544 - Everything Is Worth It

This week, Georgia covers Paul Fronczak’s Triple Disappearance and Karen tells the story of the 1990 Michigan Wedding Sting. For our sources, please visit https://www.myfavoritemurder.com/episodes. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3UFCn1g. Head to social media to share your favorite moments from this episode. Instagram: instagram.com/myfavoritemurder http://instagram.com/myfavoritemurder Facebook: facebook.com/myfavoritemurder http://facebook.com/myfavoritemurder TikTok: tiktok.com/@my_favorite_murder http://tiktok.com/@my_favorite_murder Send your hometown stories to [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Join the Fan Cult to access ad-free episodes of My Favorite Murder. Members also receive merch store discounts, exclusive audio and video content and more! Visit www.fancult.supercast.com http://www.fancult.supercast.com/ to join. Shop for My Favorite Murder and other Exactly Right merchandise here: www.exactlyrightstore.com http://www.exactlyrightstore.com/. Rate, review and follow My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is exactly right.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  911, what's your emergency?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets. 911 Nashville returns.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  It's a homicide detective down here.

• 0:19Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 0:23Speaker 03

  Hell, sin swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  That's one of the plagues of the Bible.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Brian Phillippe, 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 0:37Speaker 00

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• 1:47Karen Kilgariff?

  Hello and welcome.

• 1:49Georgia Hardstark?

  To My Favorite Murder.

• 1:50Karen Kilgariff?

  That's Georgia Hardstark.

• 1:51Georgia Hardstark?

  That's Karen Kilgariff.

• 1:53Karen Kilgariff?

  And this is what we like to call a 10-year plan.

• 1:58Georgia Hardstark?

  It's almost been 11 years now. We're gonna have to stop saying 10.

• 2:02Karen Kilgariff?

  I know.

• 2:03Georgia Hardstark?

  It's pretty great. It's pretty crazy.

• 2:05Karen Kilgariff?

  I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

• 2:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Same.

• 2:07Karen Kilgariff?

  But it is very surreal

• 2:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Karen Kilgariff?

  to be sitting in my house trying to figure out what to watch on TV and this podcast comes up on Netflix. It's so strange.

• 2:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Karen Kilgariff?

  And so we're, you know, hopefully the people at home understand. We're just pretending like this is normal and that we do it all the time.

• 2:24Georgia Hardstark?

  Couldn't I tell you something, speaking of Netflix and this cute outfit I'm wearing?

• 2:27Karen Kilgariff?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Did you know that when we were on break, I had Molly and Tess make a chart of all the outfits I've worn? So I don't repeat an outfit? Do you want to see it?

• 2:38Georgia Hardstark?

  I can't repeat an outfit. It's an old trauma wound of getting made fun of for wearing hand-me-downs.

• 2:45Karen Kilgariff?

  These pulls.

• 2:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Isn't it amazing? So thank you, Molly and Tess, for indulging my trauma and vanity. I think those two things are...

• 2:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Looks like you repeated that Steve Martin shirt a couple times.

• 2:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Well, so those are, those are minisodes.

• 3:00Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, so it repeats because it's the same day?

• 3:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 3:03Karen Kilgariff?

  I was really disappointed.

• 3:04Georgia Hardstark?

  So how dare you.

• 3:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Why don't you get your ass up out of this chair and change outfits on the day?

• 3:07Georgia Hardstark?

  You know I would do that. It's like you had been okay, like into it.

• 3:11Karen Kilgariff?

  If we get you like a curtain that spins around you and when you spin back out, you have a different outfit on?

• 3:16Georgia Hardstark?

  It's such a relief from like the first time when I was like, "Do you want to change outfits?" And you're like, "Fuck no." And I'm like, "Really? Great." And now I need to like bedazzle this and make some kind of amazing.

• 3:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Literally when I was leaving my house today, I was like, "I have to put on a shirt." I was like, "I have to cover my arms." I was saying all these things to myself and I was like, "I don't have to do shit."

• 3:34Georgia Hardstark?

  Don't.

• 3:35Karen Kilgariff?

  People don't really, it's not like that anymore.

• 3:38Georgia Hardstark?

  No. Well, Netflix has changed it for me a little bit. It's like upped the game a little.

• 3:42Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, there's the exposure aspect that we already had, but we weren't really thinking about.

• 3:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 3:47Karen Kilgariff?

  But here's my thing. And if you're here for the glamour, don't look on this side of the table.

• 3:51Georgia Hardstark?

  I wore this side. I'm wearing a fucking Jan Brady outfit.

• 3:56Karen Kilgariff?

  Sure, Jan. But my thing was like, I'm trying to provide the Kim Deal, Patricia Highsmith angle of, "We're busy and we're not doing that thing."

• 4:05Georgia Hardstark?

  I like that.

• 4:06Karen Kilgariff?

  And we represent those girls.

• 4:07Georgia Hardstark?

  I have those days. You can see in the binder.

• 4:10Karen Kilgariff?

  I've seen that. I've lived that binder. I know.

• 4:13Georgia Hardstark?

  She has those hangovers and that PMS. Despite not having her fucking uterus, she still has them.

• 4:19Karen Kilgariff?

  All those hormones are in there.

• 4:20Georgia Hardstark?

  And she puts on Steve Martin t-shirt. Vintage, but she puts it on.

• 4:24Karen Kilgariff?

  She puts it on.

• 4:25Georgia Hardstark?

  You were gonna tell me a story.

• 4:27Karen Kilgariff?

  Last weekend, we went to Dollywood.

• 4:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Shut up!

• 4:30Karen Kilgariff?

  Yep, me and Laura and Nora and my cousins Stevie and Kim and their daughters. Because Anna is the biggest fan of Dolly and she basically has been talking about, "Would you go with me if I went to Dollywood?" And we're all like, "Hell, yes, we'll go." And we finally did it.

• 4:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it like a Knott's Berry Farm? Or is it more like a Disneyland?

• 4:48Karen Kilgariff?

  I would say it's like right in between the two.

• 4:50Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 4:51Karen Kilgariff?

  So I was, it's so funny you ask that. Because I was anticipating Knott's Berry Farm and maybe Down.

• 4:58Georgia Hardstark?

  Just so everyone knows, Knott's Berry Farm is like the Southern California, like mom and pop amusement park. So think of it as like your local amusement park, which is like charming and cute, but a little janky.

• 5:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Right. Well, it's like, because it's farm-based.

• 5:12Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, and it's more like a state fair.

• 5:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Exactly. They're doing kind of the hometowny vibe where it's like, "This used to be a berry farm."

• 5:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Right. Like it's maybe a little politically incorrect and...

• 5:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Maybe, yeah, but no. Dollywood is classy. It's homey.

• 5:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 5:28Karen Kilgariff?

  The food, every bite of food you take... Oh, my God. Well, every morning, we had the breakfast buffet with some of the loveliest waitstaff, the people that work there.

• 5:37Georgia Hardstark?

  I thought you were gonna say loveliest waffles. And I was so...

• 5:39Karen Kilgariff?

  The most beautiful biscuits. I mean, they were though.

• 5:41Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Karen Kilgariff?

  Everything was cooked perfectly.

• 5:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Karen Kilgariff?

  Nora had all kinds of gluten-free choices.

• 5:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 5:47Karen Kilgariff?

  And the staff were like, of course, because my cousin Stevie was a waiter and ran restaurants and stuff, so he's immediately sassing with the waitresses who are immediately sassing back.

• 5:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 5:56Karen Kilgariff?

  And it was just the most wholesome, like what we kept talking about, walking around in the park, big roller coasters, fun roller coasters.

• 6:04Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Karen Kilgariff?

  Dolly retrospective where we walk through, and spoiler alert, if you're gonna go and you don't want it ruined for you, but through the retrospective, you come around a corner, and I don't know if you've ever heard Dolly Parton's song, "Coat of Many Colors", which is about her mom making her the most beautiful coat in the world and she goes to school and they're like, "Air poor."

• 6:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Yes.

• 6:22Karen Kilgariff?

  You come around the corner, the fucking coat of many colors is behind glass.

• 6:25Georgia Hardstark?

  No.

• 6:26Karen Kilgariff?

  So if you grew up in like, in the 70s,

• 6:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Dolly Parton was everywhere all the time.

• 6:31Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Karen Kilgariff?

  There was that country music trend that basically happened on AM radio.

• 6:34Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 6:35Karen Kilgariff?

  And she was everywhere, her and Kenny Rogers and everybody. But the coat of many colors was like so down deep that it wasn't even like a thing. I didn't even think about it. But we come around this corner, my sister and I are just like, like immediately start crying.

• 6:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 6:49Karen Kilgariff?

  Because my sister turns and goes, "It's the coat of many colors."

• 6:52Georgia Hardstark?

  It's actually the little girl's coat.

• 6:54Karen Kilgariff?

  It's the little girl's coat and...

• 6:56Georgia Hardstark?

  How does she still have that?

• 6:57Karen Kilgariff?

  It's beautiful. That's the lobby of the resort we stayed at, Heart Song.

• 7:02Georgia Hardstark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:02Karen Kilgariff?

  The Smoky Mountains, which my sister, I met them. They were there longer than me. My sister said the Smoky Mountains are some of the most beautiful nature she's ever seen.

• 7:11Georgia Hardstark?

  I want to go.

• 7:12Karen Kilgariff?

  When the leaves turn.

• 7:13Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:13Karen Kilgariff?

  It's like every single tree.

• 7:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay. Can we ask Dolly if we can do a live show at Dollywood? Do they have an amphitheater?

• 7:20Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, they do.

• 7:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Can you imagine?

• 7:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Dolly's nieces do a live show. Her relatives do a live music review of her music and other hits. And they were fucking great. It was like a 1 o'clock show and I was like, every song, I was clapping my ass off because I was like, "They're busting their asses."

• 7:37Georgia Hardstark?

  My Favorite Murder residency at Dollywood.

• 7:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Get out of town. But we need to go where the coat of many colors is.

• 7:44Georgia Hardstark?

  I'd wear that.

• 7:45Karen Kilgariff?

  Right? It would go perfectly with what you have on right now.

• 7:48Georgia Hardstark?

  I do think I would wear that.

• 7:49Karen Kilgariff?

  But also, isn't it beautiful?

• 7:50Georgia Hardstark?

  It's gorgeous. It's the cutest thing.

• 7:52Karen Kilgariff?

  It doesn't matter because my sister doesn't watch this show, but I was like, "I think I'm gonna try to sew her a coat of many colors for Christmas."

• 7:58Georgia Hardstark?

  Her? Do it!

• 7:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh-huh. We're just like, "Here, here, you can have your own." Either that or have someone paint it and do a little painting of it.

• 8:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Hey, murderinos. Do you paint, oh my God, like a little, little still life of just the coat? Would be so cute.

• 8:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Of coming around a corner and seeing your childhood.

• 8:15Georgia Hardstark?

  And knowing murderinos, like it's the artist who uses cat hair. It's gonna make the most beautiful... Because that's how talented our fucking listeners are. They're gonna use something random, like only using Diet Coke cans.

• 8:26Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 8:27Georgia Hardstark?

  They're gonna make the most beautiful because that's their thing and that's what they do.

• 8:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Nail clippings, whatever you can come up with.

• 8:32Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Karen Kilgariff?

  We would love to see it.

• 8:33Georgia Hardstark?

  We would.

• 8:34Karen Kilgariff?

  But highly recommend.

• 8:35Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 8:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, Dollywood, every employee was lovely.

• 8:38Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 8:39Karen Kilgariff?

  The experience was just like, we were just like...

• 8:42Georgia Hardstark?

  What a great summer trip.

• 8:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Georgia Hardstark?

  I love that.

• 8:44Karen Kilgariff?

  And great merch.

• 8:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 8:46Karen Kilgariff?

  What'd you do this weekend?

• 8:47Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, I'm not drinking, so nothing.

• 8:49Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, are you white knuckling it?

• 8:51Georgia Hardstark?

  Over five weeks.

• 8:52Karen Kilgariff?

  Dude.

• 8:52Georgia Hardstark?

  The longest I've gone in decade and more.

• 8:56Karen Kilgariff?

  How do you feel?

• 8:57Georgia Hardstark?

  Good. Of course, duh.

• 8:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, turns out...

• 9:00Karen Kilgariff?

  What are you doing instead?

• 9:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Reading. I'm just reading.

• 9:03Karen Kilgariff?

  Are you really?

• 9:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. I went to, I made them go to dinner with me to like, you know, like, "This isn't non-alcoholic dinner. Let's try it." And I was just like, the whole time, fucking, "This isn't fun without a martini." Yeah, but it will be.

• 9:16Karen Kilgariff?

  Right. Well, it's just habit.

• 9:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, totally.

• 9:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Have you heard of or read the book "Yesteryear"?

• 9:21Georgia Hardstark?

  I told you to read that book.

• 9:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Goddamn it. Well...

• 9:23Georgia Hardstark?

  I told you like two weeks ago to read that. I'm like, "How good is it?"

• 9:25Karen Kilgariff?

  So sorry.

• 9:26Georgia Hardstark?

  It's okay.

• 9:26Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, I didn't, I haven't started, but everybody on the trip had a copy.

• 9:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. It's so fucking good.

• 9:31Karen Kilgariff?

  I will always do that to you because you always tell me to read things and I just don't.

• 9:35Georgia Hardstark?

  The audiobook is really good.

• 9:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 9:36Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, good.

• 9:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Check it out.

• 9:38Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, I'm very excited about it.

• 9:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Love it. It's the book of the summer.

• 9:42Karen Kilgariff?

  Everybody's talking about trad wife regret.

• 9:45Georgia Hardstark?

  The whole thing of like, "Why are there no grown trad wives?" Because women of a certain age can't fucking handle that shit no more.

• 9:53Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, the pure labor of being a wife and mother, mental labor, physical labor, emotional labor, and then basically volunteering to do it alone?

• 10:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Wow. Tough.

• 10:05Georgia Hardstark?

  No. Oh, do you have a true crime update?

• 10:07Karen Kilgariff?

  There is a true crime update, but it's kind of a weird one.

• 10:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 10:10Karen Kilgariff?

  And it's around the murders of this four University of Idaho students.

• 10:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Karen Kilgariff?

  Madison Mogan, Kaylee Gonzalez, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Cronotl. Brian Koberger, who was convicted of all four murders last year, is now, wants to rescind his guilty plea.

• 10:28Georgia Hardstark?

  What?

• 10:29Karen Kilgariff?

  And get a new trial.

• 10:30Georgia Hardstark?

  I didn't hear that.

• 10:31Karen Kilgariff?

  He claims he's innocent and that he was misled into confessing. They don't know if that's actually gonna take place, but that's something he's petitioning for right now.

• 10:40Georgia Hardstark?

  I was so happy that that fucking monster was just gonna go away and we didn't have to look at him anymore.

• 10:46Karen Kilgariff?

  Right.

• 10:46Georgia Hardstark?

  But here we go.

• 10:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Georgia Hardstark?

  That sucks.

• 10:49Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. We'll see what actually happens because people have the right to put that out there if they want to and then they'll see who picks it up and what it actually means.

• 10:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally. All right, well, should we get into it?

• 11:00Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, should we talk about our network?

• 11:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Yes, so we have a network. It's called Exactly Right Media. Go listen to all our podcasts on it. There's so many good ones.

• 11:07Karen Kilgariff?

  They're right out there for you.

• 11:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Please, here's some highlights.

• 11:09Karen Kilgariff?

  This week, over on Ghosted, what's very exciting is the host, Roz Hernandez, has a new audiobook out called Peeing in an Empty Bottle. It's about her life on the road as a stand-up comic. So you can go listen to an excerpt of that on her feed, over on the Ghosted feed. If you like it, you can get the full audiobook available wherever you buy your audiobooks.

• 11:32Georgia Hardstark?

  Love it. Our newest limited series, Royal Swindle, Episode Four, Good Cop, Bad Cop, is out now. Detective Jim Frost closes in on Evelyn and Layla as more of their past comes to light. But just when it looks like they're cornered, their loyal butler Lars steps in.

• 11:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Their loyal butler Lars. This is the level of insanity this podcast gets to, and we're only on episode four.

• 11:54Georgia Hardstark?

  It's amazing.

• 11:55Karen Kilgariff?

  We're only halfway through. It's the craziest. And Royal Swindle's doing amazing on the charts. Thank you, guys, so much for supporting and downloading and listening and all of that, because it's going like gangbusters.

• 12:06Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Karen Kilgariff?

  Also, if you've ever dreamed of solving crimes at sea, which we know you have, if you're a murderino, Buried Bones and Disgraced Land are heading aboard Virgin Voyages' True Crime Voyage this coming March. Bookings are open now at virginvoyages.com.

• 12:20Georgia Hardstark?

  How badly do you want to just go on a cruise and have a drink with Jake Brennan, fucking Paul Holes, and Kate Winkler-Dawson?

• 12:28Karen Kilgariff?

  And just chop it up about facts and evidence.

• 12:31Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, that's so, that sounds like my dream.

• 12:34Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Georgia Hardstark?

  It really does.

• 12:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Do you want to go? I can get you tickets.

• 12:37Georgia Hardstark?

  I want to go. And then in merch corner, we still have a handful of Proclivity items left. You have to check them out. Go to exactlyrightstore.com before they disappear for good.

• 12:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Haven't you ever wanted to wear merch of your favorite psychiatric drug?

• 12:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, now you can with Proclivity, which is a word Georgia made up.

• 12:56Georgia Hardstark?

  It seems like something you'd run in a 5K, like, and then at the end of the 5K, like, they'd hand out merch.

• 13:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Packets of Proclivity.

• 13:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. And like, Proclivity merch?

• 13:06Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Georgia Hardstark?

  That's just what it makes me think of.

• 13:08Karen Kilgariff?

  We're also selling those silver blankets that you can wrap around your shoulders. Also, tomorrow, we've got a little treat for you, because in partnership with Cars.com, we're going to be releasing a bonus episode for you, where we give, and listeners, advice.

• 13:22Georgia Hardstark?

  That was chaotic.

• 13:23Karen Kilgariff?

  It was absolutely insane.

• 13:25Georgia Hardstark?

  And so fun. And speaking of that, we cannot stress enough that we're in no way equipped or certified to be giving anyone advice, so please take that advice at your own risk. Watch the full video of us leading the public astray exclusively on the Fan Cult at fancult.supercast.com.

• 13:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Georgia Hardstark?

  The end.

• 13:41Karen Kilgariff?

  And the end.

• 13:42Georgia Hardstark?

  And I'm first.

• 13:44Karen Kilgariff?

  That's right.

• 13:48Georgia Hardstark?

  This one has a mystery element to it, which I know you hate.

• 13:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Cold case. I hate cold case.

• 13:55Georgia Hardstark?

  I mean, I wouldn't call it that, although I guess technically it's not. Okay.

• 14:01Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 14:01Georgia Hardstark?

  So it's April 1964, right? Right when this dress was made. And we're at Michael Reese Hospital on the near south side of Chicago. So we're at this maternity ward, 1964, April. Dora Franzak is happily feeding her two-day-old baby, a boy, her first child, named Paul. Her husband Chester has to return to work at the factory, where he's a machinist, but he's planning to come back to the hospital that evening. They're so thrilled at their first baby. And that day at work, he's proudly handing out cigars to all his colleagues. While Dora is feeding the baby, a nurse walks into the room. She doesn't say anything, and Dora and her roommate both think it's a little odd. But all she does is lift the blue blanket away from baby Paul's face and look at him for a long moment,

• 14:45Georgia Hardstark?

  and then she walks out. But a half hour later, she's back, and she tells Dora that the pediatrician would like to examine the baby. And Dora hands over her brand-new baby, Paul, and it's the last time she'll ever see her newborn. This is the story of the Paul Fronczak triple disappearance.

• 15:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Ooh.

• 15:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Do you know this one?

• 15:06Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, I've heard stories of the babies that have been taken, or, you know.

• 15:10Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Whatever. But no, I don't know what this is.

• 15:12Georgia Hardstark?

  Get ready. The main source for this book is the book, The Foundling, by Paul Fronczak.

• 15:18Karen Kilgariff?

  He wrote it by himself?

• 15:19Georgia Hardstark?

  But we'll get into it.

• 15:21Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 15:21Georgia Hardstark?

  So a student nurse sees this woman dressed as a nurse, walking out with this brand-new baby into the stairwell. She doesn't recognize the nurse, and she knows that this is not usual protocol. So probably because she's a student and doesn't feel empowered to run up to a nurse, who seems more senior than her, she doesn't say anything to the nurse. Instead, she alerts her supervisor. They rush to the nursery and realize that baby Paul is missing. At that point, no one can locate this mysterious woman and the baby, even though they, like, acted immediately. There was no delay, you know?

• 15:53Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Georgia Hardstark?

  The hospital staff try unsuccessfully for two hours to find Paul and the nurse, and then they call Chester at work and tell him what had happened. He has to break the heartbreaking news to Dora, there in her hospital bed, while hundreds of police and FBI officers descend upon the neighborhood.

• 16:11Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, hey, they should have had to go in and break the news.

• 16:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, maybe not, though. Maybe he wanted to, because it's, like, coming from someone. You know what I mean?

• 16:21Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, someone personal, and it's not someone that's going to be weird and cold and clinical about it.

• 16:26Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 16:27Karen Kilgariff?

  But, God.

• 16:27Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 16:28Karen Kilgariff?

  God.

• 16:29Georgia Hardstark?

  All they figure out is this. The woman had hailed a cab on the street behind the hospital. The driver said he had driven her west, away from the lakefront where the hospital is, to 35th Street and Halsted Avenue, about a 10-minute ride. Then she had gotten out, and despite conducting hundreds of interviews and searching hundreds of buildings and homes, investigators never uncover any leads about where the woman took Paul next. And here's a sketch of what she looked like, based on the people who saw her. So it's just so vague. Woman wearing a nurse's uniform.

• 17:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Do you think that kind of looks like me?

• 17:06Karen Kilgariff?

  That's my haircut.

• 17:07Georgia Hardstark?

  It's not your...

• 17:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, I guess maybe. When I'm, like, a little stressed out about...

• 17:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Wait a second, what?

• 17:14Georgia Hardstark?

  Wait, Karen.

• 17:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Wait, what are we gonna do?

• 17:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, my God.

• 17:16Karen Kilgariff?

  Um, I'm sorry, I kind of long for the days, first of all, when we used to have newspapers and journalism. But that idea where it's kind of like, hey, have you seen this person?

• 17:25Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Imagine the kind of things that aren't getting out there and getting communicated and circulated, because, although, I have to say, and TikTok's going crazy for it, Nancy Grace is back in a big way.

• 17:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Really?

• 17:37Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, she is. She's taking up the Nolan Wells case, like, herself.

• 17:42Georgia Hardstark?

  I didn't see that.

• 17:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 17:43Georgia Hardstark?

  I mean, I've seen the case, and it's just awful, but I didn't know she was getting into it.

• 17:48Karen Kilgariff?

  She's getting people from, like, the local, you know, officials.

• 17:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Karen Kilgariff?

  And getting them on the show, and then just being way confrontational about, you know, that doesn't seem right to me. And her fucking eyebrows are as arched as a...

• 18:00Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:01Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, it's a real return to form, in that it's crazy.

• 18:04Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, I'm here for that.

• 18:06Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, it's, it's, she's doing something.

• 18:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, okay, Nancy. We see you.

• 18:09Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Georgia Hardstark?

  So at the time, when this, in 1964, it had not yet been hospital policy to take fingerprints and footprints for new babies. So the only tangible information the police have on file is the one photo of Paul that was taken right after he was born. They took a snapshot, and that's it. That photo is released to the press, as well as those sketches of the woman who took him. So here's his photo as a little baby. I know. Just tiny, just two days old. I mean...

• 18:38Karen Kilgariff?

  Tiny, but all that hair?

• 18:40Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. I mean, good thing they had that photo.

• 18:42Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, for real. Oh, it's so cute.

• 18:43Georgia Hardstark?

  I know. The Franzaks make a few desperate pleas to the press, begging for their baby back. But heartbreakingly, in those statements, they ask for him to be well-cared-for. Dora tells a reporter, quote, "Take good care of him and see that he gets enough to eat. He is everything we built our hopes on for the future. Just so he is taken care of, that's the main thing." So he's just hoping that whoever kidnapped him was doing so to, you know...

• 19:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Just to have a baby.

• 19:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. And so here's a photo of the two of them in the newspaper with the plea. She's in a wheelchair. She just looks devastated. I mean, look at their faces.

• 19:17Karen Kilgariff?

  It's just such a bizarre crime and such a bizarre situation.

• 19:21Georgia Hardstark?

  And not something you'd expect in a hospital. You think you're totally safe there.

• 19:24Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Georgia Hardstark?

  So similarly, Paul's doctors give detailed instructions to the press about how he should be cared for and how his formula should be prepared, because they suspect he might have a cow's milk allergy. So they're just hoping that it's someone who wants to take care of him. And over the next two years, the case goes completely cold. Then, in June of 1966, two years and two months after Paul's birth and disappearance, the Franzaks get the call they've been praying for every single day. A two-year-old boy has been found in New Jersey, and authorities believe he might be Paul. So rewind. The boy had been left a year earlier, in 1965, in a brand-new stroller outside a department store in Newark. He had been dressed in a clean, bright blue suit, and the stroller and little boy

• 20:10Georgia Hardstark?

  had sat unattended in front of the store for two hours, until people realized there was no parents with him. Then at 5:00 PM, an anonymous caller phones the Newark police and tells them about the child. The child is designated a "foundling," a term for an abandoned baby whose origins are unknown, which is, like, gives you chills, the word "the foundling." It sounds like a horror movie.

• 20:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, it does.

• 20:30Georgia Hardstark?

  That one movie with Angelina Jolie. That was so good.

• 20:33Karen Kilgariff?

  The baby, it turns around and then just bangs.

• 20:35Georgia Hardstark?

  It has both set of teeth.

• 20:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Little...

• 20:37Georgia Hardstark?

  And a mustache.

• 20:38Karen Kilgariff?

  I think the movie or the...

• 20:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Thinking of as the Changeling.

• 20:41Karen Kilgariff?

  I did love that movie.

• 20:42Georgia Hardstark?

  I meant the Changeling. Thank you, Molly.

• 20:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, yes. I love that movie.

• 20:45Georgia Hardstark?

  That movie was so good. And it was based on a true story that I think you covered.

• 20:47Karen Kilgariff?

  I covered it, and it's so upsetting. And it is, that movie is the worst nightmare of any parent where, that going through this where it's like, oh, some absolute lunatic is keeping children in chicken coop.

• 20:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Out in the country somewhere.

• 21:00Georgia Hardstark?

  And then she's put in an insane asylum.

• 21:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, because nobody wants to hear a lady be like, you guys fucked this up.

• 21:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. Okay, you guys go watch The Changeling.

• 21:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Go watch it. My son! That's my favorite line.

• 21:11Georgia Hardstark?

  I don't remember that line from it.

• 21:13Karen Kilgariff?

  She screams, "My son!" about 19 times.

• 21:15Georgia Hardstark?

  That makes sense.

• 21:16Karen Kilgariff?

  We could have edited this down a little bit, I think.

• 21:18Georgia Hardstark?

  So he's a foundling. The police run ads in the local papers about the foundling to be like, "Does anyone know whose baby this is?" And no one comes forward. So he's brought to live with a foster family in Wachung, New Jersey. And he's a playful, friendly little boy. He has a good appetite. He loves to swim in the family's pool and help with grown-up tasks like unloading the groceries. The only times he seems fearful or upset is when a young man suddenly enters the room, and this causes him to cower in fear and sob, which makes the family who were watching him believe he's been abused by a young man. Here's a photo of the little boy with the nurse. He is so freaking cute.

• 21:55Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, my God, he's so cute.

• 21:57Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 21:57Karen Kilgariff?

  And he looks a lot like that baby.

• 21:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. I mean, that looks like my nephew, Micah, so much to me, too.

• 22:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. He looks like a perfect two-year progression from that original baby.

• 22:06Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally. Little boy's speech develops normally over the year he spends in foster care. Sometimes he playfully puts up his fists and says, "Want a box?" But he is gentle with the littler babies in the home. When they cry, he comforts them, saying, "Don't cry." When he himself falls or hurts himself in some minor way, he comforts himself with the same saying, "Don't cry." So he remembers something from before. So this woman named Claire Eckert is the foster mom who cares for this little toddler, saying, quote, "He is one of the most perfect boys I've ever known. He has charmed all of us with his dearness and kind little ways. He has such a great love of life, and he has made us aware of

• 22:47Georgia Hardstark?

  so many things. He was my special baby," end quote.

• 22:52Karen Kilgariff?

  Also, God bless the foster parents who are actually doing it.

• 22:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 22:56Karen Kilgariff?

  And doing it right.

• 22:57Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 22:57Karen Kilgariff?

  For real.

• 22:58Georgia Hardstark?

  It's such an incredible act. Okay. When the baby had been found, the detective in Newark had alerted the FBI. And for the year that he spends in foster care, the FBI are in and out, checking on him. They take molds of his ears. They take blood samples. They take hair samples to see if the baby is little Paul Fronczak. They do this same thing to thousands of other little boys around the country, hoping to find Paul. But they don't find anything. And we got an email from a murderino, which I'll read in full at some point, because it's really interesting. I'll read it on a hometown in the future. But it says this, quote, "My dad was born and adopted on April 24, 1964 by my grandparents. On that same day, Paul Joseph Franzak was stolen from a Chicago hospital by a woman

• 23:43Georgia Hardstark?

  dressed as a nurse." So her dad is born the same day and adopted in Chicago.

• 23:48Karen Kilgariff?

  That's wild.

• 23:49Georgia Hardstark?

  She goes on to say, "The FBI tested and examined over 10,000 babies, one of which was my dad. They came back multiple times to examine my dad and took multiple hair and blood samples. The authorities were highly suspicious of my grandparents, as they weren't my dad's biological parents, and their lawyer was under suspicion of black market adoptions."

• 24:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh.

• 24:08Georgia Hardstark?

  And then she writes, "Uh, okay." And that's just an excerpt. That's from Ally. The whole email's really great. I'll read it at some point. But like, what are the chances that a murderino who listens, one of those babies is her dad?

• 24:19Karen Kilgariff?

  On the exact same day.

• 24:20Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. And adopted, too.

• 24:22Karen Kilgariff?

  That's wild. What did they collect from babies who were just born that they would be able to test it against back then?

• 24:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, nothing.

• 24:30Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 24:30Georgia Hardstark?

  So by March of 1966, when the baby is just about two years old, they conclude that they can't definitively say that the baby is Paul, this little baby in foster care. But they also can't rule it out. And of all the little boys who have been tested, this is the only time that they are kind of like, it might be him. So in June of 1966, the FBI makes the call to the Franzaks. Authorities believe the baby looks like Dora and Chester Franzak. And when the couple arrive in New Jersey to meet him, they believe it's their son. Dora cries out, "Oh, my God, that's my baby."

• 25:01Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh.

• 25:02Georgia Hardstark?

  I know. It's a joyous ending for everyone, though perhaps a little bittersweet for Claire Eckert, the foster mother. She'd given the little boy the name Scott. And she writes a letter to Dora, saying, quote, "For all the sadness you have both known, you are in for so much joy, for you will now see things through Scott's eyes, and he can make them lovely."

• 25:24Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh.

• 25:24Georgia Hardstark?

  I know. Isn't that touching?

• 25:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Georgia Hardstark?

  So Scott becomes Paul, the baby that had been kidnapped that they had lost.

• 25:30Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Georgia Hardstark?

  And life goes on. And Paul lives a normal life in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He's never told about the first two years of his life.

• 25:38Karen Kilgariff?

  That's very VC Andrews of those parents. Like, what?

• 25:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, I guess you-

• 25:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Minus all the abuse and incest, but yes.

• 25:45Karen Kilgariff?

  And creepy addicts and stuff.

• 25:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 25:46Karen Kilgariff?

  But, I mean, it makes sense that he's too young anyway at the time. But that was, you know, that feels like back in the time where it's like, oh, it's fine if he never knows about-

• 25:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 25:56Karen Kilgariff?

  -his real origins.

• 25:58Georgia Hardstark?

  And maybe, so he's still a kid at this point. So maybe they would have told him when he's older. How is a kid gonna wrap their head around that?

• 26:03Karen Kilgariff?

  Sit down and just deal with it. Just like, face it straight on.

• 26:06Georgia Hardstark?

  You're a child. You're a little adult, right?

• 26:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, this is gonna fuck up third grade for you. But just try to wrap your mind around.

• 26:12Georgia Hardstark?

  Imagine this. Okay. So Dora had been pregnant when authorities told the Franzaks that they thought they had found Paul. So Paul comes home, and just six months later, his little brother, Dave, is born. So like, what a mindfuck.

• 26:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Georgia Hardstark?

  For those parents especially, right? In December of 1974, when Paul is 10, he starts snooping around the house, like we all did, looking for his Christmas presents. In the basement, he pulls a couch away from the wall. You always gotta boot the furniture.

• 26:39Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, yeah. That's right.

• 26:41Georgia Hardstark?

  And he exposes a little crawl space behind it, and he shimmies in. And against the back wall, hidden behind some framed paintings, are three shoeboxes and a hatbox.

• 26:51Karen Kilgariff?

  Ooh.

• 26:52Georgia Hardstark?

  To find those.

• 26:53Karen Kilgariff?

  To move something and be like, these have been hidden here.

• 26:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 26:56Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Georgia Hardstark?

  I found my grandma's and my grandpa's love letters to each other before they were married.

• 27:01Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh.

• 27:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Snooping. So, sorry, Grandma.

• 27:03Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, here's the thing. All people should realize, little kids snoop.

• 27:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 27:07Karen Kilgariff?

  If you're not there, they're gonna go through your nightstand drawers.

• 27:10Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 27:10Karen Kilgariff?

  That's just a way to pass the time.

• 27:12Georgia Hardstark?

  Just don't keep your gross stuff in obvious places.

• 27:15Karen Kilgariff?

  Don't be such a pervert.

• 27:17Georgia Hardstark?

  So Paul, of course, opens the boxes and realizes they're full of newspaper clippings and letters. And he pulls out a clipping and sees a picture of a newborn and a picture from his parents, 10 years younger. That photo, he recognizes them. And they're devastated. And the letters are all from well wishers and people who had been praying for the Franzaks. So Paul realizes that he's this baby. He goes into the kitchen of the mom, like, what the hell? She gets angry at him for snooping. And he's like, "Okay, but what you did is worse. What the hell's going on?" And he asks if those articles are about him. And she says, quote, "Yes, those are about you. You were kidnapped. We found you. We love you, and that is all there is to know," end quote.

• 27:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay, Mom.

• 27:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, Mom. Go watch TV. Of course, that's not all there is to know. And Paul pretty much lives the rest of his childhood and much of his adult life, wondering if he really is his parents' missing baby. Or if he was, for the first two years of his life, someone else. And while Paul does love his family, he says he always feels a bit distant from them. And he had felt that even before discovering all these newspaper clippings and finding out the truth. He says he's always had this underlying suspicion that he's an outsider to his family.

• 28:28Karen Kilgariff?

  Hmm.

• 28:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Which I wish I felt that way, too. But I fucking, those motherfuckers are my blood. And I know that.

• 28:35Karen Kilgariff?

  You say something, Janet says something.

• 28:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. It's like, I see where I got all my problems from.

• 28:39Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, it's also interesting, because I wonder if he would always feel that, no matter if he was flesh and blood.

• 28:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Sure.

• 28:45Karen Kilgariff?

  Because of the-

• 28:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Right. Like, even if it turned out to be true, it just-

• 28:50Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, those kind of foundational years.

• 28:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Karen Kilgariff?

  He was in a different place. And that in and of itself-

• 28:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 28:55Karen Kilgariff?

  -could just be creating that feeling.

• 28:57Georgia Hardstark?

  No, that makes total sense.

• 29:00Georgia Hardstark?

  911, what's your emergency?

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder wantons.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  911 Nashville returns.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  There's a homicide detective down here.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  All sins swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  That's one of the plagues of the Bible.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Whether you're buying, renting, or selling, Zillow can help make your someday today to help find a home that fits where you are in life, or that apartment that's a little closer to where you want to be. Zillow has the right information, tools, and support to help turn your future home into a reality. Because someday starts today. Visit zillow.com/today to get started. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5

• 30:10Georgia Hardstark?

  Star Trust Pilot Reviews. OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. He doesn't get a satisfactory answer until much later. In the interim, he grows up, he graduates high school, moves to Arizona, gets married, gets divorced, works a bunch of different jobs, and never quite seems to figure out what the right thing for him is, as a lot of us fucking do. But at age 40, in around 2005, he decides to give acting a try, and he actually makes a living at it. Side note, he's fucking super handsome.

• 30:47Karen Kilgariff?

  Let's take a lickety-lickety.

• 30:48Georgia Hardstark?

  I want to tell you what he looks like before you see it. He looks like, I think, Chris Hansen and a young Keith Morrison combined. He looks like the perfect, like 20-

• 30:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Chris Hansen from To Catch a Predator.

• 31:00Georgia Hardstark?

  Yes. He looks like a Dateline or 2020 host, like he would be telling you about his own crime.

• 31:05Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, I see.

• 31:05Georgia Hardstark?

  So here he is.

• 31:06Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 31:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Hi, Silver Fox. So he's based in Las Vegas at this point. He gets a lot of commercial and print ad campaigns, and then he gets a nice gig as George Clooney's stand-in on Ocean's Eleven.

• 31:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Nice.

• 31:19Georgia Hardstark?

  So like, clearly, don't you see Chris Hansen and Keith Morrison?

• 31:22Karen Kilgariff?

  I do.

• 31:24Georgia Hardstark?

  That is a square jaw. So he meets a woman named Michelle, and they fall in love and get married, and then Michelle gets pregnant, and at this point, you know, Paul is forced to confront this question that's nagged him his whole life, because his doctors start asking him about his family's medical history. I feel like a lot of people find out those stories that they send us for the hometown stories.

• 31:41Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, like the ancestry.com-

• 31:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Karen Kilgariff?

  -type of curiosity that then unravels.

• 31:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Speaking of-

• 31:46Karen Kilgariff?

  Hello.

• 31:47Georgia Hardstark?

  This is before the explosion of DNA genealogy kits, but at-home paternity tests are, at this point, available at drugstores.

• 31:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Very Maury Povich.

• 31:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally. So Paul buys one, and while his parents are in town visiting them, he asks them to take the test, and they do, but then they start to have regrets. They ask Paul not to send the swabs in for testing, like, just don't, we don't even want to know.

• 32:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Right.

• 32:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Paul agonizes over the decision for a week, but ultimately, he sends the test in. And a few weeks later, he gets the answer that no one wants to hear, but it feels like everyone kind of already knows. Dora and Chester are not Paul's biological parents.

• 32:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Sad.

• 32:22Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 32:23Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, but it also has to be a little bit like, hey, at least I know-

• 32:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Karen Kilgariff?

  -I can trust my gut.

• 32:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 32:30Karen Kilgariff?

  If I feel something and I have this instinct, then I know there's a reason to follow it.

• 32:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, limbo is not a place to live your whole life. Paul's parents are, at first, furious at him for sending him the test, and they're devastated, having their nightmare reopened, and the realization that they have no idea where their biological son has been for more than 40 years. Like, they could trick themselves into thinking they had him, and now-

• 32:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 32:54Georgia Hardstark?

  The devastation that it's all coming back, you know, coming true again.

• 32:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Georgia Hardstark?

  And this opens a rift between Paul and his family that lasts for the next several years, as Paul begins to piece things together on his own. At this point, Paul conducts exhaustive research about his own life. He speaks with a woman named Mary Hendry, whose father, John T. Carton, had been a Chicago police lieutenant and had run the kidnapping investigation-

• 33:19Karen Kilgariff?

  Hmm.

• 33:20Georgia Hardstark?

  -originally. She says, this woman says, quote, "I remember my father standing in the kitchen of our home, shaking his head. He talked about what good people the Franzacks were, and how badly he felt for them, and what a good job they would do raising the baby. But he also said that the child they took home was not their baby."

• 33:37Karen Kilgariff?

  He knew.

• 33:37Georgia Hardstark?

  "He was certain it wasn't the right boy. My father told us, the FBI and the police both agree the child was not the kidnapped baby, but the Franzacks were such good people, they agreed to let it unfold the way it did," end quote. So there's a two-year-old baby missing, this two-year-old baby needs a family. Let's all just, what's cognitive dissonance? What's it called?

• 33:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, or just like selective-

• 34:02Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Karen Kilgariff?

  So everyone-

• 34:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Denial, I guess.

• 34:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 34:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Isn't that sad?

• 34:06Karen Kilgariff?

  And it reminds me of The Changeling.

• 34:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 34:09Karen Kilgariff?

  It's that same thing of, like, Changeling version is much more sad, because the mother immediately knew.

• 34:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Karen Kilgariff?

  But yeah, when you're in that situation, and someone's like, the dates line up, the timing, the this, the that, then you just want to be out of your misery.

• 34:23Georgia Hardstark?

  I feel like you'd go, you'd be a little psychotic if your fucking baby was kidnapped.

• 34:27Karen Kilgariff?

  Because then it makes sense how mad they are at him when he opens it back up, because they're like, we can't face the fact that then we gave up.

• 34:34Georgia Hardstark?

  Paul shares this story with the media, and it attracts a lot of attention. So the FBI reopens the Paul Franzack case.

• 34:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Hmm.

• 34:41Georgia Hardstark?

  And in 2013, he's contacted by Ancestry, and they tell him about their new DNA genealogy project. And so Paul submits his DNA, there are a lot of false leads, and then a group of genetic genealogists called the DNA Detectives, led by our girl Cece Moore, who's, of course, the head of Parabon Nano Labs Genetic Genealogy Unit. She winds up taking on Paul's case, and we know she can solve anything.

• 35:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Great.

• 35:05Georgia Hardstark?

  So in 2015, they finally figure out who Paul is. He was born, the little baby who was found outside the store, the department store. He was born Jack Rosenthal, and shockingly, it turns out he was a twin.

• 35:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Ooh.

• 35:17Georgia Hardstark?

  So this is probably the saddest twist in the story. Paul learns that he had been born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, remember, he was found in Newark, and that he and his twin sister Jill, so it was Jack and Jill, had disappeared in 1965. So he travels back to New Jersey, he meets relatives who said that they had seen him and Jill as babies, and then suddenly, his parents started making up excuses as to why he and his sister were not around anymore.

• 35:43Karen Kilgariff?

  What?

• 35:43Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 35:44Karen Kilgariff?

  Like, they just dropped them off in front of a store?

• 35:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Well, there are other relatives who say that they had seen Jack and Jill abused and neglected. Paul learns that his father had been a Korean War veteran and likely had PTSD. Remember, he would get scared when a younger man would walk into the room.

• 35:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Georgia Hardstark?

  He learns that his mother had been an alcoholic, and both of Paul's biological parents had died in the 90s of cancer. So Paul pursues multiple avenues to try to find his twin sister, including digging up the lot where his biological parents' house had been.

• 36:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Wow.

• 36:15Georgia Hardstark?

  He never finds anything.

• 36:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, he was digging up the lot like his sister could be buried there?

• 36:20Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Because after they were children, no one saw anything. He knows he survived and what happened to him, but no one knows what happened to Jill. The working theory is that Jill may have died in their biological parents' care due to abuse or neglect, and that Paul was then abandoned at the same time, because they both kind of disappeared together. So Paul also has a biological older sister, who's only about two years older than him. He meets her, she has no memory of him or Jill. He also has a brother who he emails and who says he doesn't want to be in contact. Both of these siblings, of course, had extremely difficult childhoods. So for about five years, this is where the investigation is at a standstill. Paul publishes his book, The Foundling, in 2017, never having found the real little boy

• 37:03Georgia Hardstark?

  who was stolen from his parents. That's like, he solved this mystery of who he was, but there's still this big question mark. And so in 2020, it comes out that the FBI had identified the real baby of Dora and Chester a year before, in 2019. His name had been Kevin Ray Beatty, but his existence is only reported on after his death of cancer. So he had found out shortly after finding the test results out, so he didn't really want anyone to know it was him, I think, or, we don't really know what was going on there.

• 37:34Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 37:34Georgia Hardstark?

  Kevin's children had seen reports about Paul's search for answers, and for reasons that are still unclear, had suspected that their father is the real Paul Franzack. Kevin had taken a DNA test, and these suspicions were confirmed, and then he passes away from cancer, and then the FBI lets everyone know.

• 37:52Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 37:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Kevin had lived in a small town in Michigan called Manton. Friends and neighbors remember him as a very kind man. So here's a photo of the baby picture and an age progression drawing-

• 38:01Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 38:01Georgia Hardstark?

  -of what he would look like.

• 38:03Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh.

• 38:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, now here's the baby and what he actually looks like. So look at that guy. It looks just like him, doesn't it?

• 38:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, and then think of fake George Clooney. Like, that doesn't look anything like-

• 38:14Karen Kilgariff?

  That's right.

• 38:15Georgia Hardstark?

  -the baby.

• 38:15Karen Kilgariff?

  It doesn't match at all.

• 38:16Georgia Hardstark?

  I guess you can't tell what a baby's going to look like, but isn't that crazy? That's so close. Wait, go back.

• 38:20Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, that's, that's wild.

• 38:22Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Karen Kilgariff?

  They should have taken-

• 38:23Georgia Hardstark?

  So that's their real baby.

• 38:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Hmm.

• 38:25Georgia Hardstark?

  I know, isn't that sad? Okay, before Kevin's death, he had gotten to speak on the phone multiple times with Dora Franzack. At this point, the case is still considered open, and very few details about Kevin and what happened to him after he was kidnapped from the hospital have been reported, but we do know this. Kevin had been raised by a woman named Lorraine Fountain. She died in 2004, and Lorraine had been dating a doctor from Chicago, and then moved to Arkansas for about a year. And when she returned to Michigan, where her family lived, she had a baby with her. But Paul, who now has a podcast called The Franzack Files, and he's actively investigating his whole story and trying to figure everything out.

• 39:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Georgia Hardstark?

  It's not funny.

• 39:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Georgia Hardstark?

  He doesn't believe that Lorraine was the one who kidnapped the baby. He believes that she had some kind of connection to organized crime in Chicago, and Paul believes that Lorraine was paid to forge a birth certificate and raise Kevin as her own.

• 39:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Why, though?

• 39:26Georgia Hardstark?

  I, I don't know. It's almost like, was there some black market for babies? Probably, right?

• 39:31Karen Kilgariff?

  I don't know. Does the mafia trade in babies? That doesn't seem like their style.

• 39:36Georgia Hardstark?

  I know, but like, maybe one of the mafioso's girlfriends wanted a baby, and so they kidnapped one, and it didn't work out, and then they couldn't just give it back, right? They had to, like-

• 39:45Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, but that's going so far around the bend. It's easy to get a baby.

• 39:50Georgia Hardstark?

  It's not easy to get a baby.

• 39:52Karen Kilgariff?

  Take it from me, Georgia, it's really easy to get a baby.

• 39:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Did you watch that documentary about the woman who-

• 39:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Would just go take them out of people's houses?

• 40:00Georgia Hardstark?

  No, it's even worse than that. What was it called?

• 40:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Maternal Instinct.

• 40:02Georgia Hardstark?

  Maternal Instinct.

• 40:04Karen Kilgariff?

  Is it good?

• 40:04Georgia Hardstark?

  It's so, it's so troubling.

• 40:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay.

• 40:07Georgia Hardstark?

  It's just, you wouldn't-

• 40:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Because I saw something on TikTok talking about it, but the people were so freaked out that were telling it. I was like, should I not?

• 40:15Georgia Hardstark?

  You've covered a case very similar to it. It's, it's so psychotic, you just couldn't, you can't even-

• 40:20Karen Kilgariff?

  It's the ladies that want to be pregnant and go after pregnant ladies?

• 40:23Georgia Hardstark?

  Something along those lines. Lying about pregnancy, and then the extremes that they go through when they get caught, and just won't let it go.

• 40:32Karen Kilgariff?

  Here's the thing. We have a lot of shame about who we've been in our lives-

• 40:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Me and you.

• 40:37Karen Kilgariff?

  -and the obsessions that we've had.

• 40:39Georgia Hardstark?

  You and I, absolutely.

• 40:40Karen Kilgariff?

  The mistakes we've made.

• 40:41Georgia Hardstark?

  So many.

• 40:41Karen Kilgariff?

  But every once in a while, and maybe that's what this is all about-

• 40:44Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Karen Kilgariff?

  -is looking at these extreme human beings and going, at least I never-

• 40:49Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 40:49Karen Kilgariff?

  -stole someone else's baby, because I was obsessed with having a baby.

• 40:53Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally. And lied about being pregnant. Why?

• 40:56Karen Kilgariff?

  Why?

• 40:56Georgia Hardstark?

  I can't even understand why you would lie to it, which makes me think I'm a good person.

• 41:01Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, all I want to do is get drunk at the rustic inn and eat grilled cheese sandwiches all day long.

• 41:05Georgia Hardstark?

  That sounds great.

• 41:06Karen Kilgariff?

  I don't want anything to do with anybody's baby.

• 41:09Georgia Hardstark?

  No, same.

• 41:10Karen Kilgariff?

  No, thanks.

• 41:11Georgia Hardstark?

  Um, Paul-

• 41:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Are we allowed to say?

• 41:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Send us your babies. We don't want anything to do with them.

• 41:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Send us your bad baby stories.

• 41:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, send us, tell us how hard baby is. Paul has recently put out a call for more information. He's hoping to hear from anyone who lived in Chicago from 1962 to 1964, who frequented an establishment known as Durkens Bar. And I looked it up and it was like, ye rustic dive bar. It was one of those bars where like, one o'clock in the afternoon, people were already drunk, kind of a place. It's not like that anymore, unfortunately. It's a little more like college bros, but it still exists. So, ask your dads, everyone.

• 41:54Karen Kilgariff?

  What's the theory?

• 41:55Georgia Hardstark?

  I don't know. I don't know. Listen to the podcast.

• 41:58Karen Kilgariff?

  Somebody in there, yeah, I want to listen to this podcast.

• 42:01Georgia Hardstark?

  That maybe that the dad, his actual dad, used to go there. You know, the one who was, had PTSD and maybe talked about his children.

• 42:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, yeah. In a drunken way where he would have given it away.

• 42:11Georgia Hardstark?

  His mom was an alcoholic, so maybe she fucking hung out there and just talked.

• 42:15Karen Kilgariff?

  Ran her mouth.

• 42:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 42:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Ooh, that's interesting.

• 42:18Georgia Hardstark?

  Right? Guys, ask your grandfathers.

• 42:21Karen Kilgariff?

  Piece it together.

• 42:22Georgia Hardstark?

  Dude, the official FBI investigation into who exactly took Kevin, AKA little Paul, when he was just two days old, also remains open. And that is the story of the Paul Fronczak triple disappearance.

• 42:35Karen Kilgariff?

  God.

• 42:36Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 42:37Karen Kilgariff?

  Wait, I have an idea. Why don't they, why don't they, how would you do it? Forward age, the illustration of the lady in the newspaper.

• 42:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Karen Kilgariff?

  Or backwards age, something, do something with that information. Cause that's a, that's a witness sighting.

• 42:53Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, but it's so vague that I can't imagine.

• 42:56Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Georgia Hardstark?

  It just looks like any, it looks like a nurse, you know?

• 43:00Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Georgia Hardstark?

  So bananas.

• 43:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Crazy.

• 43:03Georgia Hardstark?

  I know.

• 43:04Karen Kilgariff?

  You've done it again.

• 43:05Georgia Hardstark?

  I know, I'm sorry, I told you.

• 43:06Karen Kilgariff?

  Here's the thing, I think it's great that Paul Fronczak has started a podcast. I think that's exactly where things like that belong.

• 43:12Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Karen Kilgariff?

  And then people who listen to these podcasts and similar podcasts can get involved.

• 43:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Karen Kilgariff?

  God, solve it.

• 43:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Tell us, we want to do a true crime update soon about this case, please.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder wantons. 911 Nashville returns.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  What's a homicide detective doing here?

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Three bodies on the ground.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  That's one of the plagues of the Bible.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 43:56Speaker 00

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• 44:51Karen Kilgariff?

  Luckily, my story is all about evidence and facts, collecting evidence and facts. And, hey, it's a little bit of a turn, but you'll see, I think you'll enjoy it. It begins in the mid 80s, which I know you like.

• 45:06Georgia Hardstark?

  I do.

• 45:07Karen Kilgariff?

  In southeastern Michigan, which you also like.

• 45:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Weird, but it's just in Michigan.

• 45:10Karen Kilgariff?

  In and around Flint.

• 45:11Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 45:12Karen Kilgariff?

  Right, which is, if you don't know, not too far from Detroit. It's a difficult time, the mid 80s is a difficult time for many communities in this part of Michigan. General Motors has begun closing local plants, costing thousands of people their livelihoods. And then, the wave of crack cocaine hits the streets. Over the last two decades, drugs like heroin have taken a toll on many Michiganders, but crack spawns a uniquely devastating crisis and the state's violent crime rate soars and peaks in 1986. So, it is around that time. And so, of course, when that happens, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 becomes federal law and that kicks off Ronald Reagan's war on drugs.

• 45:55Georgia Hardstark?

  That's what I grew up as a little kid, like drilled it in your fucking head. It made me want to do drugs so bad.

• 46:00Karen Kilgariff?

  It was, you know, it's funny, it makes me think of the first time anyone ever offered me pot. I was a freshman in high school and I burst into tears.

• 46:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 46:08Karen Kilgariff?

  That's how intense Nancy Reagan's.

• 46:10Georgia Hardstark?

  She fucking.

• 46:11Karen Kilgariff?

  Bent little finger pointing at us. I mean, those people.

• 46:14Georgia Hardstark?

  Blight, blight on humanity.

• 46:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Don't upset the ghost of my mother who will come and haunt us forever.

• 46:20Georgia Hardstark?

  No, because she agrees with it, not because she's mad at it.

• 46:23Karen Kilgariff?

  She agrees with it to the point where she will cross back over to lecture both of us about how Ronald Reagan ruined this country.

• 46:29Georgia Hardstark?

  I will sit fucking crisscross applesauce and listen to Nurse Pat tell me everything.

• 46:35Karen Kilgariff?

  Dude, that is how I was raised. If you ever are like, why is she the way she is? Because dinner was either my dad being hilarious, or my mom literally predicting like an ancient Greek oracle, the future, where it's like, who's going to take care of these people? These laws that they're passing, like insane.

• 46:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Fear, so much fear.

• 46:56Karen Kilgariff?

  And intense pattern recognition, which I'm always very proud of. She passed it down. All that is to say, war on drugs kicks off in this country and it kicks into overdrive, introducing new laws like mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. In recent years, public health experts have criticized these policies as being racist, punitive, and not particularly effective at addressing drug use in any way. Its underlying issues or drug sales on the streets just didn't help really anything at all. But, it was the 80s, so when Nancy Reagan appears in a telecast from the White House wearing her little red sweater and begging young Americans to quote, "Just say no", the idea of the war on drugs becomes broadly popular.

• 47:40Karen Kilgariff?

  It's like, oh, they're really doing something about.

• 47:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Karen Kilgariff?

  These drug addicts and these people and this crime.

• 47:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Karen Kilgariff?

  The messaging was inescapable, it was everywhere. Here she is, remember?

• 47:50Georgia Hardstark?

  God.

• 47:51Karen Kilgariff?

  Please.

• 47:52Georgia Hardstark?

  That fucking shampoo set and that Mr. T chain around her neck. Fucking hate her.

• 47:58Karen Kilgariff?

  That Mr. T chain. She was good friends with Mr. T.

• 48:01Georgia Hardstark?

  That's right.

• 48:02Karen Kilgariff?

  It's just so weird because like, the first lady passing down this, this is what we're all going to do about, it's just such a different time. It's like it was Victorian times or something, how we were all just in the monoculture going, yes Nancy, you're right.

• 48:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Your husband's an actor, so that makes you what?

• 48:18Karen Kilgariff?

  That makes you also an actor.

• 48:20Georgia Hardstark?

  That's right.

• 48:21Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay, so, by 1990, the war on drugs is in full swing, yet lots of people are still buying and selling drugs, it turns out. Enter a man named Lacy Brown. He is a big, rough-and-tumble, chain-smoking, 47-year-old North Carolinian, living in southeastern Michigan. He's got long hair, he's got a big beard, pierced ears, his nickname is Moon, which is a double entendre. Not only does he stay up all night drinking, he also gets a kick out of dropping his pants and showing his bare ass to people at parties.

• 48:51Georgia Hardstark?

  Which wasn't problematic back then. It was height of humor back then.

• 48:56Karen Kilgariff?

  Streaking, mooning people, being a peeping tom.

• 49:00Georgia Hardstark?

  The amount of grown man's asses we saw as humor.

• 49:03Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 49:04Georgia Hardstark?

  Is unsettling.

• 49:05Karen Kilgariff?

  It was non-stop.

• 49:06Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Karen Kilgariff?

  So, and let's take a look at Moon's, just so we get the sense of the guy who likes mooning people so much that's his nickname.

• 49:13Georgia Hardstark?

  The guy in the front?

• 49:14Karen Kilgariff?

  It's the front guy with the long hair and the beard.

• 49:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, and the overalls.

• 49:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Essentially, based on that appearance, you would assume he's either a drug dealer or maybe a drug purchaser.

• 49:24Georgia Hardstark?

  Is he?

• 49:25Karen Kilgariff?

  He's actually an undercover cop.

• 49:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, fuck!

• 49:28Karen Kilgariff?

  And he is in the area to bust drug rings. This is the story of Lacy Moon Brown and the 1990 Wedding Sting.

• 49:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, my God. I don't, this is like, a theme I'm really fucking obsessed with that I, we just don't hear enough of.

• 49:44Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, tomfoolery of the cops in the 80s.

• 49:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, undercover in a really dangerous situation.

• 49:50Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 49:51Georgia Hardstark?

  And like, actually embedding yourself, your whole life, is that role.

• 49:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 49:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Like in the mafia too, and they have, I just find that so fascinating.

• 49:57Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, like the movie Donnie Brasco, where it's just like, he's in and he can't get out, and it is such a crazy life. So, this whole story that I'm about to tell you is based on a 2015 Atlantic article by a reporter named Jeff Mase, entitled "The Wedding Sting." The rest of the sources are in our show notes, but that article is the primary source. So, this man, Lacy Brown's personal journey that led him to law enforcement is unorthodox, to say the least. This is according to him, this is his story. He starts drinking when he's six years old.

• 50:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 50:29Karen Kilgariff?

  He joins the Marines in his 20s, but gets kicked out for violent conduct.

• 50:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Cool.

• 50:34Karen Kilgariff?

  In the Marines. As a civilian.

• 50:36Georgia Hardstark?

  I thought they liked that.

• 50:37Karen Kilgariff?

  I know, isn't that the point? As a civilian, he racks up charges for everything from illegal possession of moonshine to assault. In 1972, when he's around 30 years old, he finds himself in a jail cell following yet another arrest for felony assault with a deadly weapon. This is rock bottom for him. He's going through severe alcohol withdrawal and he begs for God's mercy. And then his felony is suddenly reduced to a misdemeanor and he's released from custody. He takes it as a sign that God is listening to him and he vows to change his life. So he course corrects by becoming a police officer.

• 51:10Georgia Hardstark?

  Jesus. A little left, bro.

• 51:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Easy.

• 51:14Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, don't.

• 51:15Karen Kilgariff?

  Go fishing.

• 51:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Don't just like take a sharp right.

• 51:17Karen Kilgariff?

  How about you could become a plasterer?

• 51:20Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally, welder.

• 51:21Karen Kilgariff?

  Build something.

• 51:22Georgia Hardstark?

  Nice welder.

• 51:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Help people.

• 51:24Georgia Hardstark?

  Postman, that's perfect.

• 51:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, right?

• 51:26Georgia Hardstark?

  Boom.

• 51:27Karen Kilgariff?

  Bring your beard around, you can moon people if you want at the end of your shift. In 1977, against all odds, Moon graduates from the police academy and he gets his start at a department just outside of Detroit.

• 51:38Georgia Hardstark?

  Wait, the violent guy? That guy? Oh, good.

• 51:41Karen Kilgariff?

  Too violent for the Marines.

• 51:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 51:43Karen Kilgariff?

  For the Marine Corps.

• 51:44Georgia Hardstark?

  Great.

• 51:44Karen Kilgariff?

  Now he's at your local police department.

• 51:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Great.

• 51:46Karen Kilgariff?

  But he's not your typical police officer. Later on, one of his colleagues will say, quote, "If you saw him, you'd never believe he was a cop. He had food stuck in his beard."

• 51:57Georgia Hardstark?

  I mean, I'd buy it.

• 51:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Way, way to give a quote.

• 52:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Way to talk about what's important.

• 52:04Georgia Hardstark?

  That guy slept with his wife or something.

• 52:06Karen Kilgariff?

  Something. He's just like, this guy's a pig. But another coworker describes him as, quote, "More believable as a bad guy than he was as a police officer," end quote. So Moon's unconventional look and wild disposition work for him, especially, of course, when he starts going undercover. And as he does, he is so effective that he basically becomes a free agent of sorts, doing contracted work for everyone from the DEA to the FBI to various drug units across Michigan.

• 52:36Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 52:37Karen Kilgariff?

  So I'm sure that not very many cops looked like him or had that kind of built-in, there's no way you could be a cop, energy.

• 52:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Right, and the like, he had so many years to practice being a bad guy.

• 52:50Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Georgia Hardstark?

  You can't, if you're 21 and you're a cop, you've never broken the law in your life, maybe.

• 52:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Georgia Hardstark?

  You're not, you don't know how they act. You haven't hung out with bad people, so he kind of knows that.

• 53:00Karen Kilgariff?

  He knows. He's drawing from a rich well of experience. And also, it's the thing I think of on TikTok all the time, which is, people don't understand what good acting is. They think that good acting is like the thing. And it's like, no, no, no, you have to go way under and make people think you're not doing anything.

• 53:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, I can't do that.

• 53:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Georgia Hardstark?

  It's hard.

• 53:19Karen Kilgariff?

  It's very hard. It's a true skill, but for somebody that's actually going undercover, it's like, I'm sure they saw this guy and were like, holy shit, he's so believable, get him while you can.

• 53:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 53:28Karen Kilgariff?

  Because the other guys are like, I'll put my part on the other side and then we'll get him, Nancy. So it's dangerous work, of course. Moon regularly works nights to ingratiate himself with the local criminals while investigating a full range of crimes. He gets shot at, he is robbed, he is beaten. But his legend grows with each new job, which usually ends in a big cinematic sting operation and multiple arrests. So he goes in and he does his time and he makes his friends and then it all blows up.

• 53:57Georgia Hardstark?

  And I love these though, because then he gets arrested on the scene too and taken away. I always was like, how does he move on to the next thing when they all know that he's the guy, forget it, you get it. I drank a lot of Coca-Cola.

• 54:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Drink to that and power through it. No, exactly. And I think that keeping people's cover is so crucial.

• 54:14Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Karen Kilgariff?

  But then again, you just, I just want to keep on putting it in the parameters of, this was the war on drugs, which was an illogical, kind of like the rebirth of like that cop culture of leave it to them, they know best.

• 54:28Georgia Hardstark?

  It's like the police state. That's what it, I mean, not that it's not now, we all know that, but like, that's kind of when it was.

• 54:34Karen Kilgariff?

  The source of it, where everyone jumped on board and said, no, this is the best way to handle our problems.

• 54:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you shouldn't, you know.

• 54:42Karen Kilgariff?

  All that shit. But now in 2026, it's like, people are just like, oh, wait a second, do they not have our best interest?

• 54:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 54:48Karen Kilgariff?

  As the robot dog with guns attached to its head walks down and keeps the peace.

• 54:53Georgia Hardstark?

  The only good thing that came out of the war on drugs, I have it at my house, Murderino gave it to me. It's the fucking case that you open up and they show you every kind of drug that you could get that they brought to an elementary school and showed all the kids what a doobie looked like and what fucking Quaaludes looked like. And some Murderino, whose dad was a cop, went in her fucking garage.

• 55:12Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 55:13Georgia Hardstark?

  Sent it to me.

• 55:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Here's the dare program in a briefcase.

• 55:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Treasure, I have, I'll bring it for a fan call video.

• 55:19Karen Kilgariff?

  That's a great idea. That's, that was a true highlight of our early days.

• 55:22Georgia Hardstark?

  Every time I see it, I'm like, this, everything was worth it. All the downs, worth it for this fucking thing.

• 55:27Karen Kilgariff?

  That and those haunted dolls that we had for a while.

• 55:30Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Karen Kilgariff?

  That's, we really peaked.

• 55:33Karen Kilgariff?

  We'll get back there someday. Okay, so the thing about this guy is that he was really in it and he was really doing it. So like, for example, one of his most famous arrests was he goes to a local carnival and he follows a suspect onto the zipper. My favorite ride at the carnival that I've talked about multiple times.

• 55:50Georgia Hardstark?

  Yes.

• 55:50Karen Kilgariff?

  He actually like does stuff like that.

• 55:52Georgia Hardstark?

  You don't have to go on, bro.

• 55:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Nope.

• 55:55Georgia Hardstark?

  Just stand over there.

• 55:56Karen Kilgariff?

  He's like spinning in a circle, chasing him and the eternal, like you'll always be behind him. Another time, he posts a fake obituary for a living suspect that he's just apprehended and stages a fake funeral for him. And when that suspect's criminal associates show up to mourn him, pay his respects, Moon arrests a bunch of them.

• 56:17Georgia Hardstark?

  So smart.

• 56:18Karen Kilgariff?

  So for background, officers in most cases are allowed to use deception to lure suspects to an arrest, but it becomes entrapment if the officer's actions directly result in a suspect committing a crime they otherwise would not have committed.

• 56:31Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 56:32Karen Kilgariff?

  So there's a kind of a difference there where it's like, that used to be the concern. That's the serpico world of like crooked cops versus the ones that are trying to do good.

• 56:40Georgia Hardstark?

  Planting, you can't plant evidence, but.

• 56:43Karen Kilgariff?

  No.

• 56:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Blah, blah, blah.

• 56:44Karen Kilgariff?

  And I think this is where all of that starts to flip in that serious way of there's this weird kind of trust of like, you know, your local authorities are going to fight a war on drugs and we're all going to support them in it, in that idea.

• 56:58Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, it's for the greater good. It's getting drugs out of children's hands when it's like, that's not what's happening.

• 57:04Karen Kilgariff?

  It's not what happened.

• 57:05Georgia Hardstark?

  And you're being fucking lied to.

• 57:06Karen Kilgariff?

  And how did those drugs get onto the street in the first place?

• 57:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 57:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay, so back to this undercover cop, Moon, who is very dedicated. He actually meets his wife while working undercover. He arrests her brother for making a bomb.

• 57:20Georgia Hardstark?

  Does he trick her? I hate that part. They do get married and stuff and like the wife doesn't know.

• 57:24Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, no, no, she does.

• 57:25Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, she does, okay.

• 57:27Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 57:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, so her brother is making a bomb.

• 57:28Karen Kilgariff?

  He has to go undercover to meet the brother, to arrest him for bomb making, and then he's like, what's up? Once that is over. So now we're in 1990. Moon is working undercover in the Flint, Michigan area, investigating the local drug trade. And based on reporting, it seems that this drug trade was much more pot focused than it was crack cocaine focused. He is working alongside a 38-year-old Flint police officer named Debbie Williams. And Jeff Mase, the author from that Atlantic article, describes Debbie as one of only a few women who, quote, "crawled, shot and boxed her way through the male-dominated police academy in Flint."

• 58:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Hell, yeah. Dr. Clarice Starling over here.

• 58:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Right, she had to jump over that thing and gray sweatshirt.

• 58:11Georgia Hardstark?

  Army crawl.

• 58:12Karen Kilgariff?

  So Moon and Debbie work undercover together posing as boyfriend and girlfriend drug addicts.

• 58:18Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 58:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Debbie will later say, quote, "I had to tell Moon, you have to remember to pretend you're in love with me." He was kind of embarrassed by it all.

• 58:26Karen Kilgariff?

  So he wasn't a great actor, I'm sure he was, it was just like him as himself.

• 58:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Karen Kilgariff?

  But then Debbie comes along and they have to kind of set up these things. One of his characters.

• 58:35Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Karen Kilgariff?

  Was in a relationship. And so he had to pretend like he was in a relationship and that's when his acting got stressed, strained a little bit.

• 58:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Weird.

• 58:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, right? But to the people that they are regularly buying drugs from, the couple is believable. Debbie has bright blonde hair and a stoner persona, and it seems like a natural fit with Moon's bearded, chain-smoking kind of tough guy persona. Rounding out this team is Sergeant Vic Wassalition of the Chiauawase County Sheriff's Department. Vic's in his mid-40s. He's essential to this operation because basically Moon and Debbie go and they hang out, they make their drug deals and they buy and they talk to people, and then they meet covertly with Vic. They get into a car, usually in a remote parking lot. They do basically an info dump, tell him everything they've just seen and heard and the names and the dates and everything into a recorder he has.

• 59:27Karen Kilgariff?

  And then that will later be kind of processed and used as evidence. Vic knows the undercover world himself. In the 80s, he worked as a, he went undercover as a biker named Animal to infiltrate the local cocaine trade. That was very dangerous. He found himself walking a tight line between not blowing his cover and not breaking the law.

• 59:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Do they have to do drugs?

• 59:49Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, it's interesting, that's illegal that they do drugs, but then of course, testing people and making them do drugs to prove they're not cops is very common. So there are times where to keep cover, they do have to do it.

• 1:00:02Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Karen Kilgariff?

  So for example, once a man shoved a gun in Vic's face, demanding he smoke a joint to prove he wasn't a cop. Obviously, he smoked the joint, but he usually found ways, they got very creative about how to stay clean in those situations. He actually carried around a modified coke straw that had a special blockage kind of compartment inside. So he could snort coke and it would catch the coke in the straw, but never go into his nose.

• 1:00:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 1:00:30Karen Kilgariff?

  Bummer.

• 1:00:30Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally, what a waste.

• 1:00:31Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, uh, yeah, so, because then they would have to get drug tested. I mean, they couldn't lose people to become drug addicts.

• 1:00:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:00:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Because drugs are bad for you.

• 1:00:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Karen Kilgariff?

  So ultimately, Moon, Debbie and Vic spend months building relationships with these local dealers and then criminal cases against them. But Moon has spent more than a decade in law enforcement at this point, and this high-risk work isn't paying that much. He and his wife Beth now have small children and she will later say, quote, "There were times we couldn't afford to eat and I felt bitter."

• 1:01:06Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:01:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. "All I ever wanted was a roof over our head," end quote. So together, they dream of a quieter, easier life, maybe back in Moon's native North Carolina, where they could buy land and settle down. So that's kind of the plan that they come up with, but of course, Moon wants to do one last big job.

• 1:01:25Georgia Hardstark?

  You can never do one last big job.

• 1:01:27Karen Kilgariff?

  They always have to, these men. The longer the beard, the more they have to do one last big. So in September of 1990, Moon pulls Vic aside and says, quote, "I'd kind of like to go out with a bang. Do you got any ideas?" So Vic says, "Yes, I do, buddy." Because Vic has come up with the ultimate drug sting, one that enables them to arrest all the suspects they have been investigating over the last several months in one big fell swoop while saving the local cash-strapped police department's big money.

• 1:02:00Georgia Hardstark?

  A wedding.

• 1:02:02Karen Kilgariff?

  A wedding.

• 1:02:02Georgia Hardstark?

  I love it.

• 1:02:03Karen Kilgariff?

  A fucking wedding.

• 1:02:04Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh.

• 1:02:04Karen Kilgariff?

  They're gonna throw a fake wedding. What's crazy to me is reading the phrase, "The local cash-strapped police departments," which here in 2026 just doesn't exist anymore.

• 1:02:13Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:02:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Because they figured out, politically, you take the war on drugs energy, you keep building that of, "We've gotta fight this crime."

• 1:02:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Scare everyone, yeah.

• 1:02:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Fear, fear, fear. And now we have police budget lines that are 100 times longer than any other budget. And the teachers make minus $500 a day.

• 1:02:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Seriously.

• 1:02:33Karen Kilgariff?

  It's fucking insanity.

• 1:02:35Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay, is that right? I have to say that every time?

• 1:02:37Georgia Hardstark?

  I love it.

• 1:02:37Karen Kilgariff?

  So the same afternoon that Vic and Moon are having this discussion, Moon calls his partner Debbie and asks her to fake marry him. She says, "Sure." And now the Chiawasi County Sheriff's Department allot a very tight budget for this team to pull off this wedding sting. So they shift into planning mode. Writer Jeff Mase reports, quote, "In the weeks leading up to the wedding, cops put aside crime reports and fingerprints to work on seating plans and floral arrangements."

• 1:03:07Georgia Hardstark?

  What if one of them was like, secretly like, "This is Oliver."

• 1:03:10Karen Kilgariff?

  "I'm so good at this."

• 1:03:11Georgia Hardstark?

  And then like quit to become a wedding planner.

• 1:03:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Georgia Hardstark?

  I want to read his story.

• 1:03:14Karen Kilgariff?

  They're the guy that's like standing there with the short cigar and like the, you know, the comb over.

• 1:03:18Georgia Hardstark?

  You'd never know.

• 1:03:19Karen Kilgariff?

  And he just like taps into something beautiful. He has a true vision. Well, that didn't happen in this wedding because it's so hilariously bad.

• 1:03:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 1:03:28Karen Kilgariff?

  And funny to me.

• 1:03:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:03:29Karen Kilgariff?

  So in the weeks leading up to the wedding, the operations room began to sound like a wedding planner's office as grizzled lawmen interrogated caterers. During briefings, they discussed whether the bride should wear her hair up or down. How much they would spend on food and how they would squeeze Moon into a tuxedo.

• 1:03:47Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh my god.

• 1:03:48Karen Kilgariff?

  There he is. He's a little... The beard got trimmed from that first picture you saw.

• 1:03:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, he looks like a trucker or like a biker.

• 1:03:54Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Georgia Hardstark?

  For sure.

• 1:03:55Karen Kilgariff?

  He's the real deal.

• 1:03:56Georgia Hardstark?

  I like that tile in the bathroom. That's neither here nor there.

• 1:03:58Karen Kilgariff?

  That looks like every live show we've ever done where we're just like...

• 1:04:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 1:04:02Karen Kilgariff?

  I come out and I'm like, "Hey, can you pull these Spanx up? Help me pull my Spanx up."

• 1:04:05Georgia Hardstark?

  I don't know how I'm going to zip this.

• 1:04:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Okay, so the wedding date is set. It's September 21st. This wedding's gonna be held at a discreet, modestly sized, and importantly, inexpensive community hall near Owasso, Michigan.

• 1:04:19Georgia Hardstark?

  The like buffet tables?

• 1:04:20Karen Kilgariff?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:21Georgia Hardstark?

  I can just see them.

• 1:04:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Those fold-out.

• 1:04:23Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, gray.

• 1:04:24Karen Kilgariff?

  Long numbers. And they put a nice paper tablecloth over the top.

• 1:04:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh my god.

• 1:04:28Karen Kilgariff?

  Debbie and Moon continue buying drugs and collecting evidence. Only now, when they do it, they share the happy news with all of their drug friends and they start handing out wedding invitations to these people, AKA the dozens of suspects that they're trying to entrap in this ring.

• 1:04:42Georgia Hardstark?

  It's pretty smart.

• 1:04:42Karen Kilgariff?

  Or not entrap, sorry, that they're trying to invite to participate in this.

• 1:04:47Georgia Hardstark?

  In the sting.

• 1:04:47Karen Kilgariff?

  In this kind of mean sting. Because also I was thinking about it where it's like, so they're there buying pot. It sounds like buying coke here and there, maybe, who knows? And just kind of hanging out with people. And then these people, they're like, "Hey, do you want to come and celebrate our love?"

• 1:05:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh my god, I'm so touched that you'd invite me. Like, I didn't know we were that close, but like, that really means a lot to me.

• 1:05:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, and I'm just selling this pot because I'm trying to get by.

• 1:05:11Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Karen Kilgariff?

  And in 40 years, HBO or Showtime's gonna make a series about how it's cool if this mom is just selling some pot. But for right now.

• 1:05:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, we have, live in a society that believes we should go to jail for 50 years because of it.

• 1:05:24Georgia Hardstark?

  And let me get you a wedding gift, too. That's the most fucked up thing, is they all arrive with a fucking blender.

• 1:05:30Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean...

• 1:05:30Georgia Hardstark?

  Just, "I want my blender back," is what I'd fucking say. Do they get thank you notes?

• 1:05:34Karen Kilgariff?

  I would, we'll see. Because who knows the level of dirtbag that this wedding truly goes to? It would be kind of fun to be able to see. But spoiler alert, it has been optioned to be made into a movie.

• 1:05:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh.

• 1:05:45Karen Kilgariff?

  Because of course, this is that kind of like, only in America in 1990 could this thing happen.

• 1:05:50Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:51Karen Kilgariff?

  So, now it's the night of September 21st and guests begin to show up to the venue just before 6:00 PM. Vic is posted in one of the cars out in the parking lot, clocking each suspect as they enter. Outside the venue, guests are greeted by a big sign telling them to check their weapons before entering.

• 1:06:08Georgia Hardstark?

  So smart.

• 1:06:09Karen Kilgariff?

  And most people comply, leaving their guns, knives, and I added brass knuckles in their cars. They go back to the car.

• 1:06:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Unload everything, hammer, a scythe.

• 1:06:22Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, they have like, "But take your wedding gift," and it's just a little baggie of coke.

• 1:06:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Georgia Hardstark?

  It's like not entrapment or planting it if you took it and put it in your pocket.

• 1:06:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, that's right. They take their coke and they put it in a beautiful wedding card.

• 1:06:32Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, with some Jordan almonds.

• 1:06:34Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. Goddamn Jordan almonds used to bum me out as a kid.

• 1:06:37Georgia Hardstark?

  They're such bummer.

• 1:06:38Karen Kilgariff?

  First of all, I was like, "Are we allowed to open this netting? Why are we digging into netting?"

• 1:06:42Georgia Hardstark?

  It's disgusting.

• 1:06:43Karen Kilgariff?

  And that's just for a shitty old almond. Okay.

• 1:06:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Not even salted. Okay, sorry.

• 1:06:47Karen Kilgariff?

  Not salted, not chocolateed. Once, uh, the guests get inside, there's an open bar, there's music, and there's dancing, and they're having a raffle.

• 1:06:56Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:06:56Karen Kilgariff?

  For about $100, which would be how much in today's money?

• 1:06:59Georgia Hardstark?

  600.

• 1:07:00Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, 250.

• 1:07:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Well, shit.

• 1:07:02Karen Kilgariff?

  It's only 1990. You can enter to win a chance to win an entire brick of marijuana.

• 1:07:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay, a raffle at a wedding is like, fuck yes.

• 1:07:10Karen Kilgariff?

  It's hilarious.

• 1:07:11Georgia Hardstark?

  I love it. And a brick of marijuana is not as cool.

• 1:07:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Which is stacked nearby.

• 1:07:16Georgia Hardstark?

  That's so funny.

• 1:07:16Karen Kilgariff?

  I would like to think.

• 1:07:18Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it Kush?

• 1:07:19Karen Kilgariff?

  If I walked in.

• 1:07:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it indica? What are we talking?

• 1:07:23Karen Kilgariff?

  That if I walked in, I'd be like, "Open bar, raffle for weed in a brick?"

• 1:07:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Karen Kilgariff?

  This feels wrong.

• 1:07:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Karen Kilgariff?

  This is all too good.

• 1:07:30Georgia Hardstark?

  Totally.

• 1:07:31Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Georgia Hardstark?

  But I do think we should start doing raffles at weddings.

• 1:07:34Karen Kilgariff?

  Hell, yes.

• 1:07:35Georgia Hardstark?

  Are you listening, listener?

• 1:07:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Are you listening, brides? You selfish brides?

• 1:07:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Invite us.

• 1:07:39Karen Kilgariff?

  And also raffle off, like, what would be good to get at a wedding?

• 1:07:43Georgia Hardstark?

  One of the gifts. Pick a gift. Pick one of the gifts on the table.

• 1:07:46Karen Kilgariff?

  You're like, "Oh my god, we got a new air fryer."

• 1:07:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, you can't open it, but you should pick a gift off the fucking...

• 1:07:50Karen Kilgariff?

  That's a really good idea. Or like, your raffle wins you, you get to do the money dance. Move aside, bride. Have you, I didn't know about money dances until...

• 1:08:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it Greek or is it...

• 1:08:01Karen Kilgariff?

  I think Italian.

• 1:08:02Georgia Hardstark?

  I think a lot of cultures do it, actually.

• 1:08:04Karen Kilgariff?

  I think so, too.

• 1:08:04Georgia Hardstark?

  It's fucking cool.

• 1:08:05Karen Kilgariff?

  Not Irish Catholics.

• 1:08:06Georgia Hardstark?

  We just get raised in a chair, which is pretty fucking awesome, so.

• 1:08:09Karen Kilgariff?

  God forbid. Irish Catholics would be like, "We don't need your money." Assuming these bricks weigh about a pound each, the weed in the raffle would be worth, on the street today in 2026, how much money a brick?

• 1:08:22Georgia Hardstark?

  $100 we're talking, you said?

• 1:08:23Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes. So if you only paid 100 for this brick, then how much?

• 1:08:28Georgia Hardstark?

  I don't know how much a brick's supposed to be.

• 1:08:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, you do. We all know you went to rehab.

• 1:08:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Not for fucking weed.

• 1:08:35Karen Kilgariff?

  Not for selling bricks of weed.

• 1:08:39Karen Kilgariff?

  Um, street worth $1,000 today.

• 1:08:40Georgia Hardstark?

  In today's money.

• 1:08:41Karen Kilgariff?

  In today's money.

• 1:08:42Georgia Hardstark?

  That's a lot.

• 1:08:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Right? Good for 100.

• 1:08:44Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Karen Kilgariff?

  100 for 1,000?

• 1:08:45Georgia Hardstark?

  I'll take it.

• 1:08:46Karen Kilgariff?

  And back to the entrapment point from earlier.

• 1:08:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:08:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Because they are not placing these pot bricks into suspects' hands directly, it's fine. They're simply creating an opportunity for the suspects to bid on them on their own volition, therefore it's not entrapment.

• 1:09:00Georgia Hardstark?

  That is tricky, tricky, tricky. Whoever, whatever fucking police officer came up with that idea, got a raise or whatever.

• 1:09:08Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, I think so.

• 1:09:09Georgia Hardstark?

  They got a brick of weed.

• 1:09:10Karen Kilgariff?

  They got a brick of weed. But all of it is a little bit like, people really enjoying the school play energy.

• 1:09:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, too much.

• 1:09:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, because I'm like, I would have been there like, "Sorry, they don't have raffles or tables full of gifts."

• 1:09:24Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:09:25Karen Kilgariff?

  That you're raffling at a wedding.

• 1:09:26Georgia Hardstark?

  No.

• 1:09:26Karen Kilgariff?

  This is Boys Gone Wild, essentially.

• 1:09:28Georgia Hardstark?

  100%, it's a movie. It's a movie.

• 1:09:30Karen Kilgariff?

  It's a movie of too many boys and there's Debbie running around, she can't fix everything. She's like, "That's not realistic."

• 1:09:36Georgia Hardstark?

  It's Margot Robbie for sure, right? It's like, Margot Robbie, like, Nancy, what was her name? Not Nancy, Tonya Harding?

• 1:09:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Margot, just like a little bit trashy.

• 1:09:45Karen Kilgariff?

  A little trashy, a little bad perm-y.

• 1:09:47Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Because actually, well, this is them from the day. So we have Debbie.

• 1:09:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh my god.

• 1:09:53Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, in her wedding dress that she, that, that actually Beth, Moon's wife, found for her at the Salvation Army.

• 1:09:58Georgia Hardstark?

  Hell, yeah. Oh, that is so 80s, but I know it's 90s. Is that him in the background? Is that Moon?

• 1:10:05Karen Kilgariff?

  No, that's actually Vic in the background in the sweatsuit.

• 1:10:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:10:08Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, that's Vic.

• 1:10:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Wow.

• 1:10:10Karen Kilgariff?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:11Georgia Hardstark?

  She looks so happy.

• 1:10:12Karen Kilgariff?

  And, because she loves tricking people. So, okay.

• 1:10:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah, that's Margot Robbie with a fucking...

• 1:10:18Karen Kilgariff?

  Right? Yes.

• 1:10:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Karen Kilgariff?

  The wedding is convincing to the suspects that are, slash, guests that are there. Especially considering the room is crawling with law enforcement, who unlike the unwitting guests, are carrying firearms under their suit jackets and dresses.

• 1:10:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Bet they are.

• 1:10:34Karen Kilgariff?

  And there's at least one local reporter that Moon tipped off, promising a big, exciting drug bust, you know, because he wants this to go down, right? So the wedding photographer is actually a photojournalist.

• 1:10:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Amazing.

• 1:10:47Karen Kilgariff?

  Right? Meanwhile, the wedding cake is just cardboard covered with frosting.

• 1:10:51Georgia Hardstark?

  You can't, okay. Okay, okay. All right.

• 1:10:54Karen Kilgariff?

  It's a cost-saving measure that the police have taken, but the frosting has been professionally decorated with little bees because it's the inside joke of this is a sting operation.

• 1:11:06Georgia Hardstark?

  You guys.

• 1:11:07Karen Kilgariff?

  So they're-

• 1:11:07Georgia Hardstark?

  Too much fun.

• 1:11:08Karen Kilgariff?

  They're having fun.

• 1:11:09Georgia Hardstark?

  Go to work.

• 1:11:10Karen Kilgariff?

  They really are just like-

• 1:11:12Georgia Hardstark?

  That's funny.

• 1:11:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Let's ruin some lives and have a great time doing it.

• 1:11:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Karen Kilgariff?

  The music provided for this wedding, the live wedding band, is a bunch of dudes, and the band is called SPOC, and it's short for Somebody Protect Our Crops.

• 1:11:29Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it a real band that they hired?

• 1:11:30Karen Kilgariff?

  No, the crops being marijuana.

• 1:11:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Karen Kilgariff?

  All of the members of the band are wearing matching pot leaf t-shirts.

• 1:11:37Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, it's heavy-handed.

• 1:11:39Karen Kilgariff?

  Very, very corny, corny. They didn't care about the corn.

• 1:11:42Georgia Hardstark?

  No.

• 1:11:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Also, it's an inside joke because Spock spelled backwards as cops.

• 1:11:47Georgia Hardstark?

  Cops.

• 1:11:48Karen Kilgariff?

  And the band are cops from different departments in the area.

• 1:11:52Georgia Hardstark?

  Who? They finally get to play their instruments.

• 1:11:55Karen Kilgariff?

  And apparently, they're fucking terrible. Everybody says so.

• 1:11:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Good.

• 1:11:59Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes. Here's a picture of that band.

• 1:12:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, I need that. That's gotta be our merch.

• 1:12:04Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, but it's like-

• 1:12:06Georgia Hardstark?

  MFM.

• 1:12:07Karen Kilgariff?

  It's so, sorry, but it's just like, hey, we're not cops. We love weed.

• 1:12:13Georgia Hardstark?

  Says cops.

• 1:12:14Karen Kilgariff?

  It says fucking cops on it.

• 1:12:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, no stoner would make, go to the trouble to make band shirts.

• 1:12:21Karen Kilgariff?

  No.

• 1:12:22Georgia Hardstark?

  No. And no band has ever made band shirts that they then all wear.

• 1:12:25Karen Kilgariff?

  So Moon and Debbie invited about 40 people in their drug dealing and doing life.

• 1:12:31Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:12:31Karen Kilgariff?

  Only a dozen or so show up. To those dozen that did-

• 1:12:35Georgia Hardstark?

  That's such a pothead thing. You can't invite, you know, okay.

• 1:12:37Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes, exactly. It's just like, oh, it's all right. I meant to tell you.

• 1:12:40Georgia Hardstark?

  Is it today?

• 1:12:41Karen Kilgariff?

  The ones that are there are like, man, this is great.

• 1:12:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Karen Kilgariff?

  So, everyone takes their seats. The ceremony begins.

• 1:12:48Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:12:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Debbie is walked down the aisle by her father, who is actually an undercover cop. She's wearing a dress, as I said, that Beth found at the Salvation Army for $17.

• 1:12:59Georgia Hardstark?

  Nice.

• 1:13:00Karen Kilgariff?

  How much in today's money?

• 1:13:02Georgia Hardstark?

  $49.

• 1:13:02Karen Kilgariff?

  $45.

• 1:13:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh!

• 1:13:03Karen Kilgariff?

  So close. Yes, nice one. You knew that because it was about thrifting.

• 1:13:09Georgia Hardstark?

  That's true. I know how much shit is at the Salvation Army.

• 1:13:11Karen Kilgariff?

  Also, Debbie's wearing a garter on her thigh that holds a small gun.

• 1:13:15Georgia Hardstark?

  If she cries, then she gets bonus points. That'd be so good.

• 1:13:18Karen Kilgariff?

  She's such a good actress.

• 1:13:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Karen Kilgariff?

  Just the one single tear. When they get to the altar, the minister, who is actually Flint's police sergeant-

• 1:13:26Georgia Hardstark?

  Come on, they'd recognize him.

• 1:13:28Karen Kilgariff?

  He's also in costume, so fake vows are exchanged, and Debbie and Moon say, I do.

• 1:13:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:13:34Karen Kilgariff?

  And once they do that, the band kicks off, with one undercover guest later describing their performance as, quote, "absolutely horrible."

• 1:13:45Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:13:48Karen Kilgariff?

  It's like, you can just feel the lack of rhythm.

• 1:13:50Georgia Hardstark?

  It's poker.

• 1:13:52Karen Kilgariff?

  They can only do poker. So, the booze is flowing, everyone's having a good time. Now the food is served, and while everyone eats, undercover officers pretending to be friends and family of the bride and groom start to stand up and give fake speeches and toast to the happy couple. The wedding party even poses for photos. They do the whole thing.

• 1:14:13Georgia Hardstark?

  No.

• 1:14:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Georgia Hardstark?

  They're already there. Like, just don't, just do it.

• 1:14:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Just get it over with.

• 1:14:18Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Karen Kilgariff?

  But no, they're in the school play and slash-

• 1:14:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:14:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Their first time improvising, and they're having fun with it.

• 1:14:24Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:25Karen Kilgariff?

  So now it's around 9 o'clock. The band begins to play the song, "I Fought The Law And The Law Won," right?

• 1:14:32Georgia Hardstark?

  So heavy-handed.

• 1:14:33Karen Kilgariff?

  That's the cue. It's so fucking corny.

• 1:14:35Georgia Hardstark?

  No way.

• 1:14:36Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes.

• 1:14:36Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:14:36Karen Kilgariff?

  A guy jumps on stage, like, he's about to give a toast, but instead, he says, "Let's have some fun," and then he asks that all the undercover officers stand and make themselves known, and the other guests start getting placed under arrest.

• 1:14:50Georgia Hardstark?

  Whoa.

• 1:14:51Karen Kilgariff?

  At first, there's disbelief-

• 1:14:53Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Karen Kilgariff?

  -among the guests. One person starts laughing as he's getting handcuffed, with an officer insisting that, quote, "We were not kidding. We have a warrant for your arrest," end quote. In all, 15 people are taken into custody that day, and dozens of others that Moon, Debbie, and Vic have been investigating will be arrested elsewhere in the coming days, so it's all part of the same sting.

• 1:15:14Georgia Hardstark?

  So you didn't have to do the fucking wedding in the first fucking place.

• 1:15:17Karen Kilgariff?

  Clearly was you guys blowing off some steam.

• 1:15:20Georgia Hardstark?

  That's right.

• 1:15:21Karen Kilgariff?

  As you can imagine, once news of this sting hits the papers-

• 1:15:25Georgia Hardstark?

  Viral.

• 1:15:26Karen Kilgariff?

  90s version of viral. Stories run with flourish, like, there's an Associated Press article with the subhead that reads, quote, "Here came the bride, all decked in white, and a snub-nosed revolver."

• 1:15:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Where's the editor? Can I talk to the editor, please?

• 1:15:42Karen Kilgariff?

  And a snub-nosed revolver.

• 1:15:43Georgia Hardstark?

  No, we gotta shorten that up.

• 1:15:45Karen Kilgariff?

  The rhythm's off. There's no internal anything. Okay, so Moon, for his part, becomes the subject of a Detroit Free Press profile the next year in 1991, when he finally retires. The reporter writes, quote, "His spirit and his health exhausted by two decades of undercover work, a legendary narc heads for the hills."

• 1:16:07Georgia Hardstark?

  That one's better.

• 1:16:08Karen Kilgariff?

  That's way better, end quote.

• 1:16:09Georgia Hardstark?

  It was a different crime. It could be, "Here comes the bribe," but it's not. It's not that, though.

• 1:16:14Karen Kilgariff?

  It's, um, "Here comes the raffle."

• 1:16:16Georgia Hardstark?

  That's right.

• 1:16:17Karen Kilgariff?

  "Brix of pot, anybody? No big deal." It's like at your cousin's wedding when they raffled off the weed.

• 1:16:22Georgia Hardstark?

  You remember.

• 1:16:24Karen Kilgariff?

  Fucking weirdos. Okay. Part of this, to me, feels a lot like when I was in college and I was a theater major. So, being a theater major, it was all about, like, hanging out in the theater department and like, "Do you need me to do anything? And what's up here?"

• 1:16:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Crafty and creative.

• 1:16:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes. You just wanted to be, you wanted to be identified as amongst these people. That's what I wanted.

• 1:16:45Georgia Hardstark?

  When you're new at improv, that, like, UCB.

• 1:16:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Right?

• 1:16:49Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Karen Kilgariff?

  And you're just like, "I guess I gotta sit in a cafe and write up my suggestions," or whatever. Nurse! But it seems to me that the energy with which they went into that, it was because they liked hanging out and doing it. They liked working on it. I think that is gonna prove out to be true later.

• 1:17:04Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:17:05Karen Kilgariff?

  Please hold while I read you this part instead. And I told you this, in 2015, Jeff Mase's article from The Atlantic gets optioned for film rights.

• 1:17:17Georgia Hardstark?

  Going to the chapel, and you're going to get arrested.

• 1:17:19Karen Kilgariff?

  There it is.

• 1:17:20Georgia Hardstark?

  Stop thinking about it and listen to it.

• 1:17:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Just keep on pitching. When they come to you, you say them.

• 1:17:25Georgia Hardstark?

  Never mind.

• 1:17:26Karen Kilgariff?

  It's been stuck in turnaround, but that idea, like, the second the article came out, they're like, "We gotta make a movie of this." Vince Vaughn. Whether this sting was successful by any measure, though, is tough to say because-

• 1:17:38Georgia Hardstark?

  15 people, yeah.

• 1:17:39Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. 15 people who were basically pot smokers. There was not-

• 1:17:42Georgia Hardstark?

  Nice ones, it seems, because they came to a wedding.

• 1:17:44Karen Kilgariff?

  I know. The nice, caring ones that were like, friendships matter to me. At the time, Flint doesn't have digitized court records. They're on the paper system still. It's 1990. The week that many of the cases from the arrests from this sting go to court, a tornado hits the area, and the important documents are scattered to the wind.

• 1:18:06Georgia Hardstark?

  That's God. That's God saying, "Fuck Nancy Reagan."

• 1:18:09Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Georgia Hardstark?

  "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. You're cool."

• 1:18:11Karen Kilgariff?

  Same God that got Moon out of his initial thing-

• 1:18:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Right.

• 1:18:16Karen Kilgariff?

  And got his thing made to a misdemeanor, that same God was here. Just like, enough of this. You had your fun.

• 1:18:21Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:22Karen Kilgariff?

  You should've made a real kick. Decades later, Jeff Mase attempts to suss out the number of convictions and details on what happened to those involved, but it's so murky because they don't have that actual paperwork.

• 1:18:34Georgia Hardstark?

  They should throw a funeral and have everyone who showed up at the-

• 1:18:38Karen Kilgariff?

  I mean, well, what's clear from the day reporting is that around 30 people are handed drug charges in connection with this investigation and this sting.

• 1:18:46Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:18:47Karen Kilgariff?

  It seems like very few suspects were given long or harsh sentences. Most probably resolved them through plea deals and basically got to go back to their regular lives. Vic will later say that some of the people they arrested took it all in stride, claiming, quote, "There were no bad feelings. Everyone thought it was funny."

• 1:19:07Georgia Hardstark?

  You got me.

• 1:19:08Karen Kilgariff?

  And that's such a cop attitude of like, they loved it. Here's a guy getting arrested, and you can tell, you can look at his face and see.

• 1:19:15Georgia Hardstark?

  Okay.

• 1:19:16Karen Kilgariff?

  It doesn't seem like he thinks it's all that funny.

• 1:19:18Georgia Hardstark?

  He looks shell-shocked.

• 1:19:20Karen Kilgariff?

  That's Debbie and Moon.

• 1:19:21Georgia Hardstark?

  You know why? Because he wore fucking acid, what are those jeans called?

• 1:19:23Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah, acid-washed.

• 1:19:25Georgia Hardstark?

  A wedding.

• 1:19:25Karen Kilgariff?

  Acid-washed jeans and a Freddy Krueger sweater.

• 1:19:27Georgia Hardstark?

  And look at the bride with the gun in her hand. That is a-

• 1:19:31Karen Kilgariff?

  She pulled that right out of her thigh garter-

• 1:19:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Damn.

• 1:19:34Karen Kilgariff?

  And said, "How dare you smoke pot."

• 1:19:37Georgia Hardstark?

  And he's got a joint in his mouth.

• 1:19:38Karen Kilgariff?

  He's got-

• 1:19:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Moon's got a joint in his mouth.

• 1:19:40Karen Kilgariff?

  Moon's already lit up.

• 1:19:41Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:19:42Karen Kilgariff?

  That guy totally looks like he's like, "Oh, that's what I get for trying to be nice to people." I basically wrote here, "I'd love to hear a 2026 interview with the arrestees to see how true that statement is." That's the podcast we need to hear.

• 1:19:53Georgia Hardstark?

  If anyone listening's dad or mom was in that sting, please email us immediately. Put it in the subject line, myfavoritemurder@gmail. I'll read it on a hometown.

• 1:20:02Karen Kilgariff?

  It's gonna get like a five-alarm fire straight to the microphone if we, if you want to tell us your side of the story. Atlantic writer Jeff Mase notes, though, that more importantly, quote, "For all the drama and creativity involved, the operation ultimately didn't do much to improve the grim outlook of the city and its surrounding areas," end quote. So, obviously, the idea that we're gonna clean up the streets, this all just kind of turned it into fun times and kookiness, and it's like, and you just arrested a bunch of people that were able to plea out afterwards. In the years that follow, and in spite of the war on drugs, policing culture looming larger and larger, the scourge of drugs continues as the broader region of this part of Michigan is left to grapple with severe economic hardship.

• 1:20:47Karen Kilgariff?

  So, basically, all of this is for naught. For his part in the sting, Moon gets a $5,000 bonus, which would be worth about how much in today's money?

• 1:20:56Georgia Hardstark?

  $830.

• 1:20:58Karen Kilgariff?

  It's a $5,000 bonus.

• 1:21:03Georgia Hardstark?

  Not 100. 8,300.

• 1:21:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Closer.

• 1:21:08Georgia Hardstark?

  It's 12,000.

• 1:21:12Karen Kilgariff?

  This went down to 800.

• 1:21:13Georgia Hardstark?

  It's been an hour.

• 1:21:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Anyway, this bonus enables Moon to retire, get his

• 1:21:19Georgia Hardstark?

  Get his family, you're right.

• 1:21:20Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah. Retire, get his family together, and go move back to North Carolina like he planned.

• 1:21:25Georgia Hardstark?

  Great.

• 1:21:26Karen Kilgariff?

  In 2006, Lacey Moon Brown passes away at just 63 years old with his obituary reading, quote, "The moon shines no more in North Carolina."

• 1:21:37Georgia Hardstark?

  That's dramatic.

• 1:21:38Karen Kilgariff?

  Uh, his cause of death is unclear, but he was a heavy smoker and who knows?

• 1:21:43Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Karen Kilgariff?

  There is one sweet, weird side note that I was talking about before, which is that during the fake wedding, when Sergeant Vic Wassalition watches Officer Debbie Williams coming down the aisle in her dress, in her Salvation Army dress, he realizes that night he has feelings for her and he says, quote, "I couldn't let her go." They end up falling in love and eventually marrying. And as best as Maren can tell from her research, they're still together to this day. So my thing is, I think that this idea where it was like, it was for Moon to get one last kind of like, "Hooray for you" in the papers. And then all the other stuff was like, when you like hanging out with people, so you're

• 1:22:27Karen Kilgariff?

  like, yeah, we better get together and figure out that raffle tomorrow, Vic.

• 1:22:31Georgia Hardstark?

  Oh, right.

• 1:22:31Karen Kilgariff?

  Like, it has that feeling.

• 1:22:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Like, I wanted it to go on as long as possible, kind of a thing.

• 1:22:35Karen Kilgariff?

  But they have a fucking cop band playing. Like, you can't just have a DJ like normal weddings.

• 1:22:41Georgia Hardstark?

  That's so romantic.

• 1:22:42Karen Kilgariff?

  They had cops fucking "I fought the law" rehearsal.

• 1:22:46Georgia Hardstark?

  When did you know you were in love with mom?

• 1:22:49Karen Kilgariff?

  Well, when she pulled out that little pistol from her thigh garter and said, "Fucking up against the wall." And that's the story of the 1990 Wedding Sting.

• 1:22:59Georgia Hardstark?

  That was fun.

• 1:23:00Karen Kilgariff?

  Hey, we're not opposed to having fun on this podcast. If you have any ideas of how we could have more fun, please write in [email protected].

• 1:23:08Georgia Hardstark?

  Or just comment on the Instagram. That's the only way I'll ever see, like, comments is if it's on Instagram and the fan cult.

• 1:23:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Yes. We can't go looking for it anymore, people. We've been through so much.

• 1:23:18Georgia Hardstark?

  My brain is like, you know, I have like, my eyeballs like a cartoon are filling up with...

• 1:23:22Karen Kilgariff?

  I just have those ones from like, 2017 that I looked at one time and it's burned into my memory forever.

• 1:23:27Georgia Hardstark?

  The comments?

• 1:23:28Karen Kilgariff?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:28Georgia Hardstark?

  Never, never, never.

• 1:23:29Karen Kilgariff?

  Why is it them? We don't know. We don't know.

• 1:23:33Georgia Hardstark?

  Sorry about your free thing. You don't like it? Go to get another free thing somewhere else.

• 1:23:38Karen Kilgariff?

  You go start your free thing.

• 1:23:39Georgia Hardstark?

  Yeah. You know how many free things there are for you to like?

• 1:23:41Karen Kilgariff?

  Opine elsewhere.

• 1:23:42Georgia Hardstark?

  It's supposed to be political. You don't fucking know that.

• 1:23:46Karen Kilgariff?

  Stay sexy.

• 1:23:47Georgia Hardstark?

  And don't get murdered.

• 1:23:48Karen Kilgariff?

  Goodbye.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Elvis, do you want a cookie?

• 1:23:59Karen Kilgariff?

  This has been an Exactly Right Production.

• 1:24:01Georgia Hardstark?

  Our managing producer is Molly Smith.

• 1:24:02Karen Kilgariff?

  Our consulting producer is Kate Schellbach.

• 1:24:05Georgia Hardstark?

  Our creative lead is Allison Agosti.

• 1:24:07Karen Kilgariff?

  Our associate producer is Tessa Hughes and our editor is Aristotle Acevedo.

• 1:24:11Georgia Hardstark?

  This episode was mixed by Leona Scolacci.

• 1:24:13Karen Kilgariff?

  Our researchers are Maren McLaughlin and Ally Elkin.

• 1:24:16Georgia Hardstark?

  Email your hometowns to [email protected] and follow the show on Instagram at MyFavoriteMurder.

• 1:24:22Karen Kilgariff?

  Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:24:27Georgia Hardstark?

  Or watch new episodes every week on Netflix. Search for My Favorite Murder, add us to your list, and hit the double thumbs up button.

• 1:24:35Karen Kilgariff?

  Goodbye.

• 1:24:43Karen Kilgariff?

  Calling all amateur detectives and podcast obsessives.

• 1:24:47Georgia Hardstark?

  Virgin Voyages' second True Crime Voyage sets sail March 20th, 2027, for a five-night escape to Grand Turk and the Beach Club at Bimini.

• 1:24:55Karen Kilgariff?

  As part of the On Air at Sea collection, this immersive sailing brings together fan favorite podcasts, including Disgrace Land, Buried Bones, and Wise Crack, for live recordings, behind-the-scenes access, exclusive meet and greets, and crime-themed programming that you won't find anywhere else.

• 1:25:11Georgia Hardstark?

  All aboard our award-winning, kid-free ships.

• 1:25:14Karen Kilgariff?

  Head over to virginvoyages.com/truecrime to secure your spot.

• 1:25:18Georgia Hardstark?

  Goodbye.

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