Pod Insights Criminal Amok About this episode While investigating a murder, a Polish detective discovered an unusual clue – a novel that contained an odd number of similarities to the real-life crime.
David Grann is the author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon, and his article about Krystian Bala is contained in his collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.
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0:26 Speaker 01 Stonefire Naan is inspired by ancient traditions, baked on stone at blazing high heat. But it's perfect for your new traditions, too. I love putting out Stonefire Naan with dips, for board game night.
0:36 Speaker 02 Or with cinnamon and sugar, for my book club gals.
0:38 Speaker 03 We enjoy Stonefire Naan. Before the ritual summoning of the Nameless Ones. We invoke the Nameless Ones. They shall not be named.
0:46 Speaker 04 And we do Stonefire pizza parties for the kids. I'm really scared right now.
0:52 Speaker 01 Stonefire: From Our Tradition to Yours. Together, we Naan.
0:58 Speaker 05 This episode includes graphic descriptions of violence. Please use discretion.
1:05 Speaker 06 One day in southwest Poland, there were a couple fishermen. And one of them noticed something floating. And then the other came over, and they realized it was a body. And there was a noose around the neck. And the hands had obviously been tied behind their back. There was no doubt that the figure had been murdered.
1:28 Speaker 05 This is author David Graham. The men who found the body called the police, who came to remove it.
1:35 Speaker 06 It was decayed. And it was evidenced, once the pathologists looked at the person, that they also had lacked food in them. So somebody had clearly deprived the person of nourishment. Some indications that they had been beaten and tortured. And there was something very peculiar, the way the noose was around the neck, and the hands were tied behind the back. At one point, the rope had been cut in the middle. But it was clear that the person had been held with the hands connected to the noose in the back, almost like a backward cradle. So a very, very painful position. So that if the figure had moved at all or struggled to move, they would have been choking themselves.
2:19 Speaker 06 It was clear that the body had been through a lot. It suggested almost an anger. It was almost, it did not seem like some detached murder.
2:32 Speaker 05 The man seemed to be in his 30s, was tall and had long dark hair and blue eyes. He matched the description of someone who'd been reported missing, a man named Darius Anishevsky. Darius was from the city of Rotzvav, 60 miles away, and had last been seen about four weeks earlier, on November 13, 2000.
2:56 Speaker 06 He was a young businessman in his 30s. He worked in advertising. He was married. He was known as kind of a happy, cheerful. He played guitar, got along with people, no history of violence, very personable.
3:13 Speaker 05 Darius's wife didn't want to see the body, so the police brought in his mother, and she confirmed it was him. Where had he last been seen?
3:23 Speaker 06 He had last been seen leaving his business. He had left in the afternoon around 4:00 PM, if my memory is correct, and then was seen leaving the building. He didn't take his car, which was unusual for him, because he normally, when he was going to run an errand or do something, he always took his car. He did not take his car with him, and that was the last time he was seen.
3:45 Speaker 05 What did his family think? I mean, when they reported him missing, what did they think had happened?
3:53 Speaker 06 They really didn't know. His mother had worked at the business, and the only clue was the mother had reported that somebody had called the office in kind of a demanding state, asking to speak with Darius for business, and she had then given him her son's cellphone. And then later, when Darius came back into the office, the mother asked him, you know, "Did you speak with this client, this customer who called?" He said, "Yes, and I'm going to see him this afternoon." And that was really the only kind of clue that possibly he had gone to meet this person and then disappeared. But nobody knew who that person was. There was no sense of motive.
4:38 Speaker 05 The police were able to trace the phone call to a payphone not far from Darius's office.
4:46 Speaker 05 But they were unable to find out who the caller was.
4:50 Speaker 06 You know, the authorities kind of considered almost the perfect crime because there were so few clues. And eventually, out of frustration and being stymied, the case was closed and it gradually became the coldest of cold cases.
5:08 Speaker 05 About three years went by. The case was eventually passed along to a 38-year-old detective named Yossik Robleski.
5:17 Speaker 06 He was a really interesting figure. He had had many professions. He had been a mechanic. He had been a municipal clerk. But then after the fall of communism, he joins the police department and he kind of finally found his calling. He was a large man, but he was very unthreatening. And people said they trusted him because they didn't think there was anything to fear him. And he was able to solve many cases. Interestingly enough, his first name, Yossik, translates to Jack and his last name, Robleski. The first part is Sparrow, so people called him Jack Sparrow after the Hollywood movie, Pirates of the Caribbean. And he used to like to say, rather than being a sparrow, he says, "I'm an eagle."
6:03 Speaker 05 Did he have any suspicions about the case?
6:06 Speaker 06 When he first began looking at the case, he had very little, but he kept reviewing the file over and over. He put it away, he picked it back up. One thing that occurred to him, he had one suspicion, which was when he was looking at the way the body had been abused, the way this kind of cat's cradle, the way the body had been positioned, made him think that there was some kind of personal animus that drove the perpetrator or perpetrators. He did notice one clue, or it was the absence of a clue, which was Yossik had a cellphone, but there was no report of a cellphone in the file. So he began to say, can we trace, can we figure out what had happened to that cellphone?
6:51 Speaker 06 At that time, in Poland, telecommunications and that kind of technical investigation was still pretty primitive. But he was able to get a serial number of the cellphone from the widow. And low and behold, that cellphone turned out to have been sold on an internet auction just days after the murder.
7:14 Speaker 06 And not only that, he was able to tell from the that the person who had sold this was somebody who had identified themselves as Chris B.
7:25 Speaker 05 Chris B. turned out to be a man named Christian Balla.
7:30 Speaker 06 And Yassik is aware that it's a very tenuous lead. I mean, in the sense that he doesn't know how this Christian Balla obtained the phone. He may have found it on the street. He may have bought it at a pawn shop, but it is the only lead he has. And he has to, he has to figure out, who is this person? He realizes that Christian Balla is out of the country, so he has to be a little bit careful about the way he investigates. He doesn't want to tip anyone off. And he begins to read about him and try to learn about him. One of the things he does is he learns that he was this kind of very young, bright philosopher student, had been the equivalent of his valedictorian in high school, had gotten a scholarship
8:12 Speaker 06 to get a PhD in philosophy, which he eventually dropped out of in order to work. He had been married, although was now divorced. He had a child. And he had also written a novel called Amok.
8:28 Speaker 05 Yassik Robleski learned that Christian Balla had published Amok in 2003, several years after Darius had been murdered. And not long before Yassik began investigating the case, Yassik decided to get a copy.
8:45 Speaker 06 And he begins to read through the novel, at first almost kind of casually, almost out of curiosity, is who is this person? How can I learn about him? And the novel's a bit of a shock to him. I mean, Yassik is a very kind of straightforward person, you know, very Catholic, very strong kind of view of good and evil. And the book is very blasphemous. It's very creepy. It's very sadistic. It's pornographic. It's very, very postmodern. And this character who happens to be also identified as Chris, the same Chris, like the way the phone had been auctioned off, the narrator's name is Chris, who goes on
9:23 Speaker 06 this grisly kind of rampage in the novel, indulging in sex and eventually ends up murdering the girl, his girlfriend in the novel. And so as Yassik is reading the novel. He suddenly notices certain details that catch his attention. One of those details is that the victim of this murder, the girlfriend, had a noose around her neck. So he pauses on that. And then he finds one other detail that really strikes him. And that is that the murderer, Chris, in the novel, had also not only put a noose around his girlfriend, had also stabbed the girlfriend and then sold the knife used
10:07 Speaker 06 in the killing in the novel on an internet auction site.
10:13 Speaker 05 The fact that Darius's cellphone had been sold on an internet auction site had never been made public. Detective Yasek Robleski decided to make copies of Christian Balla's novel and hand them out to his detective squad. He assigned everyone chapters and asked them to look for more similarities between the plot and Darius Janoshevsky's murder. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
10:54 Speaker 05 David Grann says Christian Balla's novel didn't get very much attention when it was first published. And out of the people who did read it, some who knew Christian were surprised.
11:06 Speaker 06 Because Christian was very charming, very bright. And so like his philosophy teachers and philosophy friends were quite shocked by it. But it is important to understand that many people found Christian mesmerizing. I mean, he, there was something very alluring about him. He was brooding, smoking cigarettes. He kind of created this character. And so even in his own life, he would kind of tell these stories that you never were quite sure what was true or what was false. He would tell people he'd gone on some adventure, had some romance, or he was at a brothel where he had debased himself. And if people would repeat it several times, he would say, ah, it's become true. It was always in Christian, both in the novel, but also in his own life, this play between
11:49 Speaker 06 what is real and what is false, what is true and what is a fiction. And then the character in the novel, was that Christian or was that just a character he created in a novel?
12:00 Speaker 05 David says once, after the book came out, an interviewer asked Christian, "Some authors write only to release their Mr. Hyde, the dark side of their psyche. Do you agree?" Christian responded, "I know what you were driving at, but I won't comment. It might turn out that Christian Balla is the creation of Chris, not the other way around." Christian had also posted excerpts of the book on his blog and would respond to reader comments under the name Chris. But David says Christian would dismiss suggestions that parts of the book had been drawn from his own life.
12:39 Speaker 06 He said at one point, somebody asked him after the novel came out, you know, a friend said, "You know, this novel makes you look really bad." And he said, "Well, it's fiction." And she said, "Yeah, but for you to have those thoughts, you must have had those thoughts." He said, "Well, anybody would think that is a fool."
12:59 Speaker 05 Still, as the detectives combed through the novel, they found more similarities.
13:05 Speaker 06 And they create like, almost like a checkboard. I mean, where they're like, "Okay, this is true. This happened in Christian Balla's real life. This didn't happen. We could confirm this." I mean, there's a scene of a theft in the novel. It turned out that theft had really happened in real life.
13:20 Speaker 05 In the novel, the narrator Chris gets drunk one night with a friend, and they decide to steal a figurine of Saint Anthony from a church. Yossik Roblesky discovered that Christian Balla had once been caught by the police doing the exact same thing. The friend he'd been with had told a judge they stole the statue because, quote, "We wanted a third person to drink with." And there were other things. Christian had been left by his wife. So had the narrator Chris. Both men loved philosophy, both drank a lot, and both owned businesses that had gone bankrupt.
13:59 Speaker 06 One thing that is also present that is of suspicion, at least to Yasek, was that Chris, the narrator, not only confesses to murdering his girlfriend in the novel, the narrator in this novel gets away with it. There's no repercussions, no stain from the murder, no penance, no punishment, no redemption, just free. But he hints in several places that there was another murder of a man who had done something to him. He never speaks about what it is, but it's kind of moved throughout.
14:35 Speaker 05 Chris alludes to the other murder in a conversation with a girlfriend. After she questions the truth of his stories, he asked her if she didn't believe that he, quote, "killed a man who behaved inappropriately toward me 10 years ago." He adds, quote, "Everyone considers it a fable. Maybe it's better that way. Sometimes, I don't believe it myself."
14:58 Speaker 06 So was there an actual other murder of a man that is being hinted at in the novel? And could that have been Darius?
15:13 Speaker 05 We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.
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17:13 Speaker 05 I think I might try their chai. Maybe mix with a scoop of their coffee flavor. Embrace your salty side. Go to kachava.com and use code CRIMINAL for 15% off your first order. That's kachava, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com, code CRIMINAL. To try to better understand Christian Balla, the police reached out to a criminal psychologist. She examined the character of Chris in the novel and wrote that the character showed features of psychopathic behavior. Quote, "He is testing the limits to see if he can actually carry out his sadistic fantasies."
17:54 Speaker 05 She agreed that there were similarities between Chris and Christian, but that, quote, "Basing an analysis of the author on his fictional character would be a gross violation."
18:06 Speaker 06 Even Yasek would acknowledge that the case was extraordinarily thin. I mean, all they had at that point, well, they had the cellphone. They knew that Christian Balla had somehow obtained Darius's cellphone within a few days and sold it on an internet site. And that's kind of, you know, all they have at that point. So they have a very thin case. And on top of that, you know, even people around the department are looking at Yasek like, "I think you've lost your mind. Like, you're looking at a novel as a roadmap for a crime." So Yasek knows he needs more evidence, but he's also a bit hamstrung because at that
18:46 Speaker 06 point, Christian Balla is out of the country and with extradition treaties, he couldn't just call him back to question him.
18:54 Speaker 05 Yasek also didn't want word of the investigation to reach Christian. Then he might never come home.
19:00 Speaker 06 And so he couldn't interview his closest family members or his ex-wife. So he's somewhat limited, learning about him through these different sources. He still has no sense of a motive for the crime.
19:14 Speaker 05 Yasek decided to look through the profile for Chris B. on the internet auction site that Christian had used to sell Darius's cellphone.
19:23 Speaker 06 And they looked and realized that very shortly, like a week before, 10 days before, Darius was murdered, that Crispy, Christian Bala, had been looking for a police manual on criminal hangings. And now, again, it's suggestive, but once again, they're also stymied because there's no evidence that the book itself was actually purchased. They don't know if that book was ever found. But at least in Yasek's mind, again, it's suggestive to him. Why is Crispy looking at a police manual, detective manual, about criminal hangings 10 days before a noose is found around Darius's neck?
20:09 Speaker 06 And then they learn that Christian is going to return to Poland, that he's coming back to visit. And so they decide they're going to bring him in for questioning.
20:24 Speaker 05 Christian Bala returned to Poland about two years after Yasek had begun investigating the case. While he was out of the country, he'd been traveling, writing for magazines and teaching English and scuba lessons.
20:39 Speaker 05 Officers arrested Christian on September 5, 2005, as he was coming out of a drugstore in a town near Rotsuaw. Christian later wrote an account of what he says happened.
20:53 Speaker 05 He said that three men attacked him, forced him into the back of a car, and put a black plastic bag over his head. He wrote that the men beat him and then called someone on the phone. He said he overheard one of the men say, "He's still alive." And, "What about the money? Will we get it today?"
21:12 Speaker 05 He said that the men drove for a while and then stopped. And one of them said, "We can dig a hole here and bury him." Christian wrote, "I thought that this was going to be the last moment of my life." But then he said the men started driving again and took him to a building where he was stripped and beaten some more. When they started to interrogate him, he realized he was in police custody. Yasek said that none of this happened. He said they did arrest Christian outside of a drugstore, but without violence. Quote, "We used standard procedures and followed the letter of the law." What do you think about that?
21:55 Speaker 05 You know, do you have any suspicion that, that Christian was, in some ways, threatened, tortured by Yasek and his detectives? Or do you think that that was another one of Christian's tales?
22:11 Speaker 06 When you read the tale, I'll just say this, it strains credulity. I wasn't there, I wasn't a witness. I do know, and then that it was investigated for a long period of time by authorities and they found no evidence of it. And there's no evidence ever in Yasek's career of doing anything like this. But it is the one time where suddenly you have Yasek saying, "This story, this story, this thing that Christian Bala is saying this time is definitely a fiction. He is making this story up."
22:49 Speaker 05 According to Yasek, he questioned Christian in his office, starting with simple questions about his work and relationships. When Yasek brought up Darius Yanishevsky's murder, Christian said he didn't know him.
23:03 Speaker 06 Iasik doesn't yet reveal the one kind of trump card he has, which isn't that much, but he knows about the phone, that Christian Bala had somehow sold the murder victim's phone on this internet auction site. And so he starts to ask him some questions and Christian about Amok, about his life, and Christian just kind of denies things. And then he asks him about the phone. And that's the one time where Christian was a bit evasive. He said, I don't remember where I got that phone. Now, it was a while back, this is many years before. And he said, well, then later, he said, well, maybe I got it at a pawn shop. And so by the end, there really isn't any evidence to hold him or
23:47 Speaker 06 to continue to hold him under Polish law. He does agree to submit to a polygraph test. The polygrapher thought that at certain points during the polygraph that a Christian who was a scuba diver might have been using certain breathing exercises. It's hard to say. I mean, these polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and the results were inconclusive in any case. And in the end, the case seems to be unraveling, and Christian is let go.
24:19 Speaker 05 The police were able to charge Christian with selling stolen property, the cellphone. He had to hand over his passport and stay in the country.
24:29 Speaker 06 And he begins to tell people that he is being investigated and persecuted because of a novel he wrote. And it creates a sensation. I mean, the human rights organizations start writing letters to the Polish Ministry of Justice, you know, deluding them with letters, saying, how can you be doing this? You're violating his rights.
24:47 Speaker 05 One of Christian's girlfriends organized a committee to bring attention to his case.
24:53 Speaker 05 In an online post, she wrote, "During his brutal interrogation, they referenced his book numerous times, citing it as proof of his guilt."
25:04 Speaker 06 And let's, you know, I think anyone hearing that someone's being investigated for a novel they wrote would say, "This is outrageous." And Yasek always says, "I need corroborating evidence." The novel is a roadmap to a crime. It is giving us some clues and insights. He knows it is not evidence. He cannot present the novel as a piece of evidence in court. He's trying to use the novel, though, to try to kind of crack the case. So Yasek then begins to now, two things happen that are very important evidentiary-wise. One of the things they try to do is they keep trying to figure out from the payphone. In those Polish payphones at the time, you would kind of insert this card, and that would allow you to make the calls. And with that card, you could then insert it into other payphones
25:49 Speaker 06 and use it again. They're able to finally crack that and figure out what the card was that was being used. And when they figure out and crack this card that was being used, they realize the same caller had placed a lot of other calls. Who were those calls to? There were two. Christian Bala's family members and friends and colleagues, everybody in Christian Bala's circle. So that was the first really strong piece of evidence, not suggestive, that Christian Bala was the one from the payphone who had placed the call to the advertising firm that lured Darius out. The next question, though, was, "What is the connection?"
26:36 Speaker 05 The detective started to question Christian's family and friends. David says many people had nice things to say about Christian. A past employer from a teaching job called him "easy to get along with" and said, "With no reservation, I highly recommend Christian Bala for any teaching position with children."
26:57 Speaker 05 But a babysitter who worked for him and his then-wife said he drank a lot. And he often gave his wife a hard time and accused her of sleeping around. Christian and his wife separated in 2000.
27:11 Speaker 06 One person reported that at one point, he had been in a bar and he had seen his ex-wife flirting with a bartender. This was just a few weeks after Darius was killed. And he was screaming drunkenly that "nobody can talk to my wife that way."
27:30 Speaker 05 Witnesses said Christian shouted, quote, "I've already taken out a guy like you with a rope." Five people held Christian back from attacking the man. Then, the detective spoke to a friend of Christian's ex-wife.
27:46 Speaker 06 Who says that one time at a bar, she had seen Christian Balla's ex-wife talking to somebody. And it was none other than Darius Yanacheski.
28:05 Speaker 05 We'll be right back.
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30:01 Speaker 05 Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. Yassik Roblesky had been trying to get Christian Balla's ex-wife to agree to an interview.
30:27 Speaker 06 So she had been very resistant to be interviewed for a long time. And I don't know the reason why. Perhaps it was—I mean, I only know what Yassik wondered. Could it be because she was afraid of Christian? Was it because she thought he was innocent? Was it because they had a child together and she didn't want to incriminate him? But eventually, Yassik goes to speak with her. And she had never read the novel Amok, but then he shows her portions of the novel and these very, very sadistic descriptions of a woman in the novel who very much mirrors her, the ex-wife. And at that point, she's willing to talk.
31:08 Speaker 06 And she says, for the first time, that she had met Darius Yanachesky in a bar.
31:15 Speaker 05 This was in the summer of 2000, the same year she and Christian separated.
31:20 Speaker 06 They had later gone on a date. They had gone to a motel. She says they didn't have sex because she learned that he had been married. But they were together and they had gone on this date. He had left. They never went on a date again, and that was it. But that Christian had showed up not long after at her apartment or at her home, broke down the door, hit her screaming, says, "I know you had an affair. I know who would. I know the hotel. I know the room."
31:52 Speaker 05 Christian's ex-wife said he also mentioned that he had visited Darius's office and described it to me. After this, Yasek decided he had enough evidence to charge Christian Balla with murder.
32:08 Speaker 06 And so Christian Balla is indicted. It creates a sensation. He continues to claim that he is being persecuted for a novel he wrote, that he compares himself to Salman Rushdie, that he is being crucified for his literature.
32:25 Speaker 05 It was reported that at one point before the trial, Christian confessed to prosecutors that he had killed Darius. But he immediately retracted the confession and had a, quote, "fainting spell." The trial began on February 22, 2007. On the first day, the courtroom was packed. One Polish newspaper wrote, "Killing doesn't make much of an impression in the 21st century, but allegedly killing and then writing about it in a novel is front-page news." What did the prosecution argue? That it was kind of cut, it was a cut-and-dry case?
33:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, I mean, they presented it as, you know, if you take away the novel and you, you know, this was a man allegedly who, out of a fit of rage, kidnapped or abducted somebody who had gone on a date with his ex-wife and then murdered him in this very barbaric way.
33:27 Speaker 05 Christian was found guilty of planning and directing the murder. There wasn't enough evidence to prove that he'd committed the murder himself. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He later appealed.
33:40 Speaker 06 He did get a new trial, but he was found guilty in a second trial as well. And he's still in jail to this day.
33:48 Speaker 05 In 2007, David Graham traveled to Poland to meet Christian.
33:53 Speaker 06 At a really tough prison, kind of post-communist prison. There'd been a riot. It was very harsh conditions. And I remember going into the visitors' room. I was surprised I was able to get in and able to see him. And as I walked in, it was this very dismal place. And I see someone kind of standing in the visitors' room, wearing a sweatshirt that said, I think it's the University of Wisconsin on it, and had dark hair. And the hair was kind of standing up as if the person had kind of been rubbing their hand through it. Very handsome, but they looked like a grad student. And I realized I was looking at Christian Balla.
34:31 Speaker 05 David remembers Christian shook his hand. And as they walked to a table to sit down, Christian said, "This whole thing is farce, like something out of Kafka." While they were talking, Christian would occasionally point to David's notebook and say things like, "Put this down," or "This is important."
34:52 Speaker 06 When we spoke about the novel, he was very excited when we talked about different theories and truths. And even when I asked him about some of the very specific evidence about the cellphone, how did he get hold of that? And some of the other, like, why on the public telephone? Did it look like he had made the call to the advertising firm? On those points, he was a bit evasive and kind of conspiratorial. And I didn't feel like I ever got clear answers. But he maintained his innocence. And he kept saying, "I'm the author. I'm the author. I know what I meant. I know what I meant."
35:29 Speaker 05 David says at one point during their conversation, Christian accidentally said "me" instead of "him" when talking about the narrator, Chris.
35:39 Speaker 05 Do you think that there's any part of him that wrote the book because he wanted someone to figure out the puzzle?
35:46 Speaker 06 Well, one of the questions that always kind of haunted this case was, and for me, as someone who spent many months researching it, was, you know, why did you write the novel? And had the novel not been written, I don't think Yasek ever would have had his suspicions raised to the extent that he did. And it did give him, to some extent, a roadmap. You know, the character in the novel is somebody who is dealing with guilt and a guilty conscience. I mean, that is kind of one of the themes of the novel. So was the author dealing with a guilty conscience? Was this his confession?
36:23 Speaker 05 After Christian was arrested, his book started selling out in bookstores all over Poland.
36:30 Speaker 06 He thought, and he still thinks, or at least when I met him, that his novel, while it was obscured at the time, would one day be recognized for the masterpiece it was. And then, I'll never forget this, at one point, he said to me, he said, "I'm working on a second book." And he said, "But the investigators had confiscated it, and so he hadn't been able to finish it yet." And at one point, he leaned towards me as if to make sure that the guards couldn't hear him, and he said, "It's going to be even more shocking."
37:15 Speaker 05 David Grant is the author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon. And his article about Christian Balla is contained in his collection, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajikko, Lily Clark, Lena Silison, and Megan Kinnane. Our engineer is Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter.
37:58 Speaker 05 We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, and you'll be able to talk directly with us and other Criminal listeners. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
39:00 Speaker 01 Stonefire Non is inspired by ancient traditions, baked on stone at blazing high heat, but it's perfect for your new traditions, too. I love putting out Stonefire Non with dips for board game night.
39:11 Speaker 02 Or with cinnamon and sugar for my book club gals.
39:13 Speaker 03 We enjoy Stonefire Non before the ritual summoning of the Nameless Ones. We invoke the Nameless Ones. They shall not be named.
39:20 Speaker 04 And we do stonefire pizza parties for the kids. I'm really scared right now.
39:26 Speaker 01 Stonefire, from our tradition to yours. Together, we on.
Previous Gone Next An American Original Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated