#549 - Keeping Deadly Secrets - Casa Grande, Arizona

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This week in Casa Grande, Arizona, the former owner of a popular chain of local stores disappears after a trip to the mall, but detectives uncover her longtime boyfriend is not at all who he says he is, and they have some questions. back to Small Town Murder.
Yay! Yay, indeed, Jimmy. Yay, indeed.
My name is James Petrigallo. I'm here with my co-host.
I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you, folks, so much for joining us today.
We have a wild episode for you. This is one, if you're a Phoenix person, whoever many of those are listening right now.
Really just Arizona. Really, Arizona people, you might remember this story because when I lived there at the time, it happened, and it was a big story.
So it's kind of crazy stuff. We'll get to that.
Before we do, though, quickly, shutupandgivememur com. First of all, merchandise.
But second of all, you will get tickets for live shows for sure. Terrytown and Boston.
You are up next. Very few tickets left for both.
So get in there. Sell that bad boy out.
We're coming there this month. And right around the same time, we're going to be announcing the 2025 road schedule as well.
And those tickets will go on sale, too. We're excited to come into a bunch of cities we didn't get to this year, so we can't wait.
New places, new faces, going to be good stuff here. You definitely want Patreon.
Patreon.com slash crime in sports. You get all your bonus material there.
Anybody $5 a month or above. A cup of coffee.
You can either have a cup of coffee. So minimal.
Or hundreds of back episodes of bonus stuff you've never heard before and new ones every other week including this week which is no different this week for crime and sports which you'll have access to of course sure we're going to talk about this crazy united kingdom football soccer sex abuse scandal they had going on there it is why it's like our whole gymnastics thing except over there and with soccer. It's really weird.
Which I mean when you hand kids over and you're like, here's my kid. He's 11 and he's yours forever.
So trusted. It's kind of, yeah, it's not great.
Then for Small Town Murder, we're going to talk about this trial I watched. More than the trial, we're going to talk about the whole world of this weird little cult.
It was called the Cult Baby Murder Trial, which is, that name rings all the bells right away. It's all of them, yeah.
It's the buzzwords. There's polygamy, and people naming people new names, and people drinking their pee every day.
It's wild shit. And a dead baby.
We're going to talk all about it. Holy shit, is it crazy? Patreon.com slash crime in sports.
Also, for sure listen to our other two shows crime in sports and your stupid opinions check them both out because god damn it are they funny and you're missing out if you're not listening to them you're blowing it that's that disclaimer time here we go this here is a comedy show right we're comedians and we're definitely going to make jokes now of, that doesn't mean the story isn't real. Unfortunately, these stories are as real as they get.
No details are embellished or any bullshit like that to try to make anything funnier. It's crazy enough.
There's enough murder that's crazy out there. No details need to be made up.
So we're going to make jokes, and there's going to be murder. Those things can go together if you do it the right way.
And a good way to do that is to not make fun of the victims or the victims families why is that james because we're assholes but but we're not scumbags see how that works super easy you follow those you're going to do just fine here so you think true crime and comedy should never ever ever go together maybe we're not for you then i mean's, I don't know why you're here at that point. But either way, no complaining later because you're going to hear some wild stories.
And that said, I think it's time, everybody, to sit back. What do you say? Let's all clear the lungs here.
Arms to the sky. Let's all shout.
Shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody.
Hey. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's do it.
We are going to Arizona. Yeah.
Casa Grande, in particular, is a word of man. Not the greatest.
Not the greatest out there. If you're driving from Phoenix to Tucson, it's a place to stop for gas, place to stop for gas as essentially or it's where all the car accidents happen oh yeah during monsoon seasons because you shake it those dust storms you can't see shit can't see anything and that's by the way so many of the reviews of this town are terrible drivers good god these are the worst drivers in america holy shit it's really bad stuff this is kind of southeastern arizona basically about an hour and 10 minutes to tucson if you drive real slow if you drive from phoenix to tucson you know you just gun that shit and it's nobody cares you just go as fast as you can it's about 30 minutes to maricopa our last arizona episode uh cold-blooded obsession that was the one that was that was wild they.
Yeah, the guy in the driveway.

That was messed up, man.

Bad lady.

This is in Pinal County.

Area code 520, as we know.

Motto here, Stronger United.

Right.

That's it.

Just Stronger United.

Or 2002.

Yeah, exactly.

They put that up September 12th.

A little knockoff of September 11th shit. September 12th, 12 2001 that became their their motto and they're running with it lesser known motto is please stop here for gas we got nothing else to offer a little bit of history in this town it's kind of funny actually the casa grande itself was founded in 1879 during a mining boom in arizona right the railroad came through there so they put a town up in january 1880 it wasn't called casa grande though back then it was called terminus which means end of the line you named your town end of the line everybody you don't have to get out but you can't stay here but you got to get out.
Got to get the fuck out. Terminus sounds like a diagnosis.
It sounds like a diagnosis that you don't want to get. He's terminus, not terminus.
Oh God. Dad's terminus.
Everybody. He's not going to make it to Christmas.
Holy shit. Why would you name your town? It's way too close to a pest company.
That's so bad. Yeah.
It had five residents and three buildings when it was called Terminus, which is almost a building per resident, which isn't bad. Not bad.
In September 1880, railroad executives renamed it Casa Grande because they were like, no one's coming to Terminus. We can't get them to come here for some reason.
Tell them it's a big house. Yeah, I don't understand it here.
Casagrande would grow slowly after that. Some setbacks in 1886 and 1893.
Fires destroyed everything twice. Seven years in between.
Ouch. It all burned down in 1886.
They rebuilt it with wood still. They're like, we're going to stick with this and just be more careful with fire this time and it didn't work what year did the three little pigs come out what year was it written because they had to know right i think they knew wood was flammable by then pigs aside i think they knew they had an idea of the fire was bad so um yeah it destroyed all the wooden housing structures there Then the mining boom slowed down in the 1890s, and the town was basically just abandoned.

Nobody was here anymore.

Then they started growing shit here, and eventually people came back.

And it incorporated in 1915.

And from 1942 to 1945, it was a Japanese-American relocation camp.

Do you know what that means?

Everybody knows what that means.

Pat Morita was there.

Is that right? Yes.

Pat Morita. Yes.
Mr. Miyagi

himself was

interned there. So here's some

reviews of this town. Holy

shit. This person, I like how they, I like

when a person makes like a list in their

review. This person, four stars, truth number one.
This is how they i like when a person makes like a list of in their review this person four stars truth number one this is how they start okay truth number one no place is perfect yeah that is true yeah that's true that's truth truth number two some people are never happy what is this what's none of these truths are about the town. What's happening right now? What are you doing? These are cliches.
It's so weird. Truth three, some people only know how to complain.
That's the end of the truth section of this review. Okay.
Now they've got some truths. And then they go on to say, Casa Grande is not a suburb of Phoenix and will never be due to indian reservation just north of us is that right is that a complaint or that's another truth they don't even know it that's a real truth i can drive to chandler or gilbert in 30 minutes for what i don't know there are many good paying jobs in town with more shopping and restaurants opening it does not have the nightlife or food options of phoenix it's a smaller place.
Because it's not Phoenix. Phoenix has 5 million people there.
Yeah, it's way different. To think it would is silly.
Yes. Yeah.
All in all, it is a good, solid place to live. Not perfect, but perfection is different for everybody.
I think you know whether it's just not perfect or shitty. It all comes down to choice.
If you need artificial distractions to be happy, live in the big city. If you need artificial distractions, if you want restaurants and things like that, we're not the place for you.
Yeah. Not for you.
Wow. If you are well-grounded and comfortable with yourself and like a slower lifestyle, this is a good place.
What do those have to do with each other? I don't understand. Also, if you like it to be 118 degrees most of the year, that's a great place.
It's so hot down there. It's just so hot.
It's just so hot. It's just an awful little place.
It's an awful, awful. Yeah, Phoenix people, if you know someone that lives in Casa Grande, you're like, what happened? Why? If they lived in Phoenix and end up in Casa Grande, you're going, what did you do? How did you fuck up? Why'd you lose your house? Casa Grande is the on-the-way-to-Tucson city like Gila Bend is to Yuma.
You can stop and get gas or a snack or something. That's it.
That's all it is. And get the fuck out.
One other thing. A lot of drivers all over the Southwest are aggressive drivers.
Try driving the freeways of Phoenix. Yes, everybody's an asshole.
The freeways of Phoenix are a mess. It's insane.
It's also everybody's from somewhere else and they all have those driving styles mixed together and it's fucked up. And it's a mess.
It's a goddamn disaster. Every morning, the freeways are fucked because there's an accident.
Every morning. You're all going the same fucking direction.
You can't mix Minnesota and New Jersey that much. You just can't.
It's not going to work. They don't go together.
Sorry. One star.
Keep on driving. I like that.
Yeah, that's how it is. The people here are dishonest, incompetent, and selfish.
All of them? There's tens of thousands of people here. That'd be a lot a lot businesses are constantly being chased out and belittled by their own residents how the hell does that happen you mean they're not buying things there are no fine dining establishments and there aren't any places for entertainment or nightlife there are an astounding amount of mexican restaurants and fast food places for a small town it's just a pit stop do you think lives there that you think lives there? That's it.
That's what I mean. Who's living there? It's a cheaper place where you can get to Phoenix.
Yes. Well, that's how it is.
It's just a pit stop at the Phoenix metro area and the Tucson metro area, a quaint cow town of a community with their chief industry of agriculture. This county once held the highest teen pregnancy rate while also claiming the top spot in high school dropouts not too long ago in the entire nation very nice wow congrats how did they know that well they have stats on that shit yeah yeah and also they probably are from there and somebody told them and we're like oh i'll never forget that that little fact i had to be on the local news or something hey everybody we're famous yeah yuma used to be the highest per capita uh diagnosis of herpes in the country that makes sense i could see that a lot of just crossing through got any way to california stop off drop an std on somebody keep going go to san diego drop out pregnancy and fucking heal.
Who knew? What a mess. Arizona sucks.
If you're seeking a place to find a suitable school, prepare to be flabbergasted at the lack of viable options. Most students who actually graduate leave the town as fast as they can to provide better options for themselves and secure a future for their families.
If you hold a professional degree, you have nearly no place to employ it. Okay.
At the Filibertos, they don't need a degree. Yeah.
People in this town, you're going to be shocked when you hear how many people are here right now. I think I know.
It's doubled since 2000, which is crazy. 53,488.
I was going to say 47. That's close.
It's pretty big now. It's shockingly sprawling.
In the 90s, it was like a little tiny one-exit shithole. Now that's a lot of people.
A few more males and females. Median age is right at the average, a national average of 37.
Family, everything's about average. It's 50-50 married, just like average.
A few more single with children, but we know those are teenagers, as we found out earlier. So, you know, of course they're going to be single.
Race in Casa Grande, 45% white, 4.2% black, 1.5% Asian, 4.8% Native American, 42.1% Hispanic. So there you go.
Mixed around. It's white and Mexican.
That's who lives there. Yes.
That's it. Religion of this town, 24.8, so under the national average by far.
And, of course, Catholicism is going to lead up that group. Crushing.
Yeah, because as we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the Southwest now, we'll say. I don't know.
It's usually the North, but what the hell? Yeah. Spanish-Americans, they really get into it.
Oh, they love that. Yeah, that's a lot of Catholicism there.
6.9% unemployment rate, which is above the national average by a good clip there. It's just above 4 in the rest of the country, so I don't know what they're doing here.
Median household income here, a little less than the national average. Here it is $59,175 a year, about $10,000 less than the national average.
So bad for that area. Not terrible.
Cost of living, $100 is average. You'd figure here it would be, what, $12? It's the middle of the desert.
It's $102,000. So above the cost of living in the rest of the country.
Housing here, $325,600 is the median home cost to live between Phoenix and Tucson.

Like that is outrageous.

To live 40 minutes outside of the eastest area of Phoenix.

Eastest valley of the eastest, yeah.

So if we've convinced you, damn it, and obviously we've made a strong case,

if we've convinced you to move to Casa Grande, we have for you the Casa Grande, Arizona Real Estate Report. Average two-bedroom rental here is actually well above the national average, which is remarkable.
$1,450 for a two-bedroom apartment in the middle of the desert. Here's a house, four-bedroom, two-bath, 1,800 square feet.
So that sounds like a good family home. It is a huge pile of shit, this house.
The windows are literally boarded up. They literally have fucking plywood over the windows.
The front porch just has piles of shit all over it,

like somebody's garbage.

It's, fuck, the roof looks like it's caving in.

And then you go inside, and you're like,

what the fuck happened in here?

Half the rooms have, like, half wood paneling and half not.

What's going on?

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

but this house looks like it was abandoned in the 70s

and hasn't been touched since.

It's a disaster.

$99,000 for that, though. That's too much.
It's way too much. You're buying nothing.
Knock that house to the ground and build another one. Here is a four-bedroom, three-bath, 2,671 square foot.
It's your typical Arizona house. Tan.
No, two-story, tan. Stucco? Stucco.
It's that house. Yeah.
It's the post-1990 Arizona house that's typical as shit. It's all I can say about it.
Boring as fuck. $450,000 for that.
That's Arizona right there. That is what the average house in Arizona costs.
Wow. And that's the exact average house in Arizona we're talking about, too.
And here's a five-bedroom, four-bath, 3,215 square foot. Also super brown.
It's just a tan, weird place. It's like a nicer version of house number two is all it is.
They have columns out front. Okay.
Like too many columns for 3,200. It's got a little bit of land? No.
God, no. It's a 10,000 square foot property.
There's no land out there to be had, even though you're in the middle of the desert. Yeah.
You still are crammed in there. Let's just stack them next to each other.
It's not great. 769 grand for that.
You've got to be kidding me. The area.
We've done houses. Remember that one in Connecticut? I still want that house, and it's 700 grand, and it's 100 times nicer than this piece of shit.
Oh, my God. This thing's made of particle board.
You could kick your way into this house through the wall. No problem.
If you've got some wire cutters, you can cut the chicken wire that literally holds this house together. It's chicken wire and particle board.
That's all they make houses of out there.

That's it.

They're pieces of shit.

Not worth this at all.

Things to do here.

Oh, boy.

The Gourd Art Festival.

We're painting pumpkins, huh?

Oh, gourds.

Here, look.

This is what they have.

Oh, all kinds of different kinds of gourds.

Yeah, there's all sorts of shit. They make it look like pots.
Those lumpy ones, yeah. Daisies all over it.
Featuring, you know who's going to be performing there, the Rusted Spurs West. I'm going to show you these.
Look at these folks. Oh, they are rusted.
They're a little rusted. That lady is stuck in that position forever with that accordion.
Everyone in this band is at least 83 years old is what we're getting at here.

They live in Cave Creek.

They don't live anywhere near that place.

Fuck no.

Oh, my God.

They dress like they live in Cave Creek for sure.

So that's what's going on there.

There's gourd classes.

I don't know.

You've got to pre-register for those, though.

They must fill up fast.

Is that right?

An AZGS gourd competition. Yeah.
Who's got the best gourd? I'm bored out of mine. I'm bored out of my mind here.
And food, entertainment, and more. Yeah, the Rusted Spurs West.
My God. That's all they've got for music? I hope they play just disco hits.
They just play Donna Summer and shit. That'd be amazing.
It's not even country. Who sang Ring My Bell? That chick.
That's it. Yeah, sing that shit.
That's what I'd like, man. The Southwest Taco Fest.
This is probably recommended. You're probably going to get some good tacos here.
And if they aren't Mexican, if they're Native American ones, either way, you can't go wrong. They're so good.
You're going to be good here, I'm going to tell good here i'm gonna tell you you're gonna explode your fucking heart but it's so good oh yeah but you go to a small town in arizona that's half mexican there's gonna be fucking good tacos you're gonna lose your mind with how good that food is it is so good well i that's the food i go for out there immediately because that's what i can't get i went to filiberto's immediately yeah last time i was. And man, did it make me sick.
Holy shit. Makes you suck.
Every time I eat Filiberto's just liquefies my insides. I don't care.
I eat it anyway. It's like, I'm not on a plane for two days.
Fuck it. Let's do it.
There's a little one by me in my neighborhood called Mariachi's that is sincerely fucking so... It's the only one ever.
It's just one restaurant it used to be a filiberto's and somebody else bought it and it is what it is now and it's fucking magical it's better than filiberto's ever was incredible incredible it's so good the tacos the taquitos even all that shit man big chicken carne asada burrito is really obviously my favorite you can't you can wrong. It was the size of my forearm.
There's like six pounds of beef in this fucking thing. That'll be $8.
What? Yeah, it's like, all right. And I get free red sauce.
Sounds good. I've got $13 worth of beef inside this tortilla, but okay.
What animal is this from? Please tell me that. That's not enough.
I haven't paid enough here. What animal is this from? I'd like to know.
I've been to a grocery store. I know what beef costs.
I don't know what you're using. Not it.
This will be at the Dave White Regional Park in Casa Grande. It will be filled with culinary favorites of tacos, salsa, and margaritas in the first ever Southwest Taco fest come celebrate the best of culture delectable cuisine to mouth-watering tastes of taco salsa and margaritas live music entertainment featuring roger klein and the peacemakers the old arizona boys gonna say that is that's some arizona there boy they had one hit with that with the king of the hill song and that's it you if you you've run into them somewhere around if you've been in Arizona long enough probably had a filibirdo probably have playing outside of opening up the new filibirdos at 32nd and Greenway or something they play they play fucking rocky point every year those guys because mexico loves them because they just sing about tequila and stuff desert jimmy buffett that's what they are that's all it is $800 a gig jimmy buffett without the island that's all that's all we got here beer, hot air balloon tethered rides.
No, even that. Even that, not doing it.
Not doing it. And then finally, the Casa Grande Neon Sign Park.
Oh. Yeah, American Express gave them money for some reason, and this is what they billed.
Jesus. Yeah, they took, I guess, Casa Grande Main Street took second place among 25 cities nationwide and was awarded $144,000.
And that provided funding for restoration of 14 vintage and neon signs, which are old school, how you get people to come in there. Yeah.
So that's kind of neat. Crime rate in this town.
What we're interested in here, property crime is about one third above the average, above the national average. Violent crime above the national average to murder rape robbery and assault the mount rushmore of crime also above the average he's saying i've lived my life smart by staying the fuck out of here like gassing up in phoenix and keep the fuck on drive until you get to tucson exactly i can make it to tucson in one tank of gas for sure and i will never stop i'm not stopping i'm gassing up in my house and go no this is crazy i'm not doing anything of the of the sort with this bullshit so yeah holy crap okay that said let's talk about here we go shall we let's do this let's go to december uh december the 15th of 2004 oh and.
And this is in Tucson, actually. Yeah.
The Park Place Mall in Tucson. Yeah.
I've never been to that. Christmas is coming.
Christmas. So you got to be at the mall.
And that's the thing. The police receive a 911 call from a man saying, I drove here with my wife and I dropped her off at the mall to go to the Dillard's 40% off sale.
Yeah, yeah. And that's where I dropped her off.
And then I went and did my business and I came back and I can't find her anywhere. She's nowhere to be found.
Yeah. Nowhere to be found.
Nowhere. Don't know where she is.
I'm totally lost. So the cops show up there.
They go to Dillard's. They talk to the security at Dillard's.
They're looking around for her. She's nowhere to be found at the mall.
What the hell? Gone. She's a 69-year-old woman.
No, you know, not like a, not senile or anything, not wandering off. And, you know, it's not a silver alert situation.
It's just a where the fuck is this lady? And so her longtime boyfriend here says, I don't know. I don't know where she is.
I can't find her. So they're at're at a stalemate and they call her family her family rushes down from phoenix to tucson to help look for her and nobody can find her what the hell end of the day comes she's still gone not at the mall should they start looking they can't even find her on mall security footage can't even see her on the cameras can't even see her on the cameras so yeah now's crazy.
It's turned into like the Hotel Cecil situation of the lady in the water tank. Just disappeared.
What's going on? So let's find out about who these people are and why they're missing and what's happening here. The missing woman is a woman named Loretta Jean.
She's born. Mick Jilton is her last name when she's born.
Later it will be Bowersock. Much better.
So much better than Mick Jilton. Yeah.
M-C-J-I-L-T-O-N. Okay.
It's jarring looking for some reason. I don't know why the J in there.
To me it sounds worse. It's Mick Jilton.
It sounds worse than it looks. Yeah.
Mick Jilton definitely sounds like a slang term for busting a load. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah, it's something gross here. Now, Bowersock here, Loretta, she is born March 2nd, 1935.
Oh. Parents named Luther and Gladys, which are older names.
Those are definitely parents in the 30s. Those are, yeah.
I was going to say, man, those people were born, you were born pre-World War I probably. So happy kid Loretta always was, real happy.
She likes to, as a child, as a small child and all through her childhood and adulthood, she likes to dress up a lot and look her best all the time. Okay.
She likes to be presentable, likes to present herself the best that she can. She grew up in Kansas here with her family, and she's very much into tennis.
She's a very good tennis player. She'll be a pro at one of these resorts later on.
Is that right? So, yeah, she's a very good tennis player. And I saw newspaper articles from the time when she was playing, like, in adult leagues.
And, you know, they were posting the results of them.

So she played a lot.

She,

the funny thing is she has friends from a young age that she has her whole

life.

She keeps in touch with these people forever.

Everybody said she was always miss personality.

That's how she was.

Yeah.

Said she could talk to anybody about anything great at small talk and

bullshit and all that sort of thing. Apparently, she fought with her dad a lot.
She had a lot of strife with her dad here. He was an oil man who wasn't very good at finding oil.
Was he in Arizona? Yeah, he did in Kansas. Oh, yeah.
A lot of times here when you get oil men that don't do a good job finding oil, what they are is very poor. That's how that works.
It's generally it. It's very expensive to dig deep in the ground like that, and then if you don't find anything, you don't make any money off that.
I mean, if you're a car salesman, you can't sell a fucking car. You own it, so you better figure it out.
Better figure the fuck out, and that's what goes on here. and a lot of these oil guys the wildcatters as they're called they're guys that don't buy they're not a big company a conglomerate that buys a big area of land that they're pretty sure that has oil on it these people are just speculating of and buying small pieces and buying and drilling fucking holes and crossing their fingers nothing that's how jerry jones got the cowboys he got lucky on a? Yeah, he's a wildcatter.
He got lucky on a couple of wells he dug. Oh, wow.
And that propelled his business up, and then he ended up buying the Cowboys after it. Now we've had to deal with them for fucking 40 years.
Want to buy a couple of Derricks, James? I think we should. I don't think we should, no.
Also, it might all be fucked out by now. We'd put all of our money that we ever made into it, and would drill and they go we didn't find anything and then we'd be fucked we got a lot of dirt we're like we're doing seven shows a week now come out and see us seven live shows seven recorded shows 14 shows a week seven live shows we're recording every single one of them whether they whether they're worth or not.
We're really poor is what we're getting at.

Please help us.

So she had a problem with that.

He didn't do well most of the time.

But he was one of these guys who the big score was right around the corner.

The big score is right around the corner.

Which in the oil business, if you're a wildcatter, that's exactly what your whole business is.

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It's doing the scratchies, man.

It's yeah, that's essentially.

Yeah.

Essentially.

That's exactly what it is.

Um, so he, he would tell her someday, someday I'll be coming around the corner and I'll

be in a white Cadillac.

You'll see.

Oh, okay.

It's good to happen here. He'll be coming around the mountain when he comes.
That's it. Eventually, her father did strike oil, actually, and made good on this whole thing.
But it was not until they had fought and Loretta had a childhood of a lot of disappointment and not a lot of money, basically. And she's got like four sisters, I want to say, or something like that.
So it's a bigger family, too. Her mom, Gladys, had a real estate company, and that's how they paid the bills was mom's real estate money, and then dad is digging in the ground.
Dad and his fucking hobby. Yeah, that's exactly it.
So she Loretta always said that she when she found a husband, she didn't want some fly by night dreamer, some bullshit like that. And I didn't want any part of it here.
By the way, a lot of good stuff comes from a book called Bones in the Desert. today.
So it's, yeah, we'll find out why that means later on. So basically she decided that she's not going to listen to anybody and would just do whatever the hell she wanted to.
Okay. She didn't listen to her parents because she thought they were morons.
She thought her mother was a moron for being with a guy who's a moron, and she thought her dad was an idiot who was drilling dry holes all the time. He was an actual idiot yeah don't tell me what to do with my life because you two have fucked yours up royally is how she put it and she wouldn't listen to her older sisters either they would try to give her advice all the time and she didn't want to hear it she's like nope i got this i'm good she's very strong-minded and that's how she is she meets a man here um a man a few years older than her um Oh.
Yeah, within I think about a 10-year age difference here. His name is Dave Bowersock, and he's an Air Force officer.
Hell yeah. The uniform and all that looks pretty cool, though.
So handsome, yeah. Especially back then, it tended to bring in the ladies.
Yeah, the officers are the cool ones. Those look great.
Oh, yeah, they have cool fucking uniforms uniforms and shit they look real put together and yeah that kind of thing and they're doing this because they're not in they're not enlisted anymore these are guys that are done and fucking they're having the time of their lives now they love this they don't have to run 20 miles they're not yelled at every day they're smiling they think it's great he's a very guy, and Loretta likes a handsome, well-groomed cat. That's what she's – handsome is at the top of her list here.
She really likes a handsome guy. But all the sisters said, he's too old for you.
Like, he should be coming on to one of us, the older sisters. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Instead, you're going out with him. This isn't cool.
Not because they were jealous, but because they thought he was too old for her. And nobody was really that excited about her being with this older guy.
Except for Loretta. Except for her.
And she loved him and married him. She didn't give a fuck.
And they moved all over the country because he's an Air Force officer. Yeah.
So they move all over the place and they're going to start a family here. Now Loretta's very interested in everything.
She's a very smart lady. She likes politics.
She likes sports, business. She plays bridge in a league.
She plays tennis. She's a gourmet cook.
She's the USA Today. Yeah.
Yeah, whatever. Whatever it is.
Reader's Digest. Voracious reader back then.
She would pay attention. They were living in Tempe, Arizona here, which if you don't know is a, I guess, suburb of Phoenix, you could put it.
But it's all one big block. It's where ASU is, and it's in Phoenix essentially.
So they lived there for a while. She – they said that any time they – like her girlfriend said they'd be talking about something and something that interested them.
And next thing you know, she would be like –'d be buying books about it and learning about doing it and doing it. Yeah, she was into that sort of thing.
So she's very attractive. Also, they said that she, you know, she did very well.
Her one friends called her a classy lady. Classy lady.
And this is a baller today. Yeah, totally.
Yeah, she'd be pickleballing herselfballing herself silly. So she's going to have a son and a daughter here.
Son is the older one named Scott and a daughter named Terry with an I. Okay.
Now, Terry here. Terry said that her generation believes women should stand by their men and live in houses with white picket fences.
She's afraid to ever be alone without a a man but her son also said she's an outgoing woman who doesn't doesn't take crap takes no crap from anybody his mom is like that mom takes no crap yeah okay yeah that's a good way i describe my mom like that too uh i think my mom takes crap. Okay.
I describe my mom as taking less crap than she should, probably. She's just, she's always looking for a fight, my mom, with anybody.
Anywhere, anytime. I just saw her, and I wrapped my arms around her, hugged her, and she goes, she goes, there he is, and she wanted to fight about that.
That's right. Yes.
My mom at the show. Yeah.
She was ready to fight that I hadn't said hello yet. Dude, it's anything.
She takes no crap. No crap.
Even if you don't give her crap, she's not taking it. Whether you give it to her or not, she's still not taking it.
I will not take any shit from you. That is exhausting.
I have no plans on it. Good.
I won't be having any shit thrown at me. Wasn't planning on throwing any shit at you.
Sorry. So, yeah, Scott's born first.
Terry's born 1957. And Terry said that she played the dutiful Air Force officer's wife, even though that's not really how her personality is.
Yeah. Terry said she really relished that role.
You could just see her playing the role. At Christmas, we had a full blown tree and all the trimmings and everything was always just perfect.
And you could just hear her saying this is what an officer's wife should be doing. And she thought it was leave it to Beaver.
OK. So that's how she's thinking.
And it looked like the perfect family.

This handsome Air Force officer and his beautiful wife.

And they have a lovely home.

And one of each, a son and a daughter.

Is it an Air Force officer in Tempe?

Does he go to fucking Luke every day?

That's a long ride, man.

Back then, I don't know.

There was no freeways to go all the way around back then.

But there was also no traffic. No.

So it would probably be.

You'd have to take. Take Grand the whole way or something.
Or no. No, fuck no.
You'd have to take, well, I guess some of the way. Or the 10 out to fucking Litchfield.
Oh my God. That's a ride, man.
This might have been after he retired too. Maybe so.
From the Air Force, yeah. So Scott is the firstborn and he is Loretta's apple of her eye.
eye. Terry always feels second best here.
Terry's also got some issues that she won't really address until later on. She's got some dyslexia, some learning disability issues that makes her not do terrific in school, so that might be why mom kind of focuses a little more on Scott.
Terry said, my mother comes from a family of five sisters, so when my brother came along, she was in love. She had a boy.
When I came along, it was just another girl, and I was a crying baby, so that didn't help. As opposed to the quiet babies that are always...
Jesus, mom didn't like me. Scott says, about everybody knew I was the favorite.
But I was the kid who wasn't in any trouble. Terry was a needy, noisy kid.
I'm more introverted. I'd come home after school and go to my room and listen to music.
Terry would come home bouncing off the walls. He said to this day, he admits she's my sister and I love her, but I don't have anything in common with her.
Okay. Not a big fan of Terry.
Terry and Scott just not really getting along. Okay.
As an adult adult they said that which is crazy and Terry noticed Terry said that she had been an insecure child she said she wrote in a journal at one time I don't remember being held and loved as a child oh no so yeah that's that's very interesting Loretta seems a little bit cold toward Terry yeah and it gets weirder as their relationship progresses here uh she remembered fighting with her mom constantly was a teenager when she was a teenager she said i closed off to you and ran away and ran away and ran away she wrote in a letter to her mother so she just and she did she ran away from home she got in with the wrong crowd she was a a real kind of a source of acrimony here in the family terry was rebellion what is this it's a lot of shit rebellion a lot of it too and she'll explain later is she didn't do well in school because of learning disabilities which made her not in that not in an academic type of way so then she started hanging out with kids that also didn't do well in academics and they turned out to be kids that later on were fuckabouts and then she got into that group and so it's a snowball really okay this is exactly what we did essentially only she doesn't seem to be figuring it out no well she'll figure it out big time later uh in in life as we'll find out here now in the early 70s there's a divorce. Loretta and Dave have a divorce.
She said Loretta hung on until she couldn't hang on anymore. They were living in Arizona and she said she had to take control of her own life.
And Terry said we watched her change after that. She said that the failure of her marriage fucked her all up, Loretta.
She expected everything to be perfect forever. So that was a problem.
she said that she said that the failure of her marriage fucked her all up loretta she expected everything to be perfect forever so that was a problem she said that she started seeing loretta basically dating anybody and everybody she could get her hands on just to try to find somebody because she wanted to be married and have be in a relationship younger men older men anybody she could find as long as they were handsome, just men. And they did none.

She didn't really like any of them.

And some of them saw her as kind of needy.

So nothing ever worked out.

Now, Scott, the son, went off to study psychology and Terry was finishing in high school here.

And Loretta started focusing on what they called her own needs here.

Yeah.

So and she does. This is the time when she's single.
She dates a lot but never is in a relationship. And she actually does a lot of things that are good for herself.
At 37, she got a college degree from ASU. Oh, really? So she went and got a degree.
She started teaching dance and then taught tennis. And then she was a tennis pro at one of the resorts as well.

She opened two different businesses during this time period in the late 70s.

She's making her own money.

She was doing well.

She bought a house, her own home.

She had jewelry.

She was doing good.

Post-74 then, huh?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, post-74 for sure, as we found out.

God damn.

She established a tennis club at San Marcos Golf Resort in Chandler. Oh, really? That was her deal.
That's something that's a quiet fact about Arizona that a lot of people don't know. There are dozens of fucking golf resorts in this state.
Oh, dozens. There are everywhere.
It's crazy. I think everyone knows that, though.
Arizona's kind of known for golf now. Is it? It's all they do there is golf.
I suppose. Everybody's there for golf all the time.
It's just all winter. All summer.
It's pool parties. All winter it's golfing.
It's fucking golf. Yeah.
She opened and ran the tennis pro shop there for seven years. Wow.
When it closed, it was because, according to everything that went on, that the resort didn't do what they promised, I guess. Okay.
I don't know if it was a lease situation or whatever. Promoting business, whatever.
Yeah. So she got all these letters of recommendation here from all these people because she was going to open up a new shop in another hotel.
So she needed people to say, hey, she's great. Eddie Basha wrote about her.
If you don't know Eddie Basha, Eddie Basha is kind of an Arizona legend because he opened the Basha's supermarket chain and did the commercials himself. And he's kind of a very well-known guy in the Phoenix area.
The man has an elementary school named after him. Yes.
He is a legend of Arizona that it's crazy. Well, so does Curt Schilling, though, so that's not really that big of an honor.
He also was really involved in, like, charity stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he was on the board of a bunch of different companies in the state. Yeah, he was Mr.
Phoenix, basically. He's dead now.
Yeah, yeah now yeah yeah as i said was he was mr phoenix now he's buried somewhere in phoenix i'm sure probably probably on top of south mountain or something the family doesn't even you'd think that a guy that that's that kind of a legend that that family would just be like it would just go generational but now they just sold it. Sell it off! Who wants these grocery stores?

We got a shitload of them.

Just a shitload.

Just like Discount Tire.

Just like Discount Tire.

The guy that started that shit.

Rich as fuck.

You'd think his son would just go right into it,

and he sold the motherfucker.

Yeah.

Free money.

Why work?

Billion dollars?

Fuck this.

Yeah.

I would sell my father's legacy out from under him as well.

If he's dead, fuck it. What am I doing here? I don't want to work at a fucking grocery store.
He doesn't care. He's got a beautiful burial plot.
He's fine. I buried him the nicest way I could.
That's enough, right? Most expensive one in Arizona. Eddie Basher wrote this in February of 78.
It is a privilege for me to write this letter of recommendation for Loretta Bowersock. I became acquainted with Loretta during the first part of 1974 on the occasion of her association with the San Marco Resort.
In my opinion, what she accomplished was nothing short of miraculous. I heartily recommend Loretta Bowersock to you as both a tennis instructor and a proprietor of a pro shop.
She is very talented and a very pleasant woman and friendly person to know. Why don't you hire her, Eddie? Put her on your fucking board.
Let her open a tennis shop in one of the grocery stores. Who cares? She's terrific.
I don't want her doing anything for me. But for you, I hope she does everything.
She could do anything, really anything really just not for me so by the time terry was 18 obviously this is kind of it's kind of just her and her mom her dad her dad's away and her brother is doing his thing so it's kind of her and her mom so it started to change a little bit here um i guess terry wanted to sell sandwiches and soda on the golf course that her mother had the pro shop on. Her mom helped out with her connections to get her to be able to do that.
Terry is an ambitious business hustler. Yeah, she's looking, how do I make a business out of this? That's how she is.
She's really smart like that. Apparently at that point they were trying to get along

and Terry said we started tennis

and we were friends and shared everything.

This was the best time in life.

So yeah, it was

pretty good.

Now this is a change

because up to this point Terry was

considered wild, Loretta was considered

bossy and they didn't get along.

So 1979 comes around here. Terry's young.
Was she 22 at this point? 21? Yeah. Terry starts.
She opens a consignment furniture store. Apparently it started out.
She got a $2,000 loan from her grandmother. And using that money and other shit, she started selling stuff.
She called it Terry's place. Now, this will grow into Terry's Consign and Design, which if you lived in Phoenix, you'd know those stores were fucked.
There's a shitload of them. They were all over the fucking place, those Terry's Consign and Designs.
I think they're closed now, correct? I'm sure they are. I'm pretty sure.
But it was in the last, like, 10 years they closed. I mean, it's been.
Really. It was.
They were everywhere. Scottsdale and one on Indian school or something like that.
Yeah. There's one on Indian school for sure because I used to pass it all the fucking time.
I remember their signs, their billboards would be. They had like little clever shit on their billboards.
Sure. Yeah.
I guess Terry called her mother long distance from Kansas at two in the morning to suggest the idea for a furniture consignment business, which if you call me from another state at 2 a.m. and you're like, I want to start a business, right? We'll get all this furniture.
I'm going to go, how much Coke have you taken? Number one. Is this Coke or meth? This is Coke talk.
Meth talk would be, I got to get out of here. There's somebody after.
Coke talk is, we can do this.'s grandiose. Meth talk is we should take apart your TV and see how it works.
We can sell all the parts. Yeah.
Coke talk, you're planning out 40 years in the future after your retirement from this successful business. Much different.
So Terry signed the first lease and bought an old blue pickup truck with a green tailgate to carry shit around and bring the shit to the store. Yeah, that was it.
I guess she was going to visit her father, and she said, Dad took me to visit Betty, his friend who operated the cleaning house consignment shop out of a little house. She said, There I saw sterling silver, china, small furniture, and knickknacks for sale.

People were actually having fun as they purchased what others no longer needed or wanted.

Betty graciously explained how she managed the business.

By the time the day was over, I knew I could do it.

I knew I had the sales skills.

I just got to buy junk and sell it to people.

That's it.

But, I mean, she saw on the golf course, I bet people will buy sandwiches and sodas out there while they're walking.

And she saw this.

She said, hmm, there's a niche for this.

There's a market for that.

Yeah.

So she says, I just take off and do things.

That's what Terry says.

She's like, she gets an idea.

She's off with it.

Wow.

She said, then my mother slows me down so I don't get carried away.

I'm driven by ego and my mother by money.

Those are what they are.

Yeah.

Terry is always trying to show that she's just as good as scott basically her whole life and that's the thing that people get sometimes is you get that ingrained in an early in an early in your life next thing you know that is your whole goal is to i'll show them and you're still trying to show them at 50 years old when there's nobody else to show anymore she doesn't even she can't even see it she's so old can't even see it yeah um so it was um well she said loretta was the one who insisted on quality in the shop loretta said i told terry i didn't want to be a sanford and son which is yeah i'm not selling trash i'm not selling fucking pawn shops i'm not living in a junkyard is what it is. If you are too young for this, Sanford and Son was a show starring an all-time great comedian, Red Fox, where he and his son ran a junkyard from their house.
And if you saw the opening shot, it was just piles of shit out in front of a dumpy house. So they said, we had some thrift furniture in the beginning, but I didn't feel good about selling it.
I told her we'd turn things down until we got what we wanted. That's what Loretta said.
Yeah. It's about quality.
Don't just take any old crap and bring it in here. Terry said, I promised we'd always handle furniture mom would be proud of.
So when Terry went into opening another store in kind of a shitty part of town, it didn't work. Oh.
Yeah oh yeah because still has to be a place where people have money to buy stuff yeah because you yeah and if you're selling furniture it's got to be and and if you're buying it low and then trying to sell it high you're you're going to price these people out of your market if you're you're thinking oh it's cheaper so they can afford it but they can Yeah, they can't afford any of it. So she said, mother taught me to do it yourself.
Mother taught me. When we put ceiling fans in this warehouse, it was me and a female employee.
We never thought about calling someone to do it. Terry said, or Loretta said, I remember saying, I don't know what to do with my life.
It was a good feeling when she said, let's team up. So it was mom and daughter.
She's running wires. Yeah.
She does. Yeah.
Terry. Wow.
Terry just does shit. She wants to do it.
She does it. So when the tennis craze kind of went away here for her, they opened the Closet Emporium at the Fiesta Inn, which was a tiny gift shop, basically.
And they learned to work together. They had some disagreements.
Employees would hear them arguing once in a while, but still, it worked out. Loretta said, at first we realized we'd slip into the naughty girl and mother telling her what to do routine.
We had to get it on an equal basis. Now it always comes down to a question of is this good for the business?

There you go.

Yeah, they always had that dynamic of I'm your mom and, yeah, that kind of thing. So it was Terry's Consign and Design, and I found in the Arizona Republic 1982, there's a picture of Loretta putting a wig on a mannequin.

And they say there's Terry's Consignment Furniture.

Loretta Bowerstock, an employee at Terry's consignment furniture, she was co-owner, who gives the dummy's wig a fluffing in front of the Mesa store. Sorry, the newspaper's fucked up.
Workers at the store which sells used home furnishings named the mannequin Loretta after Mrs. Bowerstock uh, after Mrs.
Bowers sock, they say the two look alike. Okay.
They say, they say that. Okay.
So by 1985, they've doubled to four stores and they're starting to write their own TV commercials. Now you bet they're doing it, man.
Um, not too shabby. Um, now Loretta though, she's, she's happy with this.
She's happy to be having a business and working with her daughter and getting along and everything like that. But she's still missing something.
What's she missing? A guy? A relationship. Yeah.
She doesn't have this guy. And she had tons of friends, very active social life, but no boyfriend, which is what she wanted.
Yeah. Just it was interesting.
So I guess at first, when they're still doing this they're still like picking up and delivering furniture themselves and all that kind of thing. They said their individual skills differed, Terry and Loretta's.
Loretta's conservative approach to business and Terry had risk taker in her. Sure.
Loretta said it's good to have a younger person because she's more adventuresome. She took the risk of putting us on TV and it changed us from small to big my first thought was uh we'll look like uh sonoy sonoy to motors okay she doesn't she kept saying that used car dealers do commercials not furniture stores we don't need to do this so oh because you know she sees uh that earn yeah that's what she said yeah that't no bull with a stupid cowboy hat on.
We don't want to be that guy or the guy from Peter Piper pizza. We got to be.
Yeah. We got to have other people doing this.
But like Eddie Basher did it and he just did it in a nice way. He'd be in a suit and he'd be like, come down to Basher's.
And he'd show all the sales. And that's how he did it.
The guy from Discount Tire dressed up like a woman and threw a tire through. Exactly.
Yeah. He didn't give a shit.
So Loretta said we looked like the beverly hillbillies going down the freeway especially when a sofa fell off yeah so they said when they paid the bills at the end of a month and found thirteen thousand dollars left over one month they said holy shit this is working in the early 80s that's a fuck load of money for a month yeah they're like holy shit this is this is working uh terry said it it's ironic that she's now my best friend my partner and mom but this never would have survived with only one of us so they needed two of us and she talks about at this point too she kind of comes publicly about her learning disabilities and that kind of thing and she was saying it was hard to build a business being like dyslexic and shit shit. She said there was times when she was visibly under stress.
This is what Loretta says. Like when we went over our month-end sales reports with the accountant.
But I just attributed that to the normal pressures of running a business. What really amazes me is that she was able to hide for all these years her inability to read and write adequately.
Yeah. Holy.
Yeah. She said, Terry said, I invented my own systems.
She said, for example, I would draw crayon pictures to show myself how the business was doing financially. What? She's drawing a fucking wall.
She's drawing like money signs on a loot bag and puts like an arrow to them going in what looks like a safe door with the door open with about a building that says bank on it and a big square thing backward end yeah this is fucking crazy jesus she said i wouldn't take an employee with me to pick up furniture and when it came to writing the contract i would hand it off to them because I couldn't spell the names of all the furniture. Wow.
I said it wasn't until she learned, she said she learned that Albert Einstein, George Patton and Benjamin Franklin were also dyslexic. So she said, OK, well, I guess you can overcome this shit.
She said, when I found that out, it helped me believe in myself. At the time we were looking into franchising the store and I was being faced with a lot of legal documents, I was finally brave enough to tell people that I needed them to slow down and work with me so I could understand everything.
Yeah, we're building the atom bomb, you guys. Calm down.
Calm the fuck down. But it continued growth and they were talking about national expansion and franchises everywhere.
Loretta said Terry had built a tremendously successful business, but when we had to computerize, she realized how big and complex it really was. She had too many employees to keep track of, and with sales of over a million dollars a year, she knew a mistake could be very costly.
She didn't have the skills to learn to use the computer and continue to run a large corporation. She said, what Terry does have is tremendous motivation, and that's what guided her to take a leave from the day-to-day operation of the business and go back to school and learn what she missed as a child.
We'll talk about when that happens. Do you see a little bit of us in that? What? Doing well, but like – Yeah, we're both Terry.
Yes. Neither of us as Loretta is the problem.
If we had a Loretta, it would have been easier in the beginning. We're just two Terrys just running at walls all the time.
We've always done that. Running into walls going, I got to call somebody.
I don't know if this is my money. I don't know.
Yeah. Whose money is this? Well, plus, no Loretta would be a try comedy.
No Loretta would be a comedian because it's a dumb thing to fucking do. Because there's no future in that.
Terry would be like, I'll just do comedy. You know what I mean? Yeah, you go out.
I'll do that. It's a crazy thing to think to do.
You know what I mean? Yeah. So, yeah.
Now, Loretta's really into wanting. She's telling everyone, though, she wants a man.
She wants a man. She wants a man.
Like one to settle down with here. Just one.
That's all I need. She's been divorced for over 10 years and never anything solid she's come up with.
She did have a seven-year affair with a married man. That's a problem.
Atta girl. Jesus.
Yeah, that didn't work out too well. Seven years.
Yep. She maintained always that he was the love of her life, but he never left his wife.
His name was Rex Armistead, which sounds like a cool Rex. Rex Armistead.
Sounds made up. Yeah, it sounds made up.
Yeah, that's not his name. No, Rex.
He came to Arizona as director of the U.S. Justice Department's Regional Organized Crime Unit after there was an assassination attempt on Arizona Republic reporter Don Bowles.
I think that is the one where they blew his car up in Camelback. Yeah.
Isn't that the guy? Yeah. Yes.
That's a very interesting story. Wow.
Very interesting. Hunter Thompson wrote really cool about that, by the way.
Really good stuff about that, too. Anyway, Loretta met Rex at a bar, and she said, right away, instantaneous attraction, and he said later, quote, I did love her, which means I might not have treated her that way, but, you know, I definitely boned her.
He says she was a good tennis player and a hard-working lady. He said he got to know Terry, who was well aware of how his mother felt about him.
And they also became friends. And that'll come in handy later.
Great tennis player. Worked really hard.
You know what I mean? Batting my balls around. Yeah.
He's great at it. Real good about that.
Rex, you're a dick. So he's a real dick, Rex.
So summer of 85, she belonged to a bridge club. She's working in the store.
Loretta's hanging out with her friends and, you know, just doing shit. At this point, her and Terry are becoming kind of famous in Phoenix for these commercials.
Doing terrific, yeah. And, yeah, so Loretta was kind of, Terry's the main person, but Loretta's periphery there.
Her son, Scott, and his wife lived in Hawaii. So that's successful.
One of her sisters died, but she's close with the other three. She writes long letters to her nieces and nephews and stuff like that.
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And now back to the show. And Terry writes, our trust was so powerful.
I trusted you more than anyone. I loved you and you loved me.
And then we ran an ad and that brought us Taw. Okay.
We'll talk about Taw here. Oh, that's a person? That's a person.
T-A-W. Taw.
Really? Old Taw himself. Okay.
Now Loretta, this comes because Loretta has a house and it's a a big house, and she's all alone. So she's rented rooms out periodically to people.
And so she's put her room up for rent again, a spare room. Apparently, it's one of those houses that has, like, the master bedrooms all the way on one side of the house by itself.
Yeah. And the rest are over there.
So she's, you know, there's still privacy. So she writes in an ad, executive woman, big home, nice suite for rent.

Okay.

So she had a couple renters

in the past, like we said. She didn't like living

alone either. She liked having someone there,

and why not? Help out with the bills a little bit.

What the hell? Got a giant house. Why not?

Fuck it. So Taw Benderly

is his name. He is

born in 1937, so

not too much younger than her, which is good.

He shows up

to rent out her guest room.

This is fucking wild. He pulls

up on his motorcycle

and told her

he's a successful entrepreneur

from Scotland.

I would love

to have heard what his accent is, because we'll

find out later.

Successful Scottish entrepreneur. Yeah.
And right away, I mean, Terry says that as soon as Loretta met him, she was beaming from ear to ear. Just loved him.
He's a handsome guy and just everything that she wants in a dude. Scottish biker.
Scottish biker who's also a also a successful businessman yeah she's described as tall and handsome intelligent and well-spoken a great cook and an expert in art glass a lot of those guys need a need a room director they need they're just they're just down on their luck this month it's just a tough time he says he had an mba from wharton school of business right you know and this was the time in the 80s he said he was actually a classmate of Donald Trump's, he said at the time. He was telling her.
He said he was an inventor also. He invented things.
That's his main business also. Okay.
And he just knew shit about everything. He's just real fucking knowledgeable.
Okay. The problem is he arrived on a Harley with no wallet, no suitcase, and no money.
Okay. Just a guy on a Harley.
He didn't even have his driver's license on. Nothing.
Okay? Just hi. I'm here with my – me and my Levi's are here.
Aaron Brockovich's boyfriend. That's it.
Me and my Levi's, and I could take those off if you'd like. I'll leave him at the door.
I can leave him there. He says, his story is he'd just flown in from Saudi Arabia, where he'd worked for Bethel, and he said everything went wrong.
The company lost his last paycheck, and they're trying to figure out where that is. His wallet had been, he was robbed at the airport.
Somebody stole his wallet out of his back pocket. He was pickpocketed at the airport.
And all his luggage got lost by the airline from Saudi Arabia to here. Well, what a bad day.
He left Saudi Arabia thinking he had a fat paycheck and a wallet full of money and all of his stuff. And it turns out he's got nothing.
He just shows up. And wouldn't you know it, Enterprise would only rent me this motorcycle that's it i was gonna say where the fuck did this motorcycle come from he showed up from saudi arabia with no place to live no idea or anything and just fires up a harley and what the hell's going on here thank god my harley came down the baggage claim i waited for a while and i said oh that's right the oversized baggage i gotta to where the golf clubs come out.
That's right. The golf clubs and snowboards and skis and shit.
Thank God they relieved you of your luggage. Where the fuck were you going to put it on a motorcycle? That's the other thing.
This doesn't sound like it has a sidecar. Probably not.
No. So, but he's talking about his inventions and all that kind of thing.
He says he can't pay any rent until his last check pops up. and he doesn't know when that's going to be.
But it's a reputable company, so it should be at some point. But you should still let me move in, even though I don't even have identification.
No ID and no money. Can I live at your house? You got to really trust a shitload.
You got to find a Scottish accent extra charming, I would think, for that not incredibly repulsive not repulsive yeah he had to be a classy one not a shrek you know so he said you know he'll help out until then until he can pay he's a he said i'm a gourmet cook i'll cook your meals i can fix anything if you want you know i can do if you got any work to do around the house i'll fix anything you have um you know fix your life let's do that and well like i'm just waiting for my check and then it's fixed everything's fine and the log you know they lost my luggage and i got pickpocketed it could happen anybody all at once i'll worry about that another time could happen to anyone all on the same day it happens a lot he owns one pair of underwear this is it He shows up with one pair of tighty-whities and a Harley. How you doing? So he said, but I'll tell you what, if you help me out here, I will cut you in on an invention that I'm doing right now.
And when that takes off, we'll both be rich. How's that sound? Okay.
It sounds like get the fuck back on your bike and go to the next place. I don't know what to tell you, but she says.
Sounds like find another sucker. She said your room is right this way.
That's her. Is that right? Absolutely.
She was smitten with him. She just thought he was handsome as fuck.
How fucking handsome is this guy? Extremely, apparently. Terry says this.
He was tall and handsome and charming and suave.

He said he was an inventor who had no family, that he was raised by his grandmother, and that he headed a company in Scotland and never was in trouble with the law.

He said he had a great invention that he was going to make that was going to make him rich and he'd give mom a piece of the action.

Oh, and he also began to woo her and make her feel like she was the most wonderful woman he'd ever met. The first year was great.
He was always impressing her with his ideas and inventions, and he even stepped in to help me out a lot. Her, meaning Terry.
He knew I had a difficult time with reading and writing, so he suggested I go to a special reading course at ASU, which is why she did that. And he and mom would run the business for me in my absence and then i come back and get in there great because mom helps run it anyway so yeah he said i'll help your mother do it right yeah i'll do the paperwork that you usually do and so you go learn how to do don't you fuck off back to school while i sit here while i complete continue to snow your mother do you have a driver's license yet how many pairs of underwear do you own sir tell you what you can't be part of my business until you own at least five pairs of underwear how's that let's just make it that holler when your check shows up yeah that's it man go get yourself some fruit of the looms so um she came back four months later and she said she was better equipped to run everything when she came back after the program but she said her company was in financial disarray she said my employees were coming to me saying this isn't right he's doing something wrong and when I tell mom she'd stand up for him and we'd have another fight she said mom always took Taw's side she refused to listen to anybody about him at all she said that he just spoke with such authority on so many subjects that few people challenged him and that fucking accent if you have a decent enough accent you can get over on that it's crazy especially in America any British Isles accent you can get over with that shit in America we just think you you're charming in arizona oh forget it arizona even more in the 80s especially yeah no jesus you're no one knows oh my god you're like this weird unicorn so those guys that run two very successful irish restaurants in arizona not restaurants they're bars yeah they they're incredibly successful because they hang around the bar being all irish that's it it's awesome yeah people like that shit I'm telling you.
Yeah. They're incredibly successful because they hang around the bar being all Irish.
That's it. It's awesome.
Yeah. People like that shit.
I'm telling you. Imagine if we could just go over there and get over with our bullshit.
Just sitting in an Irish bar selling cheeseburgers. Just go over there.
Make a completely mediocre fucking American style bar. A shitty overcooked cheeseburger.
And here you go. Here's your Cisco frozen cheeseburger that we got for you enjoy i just love the the charm and just the atmosphere that they create with those with their charming accents you know what i mean that'd be great those fried onions on their burger it's fucking delicious these guys it sold me a budweiser it sold me four dollars worth of shit for 23 it It was great.
They sold me a $12 Pabst. The only place that happens is either overseas or fucking Austin, Texas, probably.
That town is not going to last. You guys are.
That's going belly up, I guarantee it. You guys are tripping in that town.
You walk down the street, there are stores with three boutiques with three items in them that look like they have $12,000 a month in rent. I'm like, this is not sustainable here.
And each of those things, they're selling them for $12,000 a piece. Yeah, and no one's in there.
No. And these people, it's just mid-40-year-olds pissing their 401k away.
It's wild, man. We were looking around, and we're going, this isn't going gonna last right yeah they got fucking driverless cars with driver cars just honking at them oh my god i almost got fucking hit by a waymo in phoenix really when i was yeah it was dude it was fucking really he was making a right on red while i was using my left left turn arrow to turn and he just tried to turn right into me i had to swerve out of the fucking way and I'm yelling and screaming I'm like who am I yelling at I'm yelling at a fucking robot what do you do if it hits you you gotta get out and like beat the shit out of it kick all the cameras off it cause you can't yell at anybody there's nobody to fucking take your aggression out on Siri where's your registration Siri you better have fucking insurance Siri where's your fucking insurance card holy fuck so Terry said he didn't spend 10 minutes in his presence without knowing that he thought he was smarter than everyone in the room he had a crazy confidence in himself and he's handsome and Loretta liked him they made a nice couple a nice looking couple and.
Next few years here, you know, Ta and Loretta are enjoying their years. Everybody said they were the perfect couple.
Here's a journalist, Jonna Bombersbach who wrote the book, The Bones in the Desert book said that. So Terry though is not convinced.
No? She's like, something's off. You know, he showed up with nothing and has no proof of anything.
On a motorcycle. She's rightfully skeptical.
Yeah. In the 80s, by the way.
Yeah. Nowadays, your dorky dad has a motorcycle.
That's just normal now. He doesn't go run his errands and introduce himself to people on a motorcycle.
He's going to try to rent a room on a doors. Yeah.
In the 80s, people who rode their bikes to run errands like that were a different breed of human. It's a weird person.
Yeah. Yeah.
So Terry calls up Rex. Remember Rex? Yeah.
The Justice Department guy? She says, do me a favor and use your federal shit that you have here, access to look into this guy's background. I know you're married.
Yeah. We fucked for seven years.
Do me a solid. Yeah.
That's it. So they knew that he had spent time in Texas.
So she said, look for him in Texas and see if he has a criminal record. Rex says, I ran a check on him.
He had an insignificant record in Texas. If there was violence in his background, we could never detect it.
So he passed the background check. Now, there's a couple of speeding tickets or something but that's it now some of her friends don't really buy this shit at all skyla peterson who'd been her friend for almost 20 years said the day she was there the day ta arrived so she was there for this heard his story and she said that story's bullshit she told loretta that's the lady you need around that story that right you're not buying any of that shit are you um she said he was a smooth talker and very smart but come on he has no money no luggage i never understood where he got the motorcycle but i'm sure he had a story all worked out about that too but loretta bought it all i couldn't believe it wow you can't show up with no money i'm not talking i can give you i know the rent's 800 i can give you 500 but i'm waiting on this nothing i don't have shit not a drop yeah yeah trust me trust me on this invention that i'm gonna do yeah and if i can't move in if i'm not allowed may i wash my underwear in your sink because this invention that I'm going to do.
Yeah. And if I can't move in, if I'm not allowed, may I wash my underwear in your sink? Because this is all I got.
Long ride back to Phoenix. Yeah.
When you show up like that, the fuck do you expect from people? But she says that, you know, Loretta loved him. What are you going to do? Took a chance on him.
Her sisters either saw red flags everywhere. Her sister Darla said that she flew to Phoenix specifically to meet Taw because she didn't like what she heard so far.
She said, I stayed with them for three days. I have a great bullshit detector, and his story didn't ring true.
These people are hilarious. I love these.
I love these old ladies, man. I got a bullshit detector.
Spunky old bags. It was in my carry-on.
I love it, man. And my luggage did come through from Saudi Arabia.
She said, I went to Loretta and told her all her sisters were very concerned. You don't know anything about this guy.
He has no family, no friends. That's what she was told back.
But she told him that. That's what they're all saying.
Or she told Loretta. This is what everybody's saying.
She said Loretta said this, quote, I know what I'm doing and it's none of your business. Okay.
She said in our family we were taught to keep the peace, Darla said. So what could she say? She's not going to force her.
It's her house. She's an adult.
That's the relationship she wants. What's she going to do? So that's it.
But all the sisters would always be suspicious of him. So by the time Darla's really saying, I don't like this guy, they're already sharing a bedroom.
So once there's dick involved, you're not going to penetrate through that, not for use, lack of a better term, sorry. But yeah, once there's penetration, you're not going to penetrate.
It's just not going to happen. And they were sharing everything.
They even shared her bank account because, by the way, his lost paycheck never showed up. And the airline could never find those dang suitcases.
Damn it. Where did he just materialize from? Did he come out of a hole in the desert riding a motorcycle like a fucking some sort of

weird hell's angels legend like what happened guy from raising arizona that's what he is yeah it's exactly who he is except handsome he's tex cob but handsome that's it handsome randall tex cob so he is a good cook though that is one thing he could do and he could also fix shit all around the house. So that he wasn't lying about.

So he keeps her kind of

satiated with good... So he is a good cook, though.
That is one thing. And he could also fix shit all around the house.

So that he wasn't lying about.

So he keeps her kind of satiated with good meals and fixed light fixtures and shit like that.

And also very charming.

They said he had a deep, resonant voice that was almost hypnotizing.

And that accent and everything else is something's there, you know, obviously.

So she let Todd be a part of her bank account and everything. You know, he's very charming.
Now, he's got some inventions that he wants here. Want to hear about these inventions? Okay.
He said that he had an impressive resume filled with business degrees and work history. I mean, you know, he had detailed drawings of his inventions.
He's always on the phone setting up deals, making contacts. He's regular, always in meetings with potential investors and partners, quote unquote, and all this type of shit.
He thought the thing that he was really interested in in the late 80s was solar power. Really? Which he saw that.
But, I mean, everybody saw that. Yeah, if we could get the sun to make electricity, that'd be cool.
Yeah, it would. Yeah.

I don't know.

So he wanted this solar power, and he wanted to educate the world to all of its uses.

And that's what he always said.

He wanted to educate the world.

He had big plans to create a solar power plant on the island of Lanai.

Where the fuck is that?

In somewhere, like one of the smaller Hawaiian or somewhere Pacific.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That makes sense.

Because he wanted Scott to manage it for him.

Thank you. where the fuck is that somewhere one of the smaller Hawaiian or somewhere Pacific because he wanted Scott to manage it for him the Hawaiian son the whole son who lives in Hawaii so Ta brought up legitimate businessmen into their lives a guy named Gary Bailey from North Carolina a company called Duke Solar Gary and his wife Laura became close friends with Loretta and And Loretta and Gary, I was clear to Loretta that Gary was impressed with Ta and his ideas.
And this was a guy who ran a solar company. He said Ta, then Bailey said Ta was extremely bright and he had an amazing network of people in government and private business.
He could open doors. He said, though, his ideas, though, Ta's ideas never really went anywhere.
He said that Ta just oversold things. He was great at the knowledge, but didn't know how to close a deal.
It was so sad to me. Yeah, it is tough when you have all the facts, but no reason to fucking sell it.
Yeah. He said that some of Loretta's money went for Taw's solar car cover invention.

What? I don't know what you want a solar car cover for. I don't know what that

does exactly.

What does that do?

Solar blankets for your pool?

Is it to keep it warm in the winter?

That's a weird thing.

Some to his serrated

lawnmower blades.

What? I think we have lawnmower technology pretty much figured out by the 90s, right? I think they're as sharp as they need to be. This one's sharp.
This one, Julian. That's what I mean.
What do we want it to do? Slice a tomato and afterwards cut a can and a shoe in half? What the fuck are we talking about here? I don't need a fucking lawnmower blade any sharper than they are. Grass cuts pretty easy.
It's very thin. It's not a...
You don't need to really attack it. Sling blade murdered a man with one without it being serrated.
No serration at all. Also, his transducer audio speakers.
I don't know what the fuck that is. For years, Loretta wouldn't admit that Taw's inventions were just a money pit, even though they're all this money she's investing in it.
And Terry said, I told Scott said, I'm sorry. I told my mother once I was tired of hearing about those inventions.
I told her they're old, outdated, and they're stupid, stupid things. Scott's very honest.
He said, I've been hearing about the same three things for 10 years now. Technology has moved on and the time has come for you to move on.
That worried me about her, that she was buying into this. He said Loretta took his words and understood them, but didn't do anything.
He told her that he was not going to be involved because Scott said he would be involved in the Lanai solar plant. But then he said, I'm not involved anymore.
It never got out of the planning stages. And even though Ta and Loretta had taken dozens of trips to Denver where he was supposed to be meeting with investors, quote unquote.
But they found out the investors never showed up in the trips mainly. They just stay with Loretta's sister, Shirley.
Just hang out. Just hang out.
So he hit up everybody that had a dollar in their pocket. Two nickels rubbing together in a pocket.
He could hear that shit from across the room. And he wants your investment in his inventions.
Loretta invested heavily. Terry invested a whole bunch of money based on her mom's advice.
Some of their friends, neighbors. Neighbors.
Oh, can't get no you can't come out of your house at that point how the fuck you gotta really be wow um but they did it they would invest in him and um they said he had never had any shame when he lost money he never was like i'm sorry or just somebody else's money yeah um now their commercials are out

at this point that terry's design and consign and um you know he's helping out with the business as well like we said and uh they said they didn't know what they were doing or they said he was telling loretta that terry didn't know what she was doing yeah that's what he's like turning her against Terry.

Terry, by the way,

Terry, they didn't know

what they were they didn't know whether to do the commercials like we said and terry said i have a gift of gab i think it's how well you can deliver it i would say i truly if i truly didn't have the talent i wouldn't do it but if you're good at it why not people like to see who owns the. And she'd have her mother on with her.

She said it was a way of saying this is a true mother-daughter team that's running this business. You can trust us.
He said it's recognition that they can see people behind the company instead of, in the case of an IBM, who really runs IBM. Nobody fucking knows.
Great point. Who runs it? That's what I mean.
There's an article. There's fluff pieces on them just from 1987 about their own opening another store here.
And all of this just – this business is an amazing mother-daughter business. It's incredible and how wonderful the prices are and all this type of shit.
Terry says we'd only – about the stuff they took in. We'd only take it if we thought – if we think 10 out of every 15 people would buy it.

We don't take too expensive or

too different furniture. Before we

accept it, we check it out like a used car.

They wrote the

commercials yourself, themselves,

and

one of them said, Mother and I have

pre-selected the highest quality of furniture

and priced it right for you.

She said, You can trust my mom. She inspects all the furniture to be sure it's clean and priced right.
That's great. You have your mom.
You can trust my mom. Yeah.
That seems. That would have been a tough time to sell things, too, because a lot of people were still smoking indoors back then.
Oh, God, yes. I guess people were, they understood that, too, at the time, probably.
People would buy a piece and not care. Also, they they're gonna put it in a house where there's smoke too that's the other thing even people that didn't smoke you'd go into their house you could smoke in their house that's crazy yeah my aunt dude she collected those uh cabbage patch dolls she had every fucking one of them but it was in her house where she smoked and they were all destroyed i bet when she died she died, she thought they were going to be worth money.
They're all covered in tar. They're all yellow.
The black ones, the white ones, they were all yellow. They were all yellow.
At the end of the day, I'm selling a shitload of Asian cabbage patch towels, I guess. Are you kidding? Your aunt, not me.
Your aunt's... she's an old lady.
Yeah. That's, I was making, I was being your racist old aunt.
I don't know what they are. Hold on.
I think, I think the Chinese is something. I don't fucking know.
We weren't allowed to touch them when I was a kid. I wanted one so bad and I couldn't get one.
She'd buy them and then just store them in her fucking back bedroom. I'd walk back there and look at them all.
In the boxes still? All in the boxes. In the boxes, yeah.
Still ruined, James. Still ruined.
Yeah, if she put those in a nice storage unit, they would have been worth good money. Idiot.
So by late 87, 88, Taw has convinced Loretta to demand a buyout from Terry from the store. Yeah.
Terry didn't want the buyout and she couldn't afford to buy her out of the business. So Terry wants, he wants Loretta to get bought out by Terry.
Yes. To get out, to get a big lump sum of money and get out of the business because Terry doesn't know what she's doing.
That's what he says basically. So Terry didn't know what to do here.
But she said that if I did do this, then it gets taught away from me and out of my

company.

So she finally agreed.

She said, fine.

She negotiated a monthly pan, uh, plan that paid her mother more than a quarter million

dollars for the, her part of the business.

Monthly.

No, not monthly.

That's, that's the total.

She's got, okay.

She's going to pay it monthly because she doesn't have the money sitting there in a lump sum.

Um, the offer was blunt. Basically they said, you buy me out or we buy you out.
Someone's buying somebody out. And Terry was like, well, I guess I'm out now.
I guess those two are business partners. So Taw here, he's doing this.
And Taw suggested they could save all the legal fees if he wrote up the papers himself. I'll write up the, you know, yeah.
Okay. You know, just to be a nice guy.
Loretta insisted that Taw's legal papers would be just good, so the women split ownership of the four stores they had, with Terry agreeing to buy her mother out for, it was about $150,000 then, which is about $250,000 later on. So she said as she made the monthly payments until she paid it all off, and she said, as fast as I would pay her monthly payments, Ta would go through it with one invention or another.
Oh, my God. She'd make these payments, and Ta was just fucking pissing money away.
And also drove a wedge between them, obviously. They don't want to hang out at this point.
So that's that. She said all that.
Terry said he just seemed to care about the money. That was it.
So Terry ends up creating a big empire. Eventually she had 36 stores across the nation.
Is that right? Fuck yeah. Made her a very wealthy woman also.
She did very well. And now Loretta didn't invest the money that she got from Terry.
It was just all spent on bullshit here. Loretta was supposed to be selling off real estate, but that didn't go anywhere.
She has a real estate license as well. She would buy secondhand items and sell that stuff here and there on eBay that she found in garage sales.
And neither of them ever had a job, Loretta Erta. Wow.
And Terry said, finances and our relationship had become very draining and distant. 1991, Terry versus Loretta, steel cage match, Royal Rumble, here it goes.
In court, or we're going to actually fight? Well, they're going to fight in court and maybe throw hands. This is how Terry says it.
She says that Loretta showed up at my house dressed like Alexis of Dynasty. So that was a soap opera in the 80s about rich people.
Just dressed to Kill, and you could tell that she had to be rehearsed to do this.

And she said, I'm still an owner.

And she showed me those papers Taw had done for us,

which showed she was still part owner of the company.

How?

I said, I don't care about those papers.

You and I know that I bought you out.

I fucking paid you money.

So then she handed me a lawsuit for the company and walked out the front door. I fell to my knees and cried.
I just had lost my best friend, my mother, who helped me get through life and lost the only job I knew how to do. My mother was no longer my mother.
Oh, my God. Yes.
And even she in her own journals, Loretta said in her journal, she wrote in 1987, sold my half to Terry. But yet five years later, she was saying, I still own half of it.
That's stupid. Yeah.
So apparently Ta had fucked up the papers to basically make it so it was nothing. They're just giving them money and they still own the business.
So that's a lot. Now, here's a letter from Ta to Loretta.
By the way, even though they live in the same house, they write each other letters back and forth in the house. Like long letters.
Yeah. In a 1991 letter, he mocked her complaints that, Ta, you brought too much baggage to our relationship or, Ta, you ruined my relationship with my daughter.
He taunted that she should question her own judgment if she was so unhappy and stayed with him anyway well who's the idiot now i'm an asshole you're with me if i'm so bad you're the dummy then i guess right he's got a point next terry is going on oprah what because she is a successful businesswoman that had dyslexia and went and got her learning disabilities okay yeah she overcame some challenges yeah she's on oprah now loretta's a gigantic fan of oprah loves oprah watches her every day not today and terry does not take loretta with her oh shit she takes her aunt darla with her instead ouch yep she said that I didn't take my mom to the show, to Chicago for the show. Her aunt came with her, the limo ride, the whole deal.
It was all that. She said, Terry, on the show, Terry told her life story, and Oprah talked about how she'd overcome her learning disability to, you know, earn all this shit and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Wow. Just drooling.

Loretta watched the show at home, but that was it. Seething.
Also, she appeared on Channel 3 News in Phoenix talking to Tara Hitchcock on Good Morning Arizona. That's just some real Arizona local shit for you.
Oh, Tara Hitchcock. She's a smoke show.
Jesus. And said that she'd won the Avon Award by turning her disadvantage of dyslexia into an opportunity.
Yeah. So she's doing the press tour now.
Yeah. She's killing it.
1993, she goes to Geraldo. What? Here.
Yeah. Geraldo at the Phoenix Civic Plaza was taping an episode of Geraldo.

It was called Daughters in Distress.

And when a man warming up the audience asked how a woman would feel if her mother stole her husband or boyfriend,

somebody talked about all that.

And then Terry is in the crowd here.

She's in the audience to talk about the lawsuit between her and her mother. She's going on Geraldo to talk about her mom's lawsuit.
Oh, my. But for some reason, other segments ran long.
She never ended up getting on the show. Okay.
So that's probably good. We didn't have that anyway.
Yeah, that's helpful here. So there was a lot of like this.
It was a mother-daughter thing. So 90s here, 2000s, late 90s, Loretta's finally admitting to her girlfriend that she's doubting Ta's stories.
It took her 10 years to start doubting this shit. Wow.
But she said that she actually thought maybe he was lying to her at this point. Maybe he didn't even graduate from Morton.
We don't know. Maybe his name's not even Ta.
We have no idea. Yeah.
She said she gave him so much money that she needs to keep him around so she'll get her money back at some point.

I got to stay here for when it hits, you know?

She needed to make it.

She needed to do it.

So she kind of just basically at some point, too, she then gave up on that and stopped having this idea that he's going to get rich and just wanted him to help with the bills basically. Can you just contribute, maybe get an electric bill?

It's getting expensive. It's hot.

That's, yeah. So by 1999, all of her personal journals here, she's talking about self-improvement classes and inspections of her mind and soul and all this type of shit.
In 1999, she wrote to him,

I don't know. here.
She's talking about self-improvement classes and inspections of her mind and soul and all this type of shit. In 1999 she wrote to him, I'm no longer willing.
Indeed, I was never willing, but I'm no longer going to accept your financial abuses, verbal abuses, and shirking of your responsibilities. She wrote that to Ta.
Okay. December 2001, Ta at this point they're fighting and he's exiled to a guest room at this point.
So he is excommunicated to the other side of the house. She said, I have to set a deadline sometime.
I will not go this month without a financial contribution toward his expenses. Enough is enough.
He must get some money to operate. He cannot keep expecting me to support him and his business.
It's been over a decade of this. Yeah.
Yeah. December 10th, 2002.
So a year later, she wrote this. Still no financial relief.
So it's been a year. I'm done.
Enough is enough. It's a year later.
Still same shit. Yeah.
Money withdrawn from personal account and business accounts without any entry in the checkbook. $17 left in the business account.
$500 in sinking fund that he agreed was to avoid overdrawing account and bank charges. Blatant disregard.
Cannot control what he does with money. How do I protect myself against careless and unnecessary spending? Deceitful withdrawals from bank account.
His willingness to, quote, educate the world on energy without receiving compensation? How do I protect myself from another lien being placed on my house? If bills are to be paid this month, he will pay them. Either he can find a way or phones get turned off.
I don't want to be intimate. And I know that there has been a change.
There has not been a change of attitude or skills to create a supportive relationship. I can't earn enough to pay the bills.
I'm through borrowing money to live on. It's very demeaning to my self-respect.
Okay. One more letter.
She said, the only thing I can do is to keep this, to keep this relationship from blowing up on a daily basis is a, is created a steady, reliable income that I can run a household in an organized, predictable way. Until you do that, stop beating up on me verbally for being unhappy and not having any money.
Okay. Now, 2004, Toss spends several days working.
This is years later. Still no money.
But he spent several days working on something he saw on Dr. Phil.
Jesus Christ. Dr.
Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, they're all making the rounds today. Where's Maury? Is it his baby? Why has he seen all this? Why does he have so much time to see this? They love these shows, apparently.
Daytime TV. They're around for it.
Fuck. Yeah, that's what I mean.

So this is a relationship rescue exercise.

He completed a series of sentences meant to get him to see their problems.

Yeah.

You're right.

Yeah.

So he writes this.

What makes me angry is, this is like Ted Bundy's psychological assessment.

Jesus.

Feeling and being frustrated.

When I get angry, I use my voice to express it. I would give anything if and the answer is my partner would be less critical of small things, you know, like everything I've ever told her being a lie, that sort of thing.
And not having a job, you're not having a job. My best quality is my brain power.

My partner hates it when I am not truthful. And not having a job.
Not having a job. My best quality is my brain power.

My partner hates it when I am not truthful, he says.

Well, that makes sense. Yeah.

It would be best, and then to be honest with Loretta, I can't forgive myself for failure.

And then I believe, and he says, in myself.

Oh, that I can fly.

That I can fly. I believe i can rob this lady blind

so he women certainly differ in how they view life and issues do they i think everybody likes

to have their bills paid right that's a normal thing yeah i think uh i think everybody likes

to be cared for and not be sucked dry that's nice financially and then uh women never seem to

make it Yeah, I think everybody likes to be cared for and not be sucked dry financially. And then women never seem to make the time to have mutual enjoyment, he says.
Yeah, okay. I don't even know what that means.
That doesn't mean anything. It's bullshit.
I'm doing like my mouth is open. I don't get it.
It's very, very dumb. It hurts me when my partner, and then he puts, doesn't trust me even though it is warranted.

He is hoping she reads this.

This is very manipulative. Oh, that's all it is.

That's all it is.

He's doing this in the house.

He didn't go on Dr. Phil.

He's just writing this down.

I'm sure leaving it on the kitchen table and shit.

He's like, I'm doing the steps, man.

Very passive aggressive, but also manipulative.

Later on, a forensic psychiatrist named Dr. Stephen Pitts said that she wasn't hardwired to deal with a guy who was so manipulative.
Later on, a forensic psychiatrist named Dr. Stephen Pitts said that she wasn't hardwired

to deal with a guy who was so manipulative.

She was an emotional hostage to this guy's manipulation.

She was used to trusting, you know, and this guy turns out to be just like her dad.

So December 2004, a lot of problems.

Her income each month consisted of two sources. Social Security sent her $474.
Oh, Jesus. Yeah.
And she had an investment. She had a house on Abraham Lane in Phoenix that Terry had bought for her years earlier.
Oh, nice area. Yeah.
She rents that out for $1,495 a month in 2004. So that's good.
So she said she had nice renters, paid her rent on time, and all that kind of thing. She also has a second mortgage on this house she had to take because Ta needed money for invention.
So the house... Yeah.
What a ridiculous sentence. That's exactly.
He needed invention money, so they took a second mortgage out on a fucking house. God damn it.
The mortgage for this house, because of that, costs her $1,209.08 a month. So she's making $200 a month on that house.
Yeah. After she paid her mortgage, she had $759.92 for everything else.
From every stream of money. Bills, food, you name it.
Mortgage paid. Oh, my God.
That's not enough money. No.
For everything. Bills, especially Arizona in the summer.
In 2004? Your electric bill is almost that. Yeah.
You're in so much trouble. You're fucked, basically.
Then they would have little bits of income that they earned by buying and selling items they picked up at yard sales and sold them either through Terry's or on eBay. How depressing.
So, yeah. They would try to do this.
They were trying to, you know, flip garbage and houses and whatever. Loretta had a real estate broker's license but only sold a couple of houses so never really made any big money off of that.
When she had nothing else, she would turn to Terry as a last resort,

and Terry would loan her money and gift her shit and that sort of thing.

This is a 60-year-old woman.

Yeah, exactly.

Not wanting to 65-year-old woman.

Yeah.

So she said that, you know, and Ta would say,

why don't you go fucking, he would go beg Terry for money too.

One of Terry's employees said that the staff would whisper to one another on days that Ta would come to the corporate headquarters. She said he'd sit in that lobby for hours on end until Terry would cut him a check.
We thought it was so humiliating, but he didn't seem to mind. No, because he's leaving with the check.
That's it. He doesn't care.
He has no pride in this. And Terry said said i always gave it to him because i didn't want my mother to be without but i knew she'd be embarrassed if she knew he was borrowing from me so most of the time we just kept it between us last year she had slipped him forty thousand dollars this year it was twenty thousand dollars sixty grand in two years she didn't see herself she as an enabler.
She resented all this, but she couldn't do anything. She said it was her mother loved him.
So what's she going to do? And she basically said she was pretty positive that she would probably tell my mother that these checks coming in were for investors, for inventions. That's probably what it was.

While her mother always promised that one day she'd repay the loans, Terry knew that Taw had no intention of giving her a fucking dime.

So Loretta once wrote a demand letter to Taw here saying that he doesn't contribute to

the monthly bills and he has to or he needs to get out.

At one point, she demanded $6,000 a month as his share.

And he gave her nothing.

He didn't give her $6 a month.

December 7, 2007, a wire transfer is completed.

And Loretta is finally getting a couple of bucks here.

She, I guess, sold the house to the people she rented to and got a wire transfer for $69,119.25. Okay.
Yeah. And he actually, Taw actually did something decent here.
His scheming and scamming when it comes to paperwork works out sometimes. He told her that they would escape capital gains taxes if the money were wired into his business account so it would look like an investment fee.
Yeah, what scumbags do they know the loopholes everybody with money does yeah yeah that's how they keep money so loretta figured she'd be saving thousands and it was um so there you go so she wrote in her journal and she said that i will give him some money to get out uh to get out of here and pay back terry that's Going to boot him. She detailed nearly a year ago on a list titled, What I Want for Christmas 2003-2004, and it was paying off credit cards to a three- to five-day stay at a health spa.
She wanted certain gold earrings that she liked, and also a front-entry landscape job, including a new sidewalk and driveway. How about that? Wednesday, December 8, 2004, she had an appointment for a flu shot, and then on her day planner, she wrote Saturday night dinner.
This is a Wednesday, so this upcoming Saturday. Saturday night dinner with her friend Lorraine Combs.
It said Combs, dinner, and Christmas lights. Beautiful.
Saturday, December 11, their neighbor remembers seeing Loretta cleaning out the double garage. She said she was always cleaning it because Ta always had his shit scattered everywhere in the garage.
So she didn't like mess, really. I guess one of her Christmas wishes the year before had been clean garage by January 15th to last for a year.
But that didn't work out. That'll last until February.

Yeah.

Another neighbor who was hanging her Christmas lights when she saw Loretta sweeping the front porch while Ta was in the garage doing, dicking around on something.

So that same Saturday, Loretta and Ta went to the Zales Jewelry Store in the Fiesta Mall.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's a big one.

For her.

The clerk said it was a strange visit here.

They said the woman wanted one of her rings sized and needed it back before the end of the day. The man became angry when they were told the ring could not be sized that quickly.
The man said they needed the sizing done right away because they were leaving for Tucson in the morning. As the man became angry, the woman became meek and looked like she was going to cry.
so they also went to a garage sale in Phoenix, which they like to do that day and all that kind of thing. They, their 1991 white Dodge van broke down.
So they had it towed to a neighborhood, you know, mechanic to get it fixed. And yeah, so they did that.
And Lorraine, her friend, who came over to do Christmas lights and dinner,

says Saturday night dinner was a very, very pleasant evening.

Her son and daughter came over as well, this Lorraine's son and daughter.

The dinner was a belated birthday party for Lorraine,

who Ta and Loretta were away on her birthday, so they didn't get to celebrate. Taw gave her steak knives for a birthday present.
Nice gift. She said, we ate in the dining room.
China, silver, everything was exactly in the right place. Loretta served a roast.
She said she remembered a pleasant conversation covering what everyone was doing and their plans for the holidays and all that kind of shit. After dinner, Loretta took Lorraine into the spare bedroom to show her several gifts she'd bought for Terry that Christmas.
A table runner, a green and red tablecloth, placemats, and covers for her golf club. Holiday place settings and golf club covers.
And golf club covers. It's not a bad gift.
Then they all got into Loretta's red Dodge Caravan with Todd driving,

and they all drove all over looking at Christmas lights.

So it was five hours for dinner and lights altogether.

Long night.

Jeez, yeah.

Sunday, December 12, 2004, 1.15 a.m.,

Lorraine called Loretta's cell phone and left a message thanking her for the dinner.

That's nice.

That day also, Terry stops by for lunch and eats with her mom has a sandwich and some soup and she's complaining that she's not feeling well uh this is terry complaining she said she thought it was the flu maybe terry said we sat in the kitchen and just had an everyday conversation talk kept stepping in and mom said tall we don't need you get out off out of this conversation. She said, man, a mother and daughter couldn't even have a talk without him getting involved.
And Terry said, I don't remember what we talked about, but probably something about weight and diet because we were always talking about that. Mom was always giving me ideas on what to eat and how to take the weight off.
She believed in natural foods and stuff like don't drink the orange juice, eat the orange. Great point.
Yeah, I felt the conversation was a little strained. It wasn't something you could see.
You just got the feeling. So she said her mother sent her home with chicken soup and a just-baked loaf of banana nut bread.
Hell yeah. That's a good fucking haul right there.
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You're leaving fucking stacked up.

Yeah.

Scott called his mother that Sunday from Hawaii, and they talk about it.

He said it was an ordinary conversation.

He said that he did hear that she sold her investment property and made a $40,000 to $60,000 profit.

Yeah.

Loretta called her friend Ursula Kramer in California, but got her cell phone and got her voicemail and said, it's me. Let's talk.
Got lots to tell. And Ursula said, she thought, oh, wonderful.
I knew her deal on the house had closed and she'd come into some money. And I thought, oh, great.
Well, maybe things are going to start looking up and she'll have some money finally. So that's what she said.
Now, her friend Joy said that she talked to her and and she quote, she asked if she could come over. And I said, I'm really upset and I need to talk to you.
Joy pushed for details, but Loretta wouldn't say what had her so pissed off. Joy told her to come that day.
But Loretta said she needed to wait 14 days to get a cheaper ticket to go to California. Because it's that's if you do it inside of two weeks, it's price to shoot up.
So Monday, December 13, 2004, Terry says, I don't know why, but for the second time in my life, I sent her flowers. I'm not a flower sender, but that day it just came in my heart that I wanted to show her that I loved her.
So Loretta called to gush about that. Oh, thank you.
It's a a beautiful book bouquet the call dropped which i guess was normal from their house for some reason shit so like it's like your house basically yeah oh god touchy signals here fucking miserable god damn it my in my internet drops and i can't even call the internet company to get my fucking internet back on it's so dude it's ridiculous it's rough at your house so terry said the call got, but that was normal, and she said, I was at work, so I just moved on. At 3.33 p.m., Loretta makes the first of 17 consecutive calls to 10 different phone numbers at Wells Fargo Bank.
Really? The last call ended at 4.44, so for an hour and 11 minutes she She is just calling. Yep.
At 333, I guess the desk in her office, she sat down. She dialed the Wells Fargo office in Mesa, Arizona.
That call lasted 24 seconds. Three minutes later, she called Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Office in Gilbert and talked to someone for 66 seconds.
3.38, she called the Phoenix office of Wells Fargo, but apparently didn't get through. The call only lasted six seconds.
Next call, same thing. Mesa, five seconds.
She retried the Mesa number at 354 and talked for 33 seconds, then called back and talked for another 34 seconds, then called Gilbert again for 31 seconds. Are these voicemails? What did she do? Very fast calls, yeah.
The Scottsdale branch of the Wells Fargo home mortgage call was ended at 3.59 p.m. for a 48-second call, Gilbert again for 45 seconds, Phoenix again for 8 seconds, a redial for Phoenix that created a call that lasted 76 seconds.
At 4.15, she called the Gilbert office again for 59 seconds, then Phoenix again in two calls, one for 10 seconds and the other for 50. At 4.20, she talked to someone who she got some answers for.
She called the Wells Fargo 800 number and talked to someone for 404 seconds, which is six minutes and 44 seconds, in case you're wondering. The next call was to Lodestar Mortgage at 429 p.m., lasting 109 seconds.
Then the 800 number of Wells Fargo was dialed again, and this call lasted 769 seconds, about 12 minutes. So that ended at 444 p.m.
That's her flurry of calls. She had some shit she was trying to figure out.
5 p.m., Todd drives the red van to the Cobblestone Auto Spa to pick up the white van, which has fixed brakes now. He paid $191.79 in cash.
Now Todd needed to get the van home. He explained that he had come to the station alone because his wife was home sick.
Okay. 16 minutes earlier, she's on the phone with banks.
Yeah. So he asked the mechanic to follow him home so he could deliver, you know, one van and then come back to the other.
So the, the guy took his own car to the house, Todd parked the van in the driveway, got in this guy's car, went back, picked up the other one.

The mechanic said later that Ta's demeanor was no different than usual, which is grumpy.

Just a pissed off old man.

Pissy old Scotsman here.

So about 6 p.m., Ta starts calling people.

The first call is to Scott in Hawaii.

And Scott was like, why the fuck is he calling me to chit-chat?

He doesn't call me to chit-chat.

I just invented Uber. I had an inconvenience today.
Send me $30,000. So Todd, I guess he just calls him and he said that they weren't close and they didn't chit-chat.
So he didn't get it. Scott said he was a know-it-all and pompous about it and a bit of a turd.
I really like Scott. Scott is a bit of a turd.
Scott tells it exactly like it is in the most succinct way possible. I would like to talk to Scott and hang out with him.
He seems pretty goddamn cool. A bit of a turd is a fun way to describe it.
Bit of a turd he says he knew everything down to how much food the cat should get she couldn't even decide that the only reason she was still with him she didn't want to be alone but he seemed harmless but scott said he wasn't in the mood to talk to him that night he said it was an uninteresting conversation he said look i'm bored man i don't want to talk to you i'm doing something we'll talk about he's watching something as well. Okay.
Yeah. He said...
Look, I'm bored, man. Can you call somebody else? I don't want to talk to you.
We'll talk about it. He was watching something.
Oh, okay. He said he dealt with watches that he sold on eBay, and he was asking me what kind of watch I wanted.
It was boring to me. I was trying to watch The Amazing Race, and he's talking to me about this boring stuff.
I'm watching a housewife from Nebraska run down a hill. With her local gas station attendant, for some reason, they teamed up i don't know why they're pushing a bed down kilimanjaro weird right it's gonna be strange as fuck they're pushing a sherpa up mount everest in a bed on wheels strange stuff so he said he did sound a little weird but i was distracted trying to watch the like, yeah, whatever.
I don't fucking care. Reality TV is just kicking off, man.
This is awesome. Jesus.
Then between 8 and 10 p.m. Arizona time, Scott got another call from Ta.
Oh, boy. This time, Ta said that he and Loretta were planning to go to Tucson to have a meeting at the University of Arizona the following day about a possible business deal.
And Scott was like, okay, what the fuck are you telling me for? I don't give a shit. Survivor's on now.
Leave me alone. Talked to my mom yesterday, and I'm watching something else.
I'm trying to find out who's going to be a millionaire. Was it 2004? Is it the naked guy? Maybe it's him.
So he said, yeah, that was it. He said they're trying to do that.
He said he didn't talk to his mother during either of the calls with Scott here. He talked to her earlier in the day.
So during the first call, Ta was telling him about the Tucson trip, saying they'd be stopping there for business and all that. And Terry remembers that Ta twice told her over the phone how much he loved the flowers.
Her mother loved the flowers they'd spent that. And he also called Terry to tell her about the Tucson trip.
Telephone Terry to tell her about Tucson. It's a very slow seashell.
Wow, holy shit. So Tuesday, December 14th now.
Okay. Taw's supposed to be traveling for a business presentation on solar panels at the university of arizona and loretta's joining him for the two-hour trip so they can do some christmas shopping she's going to stop at the mall yeah while he goes to do a business meeting yeah well he goes and lies about what he's lies about his failures so he dropped her off at the park Play Small, remember right where where we started with plans to pick her up at 4 p.m dillard's has a 40 off sale you do your rounds i'll be back at four okay he said he returned at that time loretta is nowhere to be found he calls 9-1-1 at 5 43 p.m and says quote we have a woman that's been my wife that's been missing i guess he's's like, I guess I should tell you she's my wife, not just a woman that's been missing for an hour and 45 minutes.
I was to pick her up at four. I was here at four and she did not show up, which is not like her.
And we're not from Tucson. He said that he talked to the store store security and mall security and would have talked to city police patrolling the mall, except they were doing something else.
They were busy. The operator interrupted, asking him to describe his wife.
And he said she's 69 years old, white, silver hair, wearing a gray outfit. She's wearing wool gabardine slacks.
She's wearing a gray ribbed turtleneck sweater, a lightweight sweater, a waist-length gray jacket, and gray suede shoes. So she's all in gray.
But her hair is pure silver. It's not just white or gray.
Okay. Okay.
Same thing, I think, really, but okay. It's all the same.
No, you don't understand. It's fucking sterling.
It's worth a lot. It's really good.
I'm going to resell it if possible. He told the operator that he and Dillard's security had been searching.
He said they've been looking. We've paged.
Dillard's is the only store she shops in at this mall. You know, this is the first time she's been in the store, so we've been checking everywhere in the store.
They check the restrooms. They check the changing rooms.
They've done substantial due diligence, which is such a weird way to put that on the phone. So in the meantime, the 911 operator is calling the emergency room of the hospital to see if any 69-year-old pure silver foxes have been fucking coming in there dressed in gray.
Yeah. Nothing.
Negative. They've got nobody in there like that.
So Taw calls Terry and told her that he thinks something's wrong. Terry hops in the car and fucking books it down to Tucson.
Is that right? Which you can do in about an hour and a half if you really pump it. Yeah, if you haul balls, you can make it.
You can do it if you're really doing it. So the mall security confirmed there'd been no medical emergencies and anything like that, and that's when Ta called 911.
Police arrived and talked to Ta at the store and then took him back to the hotel room they were staying in down there.

They were staying in a hotel for a longer talk.

They noticed that, a little bit weird, they said it was noted that Benderly had fresh scratches on his hand,

appeared consistent with having a struggle and having several fingers scratch the hand.

Okay.

Toa told police this.

He said, Loretta went to a massage school that morning for a student massage because they're cheaper. Oh, yeah.
I remember you could do that. Yeah.
Yep. He couldn't remember the name of the school, but she went there often for her osteoporosis and paid $20.
He said they then left for Tucson about 10.30 a.m. Their first stop was at Love's, arriving between 11.30 and 11.40.
He noted the traffic had been heavy. He said he bought gas there and two roast beef sandwiches, which they ate because there's an Arby's there too, which they ate in the car as they drove with bottled water.
He said he and Loretta then stopped at a discount mall where they bought two different baseball hats at two different stores. Oh.
Okay. Loretta, meanwhile, had gone into Housewear's store on her own.
He said Loretta was wearing jeans, the turtleneck, a wine-colored jacket. He'd been wearing a dark blue short-sleeved shirt and a blue windbreaker and loafers.
They arrived in Tucson about 1230. They checked into room 1613 at the residence inn.
Okay. Ta had taken care of arranging the room while Loretta waited in the van.
They got in the room for about an hour 45 while Loretta changed from her traveling clothes into the gray outfit she wore to the mall. Right.
As we know, she was carrying a gray clutch purse that contained her wallet, checks, a bank card, a Dillard's credit card. She liked shopping at Dillard's.
He noted that both he and Loretta have cell phones. He says she carries it only 50% of the time when I prompt her.
He didn't think she'd taken it with her on this shopping trip. He said that he'd gone back to the hotel to do some work for his upcoming meeting, which was yet to be arranged, and then left to pick up Loretta at the agreed-upon 4 p.m.
time. He said he'd parked out and waited 25 minutes for her to come out.
He checked his watch and noticed a stream of patrons coming out of Dillard's. He said he moved his car to another spot, then gone inside to look for her.
When he couldn't find her, he went to customer service, reported her missing. They paged her.
Nobody popped up. So then he said this about the last time he saw Loretta.
This is the police report verbiage here.

Benderly reported that he dropped

Loretta off at the south entrance of Dillard's and was

driving in their red Dodge Caravan.

When asked why the vehicle did not appear

in surveillance video, he said he had no idea.

Yeah, what can

you say to that? Benderly said

he returned to Park Place Mall at approximately

1555 hours,

355, and waited in his car until 1620 or 1625. When he did not see Loretta come out of Dillard's, Benderly went into the store, stated he entered through the south doors, and began looking for Loretta in the men's section, in case she was buying him a gift.
Yeah. Wow, she must be buying me a gift here.
Benderly reported that he traversed both floors of Dillard's, and after searching for 30 minutes he went to the customer service desk where he told them he couldn't find his wife and asked them to page her. After paging her twice, Benderly told us that Dillard's security as well as Park Place Mall security became involved in the search.
Eventually, he called the Tucson police from Dillard's. So they talked to, they said, how are things with you and Loretta, they asked him.

And they said, Benderly described his relationship

with Loretta as good, but it did have its ups and

downs. Their conflicts were of a

gentle nature, and he added that he's never

touched her in anger. He normally clams

up during arguments.

Yeah, because I've spent all

her money, so I really don't have a leg to stand on.

Not really much to say here, other than

we're poor. I'm a piece of shit.
And she does let me stay in the guest room still so it's very nice of her terry says she couldn't believe how calm ta was about all this she said i was the only one flipping out i was expecting him to be shouting let's get out there and search for her but he wasn't terry said she was anything but calm she rushed around the room fucking with her cell phone

saying we got to call the media we got to make up flyers and she said the whole time tall was on the bed dicking with his laptop she said um tall picked up his cell phone to call scott in hawaii and scott says quote i hate rhetorical questions and rhetorical greetings like how are you because nobody really cares

Scott is

wow

what do you ask Scott says, quote, I hate rhetorical questions and rhetorical greetings. Like, how are you? Because nobody really cares.

Scott is, wow.

What are you asking me how I am?

You don't give a shit.

Just tell me what you want.

Like, he is so no time for bullshit, Scott.

This is crazy.

He said, and of course, that's how Toss started.

And he said, the call went like this.

Hi, Scott.

How are you?

Fine.

Your mother is missing. Okay.
Scott says, well, does she have her cell phone? Taw said she refused to take it with her. And Scott said she will from now on.
And Taw said, I guess they got her. And then hands the phone to Terry.
What? Who got her? What do you mean got? What are you talking about? What are we talking about now? Who's after her? What's happening? So Taw handed the phone to Terry and told her brother that Taw talked about seeing a suspicious looking van that had followed them earlier in the day. They want his solar secrets.
That's what it is. They want all of his fucking solar car cover secrets.
He's got a perpetual motor design that he's he's gonna disappear about it's like they're trying to track down doc brown in the mall parking lot that's what it is fucking ridiculous oh my god so they said that he he was afraid that they had kidnapped loretta that's what she said that's that was the big thing so in her own journal terry would write this because she was in the room. Quote, six suitcases, five filled with lots and lots of Taw's clothes, one small suitcase of hers filled with four pants, four shirts, four underwears, one pair of shoes, no coat and makeup just thrown in a bag like a handful just tossed in.
It was wrong. Not how my mother would have packed her bag.
He said she was wearing a silver turtleneck with jeans and gold jewelry,

specifically her favorite gold ring she wore all the time.

Wrong.

She would never wear gold with silver.

That's the thing.

She would.

She knows. I felt a big lump in my throat, and I began to hide the fear that was in my mind.

So, yeah, they said that it's uncharacteristic for her. She very organized she wouldn't leave without notice she wouldn't leave her stuff she wouldn't have jewelry she wouldn't clash people travel a specific way if they travel a lot like i'm an incredibly disorganized person in my personal life you look in my suitcase when i'm on the road it's fucking crazy it has to be or else you won't fit it all in there in the same way.
And I'll fucking forget something. That's the other thing.
Get on the road with no deodorant. So they describe her as 5'6", 130 pounds, silver hair, and wearing glasses and gray outfit.
So they launch a search of the neighborhoods, the shopping center. 20 officers are involved in this now.
Oh, boy. A police helicopter.
They bring dogs in to the search. Oh, yeah.
Then by 4 a.m., they don't have any sign of her. They kind of scale back the search because we don't even know what we're looking for now.
The cops said, we pulled out all the stops. We have nothing.
This is a strange one. This is a lady who's very structured and organized, and they said this is outside of her.
This is very, very, very outside of her normal behavior.

So Tempe police said the last confirmation they have of anyone speaking with Loretta besides Ta is December 13th when she called her daughter to thank her for the flowers. Oh.
And the phone cut off. Remember that? Yeah.
Police considered the possibility that she might be a target for kidnappers because of the celebrity locally and their daughters on commercials and Geraldo and Oprah.

And people know that they're rich, basically.

So they might be doing that.

So they questioned Ta.

He said that after his business meeting, they were going to go to New Mexico to dig for geodes.

Really?

New Mexico to dig for geodes really new mexico to dig for geodes that's okay he also told them that he observed a white van at the mall whose driver was acting suspicious i don't know how you drive a van suspiciously but i mean if you're driving a van you're suspicious that's suspicious right away so he thought you're either real suspicious or really trying to up your Instagram fucking content. One of the two.
And no amount of fucking cute words like swagger wagon by Toyota is going to make a fucking minivan cool. It's still a minivan.
It's not cool. We hate it.
Even the people that own it fucking hate it. They own it because they have to have it.
Right. They have no choice.
A reason for it.

So he talked to me, gave a description again of the van.

And meanwhile, everybody's searching for her dogs, bikes, air support units, everything else.

Then that's when they said, OK, now we looked inside and we found Loretta nowhere in security footage in the mall either.

Not only did we not see her van, we didn't see her in there either. Yeah, we can't we can't fucking verify that the van or she were here ever.
That's the thing, and they talked to her at the home. They find a foreclosure notice on the home when they try to go to the home in Tempe.
Oh no. That led them to determine that her disappearance might not have been a kidnapping.
You know what I mean? They said maybe financial matters have something to do with this. Family members also reported that Taw had been acting strangely since Loretta's disappearance.
He'll end up holing up in a Phoenix hotel for a while, as we'll talk about. Terry said she confronted him once, asking him where her mother was, and he told her, I don't know where she is.
I don't know. Her sister, now Lta's sister, Darla, said the family had concerns about Taw from the beginning.
They didn't know anything about his family, anything about anything about him. He's just this guy that plopped down on a motorcycle and took all of her sister's money.
So they want to check, basically, her house. So they do a check of her house, like a welfare check, essentially, they call it.

They said the goal in searching her home is to learn about how she structured her life.

They said it doesn't appear at this point she had any domestic problems.

So they do that.

They said as they were making her way into the home to do the welfare check, there was a surprise knock on the door.

Who is it?

A realtor arrived at the residence and asked if the house could be viewed since it's in foreclosure.

I'm going to go over here. to do the welfare check, there was a surprise knock on the door.
Who is it? A realtor arrived at the residence and asked if the house could be viewed since it's in foreclosure. Uh-huh.
And they were like, huh? And that's when they found the foreclosure notices. Oh, boy.
Then they said mail was seen in the mailbox, which also reflected that the county had placed the home in foreclosure. They haven't made the taxes.
Nope. So police searches the home.
They search the home, and they find some other shit. They find ominous notice from New U.S.
Bank from October 2003 declaring your account as seriously delinquent. She had written on the notice called 10-2003.
Must send payments in separate envelopes. There's another letter from Wells Fargo Bank saying trustee sale date scheduled.
it said they're going to sell her house March 14, 2005 oh boy so yeah the loan recovery program is a solution to stopping your current foreclosure and stopping your sale date it said take immediate action send us a shitload of money you better hurry up this shit's about to sell then the problem is they found her checkbook and they saw that she'd faithfully written out two mortgage checks every month. One for $909.91 as the first mortgage and one for $299.17 for the second one they'd taken out to finance the inventions.
That's the $1,200 figure. The checks were sometimes not written until the 15th of the month as the grace period was expiring.
So that's why there's a grace period. But she wrote them every month, just as they should be.
And every month, the money was deducted from her bank account. But when they contacted the bank, they found out those checks never made it to the mortgage company.
What? She wrote a check and it came out of her account, but he was controlling it.

Terry said, I knew he controlled the phones, but I had no idea he controlled everything. You couldn't have a conversation with Mother without him being right there.
He always monitored the phone. But we found boxes of mail in the house, and I finally learned that he controlled the mail, too.
She only saw what he wanted her to see. One of Lta's friends said uh handling the mail both incoming and outgoing was one of ta's helpful chores helpful every month he what he would do is he'd take the envelope with the house payment as though he was going to post it and instead he would quote wash the check and remade it out to himself and then cashed it oh my month for over a year.
Oh, my God. What do you think is going to happen to that, Taw? It's the thing.
He never has the end of what's going to happen. What the fuck? He never sees what the ending is.
When the bank started sharing warning letters to Loretta, your account is seriously in arrears, he hid those letters. Hit them all.
Yeah. Asked about her mother's relationship with Taw, Terry told the cops that she had no reason to suspect he'd been abusing her.
She said, I said, you know, 17 years they've had their ups and downs, but I don't think it's any different than any other couples. So I don't really feel like they have a problem.
So Terry's not trying to, like, hem the guy up. She's being honest there.
But the police said we believe he's directly involved in her disappearance and has information about her whereabouts and knows how she disappeared. They told Terry that.
Yeah. This is what we think.
Then Sunday of that week, police dogs seize the red Dodge Caravan to check the van for blood and other indications. And they said that we were cautiously hopeful, but as each day passes, hope diminishes.

Yeah.

The Wednesday, December 15th,

official Taw interview with the cops.

Yeah.

The detective says,

we began the interview soft.

We asked where he was born

and how he came to Noloretta,

and he was happy to tell us.

He came across as super intelligent,

and he was really full of himself.

He wanted to show us he was smarter than us. T Ta was very articulate.
We just let him tell it all. The more they talk, the more they have to remember their lies.
They'll let you talk forever up there. He said, I gave him all the outs.
I said, hey, something happened. It was an accident.
Was it self-defense? We all make mistakes. Did you lose your temper? And he remembers that Todd just sat there shaking his head in denial.
The detective said, I think Loretta's dead and I think you know what happened. And he said, if you care as much as you say, you'll help us find her and not have her out there in the cold.
And then the detective said it got really confrontational toward the end, but he was still in denial.

He was totally convinced he was capable of getting away with it.

He thought he was smart and articulate. He was totally convinced he was capable of getting away with it.

He thought he was smart and articulate.

He thought he could explain it all away.

But once he reported her missing, he was boxed in.

Benderly said, I'm a gentle man.

I don't even kill bugs.

I pick them up and take them outside.

That doesn't mean you didn't.

That's extra fucked up then.

That's fucking, I mean, well, I mean, that's where they're from. Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, it's extra fucked up then that's fucking i mean i well i mean that's where they're from

so yeah yeah but no i mean it's extra fucked up that if you did hurt somebody right yeah and then the detective walked benderly through every single item uncovered his timeline of leaving tempe and arriving at loves didn't match up to the actual times recorded on credit card records and

he said, Toss said

I'm wondering if my watch was just off

I said it two hours ago. Maybe that's how I got it.
My watch was off, so that's how I got the bad time. The check-in at the hotel was wrong, and he said, oh, for God's sake, I'm totally confused.
And then he told the officers that he wasn't prepared to account for time point by point. Wow.
You know. There's a woman missing, sir.
Wasn't prepared to go through a whole murder investigation and all. He said there was a large disparity between the amount of clothes packed for Taw and those packed for Loretta.
He answered that Loretta had complained on the way down she forgot to pack some of her clothes. Like a whole suitcase worth probably.
Four days or so. Yeah.
They said he was carrying a suspiciously large amount of cash benderly said he and lorraine had been planning to surprise terry and pay her back the twenty thousand dollars they owed her although he found nothing strange in carrying around all that money for a week-long trip where they wouldn't be seeing terry right i'll just take it with me just in case i don't know if she around here. They said, why do you have two new cell phones that haven't been activated yet? Yeah.
That we found out you bought that day. Uh-huh.
And he said they were for Loretta's grandnephews in Dallas and they just were purchased. We just got them that day.
We're giving the kids gifts of cell phones. Our house is in foreclosure.
Yeah. That's how it works.
Okay. They said, well well we looked in the back of your van um why do you have a dirty shovel and a pick back there you know the big shit yeah yeah geodes in new mexico and that's what he said he said well we were gonna go dig for geodes afterwards yeah well the shovel's very dirty he goes well it's from the last time we dug for geodes we dig a lot who cleans your shovels you It's a shovel.
You don't have a shovel, guys. Shovels are meant to have dirt.
What do you want from me? So they said, well, why are you carrying a passport? Considering you told someone you were going to Mexico, but now you're saying New Mexico. You don't need a passport for New Mexico.
Old Mexico, maybe, but not new. So he said, I always like to carry my passport, which people from overseas do that.
They do do that, actually. Yeah, because it works in identification better than a driver's license.
It's more official. So they said, where'd you get the scratch on top of your right hand? And he said, that happened last week when he was moving exercise equipment in his home.
I would have said digging for geodes elsewhere. I'm always digging for geodes.
You don't understand. You saw the dirty shovel.
Come on, man. You know what's up with me, man.
So the detective wrote in his summary, I asked Benderly if he would be willing to submit to a polygraph exam. He agreed to take a polygraph exam, but since he stated he has not slept in two days, we agreed to postpone the polygraph for the next day.
I asked Benderly if he would voluntarily turn over his three firearms and passport to us. He told us that he would give us his passport but did not want to turn over his firearms.
Benderly then demanded his car back and I told him that we were still processing the vehicle. He's very Sarah Boone in here.
The next day, they found out they called the Southwest Institute of Healing arts where loretta went for massages all the time oh yeah and the director checked with all three branches of the school phoenix tempe scottsdale reporting that they could not find any record of her receiving a massage on the morning of december 14th and they have to jot that down they have to yeah it's a medical thing the last time they'd seen her was October 6th, so over two months.

First thing Thursday morning of this week now, the detective gets a search warrant approved by the judge, and at 9.57 a.m., he was at Taw's hotel room to seize his laptop, firearms, ammunition, financial documents, and personal effects belonging to Loretta Bowersock. Then on Friday, he met with Loretta's sister, Shirley, and her husband, Sid, and also their son, Matt, who's a policeman in Kansas.
They said, Mrs. Gates told us that her family has always distrusted Todd Benderly and that they even asked Loretta to leave him, but she would not.
So the next day, four Tempe officers drive down to Tucson to meet with this detective about the investigation. They said that this is what they got.
This is the report. Benderly reported that he attended Tempe and Penn State universities where he majored in administration and finance.
He later worked as a CEO of IPEC, a petroleum company owned by First National Bank. Benderly stated he worked for IPEC for approximately nine years, spending the last two and a half years in Aberdeen, Scotland.
He was brought in to clean up books and revitalize the company. Toward the end of his time with this company, Benderly told us that he exercised $540,000 in stock options and all his money later went to zero when the company failed.
So he put all his money into stock options, and then he got nothing. He did not pay U.S.
taxes, but he does pay British taxes, he said. I don't think he pays anybody taxes.
I don't think he has any money to pay taxes. Nope.
Benderly stated he returned to Houston, Texas, where he hired an attorney from John Connolly's law firm to help him recover some of his money. He said he only recovered $13,000 in equipment.
By this time, he said he was divorced from Deanna Berger and had two children with her. Now, he had told everybody, including Loretta, that he had never been married, had no children.
What the fuck? He was telling them that. He told us he lost contact with his children and his ex-wife died in 1998.
That's not true, by the way. She was still alive.
Oh, my God. Benderly reported he came to Phoenix in 1987, where his first position was as a patent engineer for Xerox Corporation as vice president.
So the vice president of Xerox pulled up on a motorcycle with no wallet and one pair of underwear is what he's saying. Come on.
He said he responded to an advertisement about a rental share in April of 87. He met Loretta and their friendship developed into an intimate one.
He said he worked for the company by doing consulting work, worked for the sign and design company. No, no, Terry's company, reformulating merchandise and smoothing out their operation.
He reported that he was a major contributor to the success of the company. I'm sure.
He also said he worked on lease negotiations, but by 1989 he decided to go into product development. He told us that he invented mowing equipment, sound equipment, and had a total of 15 inventions and holds patents for some.

Benderly said he's now involved with renewable energy and was supposed to have a meeting today with some people involved with a solar task force. When asked who the meeting was with,

names, times, locations, Benderly told us that he had information in his room in his notes.

He said he knows the director of every services for the Tucson United School District,

and as far as his meeting was concerned, it was to be an informal meeting lasting one to two

I'll see you next time. of every services for the Tucson United School District, and as far as his meeting was concerned, it was to be an informal meeting lasting one to two hours.
The time was open as he was to call in. The detective would later discover that Todd didn't just lie about all this shit, the small stuff, he lied about everything, his entire education, work history, all this shit was fabricated, even the fact that his ex-wife was dead, which's not did he think they weren't gonna follow up he thought he's a nice charming guy and everybody else buys his bullshit and they will too he had to think that these are the police this isn't the doctor's office where you can just fill out bullshit that's this is like this is again a sarah boone thing where she was like they won't check i'll just say whatever bullshit I want and walk out of here.
Wow. Holy fuck.
It's not the dentist's office. They look to see if you have diabetes here.
No, they'll check it out. No shit.
So they tell you, this isn't I don't have heart problems. I can go on the roller coaster.
This is different. So then he told the cop about their white van breaking down on Saturday and claimed Loretta had driven him to pick it up at Cobblestone Auto around 5, which we know isn't true.

Right.

Remember the mechanic dropped him off.

Yeah, she wasn't there.

The police found the mechanic who said, no, Loretta was never there.

I Ubered his bitch ass, yeah.

He literally said, my wife's home sick.

Right.

That's it.

So a closer search through Loretta's things at the Tucson Hotel showed that her reading glasses were inside her messy makeup bag wrapped in a tissue paper. Terry told police her mother couldn't read without those glasses and certainly would have them on her.
So the detective said, I think Loretta was catching on to him and she must have told him that's it. He snaps and kills her and then he has to come up with a plan.
But the thing is still, where the fuck is she? What happened? So they said it might have started out as a clever plan. You get an alibi where you have a five-day head start.
Yeah. But along the way of reporting her missing, it all falls apart then because you got to stick around.
The detective said that arrogance is his downfall. He said he's a con man.
He's a manipulator. He never accepted any responsibility or admitted what he'd done.
He thought he could get away with it. No shit.
And he said that he contacted the National Center for Missing Adults. The cops said basically they put out all these posters, do this whole thing.
They knew it was pointless. They said she is fucking dead somewhere.
There's no way she's alive. they had to do this just you know just as a procedure and throw them off the scent that they know yeah so terry uses all of her media connections all these television stations she's been paying fucking money to for all these local ads and shit and uses that to spread the news her mother is missing yeah flyers everywhere i mean has a army of people all of her employees are now also loretta searchers tara hitchcock's ass is on tv talking about i'm sure it is i'm sure she was and um so yeah the the kidnapping story after a few days though there's no ransom or anything so they're like who would kidnap a rich lady for nothing there's no point to that doesn't mean anything so they were like we need to turn our attention to Loretta's home.
There's got to be a clue in there. Now, Terry vowed that her mother will be found.
She said the reality is that her picture is everywhere, and if you have a picture everywhere, you've got millions of people, millions of people and Tucson looking for her, which is hilarious. And we don't consider them people, but Tucson.
Millions of people and a bunch of cockroaches in Tucson. That's it.
And she said, thank you, but keep looking. Please keep looking.
They turned it also over to the violent crimes division of the investigation. And they said, we have no idea what's going on in this case.
Violent crimes is just more experienced with this kind of case. And also they knew they were looking into a homicide, even though they're pretending they're looking into a kidnapping.
Now here comes the psychics out of the woodwork. You go on TV and say, I'm a rich, important lady.
And someone's missing the fucking psychics will be sleeping in your front lawn the next morning to get publicity. And probably right near her consignment stores in Phoenix, there are 11 psychics in that whole strip mall.
Oh, God.

They're everywhere.

Consignment shops, psychics, and the spy store.

Those are all the same strip mall in Phoenix.

If you're in that strip mall, you're in a mediocre neighborhood.

Those neighborhoods have those just like gun shops and liquor stores and pawn shops are in the back. Yeah, it's exactly it.
So numerous psychics, the author of the book said they came out of the woodwork. They had theory after theory.
Right. And Terry wants to hear them because she's got no other ideas at this point.
So they said in in person, over the phone, they wrote letters, they wrote emails. They talked about their visions of the murder.
They wrote maps of the burial site. They were recounting conversations they had with Loretta, you know, psychically.
And they said that, um, basically that, yes, they got these utterances from Loretta before she crossed over, they said.

So they said that Terry was keeping the faith that she, maybe these people can see something.

I don't know.

So some thought Terry was nuts.

But two police officers will say later on that one psychic helped out a lot in this case, actually.

So psychic after psychic would tell Terry that Loretta was probably standing. This is all of them thought the same thing.
She was standing and was hit hard over the head with a blunt instrument which I mean this is also based on the evidence that didn't break the skin and therefore didn't leave traces of blood inside the house. They're looking for a way because they found no blood in the house when they searched so they're looking for a way for that to happen.
So they said that most of them said Loretta died almost instantly. And Terry said she was comforted by that, actually, hearing that from psychics, even though they have no idea what they're talking about.
That's probably not true. Those who could see the murder saw Taw dragging her into the garage.
Oh. Yeah, they saw her laid on the floor near the water heater.

Some psychics saw him wrapping the body in a canvas,

like a sheet or a canvas,

before putting her into their red van,

which is parked inside a closed garage.

That's what they said.

So, yeah, they said this is eight psychics. Based on the word of eight psychics,

Terry believes that Loretta is buried in a shallow desert grave somewhere south of Phoenix. So she starts trekking into the deserts with just walking through the.
Absolutely. She said she goes into the deserts.
She allows reporters to join her, her employees. I guess it's time and a half to search for my dead mom.
She said she's still willing to tell the public about the days of scouring the hills and bushes looking for signs of her mother. She said that as crazy as the whole situation seems, this story was not as so sensationalized because we've been honest about what's going on from the beginning.
Mary Ann Morgan is one of these psychics here, a psychic detective who worked with law enforcement on plenty of local levels and national levels. She talked to Terry and said, Terry, the house is in foreclosure.
Terry didn't know that yet. The cops hadn't told her that yet.
Now, if you I'm sure there's ways to look that up online, though.

Oh, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Some way.

But Terry said that she didn't believe her and said, I'll talk to you another time and hung up on her.

Then she reached out to police,

at which point they confirmed her mom's home

was under foreclosure.

So she ate some crow and called back Marianne here.

Terry said she didn't know the details

of her mother's financial business.

She just lent her money when she needed it.

That was it.

So she didn't know.

So they said that... I called back Marianne here.
Terry said she didn't know the details of her mother's financial business.

She just lent her money when she needed it.

That was it.

So she didn't know.

So they said that there was a dire financial issue.

They told her all about the mortgages and everything like that. They said in the garage there were boxes filled with bills and late notices.

They said that Terry said that detectives had learned that Taw racked up $40,000 on eight credit cards that are in Loretta's name as well. Oh my god.
Yeah. So that is fucking crazy.
So they ask him for permission to search his car that was in the parked hotel in Tucson and he obliged. That's when they found the pickaxe and the shovel and he said, I dig for fossils and geodes.
I always have that shit. They reconstruct Taw's day.
Left about 9 o'clock. He basically, he has all of his clothes with him, pretty much.
Like, all of his shit he can carry, and anything of high value he has with him. He put $17.48 on his Visa card at 9.05 a.m.
20 minutes later, he withdrew $24,000 in cash from Wells Fargo Bank at Lakeshore Drive and Baseline Road. So we know where that is if you're a Phoenix person.
At 9.53 a.m., he purchased two new cell phones from the Sprint Phone Center on Southern Avenue, but never activated them. Highway 60 West, they drove, driving on one of the five lanes there, that big road.
He was at 1015 a.m. He called Terry at her office where she had a series of meetings planned for the day and was busy.
He claimed they were still at home and her mother was out having a massage, but they were leaving for Tucson as soon as she returned. So right away, that's lies.
He said they'll be back in about a week. And Terry was like, are they why is he calling me with all this detail i don't care he goes she said drive safe okay bye click what the fuck so just before 11 a.m he took exit 198 which is uh jimmy kerr boulevard after one of the area's politicians here in tucson yeah now they're in tucson well this uh to the outlets at casa gran is what this is.
The outlet malls, which is the only thing that's really there. There's a gap outlet, a book warehouse, all that kind of shit.
Big dogs, bullshit, kitchen collection. Reebok.
Big dogs. They had a whole outlet.
All my fattest friends wore those. Only the, yeah, fat people wear those.
They love them. Reebok, Liz Claiborne, an Amish furniture store, all this type of shit.
At 11.04 a.m., he used his credit card to make a purchase at the mall. That's the two hats.
So, and he had to, he knows, he's a smart guy. He knows he's leaving an electronic trail behind.
He's doing it on purpose, they're thinking here. So it was 11.04 a.m.
He bought two baseball caps and two, one for me, one for her. His and hers.
Yeah. Next time, two hours later here, he would be – where is he now? Okay, yeah.
1.10 a.m. He handed over his credit card again, five miles from the outlet mall that he reached two hours ago.
So then he went to exit 200 to Love's Travel Stop. In 126 minutes, he had gone two exits down the road.
An hour and a half? That's two hours, an hour and 26 minutes. Oh, 126 minutes? Or 126 minutes.
Yeah, that's two and a half. That's two hours and six minutes.
Jesus. Two hours and six minutes he went two exits, basically.
So that's wrong. That's like five miles.
That's interesting. What was he doing during that time? Yeah.
What the fuck here? The only thing separating the mall and the loves is exit 199. That's the exit you take to go to Interstate 8, which is to go way the fuck west to go to Human San Diego.
That would take you all the way the fuck to San Diego, you bet. Yep.
And they said, so that's the exit you take to go to Interstate 8 which is to go way the fuck west to go to Yuma and San Diego. That'd take you all the way the fuck to San Diego you bet.
Yep and they said so that's 168 76 miles to Yuma 353 to San Diego and that's all that's on the fucking road there's nothing else there. So they said at that time it was 1 10 p.m.
and Tad used his credit card to buy two lunches at Arby's and get $10.01 worth of gas at Love's. So he's not good at clicking it until it gets to you.
Classic over squeeze. Bad to that.
Yep. God damn it.
He then continued. Should I do 11? Fuck it.
I'm leaving. Then he continued to Tucson.
Now, he's staying low in the Tucson Hotel until December 16th when he drove back to Phoenix and checked into the residence inn at the airport at 125 p.m. He can't go to the house at this point.
Terry had it re-keyed already. He got room 357 and signed in under the name Bob Smith, which that's not suspicious at all.
Why? I guess the press is looking for him, too, at this point. He told Terry he didn't want to go to the house because there's too much media presence and all this type of shit.
And they said they're at his house. There's psychics standing outside with the media saying that they've seen the body and all this shit.
It's crazy. How do you sign into a hotel with a bad name when you have a credit card and ID? It's a residence in by the airport.
You can just say who you are and— At a shit hotel at a hooker motel because that's what those are down there. Yeah.
In 2006, anything near the airport was not for upstanding people. That was for tricks to be turned in.
I just want to know how people do it in other places. How the fuck do you do that? No idea.
I don't know. No clue.
Don't you have to have an ID for that? Yeah. Usually.
They always ask me for mine. I don't know.
Yeah, check me in or my stupid fucking name. Yeah.
So the next day, he goes in to try to get legal help. Okay.
Interesting. He said he was very well-dressed, everything like that.
The lawyer said he was perfectly quaffed in the way he walked with a false sense of suave. That was what Ta was like.
He had a surprisingly impressive bearing about him, and he had a beautiful voice, the guy said. They said, what brings you in today? And he said, my wife is missing.
I dropped her off at the mall. I called Terry.
She came down, gave Terry $20,000 cash. Now I've got police following me.
They're asking about the shovel in my truck. You're a lawyer like, whoa.
Slow down. Hold on a minute.
You're talking about shovels? This is a big number of money and a shovel. What's going on? This is not free consultation conversation.
Once you start talking about the police are upset with the shovel I have in my car, I get paid at that point. This is crazy.
So the cop said that the story kept getting stranger

and stranger by the sentence.

By Sunday morning, Terry called

Taw's hotel room

three separate times and there was no answer.

Okay.

So Terry called police

and she and a cop rushed

into the hotel. At the front desk,

she found Taw had left her

several things at the front desk. Two copper paintings valued at about $40,000.
Oh my God. A briefcase with the keys to the red van parked outside and a computer written note in cursive style that said Loretta and I vowed over the years that we would spend eternity together and so we shall.
What? A notarized document entitled Immediate entitled immediate transfer of ownership and control that read on this 18th day of december 2004 i ta benderly being of sound body and mind do hereby transfer to terry bowerstock now the daughter ownership and access to an immediate control of all my worldly tangible and intangible assets and it's my intention that this immediate transfer of ownership and control shall immediately supersede any wills or other previously executed legal documents. So he listed seven items, including his Wells Fargo account, which had $11,000 in it, his PayPal MasterCard with $2,500 in credits from selling shit, jewelry, wristwatches, a Sony notebook computer, and all his clothes.
He also left her his interest in three inventions. Oh? My audio transducers, concert walls, my lawn mowing technology, swift cut, and my heat resistant shading fabric for automobiles, covered parking.
Matt. The police said upon arrival, upon a police arrival, it was learned from hotel staff that Benderly had been wandering the hotel hallways attempting to get into different rooms and appeared lethargic.
He also kept calling the office and complaining that HBO didn't work, the channel. A Phoenix police tactical team responded to the hotel in order to get Benderly from the

room, which they were able to do.

Oh.

So he was in there.

Benderly was then moved to room 358 in order to be treated by Phoenix Fire Paramedics.

The officer explained that Benderly used his credit card when he checked into the hotel.

However, the hotel staff checked him in using the name Bob Smith based on the media attention

of the case.

You can check.

You can say, this is my name. Here's my info.
Please put my reservation under this name so people don't know him there. That's what famous people do.
Yeah. Okay.
All the time. Yeah.
Okay. It's every famous, famous like rock stars and shit have their false name.
Yeah, I know they have it, but I'm like, do they have fucking IDs that say that or they just do it? No, no, no. You tell the hotel who you really are.
You just, yeah, do it, I think. That's how it works here.
So they said, I then interviewed Phoenix police officer Ron Dorfman, who negotiated via telephone with Benderly. Benderly told Officer Dorfman that he did not want to hurt himself and did not want to hurt anyone else.
He agreed to exit his hotel room and be checked over by paramedics. After this episode of The Sopranos.
But after this comes out, yeah. Hold on a minute.
Well, HBO doesn't work, so never mind. So now they, at this point, they can't do anything with him.
He's a grown man who says he doesn't want to hurt himself or anybody else, so they have to just let him be. What the fuck? Basically.
So among pieces of evidence they collected from the van were sticks and stems from unknown vegetation in the undercarriage of the van, indicating it had recently been driven in the desert. Off-road, yeah.
Which, if you live in Phoenix or anything, you know that you never, ever, ever, ever drive your normal car through a patch of desert ever. Everything's paved.
You don't take a two-wheel drive through the desert ever. Nope.
At the lab, officers would also find a recent dent in the undercarriage and many soil and seed samples in the passenger cabin.

Meanwhile, other officers searched his room and they found evidence item number 65 was a black baseball bat that Tao had bought at the outlet mall on the way to Tucson. evidence from another collection of miscellaneous cd data discs found in a black bag on the bed.
Number 72, item 72, was the paperback book The Last Juror, which Taw had bought at some store on his way back from Tucson. They found the receipt for the book.
Another item was a get well card from the residence inn. They sent him a get well card at the residence inn.
Evidence number 74 item was a number of newspaper articles on missing person Loretta Bowersock. So Terry continues to search, searching, searching, searching, going all through the fucking desert.
She's like fucking Moses out here searching. She would wear her mom's jewelry while she searched and all that kind of thing they scoured the hills the underbelly of the bushes for three days she's lost 10 pounds while in the wilderness walking around she said there's more than 100 employees and employee spouses who came to her uh company's annual holiday party monday night and they all said they wanted to help search golly so So, yeah, they said that she'll continue to work on it.
She says, I'll get up tomorrow because I'll have the very same hope. Two friends even brought their French poodles into the desert in hopes that maybe they'd smell something.
Guess what? They won't. Those are useless.
Poodles are useless. They have no purpose in the world except you like to pet them.
There's no working purpose for a poodle. You look at them on TV and that's it.
Yeah. You pet their weird fur.
So the investigation, like I said, they're searching basically like a murder investigation is the way they're doing it. They're not treating it like it's just a missing person who might have walked away or some shit here.
So they turn to Taw's cell records to talk about what he did as well here. And that's how they found out that he left the outlet mall and taken exit 198 onto the I-8, had driven down the road quite a bit, and then stopped for a while.
Oh? Yeah. At 1231, he called the Redis phone, apparently listening for any messages.
Then he called his own cell phone, seeking messages. That call ended at 1233.
Police found all seven calls indicated the phone was stationary and used only within one cell site range, while he was off the highway in the middle of the desert. Wow.
This is off the intersection of the I-8 and Highway 84. Oh.
Yeah. So they said once they found that out, the cops said it's not matching up with any of what he reported in his timeline.
What were you doing out there for two hours in the desert? What the fuck is that all about? Then they found at Loretta's home her purse wrapped up in a towel. Inside of it was her license and credit cards.
She would. Oh, boy.
Who's going to Tucson without their license and credit cards and their glasses wrapped in tissue paper? So that's it. They said everything she would need to go shopping was right here and she was allegedly

going shopping.

So Ta claims that she had it

with her when she walked into the mall. I watched

her walk in with that bag. So somehow

it got all the way back to Phoenix and

wrapped in a fucking towel from a Tucson mall.

That was fast. That is

fucking crazy. So Ta was

asked to come in for extra questioning here

but he said I don't know anything. You're asking the wrong guy.
I really don't know anything. And he started refusing to talk to police.
Okay. Started refusing it.
So yeah, when they found the purse, they said the residence was entered with the assistance of a locksmith. No signs of a struggle were initially noted, but upon checking inside a white van in the parking garage, a long gray hair was observed on the rear storage area of the van.
The rear seat had been removed and there was a large piece of cardboard lying on the floor. This isn't looking good.
A black purse was then located rolled in a towel next to a box of towels in the back of the van. It was discovered this was Loretta's purse.
So they said that they found two pairs of shoes, a nylon rope located in the garage in the east side of the residence, the purse with miscellaneous contents, computers, life insurance and financial information, phone records, mail and computers. So the officers told the judge what happened and they need another warrant here.
And the police also found one neighbor found one neighbor home that morning that learned Loretta hadn't been seen by them for some time. They said, quote, the mom thought that strange since Loretta normally takes care of plants in the yard.
Ta had also recently borrowed $8,000 from the husband of this neighbor. Good Lord.
He didn't want to check cash prior to this Friday 12-17. Ta told his neighbor that Loretta is still sick and has the flu.
This is after she's been missing. Been missing? What the fuck? The cul-de-sac that this residence was located had been blocked to pedestrian and vehicular traffic by patrol cars and yellow crime scene tape.
Several news stations were present and appeared to be filming news segments. It must be a fucking hell of a flu.
Wow. Wow.
They said the house was clean and tidy. They did find a suspicious red stain about the size of a quarter in the garage, but they discovered it was from a flower.
It was just a flower. So they also, they find all sorts of shit.
They have her license. they have all of her stuff here all in her purse uh they found a map in the red van an arizona map except it had a big circle around one particular area literally a fucking hand-drawn circle around the areas along interstate eight in Pinal County in the middle of the fucking

desert.

There's nothing out there.

There's nothing out there to look for or to get.

Why would he do that?

So, yeah, they said it's impossible to stand out there in the desert and believe that,

you know, there's a giant city up there.

It feels like you're in the middle of nowhere.

They said when they found that and then thought about the dirty shovel and pick, they said

that was their oh shit moment at that point.

So then they dig deeper in his history.

They find out he's not from Scotland. He actually does have a criminal record.
And when he responded to Loretta's room for rent notice, he didn't just get here from Saudi Arabia. He just came out of prison.
Oh, my God. He had nothing because he just got out of prison, hopped on a motorcycle, found this ad and wrote over there.
Wow. That is fucking insane.
He's not Scottish. He's not anything.
Nothing he said is true. He just talked like this for years.
Oh, my God. We know someone that did that, but he's a sick fuck.
This is different. He's a fucking wild guy.
That's what I, and this is what we're talking about. He's from Florida.
I wonder if he knew this guy. Tampa, as he says.
Where are you from? Tampa. Okay.
I'm sure you are. So they didn't have sufficient evidence to make an arrest at this point, though.
I don't know how. I mean, you got the purse alone.
Then Taw gets kicked out of the hotel.

The hotel asks him to leave.

But the police impounded his van, so Terry gives him a ride back to the house because she said, I had nowhere else to fucking put him.

Oh, my God.

I had to, where the hell else was I going to drive this guy?

Oh, boy.

So there's notes all over the door from the media.

So he goes into the house.

She drops him off. Okay.
Police then have to to go they want to go talk to him again yeah so they use terry's key to unlock the front door because it's technically her house yeah they announce themselves as they enter the house and they walk around the house the living room's empty they go down the hall of the master bedroom the tv's on there's a cell phone on the unmade bed, but no one's there. So they go down the hall to the kitchen.
They check all the closets and cabinets. The kitchen was empty.
So was a small laundry room off the kitchen. In the laundry room was a door that led to the garage.
Quote, the door was opened as Officer Ahmet entered the garage. He advised us that he could see a subject hanging on the northeast side of the garage.
No fucking way. As we entered the garage, I observed a white male subject hanging from the top of the garage.
The subject had a yellow extension cord tied around his neck and his feet were just touching the garage floor. As we approached the subject, Officer Ahmet touched the subject and stated he was cold and appeared to be deceased.
He fucking hanged himself in the goddamn garage. Toes touching? Can you imagine if you chose mid-hanging to not? Oh, man.
And Terry said that was a really hard night because now I was going through, did he kill himself because he was in so much sorrow or did he kill himself because he killed her? Terry, he fucking killed her. Every bit, he killed her.
So they look in, they find he'd been embezzling from her for years. They found out also that he had a history of defrauding women before that for years.
This is what he does, they said he would just suck the blood out of everybody he could find

and use his charm

to get away with it.

They still haven't found

Loretta though.

Oh my God.

And they said they know

the general area

they want to look for

but they said to find a body

that was buried in that area

as a needle in a haystack.

Yeah.

You're never going to find it.

Oh boy.

So,

she reaches,

Terry reaches out back

to Marianne Morgan,

the psychic,

who told her that Ta, she saw Ta come up behind Loretta with a plastic bag. And while Loretta fought back, Ta was strong.
She said that Loretta is in a place where there's blue everywhere. She's 150 feet from the blue.
That's what she kept saying. Months pass.
Months pass. And Terry said, I'm afraid she's not alive, that she's dead and I won't have found her.
Well, yeah, I would think so. They scoured the dirt for something red in the dirt because a psychic, multiple psychics said that.
They drove around looking at creek beds under brush where anybody could be left. They walked south of the valley along Interstate 8 near Stanfield Road.
They said it's just everywhere they walked. January 10th, 2005 comes around.
So this is later. They still haven't found her.
Fifteen trained searchers, six cadaver dogs couldn't find her. They searched this area.
Everything. Search and rescue volunteers searching dry creek beds, digging shit, looking for forming grids, using dogs.
You fucking name it. They're searching everywhere.
They cannot goddamn find her anywhere. They said they zigzagged on foot through the predominantly flat sandy land that's covered with shoulder high shrubs, weaving river washes everywhere.
Miles and miles all the time. For months they do this.
April of 2005. Psychics still asking for psychic help.
Terry's asking. He said they scoured the ground for something red in the dirt.
Didn't find anything. They're talking about one of their group outings to search.
They're still going on. January 10th, 2006.
Over a year later. A rock collector is checking in a river wash.
Yep. Near the junction of Interstate 8 and Arizona 84, and he comes across a half-buried human body.
Oh, boy. The psychic Tammy Holmes said Loretta would come into her dreams and into her home and turn off her TV, even.
Stop watching TV! Get out there and find me! Find me. I'm busy.
So the day Terry went out near Casa Grande after Loretta's, after this body was found, they said this was almost a year and a month later. Yeah.
The hiker discovers this body in a shallow grave southwest of Casa Grande. Now it's a decomposing body wrapped in a thick landscaping tarp, half buried in the desert.
They said they believed it could be Terry, or it could be Loretta, but they find bodies out here all the fucking time. This is like Leakin Park.
You know what I mean? When they were looking for shit there, like, don't... This is scary stuff out here.
If you remember the whole serial story, the Hayman Lee tale. So they said other bodies have been found in the area, but they never, they've never been contacted about a possible match.
This time it seems to be a match. And Terry said, I can feel it.
It feels different this time, but it's not done until it's done. She said, I keep praying it's her.
It would answer a lot of things, but anything I'd like to be able to bury her properly. Now, the psychic said it's something blue.
It's a blue tank, blue something. They pointed out in the photos showing that, in many of the photos, that her mother's body was found right near a blue abandoned motel in the desert near the 8 and 84 junctions.
Holy shit. The motel was just blue as fuck and it was right by there.
that's pretty impressive. Yeah.
Impressive as shit. The remains were determined to be Loretta's.
An examination showed that she died from asphyxiation. She was strangled.
Exactly like that psychic said, probably. That doesn't leave blood, too, which explains a lot.
Investigators theorized, obviously, that there was a confrontation about the financial misdeeds after she got off the phone with the bank. He, he killed her and then went and did the car stuff and picked the car up and did all that.
It was that between four 44 and 5. PM.
They think it happened. She got off the phone, rip roar and pissed.
And he said, well, that's the end of this. I think that, I think this has run its course.
I think I've taken as much as I can take. Yup.
So in an interview with Scott, he said that he wanted to get away with it. I don't think he wanted to be on the run in Mexico.
He was old and he just murdered the woman he loved. Yes, he did love my mother.
He wasn't stupid, but he was a liar of great proportion. He was a know-it-all.
He didn't come up with a good plan, but he didn't have time. But Tal liked reading mysteries and he wanted to go on with life and not be a hunted man.
Scott is, was convinced that he never thought Terry would jump in the car and go down to Tucson. And Terry says she thought she surprised him as well.
Uh, she said, my mother would have just been a missing person if it wasn't for my sister. That's what Scott said.
She's the one who got the media involved and made it a big deal. Yeah, that's his theory, but an expert in criminal behavior, the Stephen E.
Pitt, a psychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, said this man was a narcissistic sociopath. He was a self-engrossed, entitled person who thought he deserved preferential treatment and that the laws didn't apply to him.
He thought he could get away with anything and could manipulate anyone. Some of our best politicians have the same traits.

There's a lot of people out there like Benderly.

He's a con man. He didn't keep

going because he thought he could get away with it.

He just had to.

Now, a couple months later,

Terry, there's an article where she forgives him.

Really? Even though he's dead. She

says that universal

knowledge guided her to forgive

Benderly for her own spiritual

health. Okay.
She said,

I didn't want to walk through the rest of my life angry

Thank you. It says that universal knowledge guided her to forgive Benderly for her own spiritual health.
Okay. She said, I didn't want to walk through the rest of my life angry and mad.
I thought I could spend my life paying attention to Benderly and what he did or I can forgive him. Yeah.
She said she couldn't begin to forgive him until she forgave herself. She mentally said that she let go and would have stopped blaming herself.
She read her mother's journal after her death and learned that Tao had been using psychologically abusing treatments and things for years to her. Why didn't I see that was happening, she said.
Why didn't I take her out of the house? Why did I condone this? She was busy with her own life was the thing. She said she blamed herself, then jumped to her own defense, and then blamed herself.
She said, I would just stop those thoughts and get on good ones. And so that's what she's trying to do.
After her mother's death, she does begin working with DOVES, capital letters. It's a group that assists elderly victims of domestic violence.
Oh, that's nice. So something positive there.
Now, Loretta's sister, Shirley, said, I haven't been asked for forgiveness, and because he's not around, I never will be. I don't think I'll ever forgive him.
How can I when he showed no contrition? And Terry said, I get it, but, quote, I want to be happy. It's about giving yourself permission to be happy in the present moment.
I had to forgive to do that.

Sure.

Right away, by the way, it was on court TV on psychic detectives because of the blue building and all that.

They had the whole thing there.

Her ashes, she was cremated.

Okay.

And her ashes were scattered over a beach in Hawaii.

Very nice.

Very nice.

And that, everybody, is Casa Grande.

And what fucking twisted shit of a story that is. Holy fuck.
That's fucked up, man. That's mad fucked up.
If you agree that that's mad fucked up or you just thought it was a crazy story, tell us all about it. Tell the world about it.
Give a good review. Give five stars and say something nice on whatever app you're listening to.
Shut up and give me murder.com is your website. Get your tickets for live shows.
Terrytown, Boston. Here we go.
Last shows of the year. Let's go out with a bang.
There's very few tickets left, so get in there. Terrytown, we're filming as well.
Yeah, that's a big deal. Be heard on that.
And then laugh your ass off and come and hang out with us. And new dates will come up next month for next year, by the way, as well.
ShutUpAndGiveMeMurder.com. Follow on social media at SmallTownMurder on Instagram, SmallTownPod pod on facebook you definitely want uh patreon patreon.com slash crime and sports bonus material coming out your ass anybody five dollars a month or above you get everything hundreds of episodes back episodes immediately new ones every other week one crime and sports one small town murder this week we are going to do a uk soccer sex scandal for crime and sports the gross one then for small town murder we're going to talk about the cult made cult baby murder trial polygamy cults urine drinking we got it all everybody it's gross it's gross patreon.com the guy looks like a a shrunken down macho man randy savage the long guy it's hilarious like he never never was athlete.
That's patreon.com slash crime in sports is where you get all of that. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, which is right fucking now.
Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful goddamn people who would never, ever, ever, ever, ever bury us in the desert and pretend that we went missing at Dillard's. Hit me with them right now.
This week's executive producers are Peyton Meadows, Franny and Oz, Gary Howard, and Kyle Norwood. Thank you.
Thank all of you so much. Thank you, guys.
And Fran's going to come out to show next year also. Can't wait to see you, Fran.
Cool. Other producers this year are Janice Hill.
This year, this day, today, this week. God damn it.
All year. Janice Hill, Cassie Walker, Samantha Starrs, Jordan Alhans.
All hands. Allie hands? I don't know.
Andrea Fair, maybe, Stephanie Hurricane Hirsch, Crystal Castaneda, Jamie Levesque, Kate with no last name, Holly Clough, Becky

Clough, oh, what is that, Crusper, Crusper, Clusper, Janie Belknap, Sarah Ash, Lindsay

Banfield, Mandy Kaye, Carrie Burgess, Noelle Sanborn, Danielle Shields,

Jexka, Chef Andrew Southers, Sarah Hawk, Michelle ABT, Abed, Joe Voorhees, maybe.

Joe with no last name.

Torius with no last name.

Savvy C, Kenny Custon.

Megan with no last name.

Tony Lynn, Kurt Larson, Elizabeth Boucher, Jason Massersmith, Meddy B23, she is definitely 23, Bia, Bia, B, maybe it's B, B-E-A with no last name, Danny with no last name, Eddie with no last name, Don Glacken, Cole Clausen, Sean Lauer, Ian Jones, Danny with no last name, 5477-MY-ASS-01. Jamie Mattoon, partial villain.

Patricia Mattoon, partial

villain, Patricia Cagnolosi, Rachel Nissen, Julian, Guy-Lian, it's got to be Julian, right?

G-U-Y-L-I-A-N-E, guy lian what you'll guillain direct yeah maybe it's i don't know man epstein's friend her name yeah guillain yeah maxwell uh stanley dally i don't i don't want to call you a that's yeah we're not calling you a kid trafficking. It's probably Gillian, right?

I'm sure you're fine.

It might be Gillian.

All right.

Kate Williams, Traffic Jammer.

Brody would know the last name.

Heather Chalk.

Mama Baum.

Shane Phillips.

Todd Watson.

Kristen Cyborg.

Tabitha Mortimer.

Anna Burgesson.

Nope, it's just Burgess.

Lisette LeBlanc.

Lauren Richter.

Catherine Spears.

Slashy Ashy. Christian LeBanc.
Lauren Richter. Catherine Spears.
Slashy Ashy.

Christian LeBron.

Chris Joner.

Tina Amaya.

Chris Benoit.

Probably not.

I mean, maybe.

Kind of fucked up.

A little bit.

Maggie would know last name.

TJ.

Tabitha McMiniman.

Carrie Compton.

Clockwork.

Clockwork Cleo.

Idali. Italy.
Idali, Velez, Jenny from Vermont, David Peacock, Nicole with no last name, Christy Perez, Joshua Rantanen, Reina Chalice, M. Jones-Arama, Brian Ross, Caleb with no last name, Tracy Frazier, Chelsea McGowan, Anthony Nielsen, Tiki Girl, Jeremy Running, Carmella Freeze, Dylan Dompier, Kaylee Hanson, Heather Gray, Leland Lemon, Alex Manta Fuel, Zachary Eskelson, Emily Iva, Eva, Emily, Eva Schaefer, Oliver 0907, Brandy Finley.
Yeah, Oliver, I appreciate you. You got a really weird last name.
Megan, Ruth, Charlie Hill, J.P. Campbell, Amir Kupacoffee, Kupacoffee, Kupacoffee, Amir Kupacoffee, Maggie with no last name.
Azale. Is he? Azale? Izale?

What is that? Sandoval? Ezale? Is that a name? I've said it three times. Apparently.
I've changed nothing about it. Matt Goring.
Cody Kielbasa. Angela Sherman.
Mark Favaza. Jesus fuck.
Marilyn. Nope, Matt.
Meredith. Tough ones this week.
Meredith DeSmet. Jasmine Hall.
Jessica Lida. Joy Howard.
Gina Hartshorn. Caleb Nelson.
Andy Patterson. Andy Blazek.
Travis Fry. Melissa Johnson.
Becky Holder. Jen Easterby.
Lauren. Laurel.
Laurel. Thanks, Jill, for the birthday present.
I don't know if Laurel's saying that to Jill or Jill's saying it to Laurel. Thanks, Jill.
Rebel, Rebel, Rebel Marie. It's got to be Rebel, but you don't spell Rebel with two L's and two E's.
What the fuck's going on? Mike Swope. Mike Swope.
Deididra heritage girth johnson probably not jp kip

would know last name kip and jp no neither of them have a last name steven braley gwendolen b

trevor siprell siprelli uh john kelly chandler fisher fuck you reed jones hansen r larson

brenda torres amber woodward i feel like that now what yeah and i'm not fake i got three

I'm sorry. jones hansen r larson brenda torres amber woodward i feel like that now what yeah and i'm not fake i got three kids uh nanette gold uh galen martin angela crandall uh kaylee buison alt buison alt by buison alt shit zach mayo clarissaultz, and all of our patrons, you guys are the best.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Wow.

You fabulous, fantastic sons of bitches.

We appreciate all you do for us.

You want to follow us on social media, head over to shutupandgivememurder.com.

Drop down menu comes.

You click on it.

You follow us and hang out with us.

Keep doing that week after week.

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