(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, just gonna take a quick break from the show and tell you a little bit more about one of our favorite things ever, audible. - Oh, audible.com or that app. - The app is great in a mommy app, constantly listening to audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre really that you like, you can listen to and you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, even new ways of thinking. This can unlock a lot for you. Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as part of your daily routine. You don't need to even set extra time aside. That's what's great. There's more to imagine when you listen. And I'll tell you something that has set both Jimmy and I's imagination soaring and that is the Lewis and Clark journals. We're both really into these right now. - Unbelievable. - And as an audible member, you can choose one title a month to keep from the entire catalog including the latest bestsellers, the newest releases. New members can try audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/smalltownmurder or text smalltownmurder to 500, 500. That's audible.com/smalltownmurder or text smalltownmurder to 500, 500. Now back to the show. Hey everybody, just gonna take a quick break from the show and tell you about a very cool sponsor, Rocket Money. And I've used this and I've said it before on previous ads, but they found something that I had been paying for for 11 years. I've been paying for something for 11 years. - Boy did they getcha. - For no reason. And they, it was in there, I was like, oh my, rah! And they canceled it 'cause that's the other thing too. I'm like, now how do I cancel this? What do I do? And they said, don't worry about it, we got it. And they canceled it more. It was the coolest thing in the world. I'm telling you right now, don't waste your money on things you're not even using. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so that you can grow your savings. And it really is awesome. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, including $14 a month from me. - For 11 years. - For 11 years. Saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's features, stop wasting money on things you don't need. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com/smalltownmurder. That's rocketmoney.com/smalltownmurder, rocketmoney.com/smalltownmurder. Now back to the show. - Want to teach your kids financial literacy? But not sure where to start? Green light can help. With green light, parents can keep an eye on kids spending and saving, while kids and teens use a card of their own to build money confidence. As a parent, you can send instant money transfers, set up chores, automate allowance, and more. It's a convenient way to run your household, customize to your family's needs, and the easy way to raise financially smart kids. Get started with Green Light today and get your first month free at greenlight.com/wondery. (upbeat music) - Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder, Express. - Yeah, choo, choo. - Oh, yeah, indeed, Jimmy. Yeah, indeed. My name is James Petrogallo. I'm here with my co-host. - I am Jimmy Wissman. - Thank you folks so much for joining us today. Another wild, crazy Small Town Murder Express episode, all aboard the murder train as we pull away from the station. We got some crazy stuff and it'll be in Arizona this week, so it's a place both of us are familiar with and we'll have a lot of fun with it. So that'll be, it's crazy stuff though. So I don't want to say it's too fun, but it's fun anyway. At least making fun of the place will be fun. - Sure is. - That's sad. And we can talk any shit we want about the valley. - Oh. - Between the two of us, we've spent like 60 years there. Yeah, it's plenty of, we've done time there, we'll say. So that said, I think we'll start here and just say, head over to shut up and give me murder.com. Certainly get your tickets for live shows number one and most of all, there's also merch there, but September the 20th, Minneapolis. - There you go. - State theater, this big beautiful theater that's made too nice for us. - Oh boy, here we go. - Let's sign it out and let's tell awful dick jokes there and really class the place up a little bit. - Sure, yeah. - Let's do it the next night, we'll be in Milwaukee. Those tickets are almost gone, so get them right this year if you want them. Get those the rest of the year too, Oklahoma City, Austin, Boston, New York, and Kansas City, we added extra tickets. So there you go, everybody. You can head over to Kansas City and see us there. Shut up and give me murder.com. Patreon.com/crimeinsports is where you get all of the bonus material. We have so much, anybody $5 a month or above, you're gonna get the whole back catalog of all sorts of Patreon stuff, hundreds of episodes you've never heard. New ones every other week, one crime in sports, one small town murder, this week is no different. You get all of it, this week for crime in sports, which you'll get, has nothing to do with sports. It's horrible industrial disasters we're gonna talk about. Why does ocean exist? We'll tell you. Well, I mean, this is like, you know, if two people die in something, it's tragic, but if like a hundred people get immediately incinerated by steel, it's so crazy, you can't even process it. So we'll talk about that then for small town murder, we're gonna talk about, I think it was about 10 years ago, the cannibal cop who was really wild stuff. This guy is a New York City cop and really had these fantasies of cannibalism and we'll talk about is that illegal, is that what is that, exactly? And we'll talk all about that stuff. It's a thing, patreon.com/crimeandsports is where you get all that and you get a shout out at the end of the show. And before also, you should listen to crime in sports and you should also listen to your stupid opinions, which is so damn funny, I think you love it. So that said, I think it's time, everybody. Here we go. I don't care where you are right now. It doesn't matter where you are. What are you in the middle of a yoga class and in some weird pose? That's okay. Let's see, I want you to let out the biggest fart you can and then jump to your feet, look around at the shocked people, arms to the sky and let's all shout. ♪ Shout out ♪ ♪ And give me murder ♪ Let's do this, everybody. Here we go. Let's go on a trip, shall we? Let's go. Let's go. We're going local Arizona. Here we are. Yeah. And it's in the valley, but definitely not part of Phoenix. Is it? We're going to Maricopa. Oh, that is not the valley. No, well, I mean, technically, I guess. But it's out there. It's so far out there. Oh boy. It's Jesus Christ. To give you, it's about 45 minutes from downtown Phoenix. Yeah, and it's where everybody was like, I can get a giant house out there. For like $12. Yeah. It was a reason. It was like 110 grand for like a 3500 square foot house 'cause it's just, it's out there. Nothing else. There's like that 1347, the 347 that goes out there that you sit in traffic on and people get killed constantly on it. 10 goes out that way. It's all just, and it's just that area where every time there's a monsoon season, that giant dust cloud rolls right through their place. Yeah. That's it. Just goes right through Maricopa. I used to do a show at the Harris Casino out there, so I had to go there every fucking day for rehearsals for like three weeks, every goddamn day. It was horrible. It's just a nightmare of a drive. So Maricopa, it's about 45 minutes to downtown Phoenix, like we said, it's a, it's a bring a snack ride. You're bringing a snack. That's how long it is. You're bringing like at least some, some cheeses or something with you. You're stopping for a drink, for sure. Oh, definitely. You're gonna have to pee before you get there. About an hour 42, our last episode in Arizona, which was Catalina foothills outside of Tucson. That was episode 455, an explosive and terrible mystery. Right in the parking lot. That was fucking messed up, dude. So that was a wild episode. You should listen to that if you haven't. Population here, you're gonna be shocked at this population 'cause it used to be very small. Is it 20,000? 57,000 now they're up to, there was nobody there 25 years ago. Literally there was like a thousand people there 25 years ago and now there's 57,000. It was this and Gold Canyon were the big draw during the housing boom in 2006 or whatever. Yeah, and then all those people were like shit, now my house is, now it's worth nothing. Median household income out here is a little higher than the national average, about 82,388 dollars. Median home price has gone up like crazy there out there now. 370,500 dollars to live in the middle of the desert. There's literally no attraction to it. There's no draw. It's just like a few strip malls and a lot of houses and. It's a piece of shit. Piece of shit in the motto. Let's see if they incorporate their shittiness into the motto, quote, proud history, prosperous future. It's like 10 years old. What are you talking about? I don't hear the word shit mentioned in there anywhere. I think they're lying. Historical shit and we love it. Well, historically Maricopa has been in three different locations over the years. This is the third time they've tried to mount a Maricopa. Yeah, first there was incarnation. First there was Maricopa Wells, which was made around natural water. That's where they put up a little town. Then there was Maricopaville. Yeah. Wasted and away in Maricopaville. That's the worst fucking town name. Yeah. I've ever. Margaritaville would be a more legitimate town name than Maricopaville for some reason. Maricopaville is exactly where that song should take place where you're drinking away your sorrows. That's it. Because you live in Maricopa and you're all the way out there and you're like, this is, they said it was like Phoenix. And then it was Maricopa Junction, which eventually turned into just Maricopa. They just dropped the Junction after a while. Yeah, 'cause the negative connotation of Apache. That's what I think out there, it's what they were thinking. So it started out as an oasis around a series of watering holes, which was about eight miles north of where Maricopa is now. And then they moved it after those dried up and it ended up here basically. Jesus. They've grown so much between, and let's see, in between 2000 and 2010, it went from 1,040 people to 43,000 people. Jeez. In 10 years, that's crazy. That's insane. The reviews of this town, 'cause we've talked some shit as we do about any local Phoenix thing, but what other people think, let's find out. Maybe it's different. Maybe it's different. Maybe we've just had bad experiences. Us and everyone we know that's ever been there too. Maybe they've all just been wrong. Here's five stars. I would love to see more inside activity options for children, for children. They kind of get tired of playing in the McDonald's play place. I'm just getting to get it out. The McDonald's play place. 'Cause that's the only thing to do. Yeah. This is boring. It's too hot outside most of the time for them to even play at the park. Yeah. You burn yourself on monkey bars. Build a pool and put up some shade nets at your house. 'Cause that's all there is to do in Arizona. That's it. It's so tough. Here's three stars. I hate living here. That's a, that's a, didn't bury the lead there. Three stars. Three stars. To get anywhere important, you have to drive on the two lane road out of town. And that is an absolute joke, especially during rush hour. The food here is awful. If you want a good sit down restaurant, don't even bother here. You can have 30 different Mexican restaurants if you want to, though, or two different McDonald's owned by the same person. If you want to do some fun shopping, go out of town, you'll only find junk here. Nothing is worth it. Live anywhere else but Maricopa. That sounds like one star, right? Every suburb in Phoenix. Yeah. That sounded like a one star review. Yeah. And they gave it five? They gave it three. Okay. Here's three stars. Very short and sweet. Quote, "I haven't been the victim of a crime yet." Yeah. So I'm expecting it any day now. It's coming. Yeah. That's awesome. It's coming sometime, but fingers crossed. Yeah, I know they exist here. Two stars, horrible people in Maricopa, okay? They complain about everything here. Very rude and unpolished people. Oh, they're very, very rough apparently. Unpolished. What a tarnish around here. Break out the old English spray. These people are unpolished. It's tarnished, folks. I hate to say it as I'm sure not all are this way, but the majority rules. 347 is a death trap. That's the road that you have to travel on to get out of here. If I knew then what I do now, I would have run. It was not even, I wouldn't. I would have run. I wouldn't have even driven it. I wouldn't have driven it. I would have skipped the car, left it there and just got a path across the blue sky. I'm out this bitch. On his horse. It's straight in a straight line. Two stars. I don't like how nobody turns on their house lights at night. It can be a safety issue as people can easily hide in the dark. Okay, if all you need is dark and everyone's hiding, your town has bigger problems. I don't like it when the sun goes down around here. It's dangerous. One star lived in Maricopa for a year and couldn't stand it. My husband and I just moved last week. If you like being stuck on a road, poop smell, and tons of flies, Maricopa is your place. There's farms around it. It's like there's so many farms. That's it. There's two things to do here. Number one, traffic. You can sit in traffic on the 347 or you can go to the Wild West music fest. Yeah. Yeah. That's happening out there. You know who's playing there? There's all sorts of mechanical bull riding and all kinds of shit like that. But there's also, we don't even know where the fuck it is somewhere. It's got to be. Well, here's who's performing. Okay. You got flow rider. Yeah. You got Nelly. That's country. Nelly. We've talked about Nelly. I'm driving sports a lot. These are the reason that Hardy lost his wife. There's a lot going on there. Young MC will be here. How country is this, James? Well, Uncle Cracker will be here who's also not country. Then Fillmore. I don't know who Fillmore is. I don't know them either. And then a chick with a guitar named Deanna Carter. So I assume she's. Oh, Deanna Carter's great. She's country. There you go. She's terrific. That's sad. Let's talk about a murder. Worst lineup ever. That's the whole lineup. It's such an odd lineup. Flow ride opening for Kenny Chesney. What? Why? Who is watching that whole show? There's not one person who's like, "I like all these people." No. It's so strange. It's such a weird show. It's like we're hoping... Yeah. You know, people like two people on here. There's going to be a lot of people from Maricopa that love Deanna Carter that are going to see her, that are going to be screaming the n-word for an hour and a half for her show. Get off the stage. Holy shit. Get off the stage n-word and I mean Nelly. All right. Let's talk about a murder here. Here we go. Here we go. Let's talk about a man first. Here we go. Let's talk about Michael A. Jeter. Okay. It's A-G-E-R-T-E-R. A-Jeter. A-Jeter. A-Jeter. I'm sorry. A-Jeter. That's a really fucking name. It's a hard name to say. It's really hard. It's not easy. It's like for Scrabble, it would be decent. You got a lot of vowels to work with and shit, but R and a T is good and you like that. A couple of hours, but otherwise it's difficult to work with. He's born July 26th, 1985. He's born in Valparaiso, Indiana. He's an Indiana guy. He's the oldest of four kids, so he's the older brother. His brother Nick said that Michael was always caring and really passionate. He was my role model always, and I think that rubbed off on me, so he's the good older brother. He's not the shit-head older brother where the parents are like, "Don't be like your older brother. Look what happened to him." Nick's the way he is because he looked up to his brother. The older siblings, an example one way or the other, they're going to go, "Look at how your brother fucked up his life. Don't do that." Or, "Look at your brother. He's doing great now. Come on." One of those things, in 2002 when he was 17, the family moved to Urbana, Ohio, and he played high school football, and his dad was the high school football coach. He's having the most all-American upbringing ever here. He's in the Midwest with his dad as the football coach, and he's out there on the freesman. Yeah, this is, John Coogerbellenkamp is just taking notes in the background, he's stalking them. What's he doing now? Oh, okay. Listen to Bob Seager in truck. Okay. Good. Excellent. Damn it. All right. Good. Yeah, we just had a big Bob Seager discussion before this, and I think I really, I figured out his marketing that he should have had 45 years ago. You can sum him up in one sentence. Every album should be called the innermost thoughts of your dad. Your dad's innermost thoughts, volume one, volume two, volume three. He could have done it infinitely. Yeah. Feeling up tits in the woods. Numbers never stop, Bob. He used to be in a band, and he was on the road and smoking his last cigarette at the end of the night, and I'll deal with it. Watering in is that a man or a woman, your dad's fucked up, you guys. Listen, your dad thinks about shit. Your dad has to go to another place in his mind to be able to survive you. That's the thing. He has to go that time, he fingered a girl about 60 Chevy to not kill his entire family. He's got to think about memory that 60 Chevy and that's, that's what keeps you alive families out there. All of us are alive because our dad, yeah, because our dad had memories of feeling a girl up one time. That's why we're all here right now and alive. I could've eaten a few sandwiches more back then. So Michael goes into a year of college. He goes to Ohio State and he decides, though, that he wants to get out of college and get right into the workforce. All right. He has a plan for this, and that's the thing. If you kind of have a plan for a way that you, you know, something you want to do that's not really required to have a college education and you don't really need to spend a lot of money on it. You can just get these things. College ain't necessary, you can just get your basics in and. Yeah, but he wants to be in the banking industry, which I would think college would help. College serves that. At least on the high end. It seems like it, right? I think they got some math classes and something, right, that's what I was thinking. I was usually, yeah, if I go into a bank and somebody's trying to talk me into an investment and I go, do you go to college, you know, because I didn't, is why, because so I want someone who did to tell me about this. I need you to know the laws and stuff behind this. You need to know a better math than me. That's how this works. So he first worked for a first Ohio mortgage and then he ended up getting a job at Chase after that. And then in 2010, when he was 25, he wanted to get out of Ohio and he wanted to move. Five years old. Yeah. What's the move out West? So he applies for a job with Wells Fargo and their mortgage department in Phoenix and he likes the hot weather. He likes the whole deal. So a lot of people that are from the Midwest and the Northeast, when they get out there, they're like, Oh, here we go. Like, I don't know what this is. It speaks to them. The lack of trees, the open sky. It's something about it awful. To me. It's a nightmare. But to them, they go, ah, this is what I've always wanted. I don't know. It happens all the time. There's not a tree to be found. What are you talking about? I love it. You can see the sky too much of the sky. That's the problem. This guy was sunning it that beats down on you unmercifully. So he moves there. He just packed up his car and drove like fucking cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers in the beginning. He just got in there. Mary Tyler moored it right down to the fucking find him a bulky right there. Come on, bulky. Fine. Need a balcony or a rotor. Let's do this. So he found another guy that ended up. He got a roommate with the guy he knew in Ohio ended up moving out there as well. A guy named Chris Grindy or Grindy, G-R-I-N-D-E-Y. Grindy will say he moved Arizona within a year of that and they decided to get a place together. Sure. So we'll be roommates. They got an apartment in Tempe together, which if you're young, single guys. And Chris is recently divorced, his friend. Oh, fuck. He got divorced. He needs a fresh start. Now he's a guy in his 20s walking around in Tempe, which is like, oh my God, that's a- Yeah, that's your bridge in the gap. Yeah. They're like, oh, what is there? Five million fucking college age girls around here. Like, that's a- I can understand why you'd want to live there. The two of them anyway. We'll be elder statesmen to 22 year olds. Let's get it. Yeah. I think you can teach them how to drink and shit properly. Right. No amount not to throw up. Yeah. Look, I got tricks for you guys. Hold on. Yeah. You have no idea. I'm sure you got to stick with one drink and not mix. You fucking moron. Yeah. No, you don't go from that to that. That's the problem. If you're drinking beer, you're drinking beer. Stick with it. Beer before liquor. Never been sicker. You know that one? No, that's why. Because you're too young for it. You've got a lot of bad tomorrows, haven't you? That's the reason why. Because you start out just having a couple beers and it's fun and the next thing, you know, there's shots and then bad day tomorrow. Yeah. Bad day. You have to know what you're going to drink. So in 2013, he's lived out there for a couple of years. He's Chris's roommate for a couple of years. He decides that he wants to try to find a girl to kind of, he wants a girlfriend. He wants some love. I heard of meeting people and you know, it's hard and especially in Tempe, these are all college girls or young people. It's difficult. So he's like, I want to meet somebody who's trying to find somebody. So he decides he's going to get a dating app and he's going to do it that way. Oh, no. Which is, you're better off just going to bars in Tempe probably at that point. If there's a silver lining to my marriage, I sidestepped apps and I could not be happier to have missed all of those. Thrilled. Thrilled. I never want to be a part of that. Yeah. I never want somebody to have that story. It's awful. No, no thanks. So the Tempe bar scene is basically like a, like a dating, it's like Tinder in person. Right. It's what the bar scene is there. It's crazy. It's up to everybody. Fox. Yeah. Well, Tinder in person. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's right. Everybody's gross. Yeah, they don't care. So he meets a woman. The first woman he meets on the site. Is that right? The first woman he meets is a woman named Catherine Sinkovich, S-I-N-K-E-V-I-T-C-H, Sinkovich. It's Russian. Yeah. She's born in 1985 at the same age. She works at a call center at this point in time. So, you know, it's not making much money because I've worked at call centers in Phoenix before. Not a lot of money in that at all. She is, her family is Russian. Now, I don't know if her parents are from Russia or how far back it goes, but it seems to be a big part of her family's identity here. She's the youngest of eight kids. Oh, boy. That's a lot. That's a lot of kids to be the youngest of. Yeah, they were making babies in the 70s. Oh, man. That sounds like some Russian we need somebody to pick the potatoes. Shit there. I don't know. And she's got older parents, huh? They must be if she's the youngest. So the pro... Well, they are older. I don't... Well, we'll talk about her parents. She doesn't have them for very long as the problem. She grows up in Southern California, first of all. Her father died when she was very young. I don't know if he just died from being drained and having eight kids around him. Empty balls or... Or if he blew his brains out, which would be one of the two. I can't say that. If I have eight kids, I'm dying in some way, shape or form. Either the world will take me... I can't afford Southern California anymore. Yeah, that's a lot. And then her mother ended up dropping dead in the kitchen when she was 13, and Lucky Catherine was the one to find her. Really? So found her dead mom when she's 13, dead on the kitchen floor, not good at all. And now both parents are dead. Both parents are dead. And she's the youngest. A lot of her siblings are like adults at this point too, so it's not like that big of a support system. She ends up being taken in and raised by one of her sisters, by one of her older sisters, obviously. So has to. She apparently, as an adult here, she does not like to tell a lot of private information to people. She's very private. She doesn't like to give a lot of family info, or, you know, "Oh, one time when I was a kid, we were doing this," like none of that happens, really, from her. You'll get a lot of stories or anything. Yeah. If she's in 10-piece, she probably doesn't want to talk about that with those people. There's a lot of fucking rich kids there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that mom and then was raised by her sister. There's not a lot of monetary gain, and you know what I mean? Her life is probably not real rich. There's also like a shitload of Asian kids over there, though, from countries where they're like, "You know, I grew up without a floor, but I'm so fucking smart. Here I am." You know? There's like, if you walk around the math, I had to do, I was a process server. I had to serve one of the departments there, and I was walking through like the math thing. And it's all Asian kids. That's it. I'm just not a fucking white kid in the math shit. No. Are you good at that? The number one high school in Arizona is 68% Asian. Yeah. Yeah. It's what it is. That's where the education is. That's a talk. Stereotypes. Yeah. Fuck you. Good at math, apparently. The whole department is tall Asian people. Like, apparently, that's a true one, obviously. They're figuring it. They're figuring it. So they're typing it. Oh, yeah. There we go. That figure is this. Yes. So Michael and Catherine immediately click off the bat. Now he's outgoing and she's pretty reserved, but she's also kind of like, she's not scared of a lot of shit. Like Michael's father says that one of the things about Catherine was that she was a little bit daring. She liked to try things. On one of their first few dates, they went skydiving. First few? I think that might be revealing too much on one of the first few dates to show how you shit your pants exactly in a situation of crisis. I don't think someone needs to know that yet, right? What elevation? Yeah. How high pitched of a scream can you make while shitting your pants? I don't think a woman you just met needs to know that probably. I'm never doing that. It's never happened. No, not happened. Who's fucking ideal was that? It's got to be his, right? It seems like a dare like skydiving, I'd go skydiving. Well, so would I. Well, I would. We'll fucking pay to it. Let's go. Let's go right now. I know where the place is. Yeah. So they date after a few months, he brings her home to Ohio to the family. Yeah, he's going to show that that's getting serious. I mean, dead serious. Yeah. Here's my Tinder date. No, it's a 1500 mile trip to show off your Tinder date. So she brought her to Ohio and the sister, Marley, this is Michael's sister, said she seemed like a good person for Mike, just, you know, seemed great. So she ends up moving into the apartment with Chris, Grindy, and Mike. Oh, she moves into the apartment, which for Chris is like, I had this bachelor pad with my buddy and all this. And that was a girl. Friends moving in. That would suck man. So much for so much for having fun. Yeah. Thanks a lot. This is now. She's always on the couch with us. Hey, bro. You know, you can't never mind. I'll get you to bring college girls here so I can impress them with weed. She's giving you dirty looks every time you're doing shit, like, you're not my girlfriend. I don't know. So I'm giving me dirty looks. She is nice to him though. She buys Mike a dog. She gets her adopts a dog for him, a little tiny dog named Darwin. So she gifts him a dog. This is your dog and all that. And also Mike helps her transition from call center work into a job in the insurance industry. She ends up working like insurance and then she'll end up doing like mortgage stuff later on too. Really? Yeah. So she ends up, you know, professionally doing that kind of thing. Yeah. So in 2015, as we'll talk about, they're going to get their own place because they have some problems. At one point, she's working for movement mortgage. She's going to work there for the next couple of years. Now their problem, one of the, there's problems before this, but in 2016, she's pregnant. Wow. Now Mike's happy about it. Really? He's happy about, he's not real happy with Catherine, but he's happy to be having a baby. He wants, he does want a baby and apparently they, the family was like, well, you haven't you guys been fighting and everything and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's okay. It's not okay to listen to this shit. She was very controlling is the problem. Super control. Yeah. The right. Yeah. Controlling and jealous also. Yeah. Oh, she's she constantly accused him of having affairs, including now this is why some guys you go, maybe he's fucking around or maybe he's talking to people. But when you hear about the person she accused him of having an affair with you go, okay, you're just a crazy person and she accused him and really made a big deal out of it of having an affair with his sister, his own sister. Who lives in Ohio, by the way, that's crazy time. Your little, your little sister who lives in Ohio, you're fucking her, aren't you? Yeah. That's what's going on. Couldn't wait to how did she get there? That's she's a little off in the fucking head. And then it then she becomes physically abusive after that as well. And everybody notices it on Tinder. Yeah. This is the thing. Like, she's been put back on the shelf a couple of times, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you about one of the safest sponsors you could ever see. Simply safe, simply safe.com S-I-M-P-L-I, safe.com. Totally. And if you're anything like us, you think a lot about the security of yourself, your things, your family, the people you love is a big deal. Yeah, especially safety first, especially like I know for me personally, after we had the house we were selling got broken into and everything got messed up and the plumbing and all this stuff was like, oh my, thankfully we weren't there and nobody got hurt or anything like that. But I knew at that point, got to get some security because the world is crazy and especially doing our shows, we understand that. And luckily for us, when this happened, we were already doing a podcast and I knew about Simply Safe and we happen to have the best security there is. Simply Safe is the best and we've trusted Simply Safe to protect our home and our studios and everything else for years. And you know us. We're weird with research. I've researched. They are the best, by the way. Protect your home this summer with 20% off any new Simply Safe system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplysafe.com/small that's simply safe S-I-M-P-L-I-Safe.com/small. There's no safe like Simply Safe. Now back to the show. This show, Small Town Murder is sponsored by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? That's the thing you got to figure out. What do you... You can't live without, that you can't do. Some people it's maybe I have to get a workout, I have to get a run in, I have to do that. I have to watch a specific TV show, something. 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She, the sister, said quote, she knocked him out two or three different times. She had headbutted him. She is tough. Yeah, you don't want, that's the thing about going out with a Russian girl, their heads are very hard. They'll knock you right out. Very thick forehead. Very thick forehead on these Russian girls, you know, it works. So she headbutts him and knocks him out on several different occasions. He had to get stitches another time, we'll talk about here. That's her super move. That's what she always does. Yeah, that's her fucking finisher there. That's her finishing move. So 2016, this is all going on. Now the family was happy to hear the news of the pregnancy, but it was like I thought you were having problems. The friend Chris, and this is great because I heard it, I saw it come out of his mouth on a documentary thing. He said quote, I told him, I hope you're not going to marry her. Like, you're not going to marry that fucking crazy bitch, are you? Like, that's no, right? And he was like, no, no, of course not. But I do want like to be a part of my kid's life and support my child. So, you know, yeah, at one point, Chris said quote, he tells me, she just bit me, I had to get stitches. Bit me. Goddamn it. Bit me to the point of getting stitches. That's so deep. She would she take a chunk out of it like he's a hamburger that's maybe she had one of those Looney Tunes fantasies where he looked like a big chicken, she's like so dirty shit. This is, this is ridiculous. So that's dirty headbudding and biting. Yeah. So Michael asks his friend, Chris, can you help me get the hell out of here and away from this woman? Because they're still living together at this point. Oh, God. So he's like, help me and Darwin extricate ourselves from this, please. I'm bringing Darwin with me, bringing Darwin with me. So he gets a place out in Maricopa in 2016, a place of his own. A house with a garage and all that nice house, the 43,700 block of West Sage brush trail is the drive road he's on. So they move out there. This really pissed Catherine off, by the way, she was not thrilled about this at all. Like, how dare you run from me? Yeah. I'm going to headbutt you so hard when I catch up to you. You're leaving? Oh boy. Yeah. So she didn't and he didn't tell her where he was going either. So she didn't know where he was and she was off so she hired a private investigator to find him. You can't do that. That's I mean, I guess you can because if you say I'm pregnant and the father of my child is supposed to be paying for stuff, he took off and moved away and I got to find him. Anybody would be like, oh, well, yeah, you need to find that guy. Fuck him. What a dick. You know what I mean? I mean, you can you can Google you can find anybody online and know where they're at, which will go to the assessor's office and seems illegal, but all right. She finds his ass though, he's renting a place so you couldn't even it would have been harder to find him. You need a private investigator to be able to go into like electrifying the lease and shit like that. Otherwise, the property isn't in his name. So she not only finds out where he lives, she comes to his house and steals the dog. She stole Darwin, kidnapped the dog and a tiny doggy door, and she just stuck her face in and said, come here, Darwin, and he fucking came and she snatched his ass. This dog stealing bitch. You can't do that. And she tricked the dog. She tricked the dog. She's a bad lady. That's nice. Yeah. She knows the words that make him come here and that's not nice. Get Darwin. Come here, buddy. Yeah. You're going to play a treat or something and that's that little whistle. I got the whistle. My dog. There's a specific whistle and Vaughn knows it and he comes right to me. He knows what's going on here. So yeah, the dog's gone. So he's like, what the fuck? She came to my house. She stole my dog. So he gets a restraining order against her. Yeah. And it's not just the dog that causes the restraining order. The dog was the final straw. There also was the time that she allegedly, we don't know if it was her, but I can't imagine it was anybody else, someone tried to set the house on fire. Yeah. From the outside. They tried to burn the place down by using a torch on the garage door and the front door. There's burn marks all over it from someone. Garages are steel, lady. They just said, no, no, this was not a steel garage door. Oh, he's got a wood garage door. Yeah. One of the older homes. Yeah. They fucking tried to set that, you know, long that takes to burn with a torch. He's trying to the doors. This is crazy. So apparently that while there's burn marks all over the fucking house. Now. And now they couldn't prove that she was responsible for that because he called the cops and was like, I think my ex-girlfriend tried to burn my house down. Right. You know, they're like, that's juicy and all, but yeah, that's really interesting gossip and shit. I mean, that's, tell me more, but I don't think we can do anything about it. Sorry about that page six, but we can't do anything. Yeah. I mean, it's, but I mean, do call back when you have more info though, because I want to know stuff. Holler when you say her. So he goes to the landlord and asks if he can please install security cameras all over the fucking house on the outside of the house and they allow him to. So he installs all these cameras around, including a door on the front home where he had a couple of different ones, one of the front door that would document if she came over and tried to, you know, set the door on fire or anything like that. So the son is born here. Oh, okay. She has the baby in 2016. It's an August, it's a boy, Michael wants to see the baby. He hasn't seen it yet. He's trying to avoid her as a restraining order on her and shit. So he petitions the court for visitation rights, you know, codify parental rights and all that kind of thing. They go to court and she stands up in court and says he's not the father. He can't have the baby because he's not the father. So he says, I really think I am the father though. And she said, no, you're not, you're not the father. So the judge says, I know a way we can figure this out. These are really easy to solve. Super easy. Open your mouth for two seconds and we'll figure this out. How about that? So they said that the judge determines DNA testing is the only way to solve it, obviously. So they're, they're, you know, they have to go through all this DNA shit. December 16th, 2016 now is DNA test day for Michael. Yeah. And in the early afternoon, he goes to do the DNA test and then he's going to go home after that. Nice half day from work today. That's nice. Easy peasy. So he's returning from taking his DNA test. It's a little after two p.m. And he's on the phone with his sister, Marley, who I assume is the one that Catherine thought he was having an affair with because he talks to his younger sister. Oh, you weirdo creep. How dare you talk to your siblings? So she's on the phone with him and for his drive home from the DNA testing facility, which I assume is probably in Phoenix. So probably took him a while to get home. Yeah. Or Mesa or Mesa. Just right over there. Yeah. Could be there. So he's pulling into the garage of his house and she says, quote, this is Marley. I was talking to Mike through the Bluetooth in his car. He had asked me to hold on to switch over to the phone instead of the car. Because he had it on to speak. And the next thing was he said, holy shit, really loud. And then I heard three gunshots and then I didn't hear anything. So I knew something was wrong. Yeah, it's a horrible phone call. Holy shit. Pop, pop, pop. That's not great. Hey, Mike. And then she tried calling back. He's not answering the phone. He's not answering the phone. So she freaks out. She calls her father, okay, doesn't call the police, calls her father up and says that. And she said very specifically, I told my father that I heard three booms because if I said I heard three gunshots, he would say I was being dramatic because he's what he's got a Bob Seager memory in his head and he's like, Oh, which a goddamn drama all the time with gunshots. It was probably a garbage truck dump and shit against the wind, I got a memory stop right now. Gypsy wind is blowing warm tonight. Goddamn it points hollering out understand. So she says that though, and this is terrifying, I mean to make jokes here, but we work comedians and we can't help it. How do you? Yeah. That's crazy that he would say that's what he would say to her. Well, like he's a dramatic calm down. Oh, football coach, daddy's going to go gunshots. That's drama talk 50 squat thrusts now right now. Let's do it. You keep talking about gunshots. I'm going to run your ass some stadium. You're going to be hearing your heart beating in your ears from squat thrusts. You won't need to hear no gunshots. So the and the daddy seems like a nice guy. We're just still. So the police arrive here because neighbors, her gunshots and a Maricopa out there like half the neighborhood called because it's the middle of the day and there's gun shots outdoors. It's pretty loud, literally half the neighborhood call and these homes are butted up to each other. A gun shot echoes for blocks forever and there's no trees to or anything that deadens the sound. It's just bouncing off houses all the way down the road bouncing off Mexican tile roofs. That's all it is, everything just like a Adobe in Mexican time. So the the Maricopa police sergeant said when the first units got on the scene, they observed the house with an open garage door and Alexis sedan in the garage that was running. He's doing great. So there's a yeah, he's doing fine. So there's a running car in the garage with the garage door open. So they've seen the body cam footage they they come up to the side of it and you can see that there's glass broken and bullet holes in the fucking in the rear like the driver's side back passenger window. Okay. Yeah. There's bullet holes in it. So immediately the cop is like, Hey buddy, you there? Hey buddy. All right. Stay in on the but there's nobody responding at all. So they said one of the officers could see wounds on the head and blood coming out and shattered glass on the driver's side of the car. Wow. So they said, because the car was still running and Mike had a stunt as sunglasses on still. Yeah. So I mean, he obviously didn't even get out of the car. Right. He didn't even take his sunglasses off when he pulled in the garage yet, right, that which when you do that in Arizona, people, we got to say this, it's so fucking bright out wherever you live. You imagine your computer screen is your house. Turn the brightness all the way up. And that's what it's like in Phoenix. Like it's somewhere after staring into that and see if you can see a goddamn thing. You pull into your garage with sunglasses on. It's pitch fucking black. So you take them off. So that's how quickly this happened. I mean, he didn't even switch over his phone to from Bluetooth to you didn't even switch that off yet. So it's right there. So the cops immediately think, well, this guy just got ambushed when he got came in. So at this point, they don't know if there's a shooter in the area. They don't know if somebody ran in the house. They don't know if there's somebody around at first, they didn't know if it was a suicide. And then they said, well, it'd be hard to shoot yourself through your back window. So that'd be difficult. So probably not. Then they pulled out his, he had his wallet on him and his driver's license identifies him as Mike and they look at the picture, same fucking guy, okay. They said they, there's an obvious gunshot wound to the head and they said he'd been hit in the neck or in his upper body as well in his torso. There's three shots fired altogether. They find three casings right there. One of them got stuck in the beam of the door. The column there? Got caught in the column. Another one went through the door, through the seat and lodged in his body. Wow. And the other one went through the window and into his head. So somebody... What caliber is this? That's a pop pop pop. It's dead serious. It's like a nine millimeter. Huge but nothing tight. Wow. You know what I mean? Wow. So yeah, they said the gunshot hole through the rear driver's side window. That's the one with the bullet through his head. The officers on the scene said it was pretty gory actually, a lot of blood. And they believed that the, it was quote, premeditated, personal and extremely cold hearted. Seems like it. Yeah. It looks, yeah. It looks like it's like a hit basically. I mean, the guy pulled in, pop, pop, pop and somebody left. Disappears, right. Who knows? People in the house or whatever. So they haven't gotten in there. They're kind of locking down the perimeter and then they're going to go into the house. And in nowhere, five minutes into this, Chris shows up, the roommate. Oh. He shows up on the scene because the sister that he'd been talking to on the phone called Chris up and said, "Can you go check on Michael?" I heard this and I don't want to be too dramatic or anything, but please go check on him. Sorry, you know, too much drama. And so Chris pops up and, you know, they talked to Chris, he said, "I'm his best friend." And they said, "Okay. Anybody around here that he's close to?" And he goes, "I mean, not really. He knows people, but me and well, his ex-girlfriend, not family, but his ex-girlfriend who just had a baby with him and everything, that might be somebody that he's close to. Now witnesses, the neighbors recall hearing gunshots. First they recall seeing a white van parked in front of Michael's house across the street. Not like a cargo van, but like a mini van, like a big mini van, basically. One of those parked in front of the house. Multiple neighbors recall seeing the van fleeing as well because people heard the gunshots that went outside. And what the fuck was that? And a white van is leaving. They see a white van. The problem is everybody they talk to has a different description of the driver of the van. Oh. And when I say different description, I don't mean one said they look tall, one said they look short. They're talking one said black male, one said Hispanic female, one said black female, one said white female. Bunch of racists. This is why they made this a rainbow coalition driving this car. This is fucking insane. So this is why witnesses are terrible and literally the least reliable form of anything because I witnesses because this was 15 fucking minutes later and nobody knew what they said. Nobody had a clue anymore. Nobody had a goddamn clue. So the cops go into the house. And the other thing here is to see if it's been, did he have something valuable that somebody knew of? It's been ransacked. Right. No ransacking. Nothing appears stolen. Everything's in place. Nothing's out of place. It looks in order. It's not a robbery, but they do find in his closet a big home surveillance system. Oh, yeah. They're like, oh, he's got home surveillance. This is like in lights blinking all over the place. This is helpful as shit. Yeah. Great. So they got access to the surveillance footage. I got a judge to sign off on a, you know, a warrant for this and they see from the camera from the front door, they see a small person, probably a woman or a small man in a hoodie with the hood up, get out of the white van, quickly walk up toward the house as after the crazy see him pull into the garage and then you see this person hop out and run up to the garage, okay? And into the house, dark coated sweatshirt, dark pants, shoes, gloves, carrying papers in one hand with a, and had a bag like on her shoulder, like a messenger bag or a purse. So this, then the person goes out of view of the camera, which is obviously into the garage because that's where they're headed for 11 seconds. Wow. So these three shots are in 11 seconds of this, they're out of camera range for 11 seconds. So that's for them to get past the camera range into the garage, shoot to be back. And then you see the person running away and getting back in the van. So then, yeah, that's how that happened there. So they authorities contact Michael's family in Ohio, obviously until then what happened and they talked to the friend and the friend says, I would check out Catherine, right. So they do a background check on Mike and they discover that he'd had several legal disputes with her where he called the cops because she tried to burn him out. He's got a restraining order against her. There's accusations of domestic violence against her. So they're like, okay, well, I mean, if we're looking for a subject, that's the subject. Let's look her up or suspect on a subject and I guess a subject to yeah, both. So they look up Catherine, the motor vehicle, because they're like, I bet you she owns a white fucking van. Could it be possible? Look it up. Nope. She owns a Mitsubishi Mirage, which is nothing like a car. It's a little tiny car. Nothing like the van. It's like a gray Mitsubishi Mirage, grayish blue. Damn it. So they go, fuck, okay. They end up going to Mesa to talk to her because they find her in Mesa. And when they pull up, there is her grayish blue Mitsubishi Mirage in the driveway. And she's at her co-worker's house, a woman named Bridget. And in her co-worker, there is a white Chrysler Town and Country van in the driveway. Yeah. That's parked outside. So they go, well, that looks a lot like the van we saw in the footage, I'd say. That's pretty good. That was parked in the driveway next to her, you know, okay, they found out the van belongs to her co-worker Bridget, this is Catherine's co-worker. So they bring them both. At first they get everybody out of the house, we're talking, this Bridget has a husband and kids and shit. And they had to pull him out of the house, too, and he's like, why are you bringing your crazy friend over here? This is why I tell you not to make friends with everybody at work. You know what I mean? Just because you work with somebody, you don't have to be fucking friends with them. This is why. So she, they bring Bridget and Catherine down to the station to have a little chit chat with them here. Looks like you have motive and you have the van, so. You have a car. What's going on here? So Catherine tells the investigators that both she and Bridget were at work all day. She said, I, you know, dropped my baby off at the sitters in the morning, went to work by eight, got off at five, picked up the baby, and went over Bridget's house and that's where you came and talked to me. Okay. There you go. And they said, okay, but then they tried to get more details and she said, I'm not answering any more questions about a lawyer. I told you where I was. If you have any more questions, then you can ask my lawyer, which honestly isn't that suspicious. That's if you said, if she's just said, I'm not talking at all, I want a lawyer. First of all, that's legally the smartest thing to do. But the fact that she said, I'll provide you with my alibi, I'll do that, but I'm not going to play your police games where you're going to ask me 15 times to say it backwards and forwards. I told you where I am. You don't believe me. You can talk to my lawyer, you know what I mean? So that's what she says. You can get answer any more questions so they talk to the coworker and they're like, okay, this lady doesn't have motivation to kill this guy. If she's a part of it, she's going to crack here. And this Bridget said, no, she was at work all day. So was I. We were both at work all day. My van was at work all day. It didn't get home till five o'clock with me. Yeah. Plenty of other white vans. If you don't know in Phoenix, half the cars are white, by the way, literally because of the sun. The other half are silver. The other half are silver. Yeah. There's like four idiots like me with black with a black car out there. So sweating all day, just not the air condition. Everyone's like, they're so hot. Oh, do you not have air conditioning in there? You have air conditioning. You're fine. It takes so long to get them cool. You just can't touch it out on the outside. That's the problem. You're going to hire a guy to open the door for you. Hey, everybody, just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you a little bit more about one of our favorites, Quince. Oh, quince.com, q-u-i-n-c-e.com. That's right. And it's at busy seasons. We're all going around. We're going everywhere in the summer. We're traveling your wardrobes. Your wardrobes get and beat up a little bit. Let's be realistic here. We're not going to do neither Jimmy or myself. We're not going to do total wardrobe overhauls here. No. This isn't like some sort of reality show. But you get a few things here to replace some stuff, and that's a word to them, replacing some worn out stuff with some high quality essentials at a very affordable price from Quince. Yeah. 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So she said, yeah, outside of going to pick up lunch, that's the only time my van was not at work and we were both at work the whole day, all of that. So Bridget's expressing complete shock that they're even asking about Catherine in this way. She's like, what are you talking about? We were at work all day and she's not going to kill anybody. She's like a new mother and shit. This is ridiculous. So they release both women from custody. They have no alibi backed up. They do seize the vehicle though to search if they get a court order to do that. Now then they talk to some people at their job to corroborate the story, whether she was there and they have some stories about Catherine. Check out what this dog steal and bitch said, okay, wow, well, one point she said she was quote, not very happy about Mike's efforts to establish paternity. One co-worker told the police that Catherine once questioned a bunch of co-workers on weather. Any of them had a newborn she could quote, borrow for the day for a DNA test. Yeah, let me borrow your kid, take them in, they'll just swab his cheek, not like they're going to finger his butt all and then I'll take them home. It's no big deal and then I don't have to deal with this guy anymore, which is fucking diabolical. I do that to somebody that's disturbing. A different co-worker said that Catherine and Bridget and another co-worker would say that it would be easier if Mike wasn't around at all. That would be so much easier. Just wish he wasn't even around. That would be so much easier. So they're like, who hasn't said that? That's right. Yeah, who hasn't said Jesus, I wish this bitch wouldn't fucking fall off the face of the ear. I wish this, I wish this fucking asshole guy wouldn't fall off the face of the ear. My lawyers heard me say a lot of awful things. Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, we've all said crazy shit like, but not at work. No, no, no, no, no, and the DNA thing, the DNA thing was wild. Yeah, that guy can't say that legally. He's pretty much the only guy you can tell that too. So they're like, let's take a closer look at that alibi. Why don't we? Because I don't trust this at all. Like there's nobody else that would kill this guy. Not like people are mad at him. He's got no enemies. He works in a bank for Christ's sake. He's not doing wild stuff. He doesn't do drugs or anything. So they look at security video from the building where they worked and they show the Bridget's van leaving about 1230 on the day of the murder, which they said that they went out for lunch and came right back. They did. Problem is it doesn't return till 3.19 p.m. Oh, that's a long lunch. That's a long. It's a three hour lunch. That's a luxurious lunch. Yeah. Your boss is not happy. No, that is like we went out for like a tasting menu or some shit. Hey, what did you put a paper machine you and your chair? How did you how did you stay out for so long? We went to Fogo to Chow and just really tied one on, man. I'm meat sick as it gets hammered the skewers just hammered it and Michael was murdered between two and two 30. So dead center there. There's time enough for them to get food after the murder and security key swipes indicated that Bridget left the building during the period the van was gone. However, the security camera footage revealed it was actually it was actually Catherine using her key card. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they had this all fucking planned. Yeah. So the security swipes indicate that. So the investigators also learned that during the time of the murder, because they do a trace on her cell phone and find out her locations, her cell phone was off during the time of the murder was going in and out of service of being off and on. So they said the tracking recorded that she left her workplace around 12 30 p.m. Mrs. Catherine, the day of the murder, traveled to an area nearby her residence. Then the phone drops from the cellular communications network around one 30 p.m. So she turns it off. Yeah. The phone doesn't reappear on the cellular network until approximately five minutes before video surveillance shows the white band returning to the parking lot at work at 3 19 p.m. And she reenters the building a minute later. Yeah. What's more? What's more obvious that or having your cell phone at the crime. Yeah. That's what I mean. It's just as bad. Right. She would have been better off just leaving it at fucking work and saying, well, I forgot it at work. Just leave it at work. The whole fuck. I forgot it at work. I didn't have it. If you turn it off and you normally don't, that doesn't look good. And who the fuck turns yourself off while they're driving around. You should be listening to small town murder in your stupid opinions and crime and sports. Jesus Christ. Especially. This is 2016. You could have been listening to crime and sports right now. You blew it, Catherine. You would have been laughing and all of this. You said, I'm not going to kill that guy. That's crazy. I'm not going to steal his dog. That's nuts. Worst I've done is headbutt somebody. I'm going home. Yeah. And she just learned that from one of our MMA fighters. That's all. She tried to borrow a baby James. That's for DNA. That's unbelievable. May I borrow your newborn is a very strange for a medical procedure is an odd thing. Very forward for a co-word. Very forward. Yeah. So I mean, this isn't like her sister. Like let me see a baby. That would have been one thing. So her work computer also shows that the she had searched for instructions on how to make her phone untraceable on her work computer. What a fucking dummy. Plus there is a indication, obviously they knew that she knew when he was taking the paternity test. Yeah. She knew when the appointment was. Of course. Yeah. Because she knew how far it was away. And the one of the county attorneys here said it could not have been just anyone. The person who murdered Michael executed Michael had to know he was coming home that afternoon. Because normally he wouldn't be home at two thirties at work. Right. Yeah. So that's the thing. This is you had to know. So the police say, okay, she is a she this she's a cold Russian. She's not flip. She won't give a shit. Yeah. She layered up already. So once you line her up, we can't talk to her anymore. So unless we have evidence to arrest her, then we got nothing. So they said, we need to flip this coworker because this coworker knows what happened. She took the van. So they confront Bridget. They confront Bridget. Listen, Bridget, you know, cough it up. They say, we know that she used your key card to create, you know, so it looked like she was here the whole time and you weren't and all of that. She used your vehicle as well. We're positive of that. So what the fuck happened? Bridget Bridget's not as cold blooded here. Bridget isn't exactly. She's not exactly like a Gambino family member. She gives it up pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. She said, well, we bonded over relationship problems because I've had bad relationships before and I know what she's going through. And she said, Catherine was determined not to allow Mike any access to his son at all. She said she'd do anything she had to to do that. So they said, will you do a sting operation for us? You call her and talk about this shit and bring it up and get her to talk, right? So there's blood in my town and yeah, hey, a newborn's playing with a fucking 32 automatic in the backseat of my town and country. You know anything about that? So she she said, okay, why not? I'll do it. So she said that she called up and said, listen, Catherine, the cops are trying to implicate me in this murder plot. They're saying I did it. I'm scared. They're going to arrest me. My family. This is crazy. But she was just like, she wouldn't say anything. Catherine wouldn't say shit. They said all all sync of it would say she would sit there and say they can't prove that if I did it or not do this. That's what she said. She they can't prove if I did it or not over and over. Well, they can't prove it. Well, they can't prove anything. And then finally she just hung up. She hung up on Bridget. So she apparently knew what was going on and it seems like, yeah. So they go to arrest Catherine at her home, but when they get there, they find her and the baby and ever all their shit are gone. She's on the run. She's on the run newborn on the run. I bet it was the baby's idea fucking shifty kid turn the page, turn the page. So the police attempt to trace her location using cell phone data, but it keeps dropping and disappearing. She's she's on. She's on. She's on. She's yeah. She uses it, which is crazy. And they found from her laptop that she had searched how to turn emergency emergency 911 tracking off on cell phones, which turned it off is how you do it. If it's off, it's off. It's not nothing's on. That's it. So she if you anybody out there who's wondering anyway, so later she asks a coworker if she could go to his house and stay with him because you know, she's on the run from the cops on a murder beef. I'm wanted from murder. Can I sleep next to you? This is a coworker. He works at a mortgage company. Right. You know what? I don't know. I have some closings this week. So I mean, if you work at a mortgage company, you like a quiet life, you know what I mean? That's not a crazy wild style life. You go to work your hours, you know, when your hours are, you know, when you'll be home, like it's pretty boring fella. Pretty boring. He's like, hmm, do I let a crazy woman with a newborn on a run from a murder beef stay at my house? Or do I? No, I'm going to call the police and he called the police and was like, get this dog stealing twat out of my house, please. And they find in the quote, Northwest outskirts of Phoenix. So basically your neighborhood they find her in. Do we have an address? I don't have an address on this. I want the 100 block street, absolutely looked for it because I'm like, I wonder how close to Jimmy says, I got to look the guy that used to live in my house used to let strippers stay in the fucking place. So I wouldn't be surprised if it might be him. Is he a mortgage guy? I don't know. So she the cops rush there and they take her into custody, you know, and they also find her car there. Now in her car, which is hilarious, she has two stolen license plates hidden in her car. So they trace where these license plates came from. They're both within walking to two different license plates because it's Arizona. So you don't have to have a front back. It's just two back. It's the rear. Yeah. This is to keep, you know, keep on the move. They're both from houses within walking distance of her house. This lazy asshole, she went for a walk and just stole her neighbor's plate. She couldn't even go to a Walmart parking lot and just go snag a fuck. She walked to her neighbor's place on my next door neighbor. I'll get that one in this one lazy, lazy. Not that I hate. I don't care if you walking distance. I could forgive being a murderous asshole. This is just lazy though. I can't forgive slop like this. This is terrible. How do you do that? Even walking distance could be a couple of blocks. You're going to walk a couple of blocks carrying somebody's life and a screwdriver and a goddamn screwdriver. That's a Phillips head in one hand and somebody's plate in the other. Oh my God. They also found a large plastic bin packed with clothes as well. Like she's on the run. In there they find a hoodie, by the way, with gunpowder residue. Sure. Also another hoodie with gunpowder residue as well in there must have rubbed up against the one. Yeah. And they said that it did come back and show that there was significant residue in the minivan as well. Oh. Those gunshot residue in the minivan in Bridget's van, they found a dark. That's where they found the second hooded sweatshirt. She took it off and threw it in the van and then she had another one. She must have put on, but still got residue on it because her hand was on her hands. So they found a dark colored hooded sweatshirt in Bridget's van. They found that. They also, as search of the computer, revealed that she had received a report from a private investigator talking about her address, his address, and then she had recently searched for the address on Google Maps again. Make sure she knew where to get there. Now, by the way, you might be curious. If anybody out there has ever seen a morey episode, you're probably curious, oh, is he the father? Was he or wasn't he? Mike, you are the father is the father. She's just a really bad person. She knew that. She's just terrible. That's why she wanted to borrow a baby. That's just. Yeah, that's discovered. Let's tell now we have a definite proof here. And Mike's father said, quote, that he never saw his son before he was murdered and the paternity results later confirmed it was the father. So he never got to see it. He never saw his baby. That's fucking horrible. So may of 2019 trial time, yeah, she's got in plea, right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, she's saying she didn't do this, even though there she is. There she is. Here she is on the footage and the card. I mean, it adds up there. You don't have to be a genius to fucking put this one together, especially gunshot residue on her hoodie. It's not good. So may of 2019 is the trial. Did they find the murder weapon? I know. I don't think they ever did. No. She must have ditched it somewhere. Yeah. She got rid of it. Good, I guess. So the during the trial here, they they bring one of her coworkers and a guy named Jared Cook. And he remembers Catherine joking about how much easier life would be without Mike around. But she did it all the time. It wasn't just like one off-handed comment. It was like her shtick, you know, they take my wife, please kill my husband, please kill my baby daddy, please. I bring my baby daddy everywhere, but he finds his way home. Like he's doing Henny Youngman bets and shit. She's such a dick. She's going to get child support for Christ's sake. I mean, he was happy to pay. He was happy to pay it. She could have got a weekend to herself once in a while and a fucking some child support, but she had to do this shit. This coworker said that these comments made him uncomfortable because it seemed like she was pretty serious most of the time. She wasn't saying it joking around like, you know what I mean, not too bad. She was like, you know, it would be easier if he wasn't around. Do you got a free afternoon for me? Then she'd put her her finger on her chin and go, hmm. So when someone's doing that, you think they're pretty serious. Yeah. He recalled Catherine leaving work for a couple hours on December 16th. He said, I don't know where she went, but when she returned, she was very quiet, he said at that point. Real quiet. She came back all solemn here. At least she didn't come in like, fuck yeah, everybody. What's up? High five for you. High five to the lunchroom. That a, having a great afternoon. Boom. Like crotch, crotch shopping and shit. What's up, bitches? Who's getting the mortgage today? Wow. So I'm throwing them out the door blowing. Oh, man. Come on, baby. We're blowing it out. The interest rates are so, so low like my shirts cut, baby. Look at them titties. Wow. Crazy. We're crazy down here. We're husband killing crazy. So not husband boyfriend. So in the closing arguments here, the state, the prosecutor highlights the motivation. And everybody says he wants them dead, said the figure entering the garage door, carrying papers in one hand, right? And the prosecutor says that she wanted to say something, wave the papers in his face right before she executed him. That's why there's 11 seconds because it doesn't take 11 seconds to fire three shots. She said something to him and then buck the shots, we think, but the sister didn't hear anything though. So who knows? The prosecutor then reminded the jury that those papers or some papers related to the paternity dispute were found in her vehicle. So we think that's what it was. She's like, it's worth this pop pop. It was said between the lag of the Bluetooth to the phone. Yes. There's a lag there. Yeah. Wow. She could have just said, what about this? Motherfucker? Who knows what she said? And he said, holy shit, pop pop pop pop pop pop. So the verdict comes back here and not much of a, of a, of a, what are you going to do? Yeah. You know, yeah, not too much fucking really drama here just put through a better word. Because I remember drama, it's drama and a lot of drama. So verdict comes in guilty. Yeah. Of all charges here, first degree murder during sentencing. They give her a human may fuck off life without parole. Oh my forever done. Is that right? I think she's 33 at this point. Life without. Shit. Yeah. She's the youngest there probably. She's very young. And not only that, this baby's going to end up having it worse than she did. Yeah. Dad's dead when she's young, just like when he's young, just like her and mom is now might as well be dead. Might as well be dead. Yeah. Life without parole. We're going to take them there every week. Oh, let's go talk to mom. She's going to read to you. You just gave your kid the same life you've had. Same exact life. Good job. Dick had me. Well, he had a father that was interested in him and wanted to be a part of his life. The kids would be fine. So that's sad. Life without parole. The reaction, the family, Mike's family releases a statement to the press and says on behalf of Mike's friends and family, we would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to everyone involved in achieving this verdict from the first officer on site that continuously talked to Mike, even though it was clear he was gone through the ranks. That was weird too. He's like, all right, stay with me, buddy. The guy's fucking dead. It's deader than a doornail and the fucking thing like, why do you keep talking to him? He's very dead. Not like hanging on. He's obviously dead. He's been dead for a little bit. He's been dead. Yeah. That's what it is. Through the ranks to Detective Denison, deputy county attorneys, David all in Sean gensvold, we thank you. The behind the scenes effort work and support given by and goes into paralegals, paralegal Christine Forbes and victim advocate, Sonia Campos were incredibly valuable to our family. I really want to thank the fucking stenographer. I want to thank these. Yeah. She did a great job. But if I ever want to look at the transcripts, they're all there. The team spent countless hours away from their families. So ours would finally attain peace also to the jurors who were tasked with making the painful decision of an acting justice for Mike. He took every legal precaution to protect himself and he was trying to do the same for his child. Domestic violence knows no boundaries. Mike's attempts to protect the child. He never met escalated her aggression towards him, ultimately leading to his death. Wow. She tries to appeal in 2020 saying the prosecutor failed to prove that the paternity case papers found in her vehicle are the same ones carried by the person on video walking to the garage. That's what they said. They were like, it really doesn't fucking matter. There was kind of harmless error if there was any errors, how they put it. And then they, they talked about she tried to have, she tried to flee basically the flight instruction. Yeah. And she said that there was no evidence supporting a flight instruction and just like license plate collector. All right. A license plate collector with all of her cars and her all of her clothes in the back of her car. Yeah, that's normal. When you have a newborn, you just take all your shit and stay at a coworkers house for a while. So they said, yeah, that's tough shit. They said the evidence supporting the inference included her internet search for how to avoid cell phone detection. That shows she's fleeing appearance and disappearance of her phone from the network as she traveled toward the outskirts of Phoenix and stolen license plates. Keep on keeping on, bitch, and they send her back. By the way, you dog stealing asshole. Don't ever do that. Now the baby, you might be wondering, well, where's the fucking baby? The baby, which is being raised by Michael's parents, which is great because they raise nice people and it's much more favorable to being raised by Catherine or, you know, wolves basically because that's the same thing as Catherine. The other option. Yeah. The other option. Like in Ohio or I guess so, yeah, in the end, wherever, Ohio or Bennett, Ohio. So yeah, the family's raising him and like I said, they raised, seems like four nice kids. So hopefully they're old, right? They're older people now, older people. So maybe hopefully that the other kids help out. I assume his brothers and sisters would probably help out. They seem like they're very family oriented people. So they're very nice. Catherine's there forever. And there is Maricopa, Arizona. Wow. Before we end, I have to say there's articles that I was reading about the number of unsolved homicides in the Phoenix area is it's it's it's staggeringly higher than any other major urban place for some fucking reason. And a lot of it, and I'm going to, this is a weird person, the people to blame. First of all, you blame the police who don't do their fucking job and solve this shit. But second of all, every other fucking place I look, you know, hard it is to find a murder in Arizona that has enough information. The press just doesn't look into things or ask questions, whatever the police department releases a thing of we arrested this guy. This guy's convict. They just post that. They just fucking they print that and that's what they have. There's no like investigative journalism. Nothing. If the Phoenix new times doesn't do an article on this person's dad and nobody's fucking looked into it, then they'll look into it because then they get pressure. Otherwise, there's just rotting cases, remember when they found how many fucking cases of child abuse or backlog that they didn't fucking investigate. What is happening out there? Wild West, man. It's a wild west. Wild West, they didn't fucking there's plenty of taxes out there. So a while less. My boss, James, they got to go outside to do it. Yeah, put your suit code on is that we need to do homicide detectives are allowed to dress casual now. I don't care. It's a shorts and t-shirt on and get out there. Just like those bloodscapers, whatever they got, the hat with the fucking cloth down the back of their neck. Do that shit. I don't know what to tell you, but something else you should do and everyone should do this as you should get on whatever app you're hearing this on and you should give us five stars and say something nice about the show. It helps us tremendously. So thank you for anybody who's done that and thank you in the future. If you were planning on doing that, head over to shop and give me murder.com and check out all the stuff there. Merchandise tickets for live shows. We are going to be a specifically Minneapolis, September 20th will be our biggest show ever if you sell it out. So get on in there and sell that out, everybody. Let's have a ball. Milwaukee the next night. That's almost sold out though. So get those right now. If you want them, shut up and give me murder.com patreon.com slash crime and sports, all your bonus material, everything like that $5 a month or above gets you all the back catalog of bonus stuff, hundreds of episodes, new stuff every other week, one crime and sports. Well, it's all about murder. You get it all this week. For crime and sports, we're going to talk about industrial disasters and accidents, nothing to do with sports, just crazy stories. Then for small town murder, we're going to talk about somebody who wanted to eat people and see a New York City cop that wanted to eat people and we don't know. Is that a crime? What's going on? How serious was he? You know, we don't know. We'll talk about it and find out patreon.com slash crime and sports and you get a shout out at the end of the show, follow us on social media at small town murder on Instagram at small town pot on Facebook at murder small on Twitter. Hang out with us. Do all that. Know when the shit's coming out. Listen to crime and sports. Listen to your stupid opinions. You want to follow us on social media shop and give me murder.com. It's got the links. Do that. Keep coming back. Until next week, everybody. It's been our pleasure. If you like small town murder, you can listen early and add free now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wonderie.com/survey. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence that she left up there. In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lovers quarrel and root to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask. Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. In his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia or a corrupt police coverup. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a coverup to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion, and after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wonderie Plus. Join Wonderie Plus in the Wonderie app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
