Everyone, I want to share my newest podcast with you, Unsafe Spaces.
Unsafe Spaces is an investigative, serialized true crime podcast that explores the crimes that
take place in the places we're supposed to feel the safest. In season one,
Tampa's Missing Men, I explore how two different missing persons cases reported on
the same day opened a Pandora's box of unreported assaults, cold missing persons cases,
ignored rapes, and unsolved murders within Florida's gay community, and the two
men who could be responsible for all of them, not to mention the cold
cases of missing gay men in Georgia, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
South Carolina, and beyond. I'm going to play you a clip now from
Unsaved Spaces while you're listening. Subscribe to Unsafe Spaces wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's violate world. Let's bring our fantasies to realities. I'm extreme,
calculated and loving. Easy to make them vanish with no link to us in
the least, easier to find a loner guy, less connection. I do
a chokehold from behind. You hold him down, strap him up, not
to be found again. He wasn't going to be going back. These are
quotes from America Online instant messages between Master Scott, who we now know is
Scott Schweikert, and Dom Dude for sub, who we now know is Stephen
Lorenzo. Whenever I take on a new case, the first question I find
myself asking is how did we get here? What series of events, both
personal and anthropological, created an environment for these crimes to have occurred? And
in this case the answer is a lot more complicated than in others I've cover,
because in order to understand these crimes, we have to understand not just
gay culture, but societies effect on it. We have to understand power dynamics
and couples. We have to take a look at law enforcements and media's roles
in crime. It's often a challenging, convoluted, and heart breaking study in
humanity, and so it's hard to know just where to start, because more
often than not, beginnings are just the reverberations from a coalescence of events that
came before. Few things rarely begin anymore. Usually they just carry over.
But for now, I guess we'll start with December twenty second of two thousand
and three. On December twenty second two thousand and three, there were two
different missing persons cases filed with a Tampa, Florida police Department. The first
was of twenty six year old Jason Rodney Galehouse, a gay man who had
recently moved to Tampa from Sarasota, Florida. Jason was reported missing by his
roommate at eleven twenty five am on the morning of the twenty second. His
roommate reported that on the night of Friday, December nineteenth, he, Jason,
and two of their friends a couple, had gone out bar hopping in
Tampa. The four of them eventually ended up twenty six oh six, a
gay bar on North Armenia Avenue in the early morning hours of December twentieth.
Because the four friends had driven to twenty six oh six together, Jason didn't
have his car with him, and when it was time to leave, Jason
told his friends that he didn't need a ride because he was going to go
home with two guys he'd met at the bar. It was the last time
that Jason's friend saw him, and unfortunately, none of them saw either of
the two men that Jason left the bar with. Detective Carlos Lastra was the
responding officer in Jason's missing person case, and he took the disappearance seriously.
Immediately following Jason's roommate's interview and AFFI, David Lastra went to Jason's place of
work, a flower shop where Jason was a floral designer, and upon interviewing
Jason's boss, he learned that Jason hadn't been to work in three days,
which was very unlike him. In a follow up interview with Jason's roommate,
the one who had reported him missing, he told Lastra that he had known
Jason for years, that they were childhood friends. Back in Sarasota, he
let Lastra search the house that he shared with Jason and another roommate, and
when pressed about Jason's life, he admitted that Jason had been to the hospital
on two different occasions for drug overdoses, but that had been years prior.
He said that since then, Jason no longer used GHB. JHB is a
depressant drug that slows down messages traveling between the brain and the body. It's
also a party drug and often referred to as the date rape drug, but
he said that Jason did still occasionally snort cocaine and that Jason had been going
to twenty six oh six every weekend for the past six several months. He
said that Jason did have a habit of using recreational drugs and hooking up with
guys from the bars, and he confirmed that after reaching out to friends,
no one in their friend group had seen nor heard from Jason since he left
the bar that night. The second missing person's report that was filed with Tampa
Pedee on the twenty second was for twenty six year old Michael Wocholes. Michael
had recently moved to Tampa from Tarpin Springs, Florida, about forty miles away
northwest. He was working as a waiter at Bahama Breeze. According to his
former roommates, Michael was a happy, go lucky guy who'd recently reconnected with
his estranged mother and had begun dating again after a break up the previous year.
They said that Michael had started going out with men he'd met in internet
chat room zones and that it was something they worried about, But it was
Michael's new roommate, Fred Van Denebel, who reported him missing when he failed
to return home from a night out According to reports, Michael was last seen
in his red nineteen ninety two Jeep Cherokee leaving his Bay Club apartment in Tampa's
Rocky Point neighborhood between eleven PM and midnight on December twentieth, almost twenty four
hours after Jason Galehouse was last seen leaving twenty six oh six. It was
unclear where exactly Michael was headed that night. He spoke with several friends on
his cell phone after leaving his apartment, but only said that he was going
out for drinks. Michael's cell phone and jeep disappeared with him, and there'd
be no signs of Michael nor any major leads in his case for two weeks
following his disappearance. Now, there are a few different things at play in
the production of this podcast. For one, I am a gay man around
the same age Michael and Jason would be now, so it's hard not to
experience this investigation or see the people involved through a personal lens. Second,
and more critical, the only way to discuss this case holistically is to share
as best I can the gay experience and gay culture written large. It's a
defining factor in both this story and in the spaces we'll be discussing and despite
how media often portrays it, homosexuality is not a monolith. So throughout the
season, I'll be playing conversations I've had with gay men across the country and
of all ages about their experiences and how those experiences have defined their relationship with
homosexuality, their relationships with other gay men, and their identity as a whole.
This is a part of a conversation I had with an old friend,
Eric Schmidt, about drug and alcohol abuse amongst gay men. Drug and alcohol
abuse runs pretty rampant within the gay community, or at least it did when
you know, when we were I think it's I think it still does.
And you know, I for me, I can only imagine that that comes
from or I will speak for myself, like when I have over imbibed or
putting myself in risky positions with substances, it was because I didn't feel comfortable
in my own skin, or I had self loathing or lack of confidence and
was just afraid and needed something to take my head away from my body.
I guess yeah, And I wonder if that has been your experience as well.
I absolutely, I would say absolutely, I think I think also,
you know, again going back to that, like we don't we don't date
as teenagers, we don't learn how to form intimate relationships with people as teenagers,
and then drugs and alcoholicure do make that easier. I think a lot
of my drug use was was very wrapped up in the perceived intimacy of either
getting high with somebody, using with somebody. The sex that we were going
to have while we were while we were high absolutely went hand in hand with
me being able to move into a sexual space that I you know, didn't
get in the shallow end of the poolung