BONUS: If I Can’t Have You (Real Murders of Orange County)

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Hi, Snap listeners.

We are bringing you a special bonus episode today from Oxygen True Crimes hit series, Real Murders of Orange County.

You can also watch full episodes on demand on the free Oxygen app by clicking the link in our description.

Enjoy.

It's just the saddest thing in the world to think that Tom and Larry lasted such a short time.

This was one of the most graphic crime scenes I've ever been to.

There was blood everywhere.

Seeing the two dead bodies downstairs and the footprints upstairs, bloody leaving the area, we definitely had a killer on the loose.

We have to think about whether or not this could be a crime of passion.

I mean, how do you stab someone 28 times?

How could this happen to our friends?

We were in total disbelief that it could have happened.

We found a whole slew of cards, a card for every day in February.

When the bodies were brought into the coroner's office, the question as to whether or not this was a love triangle.

He seems to be obsessed.

I want this guy dead and I want him to suffer.

That was the saddest day of our lives.

Quintessential family-oriented community.

It's a beautiful city.

They have beautiful homes, lovely homes.

And we could go down to Balboa and walk around and dream about having a wonderful little house on Balboa Island.

It has been the number one safest city for numerous years in a row.

I think if people had money and they had a choice, I think many of them wanted to go and live in Irvine.

It's a beautiful, beautiful, wonderful place to live.

Bad things don't happen very often here, but they do happen.

It's easy to imagine growing old under the golden California sun, but life in this stunning part of Orange County isn't always so pretty.

In the summer of 1999, dark clouds roll over the Irvine community of Solana.

I'm Larry Montgomery.

In 1999, I was an investigator in charge of the Crimes Against Persons unit at Irvine Police Department.

On the 28th of July of 1999, Police Department was called because a man and his daughter had gone to a house in Irvine to take a piano lesson and the people in the house did not respond.

The gentleman opened the door and he smelled natural gas in the house, but he still was able to come in a short distance and look down a staircase where he saw what looked like a dead body and immediately called the police department.

My name is Mike Camille.

I'm the chief of police for the city of Irvine in California.

In 1999, I was a police detective assigned to Crimes Against Persons here at the Irvine Police Department.

Call came out over the radio of a possible 187, which is a murder.

When I arrived there, there were about three or four other officers on scene.

The paramedics were there, fire was there.

We knew that we had to go inside the residence to check on victims to ensure there were no suspects that were still there.

Once it's determined that there's gas inside that house, You now have to be very careful opening windows, opening doors, and without giving it any source of ignition ignition like a static electricity.

They cordoned off the area and they were able to shut the gas off in hopes of airing out the house before they could enter safely to help out with the investigation.

So the first thing that I noticed as we were approaching the front door is this red brick porch area and I could see what appeared to be bloody footprints.

We got inside the house and we began to walk around the different areas into the kitchen, to the laundry room.

We began to see these bloody footprints all over the the house.

Eventually making our way down the stairs.

Going down those stairs to the first body,

that particular individual was on his back and he had numerous stab wounds that we could see, at least they appeared to be stab wounds on his body.

Passing him, there was a door to the right and that was the entranceway to the master bedroom.

We entered the master bedroom and went around the side of the bed and that's where we saw the second victim.

He too had sustained multiple stab wounds.

I don't think I recall a scene that I've been to that had more blood splatter on the walls, on the ceilings.

This was one of the most

graphic crime scenes I've ever been to.

One of the things that's standard for us to do in these cases is to do a neighborhood canvas.

Talk to all the neighbors.

So myself, other detectives did this, and we really came up empty.

No one that heard anything that night.

Based upon how the crime occurred, there was no sign of forced entry.

One of the things that's always important for us to do is to positively identify the victims.

When we got down to the second body in the bedroom, there was actually some clothing there, and in the clothing there was ID for Lawrence Wong.

We had it the name of the primary resident to verify the person that we found deceased inside the residence as Tom Whitney.

We found his wallet and his identification card.

Tom Whitney, he played the piano, he played a number of instruments, he was 60 years old, and he seemed like a nice individual from everything we learned about him.

My name is Joan Rutkowski.

Tom Whitney was my friend, my friend for a long, long time, 1965.

We first met while we were graduate students in the music department at USC.

He was a happy person.

He loved to laugh.

We used to laugh so much.

He was a really good soul, that kind of good person, that kind of good friend.

You pick up the phone and call him.

Tom would listen for hours.

My name is Bolan High.

I met Tom in New York.

He was introduced to me through a mutual friend.

He was a very accomplished pianist.

He was also a musical director and he was a wonderful teacher.

He loved to teach piano.

That was

one of the gifts that he was given is the joy of helping people turn on to music is the way he put it.

And it gave him great joy.

Tom had these incredible eyes.

And they were very blue.

He looks a little sad here.

Being gay was not something that was approved in his family.

It was hard.

Those days were difficult.

Now it's a totally different world we live in.

In our conversation, Tom said, you know, I've met someone that I think could really work.

His name is Larry Wong.

Larry was on the same plane as Tom.

Larry was a fabulous musician.

and of a classical musician and a wonderful pianist and coach for opera singers.

Larry Wong, somebody who I got to know his character through working this case and interviewing people that were his friends and family and coming to learn that Larry Tu was a caring and gentleman.

Larry worked at Ellie Harbor College and I believe that's how Tom and Larry met was through their love of music.

And I said, well, it sounds as like you met someone that maybe will

turn out to be a lasting relationship.

He said, I think it might very well.

It was a good match.

And it's just the saddest thing in the world to think that it lasted such a short time.

At the crime scene, detectives continue to sort out the pieces of the puzzle.

As part of our overall survey, of the entire residence, we look in every nook and cranny.

One of the things that we located was a knife block.

And in this knife block, it looked like there was a knife that had blood on it.

Crime scene investigators and discovered that there were actually two large kitchen knives that were in the knife block that were covered in blood.

Does that mean there's more than one person?

Does that mean

they used both hands?

I don't know.

When we looked at the victims, Tom had 36 stab wounds, which is a hefty amount of stab wounds.

Larry Wong had 25.

That's overkill.

Whoever did this, are they more angry with one over the other?

One thing we did notice is there were bloody footprints on the actual tile.

Really distinct, very accurately placed footprints coming in and out of the areas of the house.

After looking at this crime scene, seeing the bloody footprints upstairs away from the victims, we knew we had a killer on the loose, and we don't know who it is.

Detectives find a trail of bloody footprints around Tom's home.

Could these gruesome missteps reveal the secret identity of Tom and Larry's killer?

The fact that we only saw one set of bloody footprints probably would limit it to one person using two knives.

We now know the size of the foot.

We know if we find somebody that knew these people and had a grudge against them and they had the same size foot, that gives us something to look at.

Basically, if the sock doesn't fit, it's not going to be that person.

He perhaps met some people that he would not have ever had any contact with under different circumstances.

Larry's sister mentioned that Larry Wong hadn't been in a previous relationship that was a long-term relationship.

When the police call me, I explained to them, I don't know his name, but I think I know who did it.

We received a telephone call from a family friend very early in the morning saying that Tom and Larry had been killed.

And we didn't know how, and we didn't really

understand what possibly could have happened.

It was so shocking, the barbarity,

the anger,

the cruelty.

Something I've never seen

or ever experienced ever.

Tremendous sadness,

anger.

How could this happen to our friends?

My name is Sam Olavato.

In 1999, I was the lieutenant in charge of the Investigative Bureau for the City of Irvine Police Department.

Because of the fact that it appeared that there was no forced entry into the residence, initially you would think, okay, this is not a stranger to these two victims, someone they knew.

So that kind of lessens the opinion that this would have been a random attack.

Stab wounds on the victims is very personal.

That indicates a very heated of passion type of crime.

When we're looking at a crime scene like this,

we have to look at exactly what's going on inside and who would have done it.

The brutal murders of newly coupled Larry Wong and Tom Whitney has cast a dark shadow over their cheery Irvine, California neighborhood.

While evidence suggests the slayings were committed by someone who knew them, neighbors still feel their loss and wonder when their killer will be found.

The murderer left a mess at the crime scene, providing a treasure trove of evidence.

Since we looked at this crime from the point of view of who would do this horrendous amount of stabbing and knew that there was probably consistent with somebody with passion, You could be hurt very easily if the person finds another weapon to come back at you because they don't die right away because you unless you hit something like a heart or a something that'll kill them but a lot of things won't kill you right away so this is just not something you plan

to do as a crime to get something from the house it is something you would do if you're passionate about i want this guy dead and i want him to suffer so that's what this scene tells us we may want to look that way not guaranteed but we may want to look that way first that's where it's pointing towards from the evidence we saw at the scene We're looking for somebody that had passion either on Larry's side or on Tom's side.

We did have somebody reach out to us, Larry's sister, that mentioned that Larry Wong hadn't been in a previous relationship that was a long-term relationship with someone by the name of John Rarik.

And then digging a bit deeper and finding out that John actually had a life insurance policy on Larry and the fact that Larry was killed, John was going to be the recipient of a large sum of money.

We need to ask more questions, dig deeper, examine motives, see if John has an alibi.

John was obviously heartbroken at the time when the breakup occurred.

He was angry, he was depressed, but when we

gave him the news that the pair had been murdered, he was not overly

dramatic.

So one of the things that John conveyed to us is that Larry had left him to be with Tom and that did pain him a lot.

But John told us that he was not responsible and knew nothing about the murder of Larry or Tom.

Sure seems like John Rarick had plenty to gain from Larry's death, but does that make him a murderer?

John's alibi for the crime was he was in a chat room in North Hollywood somewhere.

Whether you can prove the alibi or not is another thing.

So when we interviewed John Rarick and we asked him where he was between these hours, he was able to produce documents that were date and time stamped that showed his name and the fact that he was in this chat room.

And of course we followed up with the internet service provider to be sure that these were genuine documents.

One of the things we did ruling John Rarick out as a suspect is we looked at his feet and we got impressions of his feet and his feet were much larger than

the footprints at the crime scene.

And we knew that there is no way physically that his feet could have made those impressions at the crime scene.

And we were certain there was only one person that left bloody footprints at the crime scene.

The ominous trail of bloody footprints, along with the coroner's findings, brings investigators one step closer to the cold-blooded killer's identity.

The coroner did a autopsy on both victims.

And in terms of the damage done to the victims, Tom had

more stab wounds and one of the stab wounds was right into the eye and another one was real close to the other eye.

When you have this violent type of activity, the possibility of having a past lover is certainly somebody you want to look at.

Who are the past lovers of Tom Whitney?

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Just a day after lovers Larry Wong and Tom Whitney are found dead in their Orange County condominium, Irvine detectives take a trip down memory lane in search of a suspect.

When Tom came out in the 90s, it was a different world.

And I think that Tom

was almost like a teenager because he was excited finding new people, new people that didn't know him as a serious musician, who just knew him as who he was, Tom.

We had known Tom for so long.

We were family.

And to lose a family in such a violent way is,

you know, very sad.

I think that when he was experimenting and he was meeting new people, he perhaps met some people that he would not have ever, ever had any contact with under different circumstances.

So now we have a whole team of detectives that is going to the home, searching for evidence, looking for anything related to the crime.

We found a whole slew of cards.

They were greeting cards that were addressed to Tom Whitney and they were signed by someone named Choi.

During this time we could not figure out who Choi was.

We didn't have any name other than Choi.

We had a lot of people calling us and telling us, hey, I know Tom.

I want to give you information.

And we asked friends if they knew who Choi was.

When the police call me, I explained to them, I don't know his name, but I think I know who did it.

And I said, I think it was this young Asian man that Tom had been dating.

I always call him Tom on his birthday, which is April 15th.

This young man who he had seen before

was actually pounding on his doors and trying to get in when I called him.

And Tom was hysterical.

I mean, this guy was screaming.

He was running around the house, pounding on the doors, pounding on the windows.

Tom then told me that he had come in before

through the garage and I said, Tom, just call the police.

He said, no, no, I can't do that.

I can't call the police.

He said, what would the neighbors say?

And I said, this is California.

I mean, things happen.

He said, no, no, not in this, not where I live, which was a very protected community.

Learning from Tom's sister that Tom had sold a car to this person named Choi, we were able to run the license plate and see who the new owner was and through some other checks and some other connections, identify the possible owner of this car as Vincent Chung.

My name is Dave Lopez.

I was a reporter in Los Angeles, Orange County, since 1972, retired a little over a year ago.

In 1999, I was assigned to the Orange County Bureau.

What the police were comfortable with is the fact that they were not dealing with some massive, crazy lunatic who was going to go out and do the same thing again.

It wasn't a case where the media said, we've got a killer on the loose and they just had to go and find out who it was.

And Chung, who was known as Choi in all these love letters, he was their suspect.

There's a strong probability this double murder was a crime of passion.

Now that there's no doubt who the mysterious Choi is, detectives dig into his former relationship with Tom Whitney.

Once we we discover who Vincent is, we find that he has a pretty big history.

Theft.

He likes to steal things.

He's not a really upstanding citizen.

We did discover that Vincent Chung had a relationship with Tom and started about six months earlier.

Vincent and Tom are together, but they break up.

right about the time that Tom and Larry start coming together.

Tom was not particularly proud of that relationship with Vincent.

It was not something serious for him.

He was finding who he was and living a different life for a while.

When Tom said that, you know, I don't want you anymore,

it was devastating for Chong.

It was absolutely devastating.

When Tom ended that relationship, and then subsequently started another relationship with another man, I think that freaked him out.

It's clear to detectives that Vincent Chung couldn't get his pent-up desire for Tom off his mind.

Chung, he'd always have a camera with him, and he would just take picture after picture after picture of him and Tom or Tom by himself.

You know, he would go into the house and he would sit on the piano naked, waiting for Tom to come home.

Sometimes he would surprise him in the garage.

Tom would drive into the garage and Chung would be hiding

and then pop up out of nowhere.

And he just would not leave him alone.

I mean, you talk about an infatuation.

That was it.

From talking with other friends, there's information that Vincent is seen coming to the house when he's not supposed to be there, knocking on the door, leaving presents, leaving gifts.

He seems to be obsessed

at this point.

Vincent Chung became our primary suspect.

And our goal was to interview him to see where he was in the early morning hours of July 27th.

He was extremely upset because we were talking to him about him being involved in this incident where these men died.

Two days after news of a shocking double homicide rocked one of California's best places to live, eccentric Vincent Chung tops the Irvine Police Department's suspect list.

But did this obsessed ex really stab Tom Whitney and his lover, Larry Wong, to death?

Once the investigators were able to determine that Vincent Chung was available possibly to commit the crime, looking into his history, they discovered he has a warrant for his arrest for our pro violation, basically.

The decision was made, let's get him into custody, ASAP,

just in case.

If he is, in fact, the guilty party, we don't want him absounding and leaving or hurting somebody.

Police knew who they were looking for.

It was just a case now of trying to find him.

We have enough information that now Vincent Chung is considered a suspect.

So we now have a location where we think he's living.

At this point, we're talking to the district attorney and to judges about certain search warrants that we want to write and obtain for his home for the 1990 Chevy Lumina that we were looking for.

Meanwhile, now that we have an address of where we think he lives, we have a special team that we sent out to the residence.

It was a residence in San Gabriel, where we believe that he may live with his mother.

We went to Vincent's mother's house in the San Gabriel Valley and spoke to her.

She was very helpful and said that Vincent has had some issues and

hasn't been around the house and was not,

at least she couldn't give him an alibi for the night of the murder.

But she did say that her son has problems.

She said that he has been in trouble.

He's been incarcerated for theft.

Police are confident they can outsmart Vincent Chung and waste no time trying to track him down.

We had a stakeout.

on Vincent's house

in hopes that maybe he would return and we could find him.

As we are in the stakeout, there's a motel across the street or nearby.

And we noticed actually Vincent had come out of that motel and was coming across the street to his mom's house.

And so there he was and right in front of us we ended up arresting him.

The arrest was for the parole violation and he understood, he even said, I figured that would happen.

So once he's in custody, and we, at this point, we already have signed search warrants, and we also were able to associate him with a hotel room that was across the street from his residence.

And we found out that he had checked in to the hotel room on the evening of the 27th, which would have been

the same day that we discovered the crime scene.

And so we were able to do what we call a piggyback warrant and able to write another warrant to search a hotel room.

Detectives have taken Vincent Chung into custody.

With search warrants in hand, would they find the evidence they needed to tie Vincent to the scene of the crime?

Pursuant to the search warrant, we searched the garage.

We found a car that was under a blue tarp, pulled back the blue tarp, and that was the 1990s Chevy Lumina that we were looking for.

The car that helped us make that initial connection to to Vincent, it was in his mom's garage.

And so we had a warrant for that car.

And rather than searching the car there, we had this car towed to the Orange County Crime Lab so we could do a better analysis of it.

During the time once Vincent's under arrest, and we did a search warrant on the house, we discovered a few interesting things.

The The date on the 27th, he had goodbye written on his calendar.

This was the date of the murder of Tom and Larry

and would kind of indicate to you that Vincent had said his final goodbye to these two individuals.

Our goal was to interview him to see where he was in the early morning hours of July 27th.

Now's the time to talk.

Now to talk, we have to hear it.

I don't know, we have to hear it.

I don't know.

He was extremely upset because we were talking to him about him being involved in this incident where these men died.

And

his answers were not consistent with innocence of somebody being able, because they would be able to answer the questions we're asking regarding the activities that they were doing at that time.

And he just could not answer.

He would just mumble something or mumble, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

When the question's pretty simple and he should know

if he was innocent.

Were they sleeping or doing something else?

I don't know, I don't know what happened.

I don't know, I don't know what happened.

Vincent was very small, kind of demure.

You wouldn't pick him out as, oh, I think that guy could kill two people with knives.

He doesn't look like that.

He's not a big man.

He's very kind of meek in his speaking and his actions.

So he doesn't match the description you'd think of a killer who could do this to two people.

Even though police in Orange County have Larry Wong and Tom Whitney's suspected killer, Vincent Chung, in custody, getting a confession out of him might be easier said than done.

Larry and I went to the jail facility where Vincent was being held, and we went there, we mirandized him, and we had a conversation with him.

Okay, we know that what happened out there probably wasn't something that was premeditated.

Wait, no, it happened.

He just wanted to verify why.

No, they didn't know nothing.

It was really unusual because at first Vincent Chung began to become very emotional, almost hysterical at times.

He was trying to say he didn't even know who Tom was.

As we kept on talking to him over the course of more than an hour, Then at that point he began to talk about the fact that he did have a relationship with Tom and provided a little more detail about that, but never

admitted to killing Tom or Larry.

So, to tell you what we do, what we did, I always

put on the card and say thank you.

Sometimes I feel like

he

has a relationship with me a lot.

If I shoot about $400 to, I feel like

I only get something.

So we did ask him about the calendar after we had found it and that it said goodbye in the calendar on July 27th.

And he explained it that he had planned on killing himself.

And so writing goodbye on that date was a reflection of the fact that he was going to kill himself.

We thought at the time that the fact that he said that goodbye referenced the fact that he was going to try and kill himself as a convenient

alibi or deflection.

While interviewing Vincent Chung,

it was very interesting because

when you have an innocent person and you're talking to them about a topic and they're innocent, therefore they can answer your questions without worry because they're innocent.

And therefore they will answer your questions 90 to 100% of the time fairly accurately as much as they can.

And it pretty much fits like a puzzle.

I don't know, I don't remember, I don't know where I'm, I don't know.

When did you start remembering that something happened?

I don't know.

What'd you do with your clothes, Vincent?

My clothes.

However, if you have a guilty person and you want to interview them about this incident that they're guilty of doing something, therefore they have to lie, it causes stress because they must lie about certain things.

And so what I look for in an interview is to see

how upfront they are, how easy it is for them to answer questions, and do they use techniques to avoid answering the questions.

And in this case, with Vincent, that was exactly what you could hear him have all kinds of anxiety for answering questions.

We were able to elicit more and more information that helped us again paint a picture of the situation to learn more about him.

And at times, he was very matter of fact and he talked about Tom and their relationship in vivid detail.

And he talked about how much they cared for each other and he talked about how he was showering with gifts.

I put the gift in somebody's house and so I thought he might be

talked to me and I wrote him, oh, at that time I want a birthday card.

You know, I think I wrote him about Shama 20 birthday cards.

He admitted that he had made 100-plus cards and letters, and he had given them as a present to Tom.

And Tom was not happy about getting the present.

And he was very angry and upset that Tom didn't accept his present.

So, what happened is, we talked five minutes, and then he said, No.

He said, I don't want to see you, I don't want to talk to you, I will call the police.

He said, Well, I just want to give it his presence.

He said, If you give it to me, I will give it to charity.

And

he said, He's so mean, he's very cold, his friend, and sometimes he says, Oh, you want me to call the police for you?

So I said, Fine, fine.

So he's very cold and very mean.

I say, Forget it.

As we were deep in the interrogation of Vincent, he was still talking and...

I love him so bad.

He took responsibility for what we would describe as stalking behavior, for being obsessive and not taking no for an answer.

Once in custody, we had Vincent take his shoes off, put socks on.

We brought rolls of butcher paper and we brought ink with us.

We wet his feet to simulate like if his socks were wet in blood.

We rolled his feet in ink and then we had him walk along rolls of butcher paper

and to see what kind of footprint he left.

And I watched very closely and I watched him crinkle up his toes

to make his foot smaller as he walked.

I called him on it and told him to straighten him out.

He was reluctant and it was very interesting though because I'm thinking to myself, if he is innocent, he has no idea who killed these guys,

and he has no idea how big their foot is or how small their foot is,

and therefore,

why is he crinkling up his toes?

So that was huge because I watched it and called him on it.

It's all bottled up inside of you, Vincent.

Vincent, just try to get it out of your system.

Gotta get off your chest, Vincent.

I was there

to assist the crime lab doing testing on the car, telling them that if this is the right suspect and had this car, that he killed people, showed the scene with the blood, therefore probably had lots of blood on him.

And so we're looking for any blood that might be found in that car.

So we went over that car with a fine-tooth comb.

And in this case, a combination of different chemicals were used to try to bring out areas where there could be evidence, such as blood evidence, that isn't visible to the naked eye.

Investigators Montgomery and Hamill suspect Vincent isn't telling them the whole truth.

And so, Detective Jacobson steps in to try to coax a confession from him.

Do you know what DNA is?

Have you ever heard about that?

DNA is what they call a genetic marker, like a fingerprint of your blood.

In fact, though, it's better than a fingerprint.

When the crime lab called and told me what the results were,

my jaw dropped.

With telltale DNA results back from the lab, Irvine detectives are determined to get Vincent Chung to finally admit he's to blame for the murders of Tom Whitney and Larry Wong.

There's a running board that's just runs right below the driver's seat.

And on that running board, again, through enhancing with chemicals, Crime Lab was able to find some blood droplets that again weren't visible to naked eye.

Crime Lab called and they told us that in that blood sample they were able to extract DNA from both Larry and Tom and the suspect.

That shows that there's a connection between the victims and we know that night there was a connection between the victims and whoever did it very possibly had both bloods on them in great amounts because of the sheer damage done in that house.

So when we found this out, that this blood sample contained DNA from all three, that, in our opinion, was an incredibly important piece of evidence because it's showing that there is combined DNA in this blood droplets on the running board of a car that at this point we believe was the getaway vehicle, so to speak, that was used by the suspect to drive to the crime scene and then leave the crime scene.

Before investigators confront vincent chung once again shocking information from one of chung's friends gives them even more ammunition at one point of the investigation before vincent was formally charged with the crime we were contacted by his friend named drew misemsa and drew was a very good friend of vincent's and so drew reached out to us after he saw on the news what had happened to tom and larry

and drew had shared that vincent had left a message on his voice recorder.

And this message was left on the 27th.

Drew was a very good friend of Vincent's and so thinking back about Drew's courage and what he did to bring this information forward, it was something that was a pivotal piece of evidence for which we were grateful that he contacted us.

I guess now

it's my last call anyway.

And hopefully you understand

my situation.

So goodbye to me.

Goodbye.

Due to the fact that we don't have a video of everything that happened at the time of the murder, we can make some reasonable suggestions as to what might have occurred.

He probably had a key to the residence still.

He took off his shoes to be quiet.

He grabbed two knives for the butcher block.

He quietly went downstairs

and attacked them while they were sleeping.

Both of them awake, there was a struggle, and he's stabbing with both knives.

Tom is not struck in a vital area right away, so he's able to live longer and fight a little bit longer.

While Larry probably was hit in his abdomen somewhere where it took him down faster.

Basically, stab, stab, stab until he's tired and then he gets to go back and put the knives away and leave.

He was formally charged with

187 of the penal code, murder.

I got a call from the Assistant District Attorney of Orange County and they said, we would like you to testify because I could help them because of this weird little phone call to Tom on his birthday that turned into

the only person who could actually tie Vincent to Tom.

Not only would I be happy to do it, I felt that it was the least that I could do

to help Tom.

I went down to and stayed with my sister and went to every day of the trial.

It was a strange, strange thing.

Vincent didn't look the least bit vulnerable, remiss, remorseful.

He looked like an empty body to me.

He looked like he was dead.

After I testified, the Assistant District Attorney came out to me and said, went very well.

I said, well, I just said what I had to do.

The prosecutor said that it it was, you know, it was a DNA case.

And I think it was over a period of four days that the jury deliberated.

When I heard the guilty verdict, there was a tremendous feeling of relief.

And

it's over.

Tom was someone who did not allow life.

to destroy him.

That's to me the thing that I still hold was that he was a man who had to go through hell to find life.

Larry and Tom would have been very happy and I suspect they would have found it possible to get married in the time that

has passed from then to now.

It's amazing how much has passed.

For someone to come and cut their lives short just seemed like such a travesty and tragedy, not only for

the gay community, but for the Irvine community, Irvine family, was something that I think resonated for many years thereafter.

And you know, I don't even cry much now.

I think having this kind of an experience of going through with Tom

makes you stronger.

It makes you more aware.

It makes you appreciate things.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor, shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out there.

There's been like eight of them.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfucker is not real!

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast, Morbid.

Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to episodes early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.