him other than just drinking

water.

So that's what he's got by his bed all the time.

He, by this point, is delirious and suffering body spasms as well.

Whoa.

He gets so ill, he has to be strapped down.

Wow.

Because his body is so spasmatic and everything else.

So Michael Jr.

says he was strapped down.

I'm not sure if he knew who I was at that point.

Dang.

That's horrible.

Now, Michael Jr., so sick, he, like I said, he had to rent a wheelchair just to visit his dad in jail and

watch him dying, basically.

In the hospital.

In the hospital, not jail, yeah.

Hospital.

Why the hell would he be in jail?

Hey, you sick old fucking jail with you.

We don't have time for this shit.

No time.

Jr.'s criminal.

This is crazy.

Want your kids to take care of you.

Fuck off.

I'm so sick.

It ought to be illegal.

Man, so May 15th, 1981, Chuck calls the lawyer, the guy, Fishbean, the guy from

the Allied lawyer.

A, whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, A, something Fishbean.

Calls him at home at like 4 o'clock in the morning.

He tells Fishbean that the doctors don't expect Michael Sr.

to live for very long and that Fishbean should prepare an amendment to the Allied Die Casting Corporation Agreement as soon as possible and bring it to the hospital.

Okay.

Now, this is crazy.

The doctor, by the way, said he is completely completely mystified by Michael Sr.'s deterioration.

Can't believe it.

And he did not expect him to die.

That's the thing.

Chuck said, the doc says he's going to die.

The doctor does not expect him to die.

So it seems like Michael or Chuck has some

medical knowledge.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So now the Chuck and Michael Jr.

visited that day to Michael Sr., and the three men signed an amendment to the shareholder agreement that day.

This agreement promoted Chuck to vice president,

and so this, you know, filling his spot because he was vice president after that, or before that.

Now, Michael Sr.

was in serious pain, he's strapped down.

Michael's in a wheelchair.

He needs his wife's assistance to sign the agreement.

She has to help him move his hand to sign his name for this agreement.

Now, May 16th, the next day, 1981, Michael Sr.

dies.

Oh, fuck.

Early morning hours of that day.

Now, the family business is estimated to be worth more than $1.5 million,

provided that the stock holdings revert to the firm.

His holdings now revert to the firm,

and they're spread out among the

next shareholders.

So in addition to their shares in the business, the father and the brother also carry $200,000 life insurance policies, as you do when you own a business.

And Clara, the mom, Michael Sr.'s wife,

she ended up collecting that, the life insurance.

So she's got

$200,000 in life insurance and cash in there, too.

Michael Jr.'s wife said that her husband was unable to dress or feed himself or walk unaided at the time.

Like I said, she had to hold the pen while he signed the papers and everything else.

So this is a mess.

Now, right around this time, like a week later, there's a coroner's convention.

That's a party, huh?

I bet you it's actually fun.

Oh, no, those guys are the best sense of humor.

There's probably a great sense of humor.

You mix them with like proctologists, you got a party right there.

Maybe that's something.

Oh, yeah, yeah, urologist, and uh, and also a butcher.

Yeah, butchers are also big.

I've always heard this, too.

Like, meat guys, butchers are always funny, and fish guys are never funny.

People who sell fish, never funny.

But meat guys are always funny.

Fish guy.

Okay.

A butcher sounds like a job, but a fish guy doesn't sound like a job.

Well, I said a meat guy and a fish guy.

I know, but you know what I mean.

Okay.

I've never heard of a fish guy, so fish guy just sounds like a bunch of people.

Well, it'd be a fishmonger, technically, actually.

Is that what they're called?

Yes.

Wow.

I thought guy sounded better than monger.

Yeah, fishmonger sounds awful.

Yeah.

That sounds like you're you have like a pile of rotted carcasses on the shore.

That doesn't sound good at all.

And you don't sell them, you just throw them at people as they go by.

You go, hey, son of a bitch, get the fuck out of here.

You throw a rotted fish carcass at them.

Fish guy just sounds so fun.

Throw a rotted mahi-mahi at them as they fucking drive by.

Gross, what a word.

Yeah, that's why I said guy.

But he's a meat guy, fish guy.

They always say

fish guy, not funny.

Meat guy, funny.

So there's a coroner's convention.

And at this convention, oh my God,

I don't know if

I'm mature enough for this man's name.

And I don't think you are either.

Oh, boy.

You know I'm not.

I just laughed at Fish Guy.

Yeah.

I still don't know why, though.

That has nothing to do with maturity.

I just think you got drunk before the show.

It just sounds silly.

Okay, sure.

So

this is Lake County coroner Robert Mickey Babcocks.

That's number one.

Old Mickey Babcock, which sounds very old-timey.

He's chopping it up, talking to, I guess I shouldn't really use the words.

That's a bad phrase to use for coroners.

They were chopping it up.

That could have been a corpse.

Why do they do it?

A former McHenry County coroner named Alvin Queerhammer.

Oh, boy.

I saw, I said, no, his name isn't Queerhammer, and it's Queerhammer.

That's an amazing gay porn name.

That is Alvin Queerhammer?

That is the best gay porn name of all time.

Yeah.

And so Queerhammer and Babcock are going to go over this whole thing.

That sounds like a terrible 70s sitcom.

Did you talk to Queerhammer?

So they're talking about all this and they're like, this is really weird.

They're saying this,

what the hell's going on?

They said,

Queerhammer said, quote, I've got a funny one for you.

I just got a call from a doctor at McHenry Hospital.

He said there's some evidence of arsenic poisoning in the blood serum of one of his patients.

They're still trying to check it out.

But the strange thing is, this guy's father, Mike Albanese, just died in the same hospital.

Oh.

So they're talking about Michael Jr., and they're saying his dad died, too.

So Babcock said, Albanese, do I know him?

And Queerhammer said the guy who died was Michael Sr., 69 years old, and the one in the hospital with arsenic poisoning is Michael Jr.

He said the old man founded the Allied casting and die company.

He made trophies and crap like that.

His kids more or less run the place now.

So they said, this is very weird.

Then

he said, there's another son, Chuck, Creerhammer said.

So Babcock said, that's where I heard the name.

We had a Mueller woman,

meaning

mom.

Yeah.

Mary was Lambert, so this is mom.

Oh, no.

We had a Mueller woman die in my county last year.

There was some question about it at the time.

She was somehow related to an Albanese family.

Is this the same family?

This is not homicide detectives.

This is two coroners over a fucking Scotch on the rocks.

Yeah.

Having a seven and seven at a weird party that probably smelled like formaldehyde.

Kicking around drapes they've just recently had.

Real weird.

So they said, and there was Mrs.

Mueller's elderly mother.

The two died less than two weeks apart, and nobody could figure it out because they seemed so damn healthy.

Now you've got a father and son with

ties to the same family, one dead and the other full of arsenic.

So Queerhammer said, the old man hasn't been buried yet.

I think I'll have the doc take some fingernail scrapings and hair samples, routine procedure.

So

they do all of this.

And when they get everybody in here, they think Mary Lambert appeared to have succumbed to a single massive dose of poison.

While Michael Sr.

ingested small amounts over a period of months, they think.

So Babcock Babcock tells Queerhammer about this after he's done laughing every time he calls him.

He said, and after the two coroners presented it to the task force, that's when the cops said, I guess we'll look at it.

Now we'll look at it.

They literally had to, they went to the cops and they went, eh, get the hell out of here.

They had to present all these reports and do a whole thing and test and all this shit to bring it to them and go, see?

Look at all this,

which is crazy.

So they said they were notified.

They notified the police on May 18th about all this.

Now, Queerhammer, his first thought was industrial poisoning.

They both work in this plant that makes die casting stuff.

Who knows what kind of chemicals that go into the metals that they make and pour and cast and all that kind of shit.

So he said that's possible.

So he decided to look into it.

And based on the information he found,

he got samples from the deceased and they were sent to a lab for examination.

He said it was originally believed the two women both died of cardiac arrests, but they were exhumed and autopsies were performed.

And they revealed, How'd you like to do an autopsy on an 80-year-old lady who's been dead for a year?

Oh, boy.

Well, there's a lot of lady.

Not a lot.

No, dust, probably.

So that's horrifying.

The autopsies revealed all three people had died from ingestion of fatal amounts of arsenic.

So the detective said that

I'll just read the quote from the paper.

Pazzanelli, who's the detective, noted Queerhammer was looked at with a jaundiced eye

when originally suspecting arsenic.

Because that sounds too fantastical.

It just does.

They've been poisoned by arsenic.

That's an Agatha Christie story.

That's silly.

1980 something.

Yeah, that's a stupid TV show.

That's not real.

You know what I mean?

So he's like, get the fuck out of here.

Two old ladies died.

You're telling me that, you know,

come.

Yeah, calm down, chief.

Calm down, Queerhammer.

Relax.

So Queerhammer said, at first we thought it was industrial poisoning, then we thought it was a homicide.

But,

you know, they get all the samples and everything else, and it doesn't look good.

So

now the detective Pazzanelli ordered a background check on every person known to have contact with Albanese, with the Albanese, Lambert, and Mueller families, all of them.

Among them is Chuck, who they learned moved with his family into their big house in August of 1978.

They had just added a swimming pool in the summer of 81, a year after the deaths of the ladies, and were planning to enclose it with a dome for year-round use.

Wow.

A fucking domed in, not a room in their house, a pool dome.

I've never heard of that before.

Have you?

That's crazy.

I've certainly heard of enclosed pools and outdoor, but a dome, no, like where it's all glass on the outside?

No.

They're usually attached to the house, those indoor pools.

They're like, you know what I mean?

They're not like out and separate with a glass with an enclosure over it.

I've never heard of that before.

It's wild.

So anyway, he said, yeah, they're planning to do that.

Chuck had several cars, two Cadillacs, one of which had belonged to his late father.

They look at all of his vacationing and everything like that.

And they're like, they even bring the babysitter on vacation with them.

Really?

Yeah, so they can party.

So, I mean, that's an extra person you have to pay for.

So, yeah, they do all the fingernail tests, hair and everything, and they conclude that all three people were killed by arsenic poisoning for sure.

Now,

the doctors here,

there was multiple doctors because the women had a different doctor than the men did.

So they talk about that, and

they got together and said that the symptoms were also consistent with other types of poisoning, and none of the doctors said they were the one who diagnosed arsenic poisoning when talked to the cops.

They're like, we never found shit, so I don't know about that.

One of them is Dr.

Frank Charles Carter, who treated Chuck, or I'm sorry, who treated Michael Jr.

He said he'd been puzzled for months about the reason that Michael was suffering severe nerve problems and having trouble walking.

He said he didn't find out Michael had been poisoned until after the telephone call from Queerhammer, who told him,

your boy's been poisoned.

So the first thing they're looking at is an industrial accident.

They said, it's got to be some kind of industrial shit.

They said maybe they came in contact with that sort of thing, and that makes perfect sense.

However, they found out through going over everything in the company that arsenic was never used in that building in the manufacturing process.

So there's no arsenic around.

Chuck thinks he knows what happened.

Chuck's got a theory.

He says, and this is an obvious one, it's octopus.

Clearly,

we were all eating puss.

Duh.

Jesus.

Yeah.

He said that Michael Sr.

may have received arsen poisoning from an octopus meal consumed shortly after or shortly before entering the hospital.

The package of octopus was received and lab tests revealed that arsenic in the octopus was within normal levels, though.

So it wasn't the octopus.

It's crazy that it has arsenic at all in it, but in normal levels.

I don't know that they do that.

Isn't that wild?

Yeah.

Well, yeah, nobody puts it in.

It's just there.

It's a man-made chemical, right?

No, no.

Yeah, naturally occurring.

I think you can make it, probably.

It definitely is made.

But yeah, not originally.

Because that's what they used for rat poison, right?

That's what rats are poisoned with.

And we'll find out about that in a minute.

Oh.

So they said, though,

traces of arsenic is found in many food items.

And also, every person you test will have some arsenic in their system.

Everybody.

Everybody.

It all is in there.

They said, though, no concrete connections made between the deaths, though.

They can't figure it out.

They questioned Virginia and Chuck, and

that was that.

They got no answers.

So Charles takes over the running of the business.

His brother's in a wheelchair and can barely sign anything.

The police receive

because Virginia had given permission for the exhumation of mom and grandma and everything like that.

When they test them again here, they found that

370 times the normal level was in grandma.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

So much eight times.

370.

370.

Wow.

They also go in and test the cookie jar on Michael Sr.'s desk.

Yeah.

There is arsenic in the cookie crumbs in the jar.

In the bottom, yeah.

Cookie arsenic.

Yeah.

Okay.

So now they talked to Chuck about that, and Chuck said, I always ate cookies out of that cookie jar.

Oh, shit, that's crazy.

He said, even after dad died, I kept eating his cookies.

Really?

He ate a dead man's cookies, man.

He said he wasn't, he doesn't know how he escaped the arsenic that killed his father.

And he said also, they said, well, why'd you leave the cookie jar in his office?

He said, I don't know.

I just go in there.

Every time I was walking around, I'd get a hankering for a cookie.

I'd go in and grab one.

And they said, why didn't you just bring the jar into your office?

Your dad's dead.

Yeah, he's not there anyway.

His answer is the greatest thing ever.

He goes, oh, there's no room for a cookie jar in my office.

I don't have room.

No No room for a jar with some cookies in it.

Yeah.

He's in a broom closet, this guy.

I don't even have a desk.

I mean, Jesus, I sit on the floor and that's it.

I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm in the handicapped stall.

I only got enough room for

the telephone.

And honestly,

if my brother comes in, I can't even use that stall.

I got to go switch to a regular, you know.

So three different fingerprints were detected on the cookie jar.

Michael Jr.'s,

Chuck's, and a third that could not be identified.

And the reason that is is because Michael Sr.

in his entire life was never fingerprinted for anything.

Oh.

So they don't have his fingerprints.

It was impossible to conclusively establish the third fingerprint.

So they exhumed him again.

This poor man cannot rest.

Dude, think about the poor bastard at the graveyard who's just got a shovel ready all the time.

He's like, back to this one?

Great.

Good.

I kept the dirt nice and loose just in case.

So his fingers were too decomposed to obtain prints, though.

So we still can't get them.

They just pulled him up and put him back.

No reason.

No reason.

So I mean we can assume they're his.

It's in his office.

He ate the cookies, but they don't know.

Hey everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show, tell you a little better way to manage your money with Chime.

Oh chime.com.

Absolutely.

We've all been there to the point where your money is, you're real cutting close on everything and you're trying to make progress, but you miss a payment and then there's an overdraft fee if something's late and your deposit didn't hit just in time when you had it all timed out.

It's horrible.

It's tough to do.

CHIME gets that and they understand that every dollar counts.

That's why when you set up direct deposit through QIIME, you get access to fee-free features like free overdraft coverage, getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit, and more.

Learn more at chime.com slash small town murder.

Chime is banking done right.

Open a checking account with no monthly fees and no maintenance fees.

Get paid up to two days early when you you set up direct deposit.

With qualifying deposits, you're eligible for free overdraft up to $200 on debit card purchases and cash withdrawals.

To date, CHIIME has spotted members over $30 billion.

Open a checking account with no monthly fees, no maintenance fees, not to mention access to over 47,000 free ATMs, more than the top three national banks combined.

Mind you, this Chime is great.

It really is.

I'm telling you, I wish that I had this sort of thing when I was a little younger, my 20s, and all that.

And I didn't know anything about money.

This would have helped me so much, and it would have helped me keep myself together here.

And you can do it too.

Work on your financial goals through QIIME today.

Open an account in two minutes at chime.com slash small town murder.

That's chime.com slash small town murder.

Chime feels like progress.

Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank.

Banking services and debit card provided by the Bank Corporation Bank NA or Stride Bank NA.

Members, FDIC.

Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply.

Timing depends on submission of payment file.

People apply at out-of-network ATMs, bank ranking, and number of ATMs, according to U.S.

News and World Report 2023.

Chime checking account required.

Now back to the show.

So Chuck carries on the business.

He's in sole control.

His finances are still fucked up, though, somehow.

Even though he's had all this giant influx of money, it hasn't been, it was just a little bit here and there.

The big life insurance policies went to mom and everything like that.

So

he started to sell scrap metal from the company on the side for his own pocket.

He sold scrap metal and zinc, which were both property of the corporation, to J.W.

Reichel and Sons and to the Clearing Smelting Corporation.

He sold 88,000 pounds of zinc.

Wow.

That's a lot.

And $9,300 worth of scrap metal in those transactions.

He insisted that the checks be made out to him personally or to cash, which that's not shady at all.

Just make it out to cash.

He would not accept checks made out to Allied Die and Casting.

And he was selling them for like 60 cents on the dollar of what it was actually worth.

He was selling it way discounted.

He received nearly $40,000 for these transactions.

Ooh.

Now, in November of 81, when the police are investigating all these deaths and everything, Chuck called Ed Cohen at Clearing Smelting and told him, if anybody calls regarding any of our transactions, you don't know nothing about it.

You don't know nothing.

You don't know shit.

Okay.

So police were unable to discover the presence of arsenic and hair and fingernail samples of other employees at Allied Die Casting or the presence of any kind of poison at the Leisure Village complex.

So they ruled out all these outside forces of where the poison could have came from.

So now the nurses and doctors who had attended to Mary and Marion, Mary and Marion in the hospital were questioned, not only for their participation, but what did they see?

Several nurses remembered that Chuck and Virginia had visited the two women on a regular basis.

They were real stalwarts for them,

real close.

They also recalled they're so sweet.

They even always brought cookies and donuts.

Cookies and donuts for the family.

Cookies and donuts.

Isn't that sweet bringing cookies and donuts?

So, wow.

All the suppliers of Allied dye were canvassed in an attempt to learn if arsenic in any shape or form had found its way into the company's hands.

Did they recently buy arsenic?

They learned that Allied, that's when they learned that Allied sold scrap zinc to a metal plating firm.

That's the Reichel guy.

Now, Joe Reichel told police that he had a conversation with Charles concerning arsenic.

Yeah.

They said, really?

We talked about arsenic.

You talked about

In our zinc scrap conversations.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Reichel said Chuck told him that he was having trouble with insects around his home and wanted advice on how to get rid of them.

Joe Reichel suggested, how about arsenic?

Yeah.

And he gave Charles two pounds of arsenic.

Two pounds?

That's a crazy.

Which It's a lot of arsenic.

But apparently

this guy, Reichel, that firm used arsenic in the manufacturing product of what they did.

So they had a shitload of it.

They had barrels of the shit sitting around.

So he literally like dipped a cup in and gave him some arsenic.

Now, Joe Reichel, a little bit more about him.

He is the vice president of J.W.

Reichel and Sons in Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

And he said in the autumn of 1979 is when he started talking to Chuck about arsenic.

Really?

10 years ago?

A long time ago.

Yeah.

No, two years before, yeah, before all that stuff.

So Reichel said that Charles told him he needed to get rid of some pests around the house.

And he said that his company had a small quantity of arsenic, which was used for the plating process.

So Reichel brought Chuck a small Tupperware container of arsenic a few weeks later.

Then Chuck requested more arsenic a couple weeks later.

You got more of that shit?

I've been sorting it.

They're really eating them up.

They love that shit, boy.

They're getting huge.

It makes them bigger.

Reichel brought Charles a small baby food jar full of arsenic.

Oh my God.

Baby food.

Hey, if we can not use one specific container for arsenic, let's make that like the strained peas.

Can we not?

Yeah, don't put it on banana food.

Don't put it in baby bottles.

Don't.

None of that.

Yeah.

There was an old formula container I figured I'd put it in.

That won't get messed up.

It's probably a white powder, right?

Yeah, it's a silvery white, like off-white.

Yeah, don't put that in anything that looks like it could be fed to a non-children.

Definitely not in a baby food jar.

Yeah.

Do you have a poison jar or like an old

like an old can of something that's poisonous that has crossbones behind that Gerber baby's head?

Because I can't.

Please.

Just

color him out with crossbones.

He's the skull of the skull and crossbones.

Yeah.

Just put them across the baby's face.

So, yeah, he said I needed him for recurrent.

pest problems.

So he said that he put the arsenic out at night near the garbage container because the pests had been getting in there at night and he would find garbage strewn all over the lawn.

Goddamn raccoons and everything else.

Poison these raccoons.

Which is fucking interesting.

So yeah, he said that I gave him about two pounds of it.

He asked me if I had anything that he could use to get rid of some pests.

I suggested arsenic.

He asked me how to use it.

Now, Chuck did not, when the cops talked to him, he doesn't really have an explanation of why he would put shitloads of lethal poison out where

not only

the animals can get, but like household cats from around the neighborhood,

kids could reach it, just on the ground.

Yeah.

They said, well, rather than doing that, why didn't you just, you know, get garbage cans that had lids?

Yeah.

And he went, oh, I don't know.

This seemed easier.

Yeah.

Just get a lid.

I'm bloodthirsty for raccoon.

I was going to just, I wanted raccoon blood.

Yeah.

It was going to be like that Sebastian Meniscalco bit when I came out with it.

What did he do?

The antifreeze, his dad fucking poisoning everything with antifreeze because it was eating his garden.

That's the old Italians will do that.

You dare eat their fuck with their garden.

They'll go out there and poison everything.

Antifreeze their whole garden?

He said he put antifreeze in a sandwich, made an antifreeze sandwich and put it out for the raccoons.

He said he comes out the next morning, goes, fucking birds, cats.

Pigeons, raccoons, you name it.

Everything was dead out there.

He killed everything.

Jesus.

It's not a good thing to do to just put poison out there.

Anything can get that.

So one of Chuck's neighbors, Pat Marshall, said that there had been problems with vermin and animals in the area, but the problems didn't start until the spring of 1980.

So why the hell was he looking for arsenic in 79?

He's getting it early.

Yeah,

she also said that the Albanese's garbage was strewn all over the lawn in the spring of 1980.

So that was true.

And Chuck obtained the arsenic at least four months before the garbage and pest problem described by all the other neighbors.

Premonition, babe.

He knew it was coming.

See, that's how you're good at business.

You have

to be able to

forecast the market.

You have to.

What else are you going to do?

November 18th, 1981.

He is at work, Chuck, doing his thing.

He is set to leave the next day.

to go on a vacation with his wife and his mother, Clara.

Oh.

Just him and Ginny and Clara.

By the way,

hasn't been getting along great with Clara lately.

Clara's being a little pain in the ass, huh?

A little bit of a pain in the ass.

Now, at work, the police come and arrest Chuck.

Yeah.

They arrest him for murder

of everybody.

Yeah.

And they said they weren't ready to arrest him yet, but they had to because they found out planning a trip to Jamaica with his wife and mother.

They were convinced he intended to murder his mother.

Wow, she was next.

Then everything would have gone to him and Michael.

They could have split it, and then he would have just had to work on Michael.

Christ, he could have just pushed him down the stairs.

He's still in a wheelchair.

He's so good.

Yep.

So they said that we had to get to him before they got on that plane.

Yeah.

They said he planned to leave and they said that we couldn't give them, meaning the women, the proper protection in Jamaica.

Right.

So he's arrested and charged with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

It's fucking wild.

They were like, because the cops just, a travel agent called the cops and said, hey, I've been reading and this stuff and this guy's going to Jamaica.

I don't know if that's important.

And they were like, holy shit, thanks for telling us.

So with Clara's profit sharing from the company for

the company here, her $60,000 salary and her husband's estate and life insurance benefit

amounting to almost a million dollars.

They said, he's killing her.

He's going to get a shitload of money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they were like, fuck that.

We got to do this shit.

So he would have control over the business.

He'd have everything.

So the detectives

here, they booked seats on the same plane to follow the trip to Jamaica.

But they said, we can't fucking do that.

We can't.

What if they...

These guys had Hawaiian shirts on.

They were all ready to drink fucking drinks out of a coconut.

And he's like, oh, no, that isn't happening.

Because they're like, what if we lose him?

Yeah.

He's going to kill this lady.

3B singing, Joe, Aruba, Jamu.

Ah, we just got to get him now.

Let's do it.

Shit.

And that's funny because normally I doubt the

county coroner gets a lot of publicly paid trips to Jamaica, I don't think.

They were like, God damn it.

Ah,

my ties.

Fucked.

Not sure.

One of the task force investigators said, we certainly would have had egg on our face if one or both of them had died.

Yeah, if you were just following behind, fucking listening to the steel drums while this woman's murdered.

Yeah, that would be.

Drunk on rum-soaked pineapple, you fuck.

Drunk on rum-soaked pineapple on taxpayer dollars

while a woman's being fucking butchered in a hotel room somewhere.

Oh, Luzy trudging through the sand.

Oh, God, that's amazing.

Queerhammer said, quote, we were afraid we might lose one of them.

We might lose one of the women down there.

Our job is to keep people alive.

Babcox, the other coroner, said, in my 20 years as coroner of Lake County, I have never encountered such a cold-blooded, calculated, sordid destruction of two families.

This is fucking insane, dude.

Honestly.

Like, he had to have charts and okay, it's the 21st.

I give this one some arsenic here.

I got to make doughnuts.

He's got to figure out the.

Yeah, he's got to.

Jesus Christ.

He's got to get up at 4 a.m.

and

got to make the doughnuts.

Oh, I got to make cookies and donuts.

Jesus Christ, this is so much.

Baking at 4 a.m.?

Oh,

he's up baking with an apron on.

Imagine him.

Oh, these look beautiful.

Look at those.

Nice and brown.

So Chuck is held in McHenry County Jail

with a $2.5 million bond set.

Wow.

They're pretty sure.

Yeah, well, also, they know he has control of a bunch of assets, so they don't want him to start selling things.

And he could sell all his stocks

and possibly get out of there.

So, yeah, charged with the attempted murder by poisoning of his brother and three murders, obviously.

His brother still has leg braces on at this point from this shit.

He's a mess.

They said Passanelli, who's the lead investigator, he said that

when we started, we hit a brick wall, backed up and hit it again.

That's where the professionalism and dedication comes in.

Right.

That's two drunken coroners just noticed a coincidence.

There was no dedication by you.

You just went, I guess they got sick.

Old Broads broads die.

You know what I mean?

Anyway.

We hit a brick wall.

The coroner happened to be, thankfully, on the other side of the wall already.

Thankfully, he had a queer hammer and busted through it.

Yeah.

He got this.

So he admits the theft.

That he admits.

I did steal that shit and sell it and all that, but I didn't kill anybody.

That's fucking crazy.

What are you nuts?

He said that, you know, I don't contest the theft charges from the sale of scrap metal and zinc.

He does say that he didn't poison anybody.

He accused his brother Michael of poisoning dad.

He said, fucking Michael poisoned him and probably got poisoned himself doing it.

That's what happens.

Yeah, that's easy.

Poisoned himself.

He said that, yeah, he poisoned himself, and he said he probably poisoned himself a little bit on purpose.

Not enough to kill him, but just enough to point the finger at me so he could get rid of me, and then he has control of the company.

See?

Dia.

Fucking Michael Jr.

is dia fucking bollicle, willing to be in a wheelchair to get control.

That's some shit right there.

Kaiser Soze, he is.

Fucking wow.

So Chuck was not able to explain how Michael Jr.

could have administered the fatal dose to Michael Sr.

on May 15th, 1981, when Michael was so crippled he could barely hold a pen.

Great point.

I said, well, how do you poison him?

And Chuck said, listen, Michael's the architect.

By the way, it wasn't me.

I did sell all that stuff, but it was all Michael's idea.

He just blames Michael Jr.

for everything.

Oh, boy.

He said, yeah, he was the architect of the sale of zinc and scrap metal.

He said that he paid Michael cash because his brother was so crippled he couldn't sign checks.

He goes, that's why he goes, they go, well, you got paid in checks.

And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I paid him in cash because he just couldn't endorse his own check.

That's all.

Couldn't even do it.

They said, well, then.

How did your brother sign his paychecks during the period then?

Because he has paychecks that he signed himself.

And he said, I have no idea.

I can't explain that.

Not good.

Then he denied being present at work on September 8th, 1980, shortly after he was demoted and the day Michael had his first vomiting attack.

He said, yeah, he was, he was, Charles, Chuck was presented with a series of checks and order forms that he had signed on September 8th because they were like, well, it says you were at work because you signed a whole bunch of shit and ordered a whole bunch of shit.

We're talking 20 different documents all dated September 8th.

He said, I must have put the wrong date on all the time.

I post-date checks all the time.

Well, yeah, I do that all the time.

He was, I thought it was the 7th.

I don't know.

That's what happened.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah,

that's the child support people.

Yeah, and they said, well, that's all fine.

So you blame Michael because Michael wants to control the business, get rid of dad, get you out of the way.

That makes sense.

But who the fuck profited from the two women dying?

Yeah.

Michael doesn't get shit for that.

And Charles said, I did, and my wife did.

I got the money for that.

So he's in jail.

Now, while in jail, awaiting trial, he made a friend.

Oh.

Made a friend.

He made a friend named Marty Nathan.

Now, Nathan isn't as close a friend as Charles would like him to be, apparently.

Yeah.

Because Nathan goes to the cops afterwards and says this, that Charles came to him and asked him, quote, if I knew anybody that could take care of some people for him.

Perfect.

Yeah.

And then he said, like, about some money for like $10,000 on a first payment and like $10,000 or $20,000 on the second one.

And I took it and, you know, thinking that he meant to have them killed.

So I said, how'd you take that?

And he goes, I think he wanted to have them killed.

Why the hell else?

You're going to pay me $20,000 to go over and mow their lawn and cook dinner for them.

He's terrible.

He wants me to go over and wipe them out.

Talk a minute at night, do their laundry.

He also said that Charles wanted to have his brother Michael killed.

Not only Michael, but Joe Reichel, the guy who testified that he gave him arsenic.

Oh, my God.

Just that guy.

So he can't testify against him about the arsenic.

That's wild.

He said, do all this while I'm in jail because then I can't, you know, I can't be blamed for it.

So Nathan never got any money from Chuck, but he agreed to mail some letters for Charles when he was discharged from prison.

And he does.

So May 1982 is the trial for Michael Sr.

and Mary Lambert.

Okay.

So the two oldest of the group here.

Michael Jr.

comes to the trial, still has a hard time with his hands.

He has leg braces now, but he has such bad numbness that he can't button his shirt still.

Yikes.

Yeah.

Now, Chuck's attorney.

This is not a good choice of attorney.

His attorney has never tried a capital case, and this is a a capital case.

He's up for the fucking death penalty.

Yeah, of course.

So the prosecutor portrays Chuck as an ingratiating salesman who wrangled extensions on mounting debts while never interrupting his lavish lifestyle.

He said, quote, he skipped a mortgage payment in June of 1980 and went to Marco Island, Florida.

He said he knew where he was going to get the money.

Someone was going to die.

Wouldn't matter anyway what I spend.

That's right.

So they bring in the Joe Reichel guy, the guy who gave him the poison.

And they said, Do you recall when this happened?

He said, It was a couple years ago, I believe, in late 79.

I had a phone call from Chuck.

He knew we did plating some time back, and he stated to the fact that he had some pests around the house, animals in his garbage, and doing some damage around his house.

He asked me if I had any chemicals left from plating that he could possibly use to get rid of his pests.

Like, they don't sell

this type of poison in every hardware store in the country in 1979.

Every place had that.

Do you have any undocumented surplus stock somewhere?

Something you could just give me in, like, a baby jar, maybe?

Yeah,

I don't want to have paper trail of me going to Ace Hardware.

I mean, well, back then you would have paid cash.

You could have just went to the next town and bought a thing of rat.

It says rat poison on the fucking box.

It's crazy.

But it looks just like skinny and sweet.

Yeah, yeah, perfect.

Good for coffee.

It makes it much better.

He said, I had a number of different, I said I had a number of different chemicals in the house.

I named off a few, which one of them was arsenic.

They said there were some others.

Do you recall?

He said, we had sodium cyanide, zinc cyanide, copper cyanide.

These are very deadly.

Our place is just a regular

poison factory.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, it's a poison buffet over here.

We have.

They were all used in our solutions when we did plating.

They said, you also named arsenic.

He said, and arsenic.

They said, after this conversation, where the defendant and you talked about arsenic, what did he say during this conversation?

And the guy said, he asked if he could have some of it.

And knowing Chuck for a number of years, I did.

I gave it to him.

They said, if he could have some of what?

And he said, arsenic.

And they said, all right, then what happened?

He said, I told him all right.

Gave him the arsenic.

Now they bring in Fish Bean, the lawyer, and he attempts to describe what Michael Sr.

had said at the meeting where Chuck was demoted.

And this brings objections and legal fights over all this shit.

They have a statement made by the trial judge during the course of a sidebar, and he said, I think you've got a conference here, and I think the state is entitled to at least elicit from Mr.

Fishbean the fact that MJ Sr., that's Michael Sr.,

was the one who wanted this change, what the change was, without getting into his conversations as to the things in your company.

But that, because basically, it's there's legal stuff he can't really talk about.

Okay.

I don't know if I well, I guess once the client's dead, you can talk about it.

I think.

Once the client's dead, you can talk about their shit at that point, I believe.

I think it's only when they're alive you're not allowed to.

So that's part of it here.

So they talk to him anyway.

The attorneys start to continue to argue and they reach this compromise.

The state's attorney said,

Your honor, Your Honor, Dick, his name is Dick.

Dick, if you don't feel I can get into Michael Sr.'s conversation, would you object to me leading Fish Bean and to some extent away from it?

And the defense counsel said, no.

And the defense counsel said, no,

I think he's intelligent enough to know where you are going to go.

And the prosecutor said, I'll just ask him.

And he said, I'll simply ask him

who was there, who instigated the meeting, how did it come about.

Michael Sr.

wanted it without going into specific conversations, what was the purpose of the meeting?

They said a conversation regarding the internal structure.

He was unhappy with Chuck.

All right.

Do you remember the conversation you had with Chuck and what Chuck had to say and all that?

We're going to do that, basically.

So the judge sustained the objection and overruled it concerning everything else so they could talk to the lawyer about all this type of shit.

So they say after Michael Sr.

had a rather lengthy presentation to Chuck, Chuck said to Michael Sr., what are you trying to say, dad?

At which point, the lawyer says, I objected, and in effect, clarified and somewhat amplified what Michael Sr.

had said.

I expected Chuck to then, in effect,

I explained to Chuck that in effect, Chuck, your dad is telling you that he's very unhappy with the arguing between you and he, and he's very unhappy with your criticism of him, and he doesn't want you to work in the plant anymore.

He doesn't want you to be under the same roof with him.

He He doesn't want you to be an employee anymore of the corporation.

That doesn't mean you can't be a shareholder or a president or a director because he has no power to do that.

But he's taking this action as chairman of the board of directors to terminate your employment and terminate your compensation from the corporation as an executive employee.

So he was getting fired.

Yeah.

Michael limps into the courtroom, Michael Jr.,

and I mean, he's a mess.

He's

on his leg braces and crutches and everything like that.

So they said that he never made eye contact with his brother, wouldn't do it.

Kept looking away from him and

described being poisoned with arsenic.

They described him as shuffling awkwardly with the steel leg braces hidden beneath his gray suit trousers.

Jesus Christ.

He said, I still bleak.

I still suffer numbness in my feet, hands, and fingertips.

I can't pick up a coin, and keys with locks are difficult.

Jesus Christ.

He said, though,

all of this goes on talking about when he ate lunch and everything like that.

He said he became violently ill on three occasions after eating lunch in the conference room at Allied Die Casting.

On all three occasions, he said he had brought his lunch from home, but left his office in a spot accessible by his brother as well.

So his brother could have got to his sandwiches, whatever.

He said, first time he got ill was, you know, four days after an angry family meeting, and a month later and less than and no less than, or it was also less than a month later after the ladies had died from the arsenic poisoning.

So

they try to actually kind of, on cross-examination, they try to kind of blame Michael a little bit.

Yeah.

He got Michael to admit that Charles wasn't at work when he first became ill.

Michael said Chuck left work after the September 4th argument and didn't come back until after Michael was hospitalized with headaches and nausea.

So he said, well, he couldn't have been there.

He couldn't have done this.

So he said in March he was hospitalized with severe nausea, and then his father's troubles got worse the next month.

And,

yeah, the doctors all testify it's consistent with poisoning.

He said his brother had unsuccessfully also sought large bonuses from the family business, which had been refused by their father.

Oh.

He said that an inventory taken of the company following the arrest of Charles showed a

$57,620 inventory shortage.

So that's in addition to the other shit he sold.

He was selling more shit.

Yeah.

So, wow, that's stuff that he wasn't charged with.

Another thing here, they bring the doctor in and said that a doctor that was at the hospital when the brothers were, when the dad was in there, and he said that Chuck was seen hovering at his father's hospital bed during the week in which he died of arsenic poisoning he said the one i remember most being there always hovering was charles yeah now there's some people this is very exciting for this town this is a really interesting you know it's a twisted story yeah so fuck's going on this guy's looting the company and people are dying People are, he's killing people to just do whatever he wants.

Just pillage this company, which it has to end at some point.

It's like a pyramid.

At some point, you're out of people and out of money.

Yeah.

At some point, there's no more people, no more rubes to pull into the bottom layer of your pyramid anymore.

So

I guess there's all sorts of people here.

A high school business law class came to court.

Yeah.

Regular court watchers.

A group of Girl Scouts came one day.

Got to learn about the judicial system.

It's important.

Well, you got to learn how not to make cookies, I think, is how it is.

If there's a poison cookie case, the Girl Scouts are going to be there.

Don't make them at a plating factory.

No, never, never.

So one woman who goes to a bunch of court proceedings all the time says it's exciting to sit through the testimony and guess what the jury will decide.

Okay.

She said she's been to four or five spectacular cases like this in recent years.

Wait till you hear about Court TV.

Holy shit, her head's going to explode.

Charles testifies.

Yeah, you got to.

He has to.

He admitted that he wrote a letter in prison that attempted to implicate Michael in the poisoning deaths.

Yeah, you're right, fine.

I did that.

He said, yes, I did have Marty Nathan mail copies of this letter to his mother, to my mother, to my wife, to the plant supervisor at Allied Diecasting, and to my uncle Frank as well.

He said, this is what the letter said.

Joe Reichel and Charles's brother Mike.

Joe Reichel and Charles's brother Mike, he used me to kill those people and set up Charles.

The containers Joe gave Charles had powdered sugar with little arsenic, just enough to get rid of the animals.

Michael almost took too much by trying to make himself look like a victim.

The police followed the clues just as we set them up.

Mike set up the phony theft.

Now they tried to double-cross me.

That was their first and last mistake they ever made.

Double cross.

They double-crossed me.

Yeah.

Bastards, the first and last mistake they're ever going to make.

So, yeah, he's trying to set other people up.

He's trying to say that Joe Reichel and his brother were in cahoots.

Wow.

Yeah.

And Joe Reichel didn't say I gave him arsenic in sugar.

He just said I gave him a shitload of arsenic and told him how to

put it out.

Yeah.

To put it in sugar to attract the animals.

So they also bring in a handwriting expert, gives expert testimony concerning the letter.

He said it was 100% written by Charles

and that he had tried to disguise his handwriting so it would appear that someone else had written it.

Wow.

That's fucking funny.

He didn't explain why he attempted to falsify the letter, but he did admit that he wrote it.

Closing arguments here.

The prosecutor's description

goes like this.

He said, Reichel said, I got some chemicals back here.

I have some sodium cyanide, potassium cyanide.

Think I got some arsenic.

And the defendant said, I'll take that.

I'll take that arsenic.

I'll take all of that.

Now, all of the cyanides, by the way, also great poisons.

Yeah.

The problem is they are quick.

You take cyanides, you're fucking dead

now, like immediately.

So that is not how you would want to plant an illness like that.

That's a massive death.

Unless you can distance yourself from it entirely.

That's what the Iceman used to do, is hit people with cyanide.

Yeah, exactly.

They died.

It's a heart attack.

Yeah.

It's a case needle.

A heart attack.

He said, if I tell you, the prosecutor says, if I tell you not what the evidence was, certainly disregard it.

But if you certainly can recall the evidence, if I should misquote the evidence, I assure you it's not intentional.

You recall, think back, the cyanide was passed up.

Cyanide acts much more quickly, you know, a couple of minutes and you're down.

It also leaves the smell of bitter alum.

Remember that?

Yes.

It's because a doctor had said that.

So you would notice it, basically.

So this is a jury of seven men and five women and they deliberate for seven hours

wow that's a while that's a long time very long time and they find chuck guilty in seven hours yeah guilty but you never know with this type of thing this is not clear they got it right i feel like

um he did not crack he didn't do anything he sat there dead faced while they read it and a county prosecutor said he still thinks he's slicker than anybody slicker than

this one Slicker than come.

Slicker than

what's the old, what's the old saying?

If there's a disgusting old timey saying that I heard one time that I almost threw up, slicker than come on a gold tooth.

That's what it is.

It's the grossest thing I've ever heard in my life.

I was like, that's gross.

I heard that when I was like 12.

And so that's the grossest thing I've ever heard.

It's slick.

It's slick.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially with.

That's slick.

Jesus Christ.

That's disgusting.

So during sentencing, the prosecutor said he denies his guilt.

You've seen no repentance.

I think repentance is the first step toward rehabilitation, an acknowledgement of guilt.

I'm sorry.

He denies that.

Can this person be rehabilitated?

I submit to you, no.

No.

He also says, quote, sentence this evil man to death.

Yeah, his original crime was to pay child support.

That's it.

That's fucking crazy.

This is because he wants to buy in-ground covered dome pools and Cadillacs.

Fucking stupid vacations for his nannies.

Like, what are you doing?

He said he showed

no mercy to his victims and was a cold-blooded, calculated, evil murderer.

He showed no pentenance.

He also said that, because this was true at the time, 62% of American public favors the death penalty.

He said that at one time, which the defense objected to and said, he can't fucking say, what difference does that make?

Who cares?

It's what these 12 people think, not other people.

So

before, they also brought up, the defense brings up Chuck's pastor, describing him as a good family man and a regular churchgoer.

My God.

They also counter, so they called him an evil man who deserves to die for greed.

The defense

also has a, says that they call a witness to prove the death penalty was an immoral form of publish of punishment as well.

They bring in a criminal justice professor from McHenry County College.

They bring in a junior college fucking

professor to do this.

The defense lawyer asked the jury to consider Chuck's family, his wife and several children.

The fact that he has no prior criminal record, which he does, actually, he's fucking home invaded somebody.

That's horrifying.

And that the electric chair is not a painless death because that's the

method.

He said, I only hope that you do the right thing.

And then he quoted a Bible commandment saying, quote, thou shalt not kill.

All right.

He said, the death penalty is revenge, not retribution.

And by the way, no one had been executed in the state of Illinois since 1962 at this point

because the death penalty had just been restored in Illinois in 1977.

So, wow.

He said that

they talked a lot about that 62%

fucking figure.

They went back and forth.

So, also, the jurors on this one are going to deliberate for two hours and 17 minutes.

Okay.

And they get to decide.

Interesting thing is, while this is going on, a few minutes before the jury comes back here, this is crazy.

A delivery boy walks into out of an elevator onto the fourth floor of the courthouse and hands the chief prosecutor a box of long-stem red roses

that somebody had sent him.

Yeah.

The card attached said, For a job well done and appreciated.

It was from the chairman of the McHenry County Board of Supervisors, Ron Morris.

So the prosecutor smiled and was all happy.

This is his boss, basically, that sent him this.

He reached into the box and handed a rose to his top assistant.

Then he passed out the roses to his secretary, a court reporter, a student court reporter, two bailiffs.

This is some big fat guy sitting there holding a rose now for the rest of the fucking thing.

His chief investigator.

All of this while Albaniz's defense attorney stood nearby really pissed off.

You bet.

And finally, he says,

The defense attorney says, you know, my tax dollars contributed to those.

And the prosecutor said, I'll tell you what.

If you don't complain, I'll buy Chuck a funeral wreath.

So there you go.

They come back in and they say, you, sir,

may fuck off death in the electric chair.

Oh, he's going to get it.

He got death in the electric chair.

Wow.

They gave it to him.

Now, here's the thing that's weird, though.

The jurors were confused.

What do you mean?

They had no idea before this started that they were the ones doing sentencing.

Oh, they thought they were just going to say what they were going to to say, and then the judge gets

fast.

Yeah.

That was it.

They didn't know that that was up to them.

One woman here, Sharon Ardeman, one of the jurors, said, We didn't know it was up to us to decide that.

Whoops.

That's, yeah.

She said she and the other jurors thought the judge imposed a sentence.

The jurors said they didn't know what to do.

They said the majority of those interviewed said the decision to send him to the electric chair was the hardest one of their lives.

The jury foreman said that he got the impression that the judge would sentence Albanese from reading an outdated jury instruction pamphlet.

They gave them all jury instruction pamphlets that didn't have

that the jury decides this.

It still had the old thing.

So who knows when these were from?

The 50s?

They just keep reprinting the same ones over and over.

So a counselor, one of the jurors who's a counselor and psychologist, said that the decision to sentence him to death was more difficult than the decision to convict him.

He said it's one thing to think about the death penalty in an abstraction, another thing in reality.

We were making the ultimate decision.

He said that he and the other jurors interviewed said they were comfortable with their decision.

One said I was willing to face a tough decision and not waiver.

And one said it was a very tough decision.

We tried to do what was right.

And one said that I have no regrets.

I have no guilty feelings.

He didn't show any sympathy for the people he killed.

Yeah,

it is just wild that

they get to choose that.

I think that should all be

the judge, right?

I don't know.

I think you can make an argument both ways for it.

Maybe, yeah.

I mean, you're

certainly like, it's certainly society who gets to should be able to choose, I guess.

The jury can be overwhelmed by emotion is one thing in a sentencing.

Whereas the judge is going to take the legalities and kind of how it weighs into other cases and all that kind of thing.

That's what I've seen, yeah, or she.

Yeah, but I guess in the end, though, all they're really deciding is the aggravators and mitigators.

Yeah.

You know, it's not really up to them to decide other than that.

If they decide there's no mitigators, it's death penalty.

Yeah.

That's so maybe that's what it is.

I don't know.

Now, the one juror said that the majority of jurors, about 10, favored the death penalty in the early votes.

So you had two non-death penalty.

She said those originally opposed to the death penalty questioned whether they had the right to take his life, even though they convicted him.

They didn't really think that it was okay.

So they said that one of them said that the death penalty will assure that Chuck won't have a chance to do anything like that again.

One said that he doesn't believe the death penalty is a deterrent to crime, but it is just punishment.

They said ultimately, each one of us has to accept circumstances of our behavior.

Yes.

That's the jury foreman.

He said the totality of the evidence presented by the prosecution was overwhelming.

And also, he said that Chuck's testimony was, quote, almost too relaxed, almost too good.

He's too full of shit.

He's a con man.

He asked for it.

Yep.

He's a fucking con man.

He said, we concluded Michael Albanese's brother didn't do it, even though he was being blamed for it.

And that's how that goes.

Now, Chuck's lawyer is super pissed.

About what?

He said, I'm going to argue that it's unconstitutional for the judge to automatically impose the death sentence on Wednesday.

He said, especially in view that the fact of the pamphlet that the jurors were given to prepare for the case led them to believe that the judge always had the sole discretion to decide the death penalty.

I guess under Illinois law, all death penalty sentences are automatically appealed to the state Supreme Court, obviously.

But this guy, the lawyer, blasting the judge, saying this is horseshit.

And they said the proof that the state presented of his guilt was greatly bolstered by inadmissible evidence and improper arguments.

And that's the judge's fault.

In addition, the jurors were given an outdated jury handbook and were not aware they were responsible for setting the sentence until the end of the sentencing hearing when they were like, now you guys go in and decide.

They were like, for real?

Maybe that's for the best because if they sit there wondering what they're, you know, I mean, just weigh the facts for now.

We'll discuss the rest of the shit later.

No, shit.

The prosecutor said it was not greed alone that made him do it.

For Charles Albanese, it was simply a matter of desperate necessity.

He needed the money.

Now, they said that he testified that, you know, and everything, which is interesting because when someone testifies, you're looking right at him and going, I don't believe you.

Death penalty.

It's interesting.

And you would think, too, that I think when someone testifies in a death penalty case, you're kind of trying to let the jury get to know you a little bit so they don't want to kill you.

Yeah.

If you're just some dude sitting in a suit across the room with people saying terrible shit about him for a week, then who cares?

This gives you the opportunity to garner some sympathy right now.

Yeah.

You can talk.

You can look at them.

I'm a human.

See, look at me.

You shouldn't kill a person.

I think that's the way they're, yeah.

That's the strategy here.

Now, during the interim, he's sent to death row, by the way.

Yeah.

Now, during the interim, though, in between the two trials, because he's going to stand trial for the other murder, too,

and the attempted murder of Michael Jr.,

Virginia divorces him.

Okay.

But it's only for like financial reasons, so she can access certain things.

So, um, yeah, he vows, by the way, that this is bullshit.

He's going to fight it.

He's pissed in the newspaper.

Super pissed.

Super pissed.

Yeah, the newspaper says the fast-talking former auto huckster is still selling, this time himself, even though no one is buying.

In a jailhouse interview where he has been held since the beginning of his recent three-week murder trial, he conceded that circumstantial evidence against him was overwhelming.

But he said that doesn't mean he's guilty.

Instead, quote, it was the perfect setup.

That's what that means.

He said, I go over this in my head night after night.

It's so obvious to me that somebody planned this all out.

It's the biggest joke in the world.

Somebody planned this out.

You, man.

And it's weird because

for the first few

steps of this plan, I was just getting lots of money and paying off my debts.

So I thought everything was great.

It was working out wonderfully.

And now I'm here.

So the plan really came to fruition.

Long game someone was playing.

And my wife gets it all.

Oh, my God.

He said, I'm not depressed about it.

I won't die in the electric chair.

I'm very sure the convictions will be reversed and the truth will come out.

He's very sure.

Yeah.

He described himself, by the way, rather than as a con man, as a prosperous businessman.

Oh.

He said, I didn't need to rob any money.

He said that he's a prosperous guy who, quote, could get a bank loan for $5,000 or $10,000 just on his signature.

Because I could, anybody would give me money.

I got a house.

I got all this collateral yeah he said also i'm a devoted husband and father he said from the day i married ginny my family's been my whole life and he says i know we got divorced two weeks ago but we're still in love he said the divorce was the only way she could get money from my allied stocks okay he wasn't allowed to it was the only way to support her and our two little girls while i'm fighting this hilarious that he says he's a devoted to his family while his family is all the ones that have been dying he's killing off his family and three of his daughters have lived in Wisconsin for three years.

He hasn't seen them in years.

It's wild.

He said that, you know, he doesn't dispute testimony, which showed that shortly before the deaths of the two women,

he persuaded Mary Lambert to leave her property to his wife by bypassing the two other children here.

By the way, when

her mom died, when Virginia's mom died, she got more than $72,000 from her mom.

Oh, boy.

And

Chuck said, Michael didn't benefit from their deaths, I know, just me and Ginny did.

But what better way to point to me to make me the common denominator in all these deaths?

It's diabolical.

He's so good.

They made me look so guilty that it has to be a setup.

That's all it is, man.

And also to use the stuff that no one even knew that I got from a guy.

Crazy.

What?

Gene, Michael's a fucking evil genius.

This guy's been following me since 79.

And as soon as the trial was over, he Kaiser Sosaid out of the room.

He like started walking and his leg braces fell off and then he was walking normal and he lit a cigarette and got into like a long black car and drove away to go like

just bang strippers in Vegas.

That was what he did, just like the end-of-usual suspects there.

Wow.

So what better way?

He also speculates that his brother Michael poisoned their father and himself to appear as a victim as well.

Okay.

Man,

he is just diabolical, that Michael Jr., huh?

And he makes those claims with zero evidence.

Oh, yeah.

And he also said Michael Jr.

had access to the poison.

He said, I kept it in my desk at work.

He could have taken some.

Why would you keep it there?

Why would you keep a jar of baby jar of arsenic in your desk at work?

When the vermin are at home.

That makes no sense.

Wow.

He dismisses as part of the setup two notes prosecutors say he dictated to two fellow jail inmates to implicate his brother in the killings.

They said that they testified that he offered them up to $20,000 to kill Michael or Michael and his wife.

One of the notes read,

Gail, Michael's wife and I,

meaning it's a letter from Michael basically, can no longer live with what we've done.

We, with the help of another, have killed the old ladies and dad.

I took arsenic myself to make Chuck look guilty, but I overdid it.

It's a letter from poor Michael Jr., obviously.

He also said that the jurors didn't look at the final financial evidence or all the holes in the case.

They made up their minds before they even went in to deliberate.

And then they sat there for seven hours.

They deliberated for seven hours.

I think they talked about it.

He can't explain away the notes or refute his documented financial problems as well.

October 82 is the trial for Marion Mueller.

Oh?

Virginia's mom.

Yeah.

So they said, quote,

who do the facts show had arsenic?

The defendant.

Only one other person does any fact show had arsenic, and that was Joe Reichel, the one who gave it to the defendant.

Joe Reichel never met Mary Lambert or Marion Mueller, the only one with arsenic that never met them and certainly didn't get anything when they died.

Like the defendant got $70,000.

Could it be contended that Joe Reichel snuck into Mary Lambert's house and spread a little arsenic in something and then snuck out for no reason?

No, and he's the only one, other one that had any arsenic.

Those two women that died and the one in this matter, Marion Mueller, lived in a retirement village.

They were old for the most part, but they still had a life to live, and they had friends, and they had loved ones, and they had shopping excursions.

And it's not up to anyone to say someone is to die or when that person is to die, except for me and you guys.

I get to shoot that.

Yeah.

And you guys there.

It's not up to Charles Albanese to say there's no more life left in these people because he has financial problems, because he can't handle his problems.

And then otherwise, the trial is pretty much a replay of the first one.

Joe Reichel, I gave him the arsenic, the whole deal.

Verdict comes in here, unsurprisingly, guilty as balls on that one.

And the jury, this time, knowing that they are tasked with sentencing,

they say, you, sir, may fuck off death in the electric chair.

Again.

Again.

Times two, baby.

Uh-oh.

One for each of your balls.

Take that.

So February of 84, here comes his appeal that he said, don't you worry about me.

I got this covered.

So he said, number one, he's represented by a trial attorney who never tried a capital case before, so he shouldn't have been qualified.

The judge should have told him he couldn't do it.

And they said also that he failed to properly investigate or present exculpatory evidence at trial, namely that the state laboratory which carried out the tests, which helped convict him, were unreliable, which we hear all the time.

And a lot of times it's true.

We've had whole labs where pretty much everything in there was compromised before.

So also the alleged

hearsay statements of the lawyer as well.

They argue that the court should order a new trial because damaging hearsay testimony was introduced by the lawyer and,

you know.

can't do that.

Now, to qualify as hearsay, the evidence must be offered for truth of the matter asserted rather than for some other purpose.

So they said in this case, whether Michael Sr.

intended to fire Charles or not is of peripheral importance.

The important factor is the state of mind of the defendant, which really is a stretch.

That's not really true.

I'm sorry.

They're letting that in.

You can say that, but they're letting that in.

Because they want to say they were firing Chuck.

Chuck was mad.

He wanted control of shit, so he did this.

So you're getting that in without actually having the balls to say that's what you're doing.

They're saying that's

peripheral importance, but legally it has to go towards state of mind.

That's how you get hearsay in.

So that's what they have to say legally is what it is, which is not really, that's kind of disingenuous, but whatever.

So

they said that the fish bean's testimony was not offered for truth of the matter asserted, but for non-hearsay purpose, which, come on.

If it has also a big truth to it that makes you look terrible, I think that has to outweigh that, probably.

They also say that his testimony concerning his own out-of-court statement constituted reversible error as well.

Fishburne's out-of-court or Fish Bean's out-of-court statements closely paralleled the statements made by Michael Jr.

that we've held to be admissible, so for state of mind as well.

Also, cautionary instructions involving the testimony of Marty Nathan, who is the prisoner with the letters who was offered hitman duties here.

The defense counsel objected to the testimony of Marty Nathan concerning Charles Albanese's desire to take care of Michael Albanese and Joe Reichel.

The objection was overruled, and this evidentiary ruling has not been contested on appeal.

However, the defendant now argues that the trial judge should have approved a jury instruction stating that the testimony of Marty Nathan should be considered with caution and that failure to do so justifies a new trial.

Okay.

They say that Marty Nathan was not an accomplice to any of the crimes for which he was being tried, and his relatives were dead long before Nathan encountered him in prison.

So don't blame him for it, basically.

Expert testimony as well.

He talks about how the trial court erred in allowing Rudolph Schaefer, an accountant, to be called as an expert witness for the state to give an opinion concerning the financial condition of Chuck's prior, of Chuck prior to the deaths of his family members.

He reviewed mortgage papers, bank deposit slips, and canceled checks from 79 to 81 and presented his findings to the jury with the aid of charts and testified that Charles had been in critical financial condition.

That's awesome.

That's like a medical term.

Critical financial.

I mean, shit's beeping quick.

Beep, beep, beep.

We got to watch him.

Get the paddles out.

So the defense contends that the opinion testimony impermissibly invaded the province of the jury because the jury could have evaluated Albanese's financial condition without the assistance of an expert.

I disagree.

I don't think lay people sitting in a jury, I don't know shit about stuff like that.

If you showed me some businessman's financial portfolio with stocks,

I don't have a fucking idea what that means.

I would definitely need somebody to explain this to me and tell me what it means.

Also, the prosecutor statements, they said, given the consequences of a death penalty case, it is crucial that a prosecutor avoid

inflammatory comments or mischaracterization of evidence during closing argument.

The defendant maintains the prosecutor's comments constitute reversible error because of their prejudicial effect on the jury.

Specifically objecting to the prosecutor's description of how Chuck obtained arsenic from Reichel, the prosecutor described the, I'll take that, I'll take the arsenic, that bit.

And the trial judge sustained the objection, and the prosecutor said,

if I tell you what I tell you, it was not the evidence, blah, blah, blah.

If I misquote something, it's not intentional.

That speech from the closing.

They said the language used in the prosecutor's closing slightly embroidered the conversation between Charles and Reichel, but a comparison of the language used by the prosecutor and the actual testimony reveals the difference was insignificant.

They didn't say word for word what he said, but he said the gist, basically.

And he didn't say anything that made the guy look more guilty, essentially.

So they also said they don't agree with the defendant's assertion that the prosecutor misstated the evidence in rebuttal.

And also the juror handbook.

That's the big one.

He's deprived of fair sentencing because the jurors received a jury handbook that gave them the impression they would not have to render a sentence at the conclusion of trial.

They said the jury must not be concerned with what penalty may be imposed if the defendant is found guilty.

The law requires that the judge sentence the defendant.

That's a passage from the handbook they were given, specifically specifically saying, you're not going to be doing that.

Yeah.

Which is not good.

No.

That is not good.

The handbook was still in the possession of the jurors after the guilty verdict was returned and before the sentencing phase.

The defendant submits the affidavit of the jury for person, where she states she was surprised to hear at the end of the sentencing hearing that it would have to render a sentence.

They didn't even know while they were watching the sentencing hearing that they needed to pay attention to this.

Yeah.

You have to, dude, that's, I'm sorry.

Like, I get that this is a horrible guy and all this, but if you got 12 people,

yeah, because if I'm sitting there and I don't think that I have any responsibility, I'm not paying attention.

Yeah, they got to know what to do and what they're doing.

I might be daydreaming.

I might be thinking of what I'm doing when I get out of here.

I'm definitely not going to pay attention to every little thing because a man's life is in my hands.

That's not happening at all.

So that's really fucking interesting.

They also said each member of the jury was examined in accordance with the law and were apprised of their sentencing responsibility.

The confusion was caused by the distribution of the juror handbook, has been considered by the court in the past and has found to not be

reversible error.

One judge says no litigant has a right, constitutional or otherwise, to have his case tried before ignorant jurors.

To acquit the juror, or to acquaint the juror with his duties and responsibilities in a new environment and to increase his understanding of the processes of a trial can hardly be objectionable in itself.

There's no way of knowing what misconceptions might exist in the absence of an official explanation.

So their thing is the jury's probably confused on a lot of things is basically the law here.

Wow.

Other issues, they say it was error to instruct the jury to consider his potential for rehabilitation when the only sentencing alternatives were death or life in prison.

So his ability to rehabilitate himself is really irrelevant.

It doesn't matter.

Yes.

He's getting neither opportunity.

Neither.

Yeah, neither.

So they said also the potential for rehabilitation is a constitutionally mandated factor to be considered by the sentencing authority, though.

That's what the court says.

Such an instruction is designed to give the benefit of the doubt to the defendant, if any possible doubt as to the incorrigible nature of his character.

And it was proper for the jury to be given such an instruction.

They also say that the death penalty statute in Illinois is unconstitutional because it does not require the sentencing authority to make written findings of aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

The statute permits consideration of non-statutory aggravating factors, and the sentencing discretion represents an unconstitutional delegation of legislative and judicial authority.

Wow.

It has affirmed his death penalty.

Wow.

One judge...

agrees with the guilt but disagrees with the sentencing.

Yeah, with the way they did it.

Yeah.

They dissent on that and says that the United States Supreme Court has recognized that the qualitative difference of death from all other punishments require a correspondingly greater degree of scrutiny of the capital sentencing determination and ensuring that the death penalty is not meted out in an arbitrarily or capriciously way, or capricious way, the

court's principal concern has been more with the procedure by which the state imposes the death sentence than with the substantive factors that the state lays before the jury as a basis for imposing death.

Any practice that diverts the jury's attention from its principal role in the death sentencing processes undermines the entire system of procedural and substantive protections established by the Constitution.

Listen, if I'm on the jury and I think we don't have to do shit, I think we're just watching this shit and then the judge is going to tell me what happens.

Yeah.

And I zone out for 45 minutes or something and I don't pay attention to everything.

And then they say, oh, now you have to decide,

are you going to be as a juror, are you going to go in there and say, hey, listen, guys, I can't do this because I didn't fucking pay attention?

Or are you just going to go, okay, these people seem to have a good ideas and I'll just go along with those people?

Your average person is not going to want to embarrass themselves in front of the entire court by admitting they didn't pay attention, right?

You can't.

You can't say it.

It's going to look like an asshole and then it's going to

look like all kinds of gates for appeals later.

Yeah.

Especially if you get in there and all the other jurors paid attention and you're like, oh shit, what am I supposed to do?

You're just going, yeah, what that guy said.

There's no back of the book here to read to get the gist of this.

No, exactly.

So,

wow, that is interesting.

They do say that the court has approved the concept of the juror's handbook, even though the handbook may contain minimal inaccuracies which do not prejudice the defendant.

Prior to this case, however, the court has never held it permissible for the state to convey substantively inaccurate information to the jury by such devices.

Yeah, if there's something that's slightly different, but you're not going to have to decide the person's fate and you are going to have to decide their fate are way fucking different.

That's totally different.

So, this is denied, this appeal.

October of 84, the U.S.

Supreme Court refuses to hear this case as well.

I don't know about it.

December 3rd, 84, the petition to the U.S.

Supreme Court for rehearing is also denied.

July 28th, 1986,

Chuck asks the county for a new sentence and trial.

That's denied.

September 29th, 88, Illinois Supreme Court upholds the county's denial of post-conviction relief.

December 5th, 88, petition to the Illinois Supreme Court for rehearing is denied.

May 15th, 1989, U.S.

Supreme Court again denies to hear the case.

Okay.

Very quickly, in 88, he appeals his dad's murder in the other trial and says five issues are presented, whether he was denied effective assistance of counsel, denied effective assistance of counsel at sentencing hearings, whether recent evidentiary discoveries render scientific evidence admitted during the trials unreliable.

Not that arsenic isn't poisonous now.

Oh, we decided it's fine now, actually.

We put it in Oreos and it's great.

Whether the Lake County Circuit Court erred in denying the post-conviction petition without an evidentiary hearing, and whether the Illinois death penalty statute is applied in a racially discriminatory manner and is therefore unconstitutional.

He is not a minority of any kind.

So, this is all problems for him.

This is big problems.

So, July 3rd, 89, that's, by the way, denied.

July 3rd, 89, petition to the Illinois Supreme Court to rehear the case, denied again.

In May of 89, the U.S.

Supreme Court refused to hear his last appeal

for that.

He is inmate N22283, and he's fucked.

Only thing for him, they have taken the electric chair out of the equation, and we're now into lethal injection territory.

May 28th, 1993,

the U.S.

District Court, Northern District Court of Illinois, Eastern Division, denies to hear the case.

March 16th, 94, the U.S.

Court of Appeals for the 7th

District upholds the U.S.

District Court ruling.

May 31st, 94, petition to the U.S.

Court Court of Appeals fucking denied.

Execution date is set for September 20th, 1995.

Here we go.

Amnesty International releases a letter, as they do for all the executions, for him and said Charles Albanese was sentenced to death for the alleged poisoning.

It's not alleged.

We know he did that.

Of his father and mother-in-law and his wife's grandmother.

He's reportedly always maintained his innocence.

Albanese was represented at trial by an attorney who had never tried a capital case and who, according to former attorney and who represented Albanese in his appeals, failed to properly investigate or present evidence at trial, namely that the state laboratory was unreliable.

So

a letter from Amnesty International will get you exactly who gots.

That does nothing for you.

September 20th, 1995 is execution day.

Yeah.

They fly him via helicopter for this.

What?

Helicopter.

Where?

They have to fly him.

A helicopter flew Albanese on Tuesday to Stateville Correctional Center from death row at Menard State Maximum Security Prison.

Hey, how about put the death row where the fucking

where the chamber is so we don't have to pay for helicopter rides back and forth?

How much would you pray that thing crashes on the way there?

I would so pray.

I might just grab the stick.

Yeah, fuck it.

This is going to be easier, quicker, and I'm taking people with me.

God damn it.

Who knows?

I don't know if you're a murderer, if that's what you want.

So they put him there, and he's waiting in a holding cell just off the execution room for most of the days in the green room.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he requested a clergyman who conducted a brief Roman Catholic Mass with no visitors, just him.

No family attended as they could have since they were also his victims.

So, I mean, they couldn't come.

But they said they, so they could have come because they were allowed to go to the execution.

But they said, quote, they have opted not to be here.

Okay.

So,

apparently, Chuck's a big San Francisco 49ers fan.

Really?

Well, yeah, they've been pretty good the last 15 years, and they just won the Super Bowl

in January of that year, I think.

They beat the Chargers in the Super Bowl.

So he spent his last hours talking with prison guards about his life and the NFL.

Jesus Christ, that Steve Young's really something.

That Ricky Waters.

Man, he's a beast just forever.

At one point, he was even watching a game show on TV.

Okay.

Just take it.

I'm not watching a game show.

I'm not pissing my time away with that if I'm about to get killed.

Not a game show.

Yeah,

that just sucks.

If it's 9-12 that they're going to kill me and this just came on at 9,

I need closure of this game show.

That's what I mean.

I need some.

Who's winning?

What family is going to win this feud?

I can't tell.

Yeah.

You got to tell me who's going to the Bahamas.

Now, he declined a sedative earlier in the evening,

but accepted one about three hours before the execution.

Yeah, now he's getting

all the drugs you got.

That'll fucking knock me out.

His attorney said that he was prepared to die.

Nevertheless, he and his client struggled for a new trial up until the last minute.

He said, we've done everything that I can think of, his attorney said.

He faxed an appeal to the U.S.

Supreme Court prior to the announcement and before the 7th U.S.

District Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against him.

The U.S.

Supreme Court denied to hear the case and refused to postpone the execution.

Albanese refused to ask for a change in his sentence.

He wanted a new trial to clear his name or death.

He didn't want commutation.

The lawyer said,

I could probably get you commuted.

And he said, new trial or death.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fuck that.

So this attorney said he would offer to be with Albanese for this.

He said, but I'm guessing that based on his attitude and the way he's always been, he would just as soon have me in my office or in the Illinois Supreme Court office in case something breaks.

He's ready to go.

Yeah.

He's ready to go.

Now, last meal.

Oh, what do you get?

Here it is.

It's actually a decent one for once.

Cheeseburger.

Prime rib.

Okay.

Baked potato.

Yeah.

Coca-Cola.

Garbage, or garbage bread.

Garlic bread.

Not garbage bread.

Pistachio ice cream.

Very good.

Now, by the way, we know

that's it.

Meat, potatoes, and ice cream, and coffee and coke and garlic bread.

So that's a good, decent meal.

No veggies, though.

We find out where it was all from, too.

This is all broken down by the Chicago Tribune.

The steak, potato, and drink was from the Outback.

Oh, he got Outback Steakhouse.

Outback Steakhouse.

The garlic bread was from Giordano's.

Uh-huh.

And the coffee was from McDonald's.

Yeah.

He got Giordano's.

Wow.

Not bad.

And the coffee from McDonald's and the ice cream from Baskin-Robbins.

Wow.

He got name-brand shit.

We got name-brand shit.

This is what it costs the state of Illinois, by the way, which is not that much.

It's just not.

$22.19 for the steak,

$2.99 for the drink, $7.25 for the garlic bread, $299 for ice cream, $1 for coffee, $36.42.

What the fuck?

But

we won't do that with people anymore.

We go, you get your bag Southwest.

And listen, even if you want to kill the guy yourself and you don't care and you love the death penalty, it's just a human thing to go, you're a piece of shit.

I'm not.

We're not.

We are civilized, and we are going to give you a nice meal before you go, and at least act like we have some connection to reality.

Your death is going to involve a doctor to give you an IV.

Here,

have some outback.

Have some outback.

So last words were, thank you to the warden.

Appreciate the prime rib.

But he also sent a letter here.

He sent a letter to be read.

He prepared a statement before he was executed, and that was read also.

And it said, truth and justice and the judicial system is an oxymoron.

Okay.

Exclamation point.

Not only have you killed an innocent man, you've destroyed my family.

He's got some balls saying that.

All I have worked for in life and allowed someone to get away with murder.

Right.

You know, not me.

So the prison officials announced him dead at 12.24 a.m.

It took 23 minutes for him to

be moved into the execution chamber, fitted for the injection, and put it in.

He said that this is the corrections director, Odie Washington,

said he was very relaxed and very talkative.

He talked about his old neighborhood, his upbringing.

He was alert and calm, but he was showing some anxiety on occasions, and he did request on several occasions a sedative, and it was given to him.

He was the sixth person to die by lethal injection since Illinois reinstated the death penalty.

The others executed were Charles Walker, John Wayne Gacy in 94, James Free, Hernando Williams, and Gerviz Davis.

So that's it.

They said a lot of the people around, because the population went way up in the 80s and early 90s.

So they said a lot of these people don't even know about this shit.

Like

local people didn't even know anything about it, knew a goddamn thing, didn't know a goddamn thing.

The old police chief said nobody was really overwhelmed by his presence until the news broke, saying he seemed like a model citizen.

He seemed fine.

So, don't know.

But yeah, he's done.

One person said, I remember the publicity.

It just surprised me that anyone would do that to their parents.

He killed his parents.

He should pay the price.

So there you go.

2002, Mom Clara dies.

Oh, no.

So his wife got everything.

No, Michael Jr.

got everything.

Michael Jr.

gets everything.

He's still alive, Michael Jr.

I couldn't find any, I couldn't find any notice of him being dead.

So Michael Jr.

is alive.

Yeah.

He's like 85 years old, but he's doing great.

He's got a lot of money.

Hopefully he recovered by now.

I would hope he's not limping around still.

So there you go.

There is McHenry, Illinois.

Wow.

And he is still limping, James.

He was closer to death than he has any fucking idea.

Can you imagine how close?

I mean, wow.

It's shocking that he didn't try to take another shot at him, too.

Yeah.

That's a tough decision.

That's wild.

I think he was like, okay, I got to let that ride for a while.

I'll get rid of him a little later.

You know what I mean?

After, you know, because then I got to kill mom, too.

I got a list.

I got a list.

And now, if I poison him again later, it shows

a clear time of deterioration that perhaps it's just

natural.

So there you go.

What a crazy fucking story.

He just had to

switch it, period.

He thought he he was going to murder his whole family and get away with it.

He thought he could do it and take out all their business and everything else.

So because we have a serial killer next week.

So I was like, we need to break between horrible serial killers, even though this is three is technically a serial killer.

So

he could do it.

So anyway,

even the cool-off times and everything, it all fits.

So anyway, hope you liked that.

If you did, get on whatever app you're listening on.

Give us five stars.

It helps tremendously.

Follow on social media.

We are at Small Town Murder on Instagram at Small Town Pod on Facebook.

Head over to shutupandGiveMemurder.com.

What's there, you may ask?

Everything, merchandise, and especially tickets to live shows.

Get them right now, especially everything.

The next three are sold out.

So Seattle in October is your next

live show you can get tickets for.

I think there might be a couple left in Philly that you can check out, but I'm not sure.

So check on those.

Get in there, shutupandgivememurder.com.

You also definitely want Patreon.

Oh, yeah.

Patreon.com slash crimeinsports is where you get all the bonus material.

Anybody $5 a month or above, you're going to get so much stuff.

A whole back catalog of hundreds of episodes you've never heard before immediately upon subscription.

New ones every other week.

One crime in sports, one small-town murder.

How much of that do they get?

All of it.

Every goddamn second of it.

That's right.

So get in there this week, what you're going to get for crime and sports.

Athletes who have had millions and millions and tens of millions of dollars and pissed it all away.

You don't have to like sports for that.

That's just dumb people, dumb human behavior.

Then for Small Town Murder, it is part two of Ted Bundy attempting to help find the Green River killer, which is one of the most fascinating things we ever talked about.

It's fascinating.

Him trying to psychologically, it's wild shit.

Yeah, crazy.

Trying to save his own ass.

It's fascinating.

Well, trying to save his own ass and say he's actually not a bad guy.

So that is patreon.com/slash crime in sports.

And you get everything, all of our shows, your your stupid opinions, crime and sports, which you should be listening to, and small town murder, all ad-free

with that as well.

And you get a shout out at the end of the show, which happens to be right now.

Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful goddamn people in the world who you could happily eat a cookie and a donut from because you know it wouldn't be poisoned.

Hit me with them right now.

This week's executive producer, Tiffany Gonzalez, happy birthday, birthday, bitch.

She's the birthday, bitch.

So happy birthday.

Larry Butterfest, so so good to see you, Larry.

Larry.

What a great day.

Great to see you in California.

And great shows in California.

Thank you, everybody.

San Diego, Irvine, you're the best.

Marcy Collins, Gary Howard, Kimberly Radisky.

Maria Jones got married.

Congratulations, Maria.

I think it's still Jones.

It may be a different last name now.

Who knows?

Richard Sikora, Kim Perry, and Benjamin Brady.

Perhaps Brady.

It's two D's.

I don't know.

You don't know.

It could be great.

Brady.

Other producers this week.

Cody Leversey.

See you in Grand Rapids, bud.

Happy hour.

You're bad.

Checking in and Bay Coast, Texas.

Yeah.

Yes, my life is fucking amazing.

It's really coming together.

Sawdust Dreams, Janice Hill, Carol Coulson, Holly Manning,

Isaiah Herrera, Kimberly Boone, Sally Cookman, Jessica Warren, Emily Satori, Shizaminelli, Chad Walding, Lisa Stevenson, Jody with no last name, Alexis Jokes, Jots,

DTS,

Jared Parley, Cynthia

Balky.

Yep, maybe just Belk.

Nope, it's probably Balky, right?

Kyle Sweezer, Tanya Rodriguez, Emma Kepler, Devin Shum, Dagwood with no last name, Madison Payne, Daniel Kissel, Jen Ann Missy with no last name, Travis with no last name, Travis Steppe.

Perhaps it's the same person.

Maybe he got two.

Maybe it's two people named Travis.

We don't know.

We don't know.

Jennifer Nefar.

We love you.

Maria Kay, Melissa Larson, Josie Yadrick, Shiley, Shiley Saltz, Sierra with no last name, Sharon Duhan, Ted Hollerin, Donovan Chalker, Ben James, Jennifer Spies, I think, Spy Space, Chris Ann Sanchez, Keenan with no last name, Don Brooks, Matt Regan,

Reagan, maybe, Rebecca Martin, Melissa Steinrock, Sonia Crockett, Richard Berman, Logan S., Meredith

Bartelt, John Henderson, Stasa,

Stasia Harmon, Marley Arthur.

How does it go?

Stasia, maybe?

I don't know.

I don't know.

It could be any of those.

I'm bad at reading.

Clifford with no last name.

Bobby Hutchinson, Hutchison, Mary Ellen

Maestas, Maestas, Lori Clemens, Sarah Spleetoff,

Cara Lee, Kimberly Floyd, Tim Bea,

Heath Borden, Valerie Olson, Ashley Brown, Nicholas Meredith, Ed Church, Alex Alex Graves, Antebelli, Antebelli, Rosales, Tim H.,

Jason Comstock, what is this?

Eli Schwetzel, Linda Crystal Fields, Ryan

Coffinor,

Kelly Meyer, Tiaquin Paradoxum, Chris Schomburg, Aaron with no last name, Hallie

Haley, perhaps, Pierre Pierandozi, Pierrendozi, Lana McCarthy, Sarah Cruz, Chelsea with no last name, Brittany Lattimore, Wendy and Hunter Stevenson, Rebecca Clouthier, Clemy Watson, Tara Walker, Katie Theobald, Tristan C., Tom Whitney, Nick Bravo, Jess Warthen, Matt Frank, Buff with no last name, Jamie Green, oh boy, I liver Jojo.

I learn Jojo.

I learn them too.

Blair Wood,

Kelly Johnson, Lori

Gitchell, Renee Sylvester, JC, the letters J and C, Christina Trugian, Polly with no last name, Laura Steffen, Rachel Waldorn, Waldron, K and L, K L, Julia Lumio, Dan McGuff, Magoo, Darcy with no last name, Wynne with no last name, Mark Youngs,

Alexandra Teese, Michael Rasbury,

Shelley May, Michelle Van Acker, Alexandria Averet, Isabella Briggs, Lauren Elston, Colleen with no last name, Victoria Brady, Brian Blaylock, Barney, 3862, Michelle Gannon, Darren Darrell, Daryl Brazzi, Brazzi, Annabelle Moreno, Jen Scraper, Colin Lundgren, Magda with no last name, Marnie Bonarni, Courtney with no last name, Anthony Zambrano, MC, the letters M and C, Jamie Wilson, Jeb Fernandez, Lynn Guff, Allie with no last name, Sam Bonus, Matthew Lopez, Bruce Hurl, Jolene Christensen, Jolene, obviously.

God damn it, Christensen, Angel Salgato, Bobby Biski, Biski, B-S-K-I-I, Biski.

I don't know.

John Keaton, Joy Wilson, Kevin Voss, Jason Lezinowski, Michelle with no last name, Bethany Tibbetts, Alexis Sweeney,

Becky Malandrino, Eric Chavara,

Chavara, Veronica Hill, Del Rowe, Kobe Willick,

Schottelheim, Reichenbach, the third.

Reinbeck.

Get it.

All right.

Eric, Aaron, Aaron McNeely, Jeremy Hamilton, Debbie Burns, Nikki King, Sierra Hull, Jason Fox, Colby Ron,

Jackie Mullen, Jenny Jeannie, Simi, Simmy,

Terry Pollock, Breanne Spence, Christian Buchanan, Chris with no last name, Gunner with no last name, Holly Straub, Lana, Laura, N,

Stephanie Ford, Tamara Culver, Al Abel, Abel Gabriel,

Kiara, Kira, Kira Goretti, Gracie Decker, Mylene Turner, Myra with no last name, Chris Pearson, Scuba Steve 911, Jesse Jess with no last name, Shelby Elmore, Ann Perry, D.

Nix, Jay Ramos, Morgan Jennings, Snodgrass, Patrick Bailey, Matthew Maxon, Maxon, Olivia Bonesteel, Kate Beebe, Shannon with no last name, Tanya Britton, Elizabeth Nelson, Ann Culver, Rochelle Schilling, Angela Epspeth, Ann Kowatz,

Terry Pollock,

Allegra Benjamin, Sarah Delzell,

Jake Kloppen, Kloppel, Kloppel-Hemrick,

Winston Dennis, Colleen with no last name, Bennett Hancock, Bennis, it's Benjamin, Emmy, Emisses, Emiss

with no last name, Kay Kirk with no last name, Heather

Torrance,

Francis B.,

what is this?

Greg Kavan, Jay with no last name, Katie with no last name, Heather Kuhn, Ann Graybeal, Erica with no last name.

Tracy Johnson, Donna D75, Kara, Karen Altman,

Lauren Brown, Rachel Mark, Edwin Feliz, Mr.

Marcus, not the Triple X guy.

I guess there's a porn guy named Mr.

Marcus, I assume.

Or just not the guy from Triple X, the movie?

Someone with a large penis.

There it is.

Thomas Hurlbutt.

Hurlbutt.

Hurlbutt.

Hurlbutt.

Hurl out your butt.

Andrea McAllister.

That is a poop.

Ann Postel.

Paul Bremner.

Rachel Graves.

Amber

Breathawer.

Breathawer.

Dan Cole.

Mark Salute.

Salute.

Alessandro Pildner von Streinberg.

Tracy with no last name.

Michael Baroni.

Perhaps just Barone.

Angela with no last name.

Krista McConnen.

Jay, nope, Chris Jazwa, Sam Richardson, and all of our patrons.

Thank you guys so much.

Thank you, everybody, so much for all that you do for us.

God damn it.

You guys are the best.

You keep coming through for us week after week.

Thank you.

We hope you're enjoying all the content on Patreon and everything like that.

Either way, keep coming back every week.

Tell your friends.

Tell everybody about it.

If you want to find us on social media, shutup and givememurder.com is the place to go.

Drop-down menus take you where you want to go.

Keep coming back and seeing us.

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

Bye.