My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark - MFM Minisode 380
Episode Date: April 22, 2024This week’s hometowns include a sinkhole in Australia and a forgotten middle child. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
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This is exactly right.
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["My Favorite Murder"]
Hello.
And welcome.
To my favorite murder.
The mini-sode.
The mini-sode where if you're in the fan call,
you can watch the crazy hand movements
that are currently taking place.
Oh, the gestures.
I wish you could see all the gestures that we can do.
Did you hear my shoulder just crack?
That's how much I'm gesturing.
Okay, so I'm not gonna read you the subject line.
It says, hello MFM fam, greetings from terrible Texas.
And then in parentheses says not a native here
under duress.
We were just in Texas, lovely people there.
Lovely time, lovely people.
Really good, but we're all having different experiences here.
Yeah, change your policies, okay.
Please change your policies.
Like all 12 to 14 year old girls in the mid 90s,
I was obsessed with Devin Sawa,
the boy that played Casper come to life
at the end of the 1995 movie.
Oh my God.
Yeah, right.
I gobbled up all his films, namely Now and Then, Little
Giants, and Night of the Twisters.
Night of the Twisters was of particular interest to me
primarily because the weather event it was based on
occurred in Grand Island, Nebraska, a town where
I had family and close to where I grew up.
On June 3, 1980, seven tornadoes,
including three that rotated anti-cyclonically
and at least one that hit F4 status,
killed five people and injured 183.
A semi-fictionalized award-winning book
written by Ivy Ruckman came out in 1984.
She based the book on the real experiences
her family had this disastrous night.
The made for TV movie starring my dreamboat crush,
Devin Sawa, as the protagonist, Danny came out in 1996.
Given that Night of the Twisters was mandatory
and thrilling reading for all young adult literature classes
in Nebraska, which is so funny.
It's like, it really wouldn't play the same way because
we don't have any experience with tornadoes. No, I don't get it. Except for the Wizard
of Oz. That's about it. Right. Like Twister. Okay. So it says, I had a well-loved copy
that I decided to send to Devin Sawal with a note and of course a very cringy photo of 14 year old me.
Naturally I didn't hear anything back until...
Devin!
This past September...
What?
This past September I received a Facebook message from some random awesome girl asking
if I was the Christine Last Name Redacted from Norfolk, Nebraska that wrote to Devin 30 years
ago.
I said, yes, why?
And she proceeded to say that Devin Sawa had tweeted out trying to track me down because
he finally came across my book and letter and wanted to finally send me the autographed
copy back.
Thanks to this angel, we were able to connect by Twitter DMs and chat a little bit before he, all caps,
actually freaking mailed the book and a super sweet letter to my current home in Texas.
Oh my God.
41-year-old Christine was just as giddy as 14-year-old Christine would have been. Of course.
Yeah.
What a sweet guy.
He totally went out of his way to make a fan's day 30 years later.
That is fucking hilarious.
You can't buy that kind of PR.
Like about as beautiful.
It's genius.
And also, you know, his life itself was crazy.
So he probably has some box of stuff somewhere that you finally went through. Oh, that and you just got right on Twitter is like guys, I need to. Oh my God. It says
then related. One of these days I might write about my Mima Glenda who survived the Woodward
tornado outbreak of 1947. That storm spawned up to 17 tornadoes and killed over 100 people in several small Oklahoma towns.
It ends, stay sexy and don't give up hope on your childhood crush, Christine. She, her.
So you think Coriith Feldman's going to come around next time I'm at the Hollywood Bowl and
take a photo with me? Yes, of course he is. They're going to ask me for a lighter this time and walk away. Yes, I'm still hurt.
It hurts, it hurts.
That's amazing.
Cheers to Devin Sawa.
Like what a.
Oh my God.
Mench.
And also he deserves it because that love is still real.
14 year old Christine is still real.
I love it.
So cute.
Okay, I'm not gonna read you the title.
It just starts starts you guys.
Been listening since 2019 when I needed something cool to listen to
while painting a giant octopus mural on somebody's kitchen ceiling.
Wow. It says true story.
I'm a science illustrator and I get to do cool, weird stuff. Love it.
And somebody recommended you.
I finished the mural but have never stopped listening to your podcast.
I feel like I came to the murderino party late, but the other day I asked my parents if living in Santa Cruz in the 70s was scary or if they had any stories.
I mean, I mean, that's like the Pacific Northwest of California. Totally, totally. They told me stories about how they knew our neighbor across
the street, a police detective, had beers with Ed Kemper at the jury room, which I'm guessing is
our local bar, right? That was the cop bar in Santa Cruz. He loved cops. And then super casually
mentioned, oh yeah, his last victim, his mom's best friend, actually lived at our home address.
What?
Suddenly I flashbacked to being a little kid
obsessed with Nancy Drew mysteries,
desperately looking for some mystery to solve
in my own neighborhood.
Oh man.
The only weird thing that I could ever find
was that sometimes we got mail for,
I would keep all these mysterious persons junk mailings
in my top secret file and try to solve the case
of who he was and why we got his mail. This is pre-internet, so my research was pretty much just trying
to look him up in the phone book. Spoiler alert, he wasn't listed.
Thank God.
Anyway, after a while, I gave up on this mail, leaving to anything juicy until 30 years later
when my mom dropped this fact.
Wait, 30 years later is the Devin Sawa connection.
My God.
That's literally like what she wrote.
And it's about mail.
Oh my God.
What's happening?
Kemper's last victim was S***, so S*** was her son.
I was receiving mail for the son of the last victim
of the gnarliest serial killer in Santa Cruz.
I can't believe my eight-year-old self
was so close to that dot, dot, dot mystery,
but I also feel so redeemed as an adult.
I knew there was something more
than just a mail mix up there.
Okay, thanks for letting me share.
Keep doing what you do.
You're in my ears for every mural
and long art project I do.
We've made a lot of art together.
TINA. You're in my ears for every mural and long art project I do. We've made a lot of art together.
Tina.
Wow.
That is, it's almost like the blue velvet thing
where it's like underneath regular suburbia,
there's like horror waiting.
Where it's like, if it was a little bit later
and that child had the gumption to get,
like go to the library even and look up that name,
they would have been punched in the face with
true crime.
I mean, horror.
Thinking they want to solve a mystery.
Yeah, they're like, oh no, now my childhood's ruined.
Well, the mystery is that there's horrible people in this world.
Hey.
Hey, did you know April is Earth month?
And if you're listening on the day this episode airs, it's Earth Day.
So let's show Mother Earth a little love.
And if you can, try running a couple errands on foot, maybe,
rather than driving.
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or more. Goodbye. Okay, here's my next one. You'll know why I picked this one as I read
it. It says, Hi, Karen and Georgia. let's not make it weird. Here we go.
I grew up very Catholic and this meant that
every Christmas Eve, the entire extended family
went to midnight mass.
My mother always called this our penance
before presents the next morning.
And then in parentheses it says,
is there anything more Catholic than needing to suffer
to validate enjoying something?
No, there's nothing more Catholic than that. So insane.
Every year the cousins would conspire to get out of Mass. This typically consisted of funneling
our parents' white Russians in the hopes that they would forget about Mass altogether.
One year around the eighth white Russian, it became clear that Plan A was not going
to succeed. So my older cousin, let's call him Otis, informed us that he had a way to make Midnight Mass more bearable. He herded all the cousins
into the attic and then proceeded to present us with a giant joint from his pocket. At the time,
I was 14 and had never been cool enough to be offered weed, so this was the first time I'd come
face to face with the devil's lettuce. Now, it is important to note that I'd earned a bit of a goody-two-shoes reputation in my family,
to the point that all my cousins called me Sister Mary Rebecca to my face.
I was desperate to shake this title, so there was zero percent chance that I was not smoking that joint.
Forty minutes and a half along later, the six of us were at midnight mass, experiencing it like we never had before.
To this day, my mother says that she has never seen us be more spiritual or connect more
with Jesus than at that mass.
Yeah. More like Jesus's lettuce.
Yeah.
Let me live.
Yes. Loving it. The music is amazing. The truth, we were high as shit.
As an adult, I still pop a weed gummy before every Christmas Eve, midnight mass.
This ritual did backfire on me a year ago when a member of the choir
died during the service and I was left without the faculties
to appropriately react to the event.
But that is a story for another time.
Oh, no. You're just hysterically laughing.
Oh no.
Or just like blanked because other people are like freaking out.
Like people would make like weird like, and everything echoes in a fucking Catholic church.
So it's like, do something.
I can't.
Thank you for all you do.
You've got me through many late nights in grad school.
Stay sexy and don't get murdered.
Rebecca. Oh my God. That's hilarious. you do, you've got me through many late nights in grad school. Stay sexy and don't get murdered, Rebecca."
Oh my god, that's hilarious. Midnight Mass is a thing in my town too, where you basically go
drunk and then you see a bunch of people from high school. That's kind of like either you're excited
or you're like, oh no, but it doesn't matter because you were just down at like Andreessen's for three hours beforehand.
And that became like the tradition.
I have a dumb question.
Is it literally at midnight?
Yeah.
Wow.
I thought you guys went to bed early.
Well, it's essentially Christmas season.
They have more masses than usual.
So usually say if they normally have like a 9 a.m.
and a noon mass or whatever, because
here come all the, what they call cafeteria Catholics being like, yeah, we're here for
Christmas.
We love Jesus.
It's fine.
But the midnight one is like they do extra stuff and there's like choirs and they make
it a thing.
And then the young people go to the midnight mass.
It's like, okay, got it.
At least that's how it was
in the eighties and nineties and today.
I'm sure the Catholic services in church
hasn't updated itself much.
They don't love updating.
I think the last one was around 1967,
if I'm remembering correctly.
Yeah, it sounds right.
Okay, ready for a deathbed confession?
Hell yes. It says deathbed confession, probably not a. Yeah, sounds right. Okay, ready for a deathbed confession? Hell yes.
It says deathbed confession,
probably not a family secret, but unclear.
Thank you for that.
Hi ladies, after 10 years of being with my now husband
and two years of being married,
our parents finally met recently.
It says the benefit of eloping is saving money.
The not benefit is your relatives
have no reason to meet otherwise.
Lots of wine was slowing and my mother-in-law started talking about her childhood as the daughter of a spy.
Oh.
I'm going to just assume this all wasn't a secret since she told my dad and brother,
basically strangers to her hours earlier, but as a true murderino, I will not ask before emailing,
fact check my work, and will assume that being pregnant with their
grandchild means that they can't be mad at me if I wasn't supposed to share. That's right.
Totally cleared on all accounts. Yep. Her father worked for the government doing work he was never
able to fully disclose to the family. And as a young girl, they moved around quite a bit.
I think the mother-in-law as a young girl. Okay.
Yeah.
They lived in Germany for some time
where one time he took his wife on a date
for the first time in a while.
And it turns out the date was really for him
to tail someone because, you know, spying.
Then I think Florida, again, not fact checking.
And then ended up in Northern Virginia
after a brief stint in Roswell, New Mexico.
As I mentioned, he wasn't allowed to say anything about the work he did as a spy, but on his
deathbed, as family bombarded him with questions about his life's work, love this family so
much.
He left them with this one tidbit from his time in Roswell, quote, we are not alone. Oh, fuck you. The jaded part of me
immediately said, do you think he was just fucking with you as one funny thing to say before passing
away? The answer was resounding. No, he was not that kind of guy. And it says, I guess being a spy
means you don't get to have a sense of humor. Anyways, I'm not saying this was groundbreaking,
a groundbreaking confession, but I do love the idea that after a career of secrets
and solitude, that's the only answer
he left the family with.
Thank you for all you do.
It's truly been a joy listening to your voices every week
since I discovered your podcast on the day
the Golden State Killer was caught in 2018.
I was just thinking about that day earlier today
because we were just, I mean, I was just thinking about that day earlier today because we were just, I mean, I was
just thinking about that.
What an insane thing to live through.
Yeah.
Stay sexy and don't let your family die without spilling at least one trade secret, M, she,
her.
And I'm sorry I said fuck you to your grandparent or great grandparent, whichever one is correct.
Great grandparent in law.
So not even, so it doesn't matter.
Okay, okay, they won't be offended.
Emma won't be offended.
But that's so bone chilling.
Like.
We are not alone.
Yeah.
If he, I mean.
It would be mean to do.
Like, you wouldn't think he would wanna say that
to a family.
It's just almost like,
maybe you need to know a little bit of this because it might
come out one day. I don't know. Yeah. Not today. Let me go to Marshall's one more time to buy
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Goodbye.
Okay, here's my last one.
And it's a sinkhole story and it's from Australia.
That's the subject line.
Hello MFM fam.
I know Karen likes her sinkhole stories
so I'll get right into it.
My parents' house was built in the early mid sixties
and started on a septic system before moving over to main plumbing in the 1980s.
The area my parents live in was on the edge of town at the time of being built up,
and quite a few people actually built their own house rather than hiring someone to do it for them.
Also being 1960s rural Australia,
it's very possible that there were a few instances of I'll buy you a case of beer if you help me for a few days and
Sharing said beer while on the job
Flash forward to 2016 my parents have been in the house for 20 years
There was a spot in the front yard where the ground dipped no matter what my dad did
It was always there. I was 19 or 20 years old at the time. I still lived with them and I had my own car
I parked under a tree
very close to the house. I would drive over that dip in the ground almost daily and used it to gauge
how close I was parked to the trailer my dad had stored in this space as well. For dad to get the
trailer out, I would have to move my car. On this particular day, I moved my car so dad could get
the trailer out. As he was reversing his car into my parking spot, it suddenly dropped down as one of the
tires went into the ground.
Confused, my dad called my grandpa to come help him, and between the three of us, we
got the tire and car out of the hole.
While standing near the hole and talking afterwards, my dad suddenly went down.
The ground opened beneath him, and he went down into a now bigger hole about six feet. It also became obvious right away that there was
a large concrete slab sliding down towards my dad's legs. We quickly get a
neighbor to come help him out of the hole before anything else happened and
we rope off the yard. Dad and grandpa then use shovels to collapse the ground
over the hole and decided it looked to be a pit left over from a rusted out septic tank.
You know septic tanks, that's just where all the shit gets held.
The hole for reference was bigger than a Toyota Yaris.
It's not big, but it's not small.
It's real specific.
You could bury a hatchback car in this hole with room to spare.
That's big.
Yeah.
Later that day, my dad had a friend come around who did water divining to see if the tank
was still connected.
The friend decided that it wasn't and we could fill the hole in.
The next day, a guy came with multiple truckloads of dirt to fill it all in and the rest became
history. The craziest part of the story is it all in and the rest became history.
The craziest part of this story is how close the pit was to the house. In American terms,
I think it was about eight feet away from the side of the house.
Wow.
Oh, and the fact that I drove over this spot daily and it turns out even parked on it and
drove over it minutes before it opened up and tried to swallow my dad's car and then
my dad.
SSDGM an always check
with city planning before you buy a house with a sinkhole in the making, Ashley. Oh, that's what
you're looking for when you go on like to realtor.com or whatever you're like amenities, sinkhole.
Big divot in the driveway with possibilities. Also the idea, I think that is a really peak
sinkhole experience because they were there when it opened.
A small thing went in, a big thing went in, a dad went in.
Yeah, but everyone was okay, but we all got to witness it
and even participate a little bit.
Yeah, and pull a neighbor into it, get some rope.
Big time.
Yeah, okay, here's my last one.
This story has everything.
Ocean's grandparents, forgotten children.
Hey y'all, long time listener, first time writer.
Thanks to my chaotic ADHD brain,
this email has been in the works for the past two years.
I initially wrote it in a response to therapy stories,
then bad parent stories, then vacation stories.
But traumatic ocean experiences was the final push I needed
because we asked for those.
To set the scene, it was the 90s.
I'm six years old and on vacation with my family
and grandparents in Aruba.
At one of the resorts, they offer boat rides
every 15 minutes or so to a private island 10 minutes away.
So we head over to the island and are enjoying the day,
snorkeling, sunbathing, adults are drinking, it's great.
I'm having the best day looking at all the cool fish
and coral and eventually come up to the beach for a break.
But I can't find my family anywhere.
Panic washes over my young self
and they begin frantically walking around the island
looking for them.
I try to stay calm as I make my rounds,
even as islanders come up to sell their jewelry
or hair braiding skills, and eventually just go linger in the ocean close to where we were.
I may have gone into shock and then shrugging emoji.
Apparently, while I was completely oblivious snorkeling in the ocean, my grandparents had
decided to leave on an earlier boat.
My parents left soon after with my siblings, and assumed since they couldn't find me that I went back
with my grandparents. Nightmare.
How long do you think they looked? Probably eight seconds, maybe 11.
One time this way, one time that way. The end. Once back at the resort, they quickly
discovered I was not with my grandparents. And then it says, oh, the joys of being a forgotten middle child.
So my parents ran to the hotel dock and hopped on the next boat out, took the 10 minute boat
right over and found me sitting all alone on the beach, probably crying, where they
had abandoned me 30 minutes prior.
I'm sure I was rewarded with copious amounts of ice cream, but this is definitely where
my abandonment issues began.
Yeah. Stay
sexy and always count your kids. Megan, she, her. That is rough. I'm sure we've talked about this,
but I have in kindergarten, that exact same thing happened to me and I watched my mom's car drive
away with the whole carpool in it. There was like eight kids and my mom, and they drove away without me. And I was like, and like immediately start crying.
And then apparently they got like halfway back to our house.
We lived very close to Ben.
They got halfway. And my mom goes, Karen, you're being very quiet today.
And they're all like, she's not here.
That's how she knew you weren't there, as you weren't fucking
yapping it up in the backseat.
She's like, what's the matter?
Are you sick?
It's like, she's not here.
Oh my God.
What did your mom do?
She couldn't outright panic because she freaked the kids out.
Well, and also we all got, it was like a tiny neighborhood school.
So it's like the teachers stood out in front with us.
It's not like I was loose or anything. Totally. Everything was fine.
It's just the idea of forgetting your kid. Yeah.
It's rough. And also here's what my mom would do. She would be in the
wrong and then be like, oh no. And then by the time I get, she'd be like, you're fine.
Because that's all she ever said. Get in the car. Come on.
Don't be dramatic.
It's like, no, no, this one, I'm, I think this one, I'm.
I'm allowed this one.
I'm going to talk about this one
on a podcast in the future.
I'm going to get you.
Send us your abandonment stories.
Check out the fan cult if you are in, so in the mood.
If you've ever been near or around a single
or your dad has or your neighbor has, let us know.
Neighbor stories. Neighbor stories? Who's your fucking crazy-ass neighbor? Who's your cool neighbor?
What neighbor did you think was a piece of shit and they saved the day?
Yes. Who did you not talk to and suddenly you realized and then became best friends with?
Yeah, like, okay, basically we're asking for home alone stories for the neighbor.
The old man that you thought was...
Oh, I thought you meant like truly the movie Home Alone.
Is that what you meant?
Yeah, in the end there's a spoiler alert.
There's like a neighbor old man who lives around the area
and like he's the one who saves the day or whatever.
Oh, that's right.
Spoiler, spoiler.
Spoiler alert for a movie from 90 fucking two.
Yeah, this is a film that if you haven't seen it,
please catch up.
And then write to us.
Everyone's waiting for you to be done.
Anyway, stay sexy.
And don't get bartered.
Goodbye.
Elvis, do you want a cookie?
This has been an exactly right production.
Our senior producer is Alejandra Keck.
Our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.
This episode was mixed by Liana Squalace.
Email your hometowns to MyFavoriteMurder at gmail.com.
And follow the show on Instagram and Facebook at My Favorite Murder and on Twitter at MyFaveMurder.
Goodbye!