Joe Laughlin (Jack of Diamonds, South Carolina)

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Speaker 1 Our card this week is Joe Laughlin, the Jack of Diamonds from South Carolina. 54-year-old Joe was a true country guy, living a simple life in Anderson, South Carolina in 2012.

Speaker 1 He was a husband, father, provider, and handyman. It didn't take much to make him happy.
All he needed in life was his family, his workshed, and an ice-cold beer.

Speaker 1 So why someone would want to gun him down inside his own home remains a mystery, even over a decade after his death. To this day, Joe's widow has never remarried.

Speaker 1 She's still living at their same little house with Joe's picture hanging up on the wall, waiting for the day when justice will finally prevail. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 1 On July 3rd, 2012, a guy named Chad was eating dinner with his wife Liddell at their home in Anderson, South Carolina. But his mind mind was elsewhere.

Speaker 1 His good buddy Joe hadn't shown up for work in two days. And it was hard to believe that he could just be sick or playing hooky.

Speaker 1 Chad hadn't heard from Joe since Sunday and the two normally talked every single day. He'd already tried stopping by Joe's place to check on him before work that Tuesday morning.

Speaker 1 The doors had been locked and the air conditioning was running, the TV was on. Joe's truck was even parked in the driveway.
But his friend wouldn't come to the door.

Speaker 1 Initially, Chad tried to explain it all away. Joe was known to be a a drinker.
Maybe he'd been on a bit of a bender the last few days and was just passed out on the couch or something.

Speaker 1 But by the time he was sitting across the table from his wife that evening, he still couldn't shake his worries.

Speaker 1 After venting his concerns to Liddell, they both decided to go over to Joe's place one more time.

Speaker 1 When they got there, the sights and sounds of everything, exactly as Chad had seen and heard before, gave them a deep sense of unease.

Speaker 1 So Liddell called the Anderson County Sheriff's Office and requested a welfare check. When deputies arrived and before they ever opened the front door, they knew they were already too late.

Speaker 1 Emanating from the home was the smell of death. Here's Sergeant Kendall Cash, who's working the case today.

Speaker 4 They decide based on those circumstances and those facts that they have enough to force entry to determine if somebody's dead inside the house. So they force entry into the front of the house.

Speaker 4 They don't get really far into the house before they find a body on the floor.

Speaker 1 Joe lived with his wife, Anita, and her adult daughter in the small one-story house. But there was no sign of the two of them anywhere.

Speaker 1 Investigators didn't know this at the time, but Anita and her daughter had been traveling out of state for a few weeks.

Speaker 1 They'd been out in Texas spending time with family, blissfully unaware that back in South Carolina, their house had become a crime scene.

Speaker 1 Joe was found lying face down in the living room with his back visible from the doorway.

Speaker 1 His face was pressed against the couch in front of him him with a coffee table on one side and another couch on the other.

Speaker 1 There were several injuries to his back, three gunshot wounds with black powder burns around them.

Speaker 1 And upon moving Joe, the coroner discovered additional gunshot wounds to his torso, totaling at least five.

Speaker 1 Now, officers didn't find any spent shell casings to be able to determine what kind of gun had been used.

Speaker 1 But the coroner noticed something that felt like a small caliber bullet inside one of his injuries.

Speaker 4 The victim was wearing a white t-shirt, camouflage pants, pants, a brown pair of house shoes, and had a pair of glasses on his head, which explains to me there was no struggle.

Speaker 4 He got shot and the glasses stayed on his head because he didn't resist or know anything's coming his way.

Speaker 1 Here's Joe's wife, Anita, who returned home to an unfamiliar site.

Speaker 5 That room was ramsacked. Now I did ask Detective Collins, and I said, did y'all do that? You know, trying to do fingerprints? Did y'all pull all them drawers out?

Speaker 5 He was like, no, it was already like that when they come in. So that tells me they were looking for something

Speaker 1 but what were they looking for they couldn't find joe's wallet so that had likely been taken for any cash that was inside the family wasn't rich by any means even the safe in the bedroom that was still locked when police got there only contained a hundred bucks inside and they didn't keep anything else of much value in the home except for maybe a gun

Speaker 4 He normally kept a gun hidden in the cushions on the couch, and they said that they didn't see that.

Speaker 4 They were unable to locate any firearms, ammunition, or anything else associated with firearms, including the victim's own gun.

Speaker 1 In the living room, there was a note that appeared to be an informal bill of sale.

Speaker 1 The writing indicated that Joe bought a nine millimeter handgun from a guy named Matthew Aldrich and that the gun was for a loan Matthew owed the victim.

Speaker 1 The receipt was signed by both Joe and Matthew and dated June 28th, 2012. We're talking less than a week earlier.
So where was this nine millimeter Joe had apparently just purchased?

Speaker 1 Now, Aldrich was a name police in town knew well. Matt and his brother Brad were fixtures in the community, but, you know, not the most upstanding kind.

Speaker 1 And it's important to note that it seems like the two brothers didn't always get along. They weren't like super tight or anything.

Speaker 4 We knew they were problems before because they kind of terrorized this place.

Speaker 1 Now, they knew right where to go find Matt, but they ended up talking to his 23-year-old brother Brad first. And here's why.

Speaker 4 Investigator McGee had talked to a neighbor, said she had some pertinent information to pass on. So she said that

Speaker 4 and another girl named

Speaker 4 they went to tell Bradley Aldrich about Joe's murder, about his death, and they saw blood all over Brad's hands. So that was kind of odd.

Speaker 4 But when they asked him what it was, he said he had to pick up some kind of dead animal.

Speaker 1 When police found Brad to confront him about this, he no longer had blood all over his hands. But they did see a spot of blood on his right sleeve.

Speaker 1 Now, he repeated the same story about picking up a dead animal. That's why he had blood on his hands.

Speaker 1 When they asked him about the blood spot on his shirt, he said that he had gotten the shirt from his grandfather's dirty laundry, so it could have just been something that was there before.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing, though. Remember, the smell of decomposition permeated the doorway when they found Joe.
Even without the autopsy yet, they knew Joe had been there for at least a day or two.

Speaker 1 But those witnesses and police spotted blood on Brad the day that Joe's body was found. Would he really not have washed up for hours, even days after committing a crime?

Speaker 1 It didn't wholly line up, but it was still an investigative lead when they were desperate for one.

Speaker 1 And since Brad and his brother were known to be bad news, detectives probably figured it was worth looking into anyways.

Speaker 4 They ask him for the shirt and he gives it to them. Just consent, the skiz in the shirt.
So it's like, well, if you had his blood on you, you wouldn't have given him that.

Speaker 4 Like, you're putting yourself in the house, and these boys would have made us get a search warrant.

Speaker 1 Brad also consented to a DNA swab and continued to tell the police more about that bill of sale that they found at Joe's house.

Speaker 1 He told them that his older brother, 27-year-old Matt, had recently traded guns with Joe, giving him a 9mm in exchange for Joe's nine-shot.22 caliber revolver, plus $100.

Speaker 1 Brad told deputies that as far as he knew, Matt had sold or traded the revolver that he had gotten from Joe to another guy named Matt Ritchie. But guess what Matt Ritchie said when they talked to him?

Speaker 1 He claimed Matt Aldrich never brought him any gun, but he did say that he had a friend who had seen Joe and Matt Aldrich together two nights ago, would have been on Sunday, in a grocery store parking lot.

Speaker 1 They were in a truck together. Now, when police go looking for Matt Aldrich to get his version of things, they had a pretty tough time pinning him down.

Speaker 1 They tried his house, tried his friends' houses, even his father, Greg Aldrich, who he lived with, hadn't seen him in a few days.

Speaker 1 Though Greg did invite them inside and gave them consent to look around.

Speaker 1 The first time police came knocking, they never found anything in Matt's room or in the home that could tie him to Joe's murder. Certainly not a gun.

Speaker 1 But they know that he was in possession of one recently.

Speaker 1 More than that document they found at Joe's outlining their transaction, a few people could place Matt acting reckless with a firearm in the days leading up to Joe's death.

Speaker 4 Matt drove by this house on Low Water Drive, and Brad, his brother, is out in the yard with family and stuff. They're just hanging out.

Speaker 4 And they drive by, and they say that Matt puts a gun out the window, points it at Brad.

Speaker 4 And then they go to the end of the road, I guess it's like a dead end, and they hear shots, but they don't hear more than five or six. A lot of people said they heard one or two.

Speaker 1 But there was something else that didn't look too good for Matt. There were other accounts of him trying to sell off a nine-shot.22 caliber revolver shortly after Joe was killed.

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Speaker 1 Try as they might to talk to him, Matt still seemed to be giving deputies the runaround.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if it was this tracking him down that became so all-consuming, or if it was the fact that Anita had been out of state and hard to get a hold of, but law enforcement skipped over one pretty important step in a death investigation, notifying next of kin.

Speaker 1 Anita said that she had to learn the details of Joe's death through other people who had heard about it from local TV news. Here's Anita recounting that time.

Speaker 5 If I'm not mistaken, it was Wednesday when my brother called me and told me that they had found Joe dead in the house. And that's when I asked him, I said, from what?

Speaker 5 You know, I said, was it natural causes or what? You know, what happened? He said, Anita, I don't know yet. And then I got a call from another friend of mine.

Speaker 5 He was down here, standing out there somewhere. He called me and told me, he said, Nita, he's been shot.
And I was like, what? He said, he'd been shot. I was like, oh, Lord, no.

Speaker 5 I mean, you know, my first thought was,

Speaker 5 you know, I can't believe this because I thought, who's going to shoot Joe?

Speaker 5 I know he could be mouthy to some people sometimes, but only when he was be drinking, you know, doesn't have too much or something, but he'd always come in the house, shut the door and lock it, and go to bed or lay down.

Speaker 5 If I could go back and just have been here, it wouldn't have happened. It would have never happened.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's true or not. It has to be a terrible burden to carry to think that you could have changed it all.
It's the little what-ifs that I see eat away at people who don't have answers.

Speaker 1 But there is a flip side to all of this. Perhaps if she had been there, Joe wouldn't have been the only victim.
It's possible her being away kept her and her daughter safe.

Speaker 1 Either way, there is only one person who should hold blame and feel guilt, and that's Joe's killer. Detectives were still desperate to find that killer, and they were desperate to talk to Matt.

Speaker 1 So on July 5th, they set a time to meet with him at the sheriff's office at around lunchtime.

Speaker 1 I don't know how surprised or unsurprised they were when afternoon came and went and there was no Matt, but they weren't going to put up with it.

Speaker 1 Detectives drove back to his house to get him, and he ended up voluntarily accompanying them to the sheriff's office where he waived his right to an attorney.

Speaker 1 On top of that, he also consented to a bucle swap right off the bat. At first, Matt denied having any guns at all.

Speaker 1 But when he was confronted with those witness accounts, he eventually did own up to it.

Speaker 1 But he said that the gun he had been attempting to sell was a.32 caliber revolver, that it was black with a brown handle, not a.22.

Speaker 1 So where was the 22? They asked, the one that he traded Joe Laughlin a 9mm for.

Speaker 4 Matt told us that Laughlin paid him to sign that. And we're like, that don't make any sense at all.
They even told him, they're like, your reasoning does not make any sense.

Speaker 1 When pressed, parts of his story began to change. He said, okay, yeah, he'd been trying to sell a gun, but it was one he'd stolen from his ex-stepmother's house after breaking in.

Speaker 1 And when it came to the situation with Joe, yeah, he said he had made a trade with him, but he claimed it was for a.40 caliber handgun instead of the 9mm.

Speaker 1 The part about him getting 100 bucks as part of the deal remained the same.

Speaker 1 Matt told detectives that he had even ridden with Joe to SunTrust Bank where Joe withdrew the money and gave it to him, which police were able to verify through Joe's bank records.

Speaker 1 So the interesting part about this is he is placing himself with Joe, admitting to the trade.

Speaker 1 But he was not conceding to the fact that he had sold a 9mm caliber gun as other people and a signed signed piece of paper had detailed. So one of the detectives just called him out on this.

Speaker 1 Why the heck would you sign a note that clearly stated it was a nine millimeter involved in the transaction if that wasn't the case? And that's when Matt's story changed again.

Speaker 1 He said, okay, yes, it was indeed a nine millimeter that he traded Joe. He talked about trying to sell off the 22 that he had gotten in exchange.

Speaker 1 But at this point, it was hard to trust anything he was saying. Investigators couldn't get enough out of him to pinpoint where that gun was now.

Speaker 1 So they were back at square one, at least until July 20th. That's when Matt Ritchie called with a pretty fantastical story.

Speaker 1 That gun that they'd been looking for, the one he never had, well, he just found it. According to Matt Ritchie, it just magically showed up in his yard.

Speaker 1 Here's Sergeant Cash reading from Matt Ritchie's statement.

Speaker 4 I was cutting grass on my dad's property. I was cutting the blackberry bushes behind the house when I heard a noise.
I thought I had hit a rock because there are rocks all along the driveway.

Speaker 4 I pulled the mower back and saw a pistol in the dirt.

Speaker 4 I left it where it was and I tried to call Detective Collins, who was the lead investigator, because I thought the gun might be involved in Joe Laughlin's death.

Speaker 4 I saw Joe's gun back in April 2012 and this gun looks like his. I got Detective Collins' voicemail, so I called 911.
I stayed out in the yard with a gun until the deputies got there.

Speaker 1 That day, detectives recovered a New England six-shot revolver with a brown handle and black body from Matt Ritchie's yard. But they were still unsure if this gun had ever belonged to Joe or not.

Speaker 1 Everyone had always described Joe's 22 as being a nine-shot, not a six-shot.

Speaker 1 They'd have to do some ballistics testing to see if they could confirm if it was Joe's original gun, the one that could have been used to kill him.

Speaker 1 And when the results came back less than a week later, they found that the revolver was capable of firing caliber 22 long rifle cartridges, but

Speaker 4 it's not enough sufficient evidence to rule it out. It's not excluded.
It's not included either.

Speaker 1 Weeks passed by, then a few months, and it was now late October. Detectives were still waiting on forensic testing they'd sent off at the beginning of all of this.

Speaker 1 Stuff they'd collected from Joe's house, the bucle swab from both Aldrich brothers, and the t-shirt that they'd gotten from Brad Aldrich.

Speaker 1 So in the meantime, on October 29th, They sat down with Matt Ritchie to interview him again.

Speaker 4 What could it hurt, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, something about the gun just appearing out out of thin air in his yard, it just felt like BS. And they were right.
During this sit-down, Matt fessed up.

Speaker 1 He had bought the gun off Matt Aldrich about two days before Joe's body was found, likely right after someone had shot and killed Joe. Here's more from Matt Ritchie's statement.

Speaker 4 When the first detective came to my house the first night that they did the interview and asked me about the gun, I told him about Matt coming to the house with all the electronic stuff, but I didn't say anything about having the gun because I was scared that I was going to get in trouble or go to jail.

Speaker 4 Then the other times that y'all came to talk to me about the gun, I still didn't say anything because I was scared. After a while, it started weighing on me and told me that I needed to get rid of it.

Speaker 4 That is when I took the gun and put it in the grass and called the police. I told the police officer that I was cutting grass and found the gun.

Speaker 4 I knew that I had to get the gun to the police, but I didn't want to get in trouble, especially after telling y'all that I didn't have it.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry about lying to y'all, but I did it because I was scared that I might be in trouble.

Speaker 1 This felt like a win, but it didn't actually help their case much. They couldn't definitively say that the gun was Joe's or was used to kill Joe.

Speaker 1 So Matt Aldrich selling it to him didn't change the facts of the case. Now, the case file appears to just drop off for a while after investigators conducted that interview with Matt Ritchie.

Speaker 1 There's nothing else until lab results come back more than a year later in November of 2013. Specifically, the DNA analysis from the blood on Brad Aldrich's shirt.

Speaker 1 But the long-awaited results brought about more confusion than insight.

Speaker 4 Then it wasn't animal blood, but it was Brad's, it was Brad's blood. And then Matt's get mixed in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 Was it possible that Brad and Matt had gotten into a brawl over something? Had one of them been hurt? No one could say for sure what any of this meant.

Speaker 1 But what was certain was the fact that Brad had lied about how and why the blood had been on him, which only deepened the detective's belief that the boys were hiding hiding something.

Speaker 1 Now, nothing else of interest came from those reports. No DNA from Matt or Brad was found at the crime scene.
And that is where things just stop on the law enforcement side.

Speaker 1 Looking through the case files, it does seem like they exhausted all of their efforts.

Speaker 4 They were just stuck.

Speaker 1 They were pretty confident from the autopsy report and other people's statements that Joe had died on Sunday. He'd been wearing the same clothes on Sunday as he'd been found in.

Speaker 1 Plus, that's the last time Anita was able to get in touch with him, too.

Speaker 5 That Sunday night when I talked to him, that last time I talked to him, he said he was going to go to the store and get him a cart of cigarettes.

Speaker 1 It's unclear if a carton of cigarettes was actually found at the scene, as evidence documents in the case file only lists cigarette butts as being collected.

Speaker 1 But Anita believes that Joe was likely killed right as he returned home from buying cigarettes. And the reason she believes that is because someone in the Aldrich family told her so.

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Speaker 1 Sergeant Cash said, Outside of maybe robbery, which didn't really make a lot of sense since Joe didn't have much to take, there hasn't really ever been a strong motive in this case.

Speaker 1 But during our reporting, we learned some new information from Anita. There was a history of bad blood between the two families.

Speaker 5 Joe never got along with him. I mean, he's never got along with Greg at all.
They all growed up together. And Greg just had a thing, just never did like Joe.

Speaker 5 Joe didn't like him neither because they think that Joe was behind his brother committing suicide, you know, and they kind of blamed it on him because Joe married his wife.

Speaker 5 I mean, his wife left him for Joe and they filed for divorce and Joe married her.

Speaker 1 Before you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 While the detectives seemed to only suspect the two 20-something Aldrich sons, Anita actually assumed Greg Aldrich, their dad, was the one involved.

Speaker 1 She said she couldn't see Brad wanting to hurt Joe as the two had a bit of a closer bond since Joe technically used used to be his stepdad.

Speaker 1 But Matt, Anita was also suspicious of him, particularly because of an incident she remembered that happened maybe two or three weeks before Joe was murdered.

Speaker 5 My thought was what really sparked it is the fact that Joe gave Matt $20 to go get him a case of beer. That was a big mistake.

Speaker 5 And I called Joe and I said, why would you even give that boy $20 to go get you anything when you knew he wasn't going to come back with nothing? He took your money.

Speaker 5 That made Joe mad, so he went down to their house with his gun, threatening them. That's what started it all.

Speaker 1 Anita told R reporter Madison that a few years after Joe's murder, someone related to the Aldrich family came by her house one night, supposedly hyped up on drugs.

Speaker 1 The story this person had to tell implicated Greg Aldrich and just one of his sons, Matt Aldrich.

Speaker 5 And she just sit here and laid it all out. And said how it went down and everything.
She told me how they were in the house whenever Joe came back from going to get his cigarettes.

Speaker 5 My thought was, okay, how did they get in the house? Because the only spare set of keys that Joe had was up on a hook up under the house. Only three people knew where the keys was.

Speaker 5 Me, Joe, and Carlisle, the guy that lives back here. So who told them where the keys was?

Speaker 5 I didn't. I'm sure Joe didn't.

Speaker 5 They were in the house when Joe got here. And that's why Joe didn't have a chance to do nothing.
Apparently, they must have hid until they got inside, and then they come out.

Speaker 1 So she claims they planned this because they just were so mad at him.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's doubtful that investigators at the time were privy to this information or the fact that there may have been tension brewing between Joe, Greg Aldrich, and Matt Aldrich.

Speaker 1 There wasn't anything about it in any of the case files we obtained. And Sergeant Cash wasn't aware of it either.

Speaker 1 Anita told us she never did tell detectives about this admission from that family member, mostly because she just didn't have any proof.

Speaker 1 She hadn't hadn't recorded the conversation, and because she suspects this person was on drugs at the time, she didn't see the point.

Speaker 1 But her daughter was there, so at least she should be able to corroborate the story. Now, we couldn't reach the woman for comment, the one who supposedly came to Anita's house.

Speaker 1 So for now, we just have this information through hearsay.

Speaker 1 But we thought it was significant enough to include and to pass on to Sergeant Cash as it shows that there could have been at least a few reasons why there might have been some harbored resentment between the two families or at least to demonstrate how things might have escalated

Speaker 1 both aldrich brothers remained in and out of trouble over the years mostly for drugs burglaries stealing that sort of thing but things got extremely dark about five years down the line in 2018.

Speaker 1 the following story comes from local reporting by wiff news

Speaker 1 According to an article published on their website, Bradley Aldrich fatally beat, strangled, stabbed, and shot his grandmother, Judith Calvert, and his mother, Teresa Wright, who coincidentally was Joe's ex-wife, though there doesn't seem to be a connection between the two cases.

Speaker 1 In that coverage, Brad had stated that he was, quote, looking for Lucifer after taking meth and cocaine, and that he'd only found his mom and grandma dead.

Speaker 1 But in the same breath, he also said that if police found his DNA on the victims, that he was the one who did it.

Speaker 1 His DNA was located on fingernail scrapings from both victims, and the jeans he was wearing when he he was arrested also had their blood on it.

Speaker 1 The homicides of his two family members came after he had already shot and attempted to kill another man just a few hours earlier.

Speaker 1 We asked Anita about her reaction to this news since she and Teresa had actually become good friends living just down the road from each other.

Speaker 1 Although Anita was devastated and shaken up to learn what had happened to Teresa, She still maintains that she doesn't think Brad was the one involved in Joe's murder.

Speaker 1 She is still only suspicious of Matt Aldrich and his father, Greg Aldrich. And that's because, again, Brad and Joe were close.

Speaker 1 Anita said Brad had always been a good kid before hard drugs set him on the wrong path and altered his mental wherewithal.

Speaker 1 WIFF reported in 2021 that Brad entered a guilty but mentally ill plea to two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and two counts of possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime.

Speaker 1 He was sentenced to 40 years in prison where he remains to this day.

Speaker 1 So if Brad was connected to Joe's murder or knows more about his brother Matt's potential involvement, maybe he'd be more open to talk now. I mean, he doesn't have much more to lose.

Speaker 1 But depending on what kind of care he's receiving in state lockup, a prosecutor might have a hard time using him as a witness now.

Speaker 1 Cash said he still plans on paying him a visit because by all accounts, Brad would have no problem ratting out his brother if he thought he was guilty.

Speaker 4 We're at a point now with this case where we interviewed every witness. They all pointed the finger to Matt.
There's There's no other person of interest.

Speaker 4 There's no unknown individual listed as a suspect. I need to track down.
It's basically taking all this and sitting down with Matt and just confronting him.

Speaker 1 Speaking of confronting people, we've tried to do that ourselves. Madison called every number she could find for Matt Aldrich and his father, Greg, even other family members.

Speaker 1 She left texts and voicemails, even reached out on Facebook. But so far, we've yet to hear back.

Speaker 1 Anita will never forget a dream that she had where she asked her husband, Joe, what happened? Tell me, you gotta tell me what happened. But then she woke up.

Speaker 1 Asking that question is as far as she's ever gotten.

Speaker 5 Until I get justice for him, I can't move on. And I made a promise before they put him in the ground that I'd make sure that one day I'll get justice for you.

Speaker 5 I don't know how long it's going to take, but, you know, I hope this does something. I hope somebody comes forward.

Speaker 5 You know, I thought about putting something up on this beer board up here, you know, just so people wouldn't forget. It's the forgetting people do.
Everybody forgets.

Speaker 5 They don't even want to think about it no more. I think about it every day, but I try not to let it get me down.
I keep going because I ain't got no choice.

Speaker 1 All the pieces seem to be present. Investigators are just waiting on one final tie to wrap things up.

Speaker 1 So if you hold that missing thread, you're urged to call the Anderson County Sheriff's Office at 864-260-4400.

Speaker 1 Or you can call Sergeant Kendall Cash directly at 864-209-0582.

Speaker 1 You can always remain anonymous via the Anderson County Crime Stoppers.

Speaker 1 We'll have all the ways you can get in touch with law enforcement and Crime Stoppers in the blog post and show notes for this episode.

Speaker 1 The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 1 So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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