Everyone. Karen and Ellen will be back next week because today 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 the world.
Let's bring our fantasies to realities. I'm extreme, calculated and loved.
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, whom we now know is Scott Schweipert, 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 covered, 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 heartbreaking 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 the 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 at 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 AffA, 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, so that Jason had been going to twenty
six oh six every weekend for the past 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 PEEDEE on the
twenty second was for twenty six year old Michael Wockles. 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 breakup the previous year. They said that
Michael had started going out with men he'd met in internet chat rooms and that
it was something they worried about, but it was Michael's new room mate,
Fred van Denebil, 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 p m. And midnight on December twentieth, almost twenty four hours
after Jason Galehouse was last seen leaving twenty six o 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 leeds 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 alcohol sure 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, I 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 poolong