Welcome back to the Path with Chili. I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and
I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case. November thirtieth, nineteen
sixty three, West Hollywood, California, after not being heard from for over
two days, the nude body of twenty two year old actress Karen cups in
It is discovered on the couch inside her apartment. Her death is initially suspected
to be a drug overdose, but when the coroner discovers a broken hyoid bone
in Karen's throat, he rules that she was a victim of strangulation. Years
later, Karen's death would be linked to conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy and allegations that she made an anonymous phone call to warn
people of his death minutes before it happened. After that, the Path went
chilly, So today we're going to be exploring an unusual cold case, the
unexplained nineteen sixty three death of Karen coupsonant I originally covered this one in an
episode of The Trail Went Cold, which I released on November the twenty second,
twenty seventeen. As that just happened to be the fifty fourth anniversary of
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Well, this series of episodes
is not going to be analyzing the JFK assassination, because that would have to
be twenty or thirty parts law. Instead, we're going to be focusing on
the death of an actress named Karen Coupsonant, which occurred just over one week
later under almost circum stances. There shouldn't be any reason to link these two
events, but to give you an idea of how far reaching the JFK conspiracy
theories go. There's some people who believe that Karen cups in It was murdered
because she knew too much about the assassination. In fact, there's even's been
speculation that she made a phone call on the morning of the assassination and tried
to warn people that it was going to take place. I decided I wanted
to revisit this one because when I attended the True Crime Podcast Festival in Dallas
last year, I paid a visit to the JFK Museum, which is located
in Daily Plaza at the building which used to be the Texas School Book Depository.
So you can stand right next to the spot where Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly
fired the fatal shots. After I went there, I decided to go down
the rabbit hole and start researching the assassination again. So on this episode,
I'll probably have some new thoughts about it and the so called connection to Karen
cups in it. Regardless of whether or not you believe it as any connection
to JFK, Karen's death is still a pretty striguing mystery in its own right
and well worth exploring from all possible angles. Okay, you have me fascinated.
I am obsessed with hearing different philosophies and conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination.
But even bigger than that Robin you nailed it, like, maybe it
has nothing to do with the JFK assassination. And one of the things we
hear all the time is someone saying, like, I want to know why
this happened, but we know it happened. Karen had her highoid bone broken,
which means someone strangled her to death. So no matter what the why,
we have this young model actress who is found deceased and murdered and we
don't know what happened to her, So just like the JFK mystery, hers
is equally important to saying, like what happened to her? Not just why,
but what and who? Which I can't wait to hear more exactly.
Like, it's possible that the whole JFK angle has kind of muddled a case
bit, that it might be spirit steering it into conspiracy theory territory and kind
of distracting from the real facts. But like you said, regardless of whether
or not there is a connection, she still seemed like she was the victim
of a very strange death and she deserves a resolution. Our story begins in
West Hollywood, California, in nineteen sixty three. Our central figure is twenty
two year old Karen Cupsinett, who originally hails from Chicago, the home of
her parents, Irv and Si Cupsinett. IRV Cupsinett, who usually went by
his nickname Cup, was one of the most prominent recognizable figures in Chicago,
as he was a gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun Times for several decades,
hosted his own syndicated TV talk show, and worked as a radio announcer for
the Chicago Bears. Football team. Karen used her influential family name to break
into acting before she moved to Hollywood and made her screen debut with a bit
part in the nineteen sixty one Jerry Lewis comedy The Ladies Man. Which side
note you because Jerry, is this the same Jerry Lewis? That is the
guy that married the thirteen year old? Or is that a different Jerry Lewis?
Oh, that's Jerry lee Lewis, the piano player. Okay, okay,
I was like, but The Ladies Man. But Jerry Lewis sounded kind
of like a bit of a creep as well. He had a lot of
women in his lifetime, and he was not particularly attractive all right. Over
the next two years, Karen's acting jobs would mostly be guest spots on television
shows, and her final role was on an episode of Perry Mason, which
did not air until after her death. After doing a guest appearance on the
TV series The Wild Country, she became romantically involved with the show's star Andrew
Prine. However, even though Karen wanted to settle down, get married,
and potentially start a family with Andrew, he did not wish to make their
relationship exclusive and wanted to keep dating other women. In July nineteen sixty three,
Karen became pregnant with Andrew's child, so she traveled down to Tijuana to
have an illegal abortion and was accompanied by her friends Mark and Marcia Goddard.
Mark Goddard was also an actor and went on to play the role of Major
Don West on the TV series Lost in Space, and he agreed to pay
for Karen's abortion. How sad, I mean, we've talked about this with
other cases, but Karen, it's nineteen sixty three. So this idea that
she's a young actress, you know, she's in her prime. She's trying
to book all of these roles, and all of a sudden she gets pregnant
with someone's baby who doesn't want a long term, serious relationship with her,
and so she's making a decision to go down to Mexico and get an illegal
abortion, and thank god she has these two friends who are going to go
with her, because of course Andrew the father isn't involved or going with her.
So really sad, difficult circumstance, which also sets her up for some
other problematic issues, right, like is someone upset with her about the abortionist,
someone upset with her about a relationship with Andrew, Like, could some
of those things have also later role in what happened to her down the road?
Is this a relationship, Robin that you feel like Andrew just kind of
overpromised and underdelivered and then when pushing came to shove, he just wasn't there
for Karen. That's what I'm guessing, Yeah, because I looked up Andrew
Prine's biography and it says that he had a spouse, but it's not clear
to me if he ever got married or have children. So he just sounded
like a guy who wanted to date a lot of women and just did not
feel like settling down and having a family. So it's probably similar to that
episode we did last month about the Judie Hyams disappearance, where she was another
young woman who got pregnant with a man who didn't seem to be interested in
being a father, so she was forced to have an illegal abortion on her
own, but pretty much had to fend for herself, and luckily she had
some friends the Goddards, who were willing to help her, and she did
not die or anything like Judith Times likely did, and neither man could bother
to drive the woman that they were with to their abortion, nor could pay
for it. Like that's kind of shocking, exactly, So thank god Mark
Goddard seemed like a decent guy and his wife right or Marcia yeah as well?
Yeah yeah. So. In addition to the abortion, Karen's entire personal
life seemed to be in a tumultuous state at this point, as she always
had an obsession with her weight and was abusing diet pills along with other prescription
drugs. On the evening of November the twenty seventh, Karen attended a dinner
party at the Goddard's home in Beverly Hills. Even though the dinner was scheduled
to start at six thirty pm, she arrived over an hour late. According
to the Goddards, Karen barely ate anything and mostly just played around with her
food. She also looked like she might be under the influence of something,
as her pupils were constricted her lips. Her lips seemed numb, her voice
sounded funny, and she was moving her head around at odd angles. When
Mark and fronted Karen about this, she started crying before sharing an odd story
about finding an abandoned baby on her doorstep earlier that day. According to Karen,
after she contacted the police, they came to her apartment and took the
baby away. Since the following day was Thanksgiving, the Goodards invited Karen back
for dinner, but she told him that she and Andrew Pryne were planning to
spend the day at the home of actor Glenn Ford. Karen called a taxi
to take her home at eight thirty, and she promised to phone the Gooddars
later on. That's okay. So you have Karen dealing with a lot of
things here. This is not abnormal. If you're in the modeling actress industry
even today, you're going to have to make sure that you have the physique
of what they tell you is beautiful. And unfortunately, the standards they've set
for women specifically is that you need to be tiny, you need to be
itty biddy because clothes look better on you. The camera adds weight, right,
and that aging and gaining weight or being a normal size person doesn't really
get you a job. So Karen's under this influence. In the nineteen sixties,
she was pregnant and then had the you know, had the abortion.
Her hormones are probably all over the place. She feels incredible pressure to be
good enough, pretty enough, than enough, and she is breaking into that
industry, so I would imagine the pressure was even more for her to continue
to be successful. Back in the sixties two, if you think about diet
medications, they used to put crazy things, Yes, and meth was like
there would be mething, amphetamines would be part of the concoction, and it
was dangerous combinations. So when you were saying she was moving her head at
at angles and things like that, I think it very well could have been
some kind of high dose of Even just the diet pills would have made her
very her behavior problematic, And so I feel sad for her. It does
feel like everything's falling apart. And then yet still she has sacrifice having a
baby. If this story is true, that a baby's left on her doorstep,
how psychologically damaging that you had an abortion, You find a baby on
your doorstep, You have to then give that baby away. And now you're
going to go hang out with the man who got you pregnant and told you
he didn't want a relationship with you, but now he still does want some
kind of relationship with you. This is not a healthy dynamic for Karen whatsoever.
All the way around. He sounds like a total f boy, right,
Like that's just what he's there for. He's there for the good times,
he's there for the fun times. Who wants to sleep with her?
But when it comes to any responsibility, he isn't there. But with regards
to what you said about the drugs that she could have potentially been taking,
the side effects that she was having would be in line with that. And
also when you look at the story about the baby, you have to wonder
if given the situation with the abortion. I mean, there is a lot
of hormonal changes that will go along with an abortion. Things can happen.
Somebody may, due to the physical stress and the emotional stress and the physiological
changes, may have a psychotic episode. So is it possible that due to
the loss of what could have been her baby, she's then somehow materialized this
other baby that's been left on her doorstep. I mean, what are the
chances that she would go and have this abortion and then just by chance,
somebody chooses her home to abandon a infant. It just seems unlikely. I'm
not saying it couldn't happen, But it almost seems like a nightmare, like
something where when you're thinking right before you go to bed, you know,
and you're thinking about, oh man, these are all the bad things that
could happen with this situation, you fall asleep and all of a sudden it
gets into this grandized, you know, reality in your head. It does
sound like that's something that's very probable. Jeweles in my opinion, that she
was fixated on this quote letting go of her baby, getting rid of her
baby, and then oh now this is back in your face, like do
you really want to get rid of that baby? Did you make the right
decision? I could absolutely see it being something that is a psychological break where
she envisioned that. I would love to know if there were police records where
the police really did come and take a baby away. I'm assuming we don't
have that information, right Robin. We're actually going to talk about that later.
There is no records of this whatsoever. So it seems very likely to
me that she completely made up this story and that there was no abandoned baby,
and she could have just been on drugs that she had trouble deducing fantasy
from reality, and this whole story maybe and concocted from her subconscious because she
was feeling trauma and guilt about losing a baby during an abortion. After returning
to her apartment in West Hollywood, Karen was visited by one of her friends,
a writer named Edward Rubin, and they decided to watch television together.
Karen apparently had a pretty state of the art television set for nineteen sixty three,
so her apartment was often a popular hangout for her friends to watch television.
Karen excused herself and went outside for a quick walk, where she wound
up bumping into another actor friend of hers named Robert Hathaway, and invited him
up to the apartment. The three friends and you to watch TV together until
Karen started falling asleep on the couch, so she decided to head into her
bedroom. According to Ruben and Hathaway, they weren't entirely sure if Karen had
gone to bed, so they lured the volume on the TV set and continued
watching. They both said they exited the apartment together at around eleven fifteen pm,
claiming that they made sure to lock the door behind them. This sounds
incredibly probable, right if there was just one of them, I'd say,
oh, you know, did they do something to Karen? But if two
of them are sitting out there and she's inviting these people into her home,
they very likely know each other because it's probably a smaller circle of friends who
all live in a similar area. Would I'd be more concerned if it was
just one of them, But if both of them sat and watched TV,
if both can account for the other one being present, and they walked out
lock her little door behind them, so she's safe. Maybe it's just friends
coming over and being done for the night. At least I'm hoping that's the
case. Yeah, there really isn't anything particularly suspicious about them. As we're
going to talk ab out, there is kind of a long lineup of potential
suspects who could have killed Karen that night, and these two were kind of
looked at it. They were investigated, and but they both still held to
this story that they were there together and Karen, for all we know,
she could have gotten to bed or passed out or something like that. So
they just decided, well, we don't want to wake her up, and
that's when they decided to leave together and said that they locked the door behind
them, so by the evening of No Remember the thirtieth, Mark and Marcia
Goddard became concerned because Karen had not phoned them in three days, so they
decided to pay a visit to her apartment. The front door turned out to
be unlocked, so the Gaddards let themselves inside and were shocked to discover that
Karen's new decomposing body was lying face down on the couch with flecks of blood
on her face and a nearby pillow. The television set was on and playing
at a very low volume, and the apartment appeared to be in a state
of disarray. A half empty cup of coffee was resting on a stand,
a coffee pot in a brandy sniffed or full of cigarette puts were on the
floor. Sixteen cigarettes were strewn around the couch, and a lamp was overturned.
A bathroom was laid across a chair in the living room, and a
towel was found on the bathroom floor. When police were summoned to the scene,
they found a number of rambling notes throughout the apartment which Karen had written.
The notes contained sentences like quote I'm no good, I'm not really that
pretty. My figures fat and will never be the way my mother wants it.
Why must I be so alone? What's the use of living with nothing
to believe in? There's nothing only phony motives, selfish egoists, selfless people,
fat heads and drunks, And I want out? End quote. Karen
also left behind a notes listing famous people she liked, including President John F.
Kennedy. This would turn out to be somewhat prophetic, but we'll get
into that a little later. All right, I'm always a little bit cognizant
of letters left behind or found that aren't purposely placed in like a you know,
this is a note I'm leaving at my time of death, because my
god, if you happen to share your ideas in a diary or a journal,
or you make notes, or you are kind of processing things on paper,
you could look around my home and find some things where you went,
Oh, she's she's struggling, or look at this, this is proof she
wanted out. It's like, no, no, I'm writing down my fears,
my concerns, my angers, my negative thoughts. It is possible that
Karen used that instead of telling other people, right, she could have been
a very private person. She also could have not wanted to burden people around
her. Perhaps she felt healthier when she got those negative thoughts down on paper.
So I think you could make a lot out of people's belongings if you're
looking at it after someone's death. Now, when you are when you know
when something's out of place or a concern. Now, I'm very bothered by
the scene that they walk into because those guys say that they walked out and
locked the doors. That correct, that's like the last time someone saw her,
exactly like they've always maintained that they locked the door. So it is
possible that someone else could have gone to her apartment and then Karen willingly unlocked
the door and let that person inside, and that person killed her. But
it's also possible that they could have been misremembering as well, but they've always
stuck to that story that they believe they locked the door when they left.
Well, well, this is weird because it seems like a very disturbed scene.
And I'm assuming these two guys at eleven fifteen didn't just ruin her home
and then keep her safe and lock her out, like lock her into her
house. It seems like she was up having coffee or something's going on,
and then you see that she is nude and decomposing, face down on the
couch. They saw her go to her room, so something happened. There's
coffee out in a coffee pot, which shows that she was waking up,
getting ready, doing something entertaining somebody. And then the multitude of cigarettes right
there. Is it all hers like chain smoking because she's stressed out or fixated
or having an addictive, you know kind of behavior, or are there multiple
people in this room. It's a concerning scene, much more to me than
the letters themselves. So when people walked in and we're going, okay,
she probably wanted to end her life. Maybe not, like the scene doesn't
seem to match a scene of suicide. In my opinion. Quite honestly,
I think the journal entries are kind of like Schrodinger's cat. It's like a
particle wants to try out, you know, multiple pathways at the same time.
When you're writing things in a journal, you may try out a scenario.
It may be like I am over, I'm done with this, and
it's just you're playing that out. You're almost acting it out in your brain
to see how it feels. But you're not actually planning to take actionable steps
towards ending your life. There's something about writing it down that can be cathartic
and may get out kind of the point that you're trying to make. But
I don't think that those notes would be indicative of a suicide note personally,
just because you're airing you know, your grievances and saying you're done, you
know, the earthly plane or whatever. Just the way she worded it didn't
really seem like there was finality. It just seemed like she was incredibly frustrated
with the situation with certain people. And I echo your sentiments as with the
scene, I'm curious about the door knob. Was it a push doorknob?
Did they have a key? How did they lock the front door? I'm
also curious about the cigarette butts. But given the fact that we know that
Karen did entertain she had a state of the art TV, it's possible that
she might have just had an ashtray that she didn't empty all that often that
is true. I mean, when they talk about how messy the apartment was,
it sounds like Karen's life was in disarray in general. So for all
we know, maybe she just kept the apartment messi all the time, so
it was very in character for her to leave cigarettes laying around, but it's
never really been confirmed by the two other men whether the apartment was that messy
when they originally left that night. The content of Karen's writings could have been
interpreted as a potential suicide note, and some troubling things about her would soon
emerge. When Andrew Prine was questioned by police, he claimed that Karen had
spoken to him on the phone on the afternoon of November twenty seventh and shared
the same story that she had told the Goddards about finding an abandoned baby on
her doorstep. Andrew said that after he arrived back home at his own apartment
at midnight, he called Karen back and she informed him she'd called the cops
who took the baby away. Since this phone call took place after Ruben and
Hathaway had said they left Karen's apartment, this would turn out to be the
last time she was confirmed to be alive. However, the police had no
record of ever having picked up an abandoned baby from her place on November twenty
seventh, and found zero evidence to indicate that Karen's story was true. Well,
here's the thing, so tell me the timeline again. We have that
Karen is she going to the Goddard's house and telling them about the baby before
Andrew. It sounds like she told Andrew during the afternoon of the twenty seven,
then she went to the Goddard's house that evening for the dinner and then
told that exact same story, and the police apparently looked into it. There
was no record of them ever having paid a visit to her apartment on the
twenty seventh to have collected a baby. And then at midnight on the twenty
seventh, that's when she has her final phone call with Andrew, and then
she dies at some point in has found three days after that. That's a
quite busy day. I mean, she has this let's say she has a
psychotic break, or let's say the baby's found on her doorstep, but I
think it's more of this psychotic break or manifestation where she envisions having this child
on her doorstep. She goes to pieces, she tries to get or she
thinks she gets the police over there. Then she says, well, I'm
still going to go to this party. At the Goddard's house. She's struggling
obviously with her eating there, so you can tell her depression anxiety is pretty
intense at that point. Then she goes home and it's almost like she didn't
want to be alone. She invites her friend over to watch TV. She
goes outside and finds another close friend of theirs and invites him up to what
TV. And then about forty five minutes after they say they left, she's
on the phone with Andrew. So if that's the last time we know she's
talking to someone, what days her body found? Thirtieth? Okay, so
basically it's the morning of the twenty eighth that she's talking to Andrew at midnight,
and two days later her body's found. There are now so many questions
of who else could she have been exposed to, because it did seem like
she needed somebody present, or she needed to be in contact with somebody even
though she's exhausted, she's struggling, right, she's kind of feels like her
world's falling apart. It sounds like she was seeking people around her at that
moment, so that would make sense, like because the door was found unlocked,
that if someone else just happened to stop by her apartment after midnight.
She might have just decided to let them in because she needed company, but
it may have turned out that this person was the one who ultimately killed her.
There would be another disturbing of Alasia when police discovered a pile of magazines
and Karen's apartment which had been shredded and cut up with scissors. During the
preceding months, Andrew Pryne had found a number of threatening messages on his doorstep,
which were assembled together with letters and phrases cut out of magazines. When
Andrew told Karen about this, she claimed she had been receiving the same threatening
messages on her doorstep and even showed them to him. While investigators started looking
into these notes and found numerous fingerprints on the paper and scotch tape which were
used to assemble the cutout letters. One year earlier, Karen had been arrested
for shoplifting some books and clothing. While she only got off with a fi
in three years probation, her fingerprints were still on file, and they turned
out to be an exact match to the prints on the paper and scotch tape.
So yes, this meant that Karen had cut up the magazines and assembled
all the threatening notes before sending them both to Andrew and herself. A search
of Karen's diary also revealed that she had been keeping records of Andrew's encounters with
his new girlfriend, which meant she had been spying on them. It was
clear that Karen had not reacted well to Andrew's decision to date other women,
and seemed obsessed with rekindling the relationship. Andrew also confirmed that he did spend
Thanksgiving at Glenn Ford's house, which is where Karen told the Goodard she would
be, but both actors denied that Karen had ever been invited to this get
together. In addition, Karen had told her family she was not traveling back
to Chicago to spend Thanksgiving with them because she had work to do on Perry
Mason, but this also turned out not to be true since the episode she
appeared in had already been filmed. Okay, okay, bear with me here.
Karen is obsessed and loves Andrew. She's obsessed with him, she loves
him. I guarantee you this is a man. I'd love to know the
age difference, but that it has been telling her like, you know,
you're beautiful, I love you. I enjoyed being around you. In a
moment where she doesn't really feel like she's good enough for anybody, she gets
pregnant by this man, and I'm sure that very much complicated the relationship.
That probably resulted in an argument saying, look, this is not serious to
me. I don't want to be your husband. I don't want a family
with you, and he really is. She's starting to learn he's playing her,
but that doesn't minimize how badly she wants that family and that love that
she's in vision to be true. So this is the sixties. I can't
do much of anything like you know, harass you and text you or reach
out to you. Her access to him is very limited, and if he
cuts her off, he cuts her off. And so it would be driving
her mad to be thinking about the fact that he's with somebody else. She's
already mentally ill and struggling, so add that need for Andrew to truly love
her the way she loves him. She's in a bad spot with him.
I think that it's sad that someone didn't recognize she needed help, and that
in the sixties, mental health was not something that was at the forefront of
a discussion because you can you can list the things that any one of those
would have made her mental health go to pieces, And yet multiple ones are
happening to Karen. Here her telling her parents that she couldn't travel back because
she was working on a show. Go back to that note where she's saying
she's never gonna be good enough for her mom. Her parents are high performing
people. So if she was putting pressure on herself, or if her parents
were putting pressure on her, like it could have been imagined pressure, right,
I could see her avoiding the family communication or reunion at the holidays because
that's not a quote safe space for her. That she's imagined that as a
place that brings even more stress. So she uses her career as a way
to keep some distance in what she perceives as an unhealthy dynamic at her home.
But it really sounds like she's losing in touch with reality. Those notes,
as quote crazy or wild as they seem, it's so indicative of her
whole struggle, from the eating disorder to the abortion, to the need for
this relationship, to not feeling good enough him pretty it's sad, like I'm
starting to feel this such tragic weight around Karen for everyone in her life.
Yeah, we're going to talk about this later on in the episode, but
Karen definitely did not have the nicest relationship with her mother. It sounds like
she got along well with her father, but her mother was something of a
stage mom. So she's probably thinking to herself, if I have to go
back and have Thanksgiving with my family, my mother's going to be hounding me
about my acting career, about my relationship. She might be angry because I'm
not already married and have children, so I can totally understand her making up
excuses to not spend Thanksgiving with them, But like you said, there was
just so much going on in the fact when I don't think anyone realized this
until after she died, But when they found out that she'd been sending threatening
letters to both Andrew and fabricating these threatening notes to herself, that was just
a major red flag. And I think that's when they started wondering could her
death have been a suicide or that it had been an accidental drug overdose,
because she clearly was needed some serious mental help at that point. It just
gave me a Cindy James Vibe with the notes and the cutouts and stuff.
Oh exactly, yeah, very very much. And keep in mind too,
it's Thanksgiving, so she's already struggling with an eating disorder, and she says
her mom thinks she's too fat. So that's another reason she wouldn't want to
go home and be with her family, because again, is it real or
is it perceived? But she set up this narrative that her mother will never
approve of her weight, her looks, you know, the way that she
behaves. So God, Thanksgiving dinner would be the worst thing to be home
with your family for if that's the perceived relationship you have. It's harder if
you have an eating disorder too, because there's going to be this constant discourse
on your weight or your lack of eating, or any number of different things
where she feels like she's falling short. So yeah, I can completely understand
her decision to skip that. So there was a lot to indicate that Karen
was a very troubled woman, which was reinforced when thirteen bottles of prescription drugs
were found in her medicine cabinet, including I just looked these up. So
desoxin is one of them, and it is straight up methamphetamine, Milltown,
which is an anti anxiety drug, an Amvacile, which is some crazy amphetamine
combination which is extremely strong. According to Reddit, many of these bottles were
either empty or half empty, so the initial assumption from most people who knew
Karen was that she had either taken her own life or was the victim of
an accidental overdose. However, the case went in an entirely different direction once
Karen was examined by the La County Coroner, doctor Harold Kade, who estimated
that her approximate time of death was twelve thirty am on November twenty eighth,
only about a half hour after she last spoke with Andrew Pryne on the phone.
According to doctor Kade, Karen had a broken hyoid bone in her throat
and enough damage to her neck to indicate strangulation. Therefore, he officially ruled
that Karen's death was a homicide. This prompted the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
to launch a murder investigation and they start looking at potential suspects. Remember that
the one friend said that she was, you know, nodding her head and
moving her head in odd angles. It's very possible that the desk oxen or
you know, the other kind of amphetamines that she was taking, we're causing
that reaction. But that was not abnormal. Remember, we didn't know as
much then as we know now about psychiatry and about mental health drugs or diet
drugs or things like that. So the things that yep, sure do make
you lose weight, like meth, were used. And so I think it's
it's um they're looking and you're going, oh my god, there's thirteen prescription
drugs. Will shoot. She's probably begging for anything, to say thin,
to figure out why she's so sad, to go back and forth, you
know, looking for something that makes her feel better. And so it's,
oh man, it's just it's a shame because you could tell someone someone dropped
the ball here trying to help her, or she wasn't able to get the
kind of help she needed. I could absolutely see why people immediately thought this
is a suicide, because people are watching her kind of unravel throughout all of
this. But then you guys said, look, you can't say this is
a suicide. Look at the damage to her throat into the bones, and
her throat. It's very clear she was strangled, and there's nothing still tied
around her neck. She's not found hanging or anything like that, which would
indicate, well, of course it could break that, it could break the
highoid bone if she were to, you know, let's say, hang herself.
But she didn't do that. So all of a sudden, all these
things that make it so easy to think, oh, she accidentally took her
own life or personally took her own life. Now you say there is a
physical injury that we cannot look away from. Someone pressed on her throat to
break that highoid bone, and therefore we have completely changed gears and we are
chasing down a murder suspect at this point. And like we talked about earlier,
she was so desperate to have people around her. I'm assuming the list
of possible candidates is quite extensive. And don't you both find this so frustrating
that when we cover these cases and somebody is struggling with mental health issues,
maybe they're there's some kind of suicidal ideation or something that would lead people to
believe that they're very troubled at that time, and they're really going through it.
It's like oh, well, obviously it's suicide. That's what people jump
to initially. But just because somebody is struggling doesn't mean that that is a
foregone conclusion. They would also be more vulnerable in that situation, it would
be easier to victimize them, and I think sometimes we forget that with these
cases. Incredibly true, incredibly true. People watch for individuals to be struggling,
people look for more vulnerable targets, And you are absolutely right, Jules.
This is a woman who doesn't believe in herself. This is a woman
who's struggling with her mental and physical health. She is going through a breakup,
she's had an abortion, she doesn't feel connected to her family. And
so when you meet people that, you can tell their immediate need to trust
and be with people, whether they're safe or not right. And so I
think her mental and physical health would put her as a very strong target to
people who say she is physically and mentally weak right now, and she would
become someone that I could hurt and get away with it. And it's so
sad that you're right. When people are struggling, it's not just a danger
of themselves hurting themselves, but other people looking I say that person's vulnerable,
I can go after them. Well, Andrew Prime was at the top of
the list of potential suspects as investigators wondered if he might have killed Karen and
Rage after finding out she had been sending him threatening letters and spying on them.
Well, it turned out that Andrew's alibi witnesses just happened to be the
last two people to see Karen alive. After leaving her apartment. Edward Ruben
and Robert Hathaway claimed they went out for a drink at a bar before heading
back to Hathaway's duplex, where he and Andrew Prime were neighbors. Shortly after
they arrived, Prian decided to stop by the duplex to hang out with them,
and all three men claimed they chatted and watched television together until three am.
Reuben and Hathaway were all extensively interviewed and investigate as possible suspects. They
each took polygraph tests, which came back inconclusive. One red flag occurred when
the three men were reinterviewed three years later, and Ruben changed his story,
claiming that he and Hathaway went their separate ways at the bar after leaving Karen's
apartment and he spent the night with two women he met there rather than going
to Hathaway's apartment. But otherwise there was no evidence to implicate any of the
three men. And in their defense, the coroner believed that Karen was strangled
by a left handed person, and none of them were left handed. That's
terrifying. So okay, how would we know that she was strangled by a
left handed person. That's just ignorance on my part. How well, we're
going to talk about this probably on our next episode. But there are some
issues with the credibility of this coroner, doctor Pates, So it's possible he
might have just pulled this assessment out of his as ass and there's no way
of knowing if she was actually strangled by a left hand and a right handed
person. Okay, So immediately in my head, I'm thinking, okay,
maybe, like the highoid bone was pressed a certain direction. But let's say
I grabbed you from behind, my left hand could make the same impression as
my right hand could from the front. I think that's right, But it
seems like that would be a very difficult conclusion to make. I also find
it very difficult to understand how we have Ruben, Hathaway and then Prine now
associated on that night when that was never mentioned before. Is that correct?
I don't think so. Like they, I don't think they realized it until
they started interrogating them, where they just assumed Ruben and Hathaway left together,
and then Pride is saying, oh, yeah, after I called Karen,
we all hung out together that night. So it makes you wonder like if
any of these and were responsible for Karen's murder, than the others had to
cover for them and provide an alibi. Another potential suspect was an aspiring actor
named David Lange, who lived in the apartment directly below Karen's. He happened
to be the brother of actress Hope Lang, who'd earned an Academy Award nomination
for Best Supporting Actress her performance in the nineteen fifty seven film Paid in Place.
On the night of Karen's death, Lang had gone out on a date
with Natalie Wood, who, ironically enough, would suffer her own mysterious death
two decades later, but that's another story. Lang claimed he was drunk and
returned to his apartment at twelve thirty am. The estimated time of Karen's death,
but he went straight to bed without hearing anything unusual. Well, a
few days later, Lange allegedly told a friend that he killed Karen, but
when questioned by police, he maintained he was just choking. Lange hit a
history of erratic behavior and was known for drunkenly entering other people's apartments without being
invited, but no evidence tied him to Karen's death. When police trusted the
apartment, they did find fingerprints belonging to Edward Ruben, but none of the
other three persons of interest, and a couple of unidentified prints which could not
be matched to anyone. Well, within the next few years, the investigation
into Karen cups in its death would go in a direction no one ever suspected.
A lot of things to think about in this little chunk. So they
find fingerprints belonging to Edward Rubin. But the problem is, y'all said that
Karen had a great TV at the time, and she really was like this
party hub for people. So this is one of those cases unless you had
a suspect say, I have never been inside Karen's apartment. I don't even
know her, I've never been around Karen's house and all of a sudden,
I find their fingerprints. Then what else are we going to do? Because
of course Edward Ruben's fingerprints were there, he was there the night that she
was last seen. Of course Andrew's fingerprints were there. He's her boyfriend.
Of course, the friend that they brought in with Ruben would have his finger
prints there. So what's frustrating is that, because so many people were welcomed
into that home, the fingerprints would basically be useless unless you nail down someone
like I said that said yeah, no, I've never been in that apartment,
and bingo. We hit on it years later when we have a fingerprint
database, and it'd probably be a red flag if they had found David Lange's
fingerprints in there, because as far as I know, I don't think she
ever willingly invited him in there, So if they found his prints, that
would look suspicious. But out of all these people we talked about, Lang
definitely seems like the most troubling where he allegedly confesses that he killed Karen and
then just says, oh, I was only joking, Like that's the thing
people just joke about to their friends. Yeah, I only confessed to three
murders this morning. But you know, there's also Lang has that history of
going into people's apartments without being invited, so that has that very bizarre field
too. I'm praying that the guys really did log up her apartment and wouldn't
allow for someone like Lang to enter the apartment. But again, Karen could
have let him in as well, And it could be too that they've fabricated
that detail, like we see that sometimes in cases they've got nothing to do
with the murder, but given the guilt that they feel, they kind of
guild the lily a little bit with regards to what they did to protect Karen,
and they're saying, oh, we definitely locked up well did you Was
it a push lock? Was it the type of lock that you could lock
from the inside, Did you have a key? Without these types of details,
It's hard to know definitively if they actually did that. So I don't
know, the fact that this guy is going into people's apartments is super creepy,
But also the fact that his apartments weren't found I don't think tells us
definitively he wasn't there, especially given the fact that the two men that were
there earlier, their fingerprints weren't found. Correct Edward Rubens was, but Hathaways
wasn't. Okay placed himself there. But it's true you can enter someone's apartment
and not leave fingerprints depending on what you touch. I mean you could wear
gloves too, right, So just because he wasn't there doesn't mean the absence
of evidence isn't the evidence of absence, Yeah, exactly so. At the
time Karen died, the United States was still reeling for one of the biggest
tragedies in their nation's history, as President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated
while riding in his motorcade through Dealey Plaza and Dallas on November the twenty second.
Lee Harvey Oswald was identified as the assassin who fired the failed shots.
But as you well know, many people have always believed that there's a lot
more to this story, and the Kennedy assassination has been the subject of more
conspiracy theories than any other event. Ever, well, no one had any
angling that it might have a connection to Karen consonant until nineteen sixty seven,
when an author named Penn Jones Junior, known for being one of the very
first Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theorists and a heavy critic of the war in commission's
report, released a self published four volume book about the event titled Forgive My
Grief. Jones believed that the conspiracy was so large that over one bill connected
to the assassination died under mysterious circumstances in the ensuing years. One significant event
chronicled in this book occurred in Oxnard, California, at ten a m.
Pacific time on November the twenty second, nineteen sixty three, a switch for
operator received a phone call from an anonymous woman who spoke in a low whisper
and claimed that the President of the United States was going to die in ten
minutes. She started rambling on and uttering cryptic statements like quote the Justice the
Supreme Court, There's going to be fire in all the windows. The government
is going up in flames. The government takes over everything, lock stock and
barrow end quote. The operator got one of her co workers to listen in
on the call, and at some point they thought they heard the woman put
the phone down and dial another number. When the operator asked the woman if
she needed assistance, she said, quote, Noah, I'm using the phone
and stated the president was now going to die at ten thirty. The call
finally ended at ten twenty five Pacific time, and within five minutes, President
Kennedy would be dead, as the fatal bullet struck him at Daily Plaza at
twelve thirty pm Central time. What in the actual hell are you serious?
So there's somebody who did make a phone call randomly spouting off this stuff about
government conspiracy and then burning everything to the ground and that he's going to die
at ten thirty, which in California would be twelve thirty Central time, and
this person's accurate. Yeah, that's what's so weird about this story. I
mean, I'm sure like the government or random operators received like a bunch of
calls like this every day from people who go on these wild ramblings that the
president will be killed and such and such is going to be happened. But
this turned out to be the one time or not only did the accurately predict
the president's death, but they got the exact time right. That's horrifying.
Following the news of the assassination, the call was reported to the FBI later
that same day, and they believe it had originated from the ox Nard area.
It's certainly possible that the anonymous female caller was suffering from mental health issues
and that it was nothing more than a massive coincidence that she predicted Kennedy's assassination,
but the fact that she got the exact time right raised a few eyebrows.
Kennedy's motorcade was originally scheduled to arrive at Daily Plaza at around twelve ten
pm Central time or ten ten Pacific time, which was the woman's original prediction,
but there were delays and the motorcade got held up about twenty minutes since
the operators thought they heard the woman attempting to phone someone else during the call.
But she's somehow finding out about the motorcaide's delay, which prompted her to
change the time of the president's death to ten thirty. This is really odd
because she made the first call at ten, so if she's saying he's going
to die in ten minutes, she accurately predicted the time of death the first
time, when he quote should have been shot or should have passed by that
exact spot. And then, like you said, you hear her fumble to
make a phone call and all of a sudden, she's changing the time and
again tells you the exact same time that he does get shot when he passes
that spot. So this is horrifying. Like she's literally on the other end
of a phone with someone at the location in Dallas. Or she happens to
know somebody who's very well connected to the assassination. Oh, I have chills.
I don't know who this person is or if it happens to be Karen.
But how in the heck would she know this to get it right?
Not once twice she named the right time twice. Well, now I'm going
to tell you about the alleged connection to this case, believe it or not.
Penn Jones, Junior believed that the anonymous female caller might have been Karen
Coupsinant, who was attempting to warn people about the impending assassination. If you're
wondering why a twenty two year old actress in California would even have knowledge of
something like this, Jones's theory was that Karen may have learned about it from
her father or Earth Coupsinant aka Cup. You see, during the nineteen forties,
Cup became acquainted with a guy who might have heard of named Jack Ruby,
who subsequently moved from Chicago to Dallas in nineteen forty seven and became a
nightclub owner. On November the twenty fourth, nineteen sixty three, two days
after President Kennedy's assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was in the midst of being
transported by police when Ruby shot him to death on live television in front of
millions of people. While the Warren Commission concluded that Ruby acted alone when he
killed Oswald, conspiracy theorists have always believed that since Oswald was set up to
be the fall guy in Kennedy's assassination, Ruby was assigned the job of silencing
him before he could reveal anything incriminating. Penn Jones Junior believed that the mafia
somehow learned that Ruby told IRV Cup Sinant about the assassination plot, and Cupp
subsequently shared this information with his daughter, But when Karen tried to warn people
and stop the assassination, the mafia had her killed in order to send a
message to her father to remain silent. It's very possible, I mean,
there is a link there, but is it probable? Like, do you
think if you learned I can't imagine learning the president was going to be killed
and then being like, you know who I'm going to tell Reagan? Like
that's who I'm gonna go tell my Regan, not Ronald Reagan, No,
my baby, Like if I learned something so heavy, so dangerous, so
important, am I gonna tell my child? I don't care that she's little
now, Like I can't see turning to my thirty year old daughter, my
twenty five year old daughter and saying, guess what I just learned? President's
gonna die? Like what? Mom? That is? What? Dad?
That is a really big thing to drop on me. And for a father
to drop on his daughter who's already struggling in what world? Does that make
sense to share that very dangerous information with Karen? It doesn't. It doesn't
make sense. She's emotionally and mentally unstable. And I'm pretty sure that her
dad, Cup would have been able to spot the signs. So if he
was going to relay this information to somebody else to then share it, I
would think it would be somebody who wasn't his daughter, because can you trust
somebody who is on a myriad of different drugs and they're also clearly dealing with
other emotional and mental health issues. It wouldn't be the person who's going to
be a steel trap. And exactly, and what's to say that Eerv cups
in It, if he found out information about the assassination of the president,
wouldn't tell someone important, someone in authority, because most people would be kind
of shocked if her friend of yours goes, oh, by the way,
I'm involved in an assassination attempt on the president and I'm going to kill the
fall guy, the assassin, it's like the first most normal people aren't going
to say, oh, you know, I should tell my daughter that just
before Thanksgiving dinner and stuff. So it just seems like this is a major
reach here where this guy is looking for this elaborate conspiracy theory, trying to
look at links between Karen cups in It and JFK and all I can find
was while her father might have been acquainted with Jack Ruby, like fifteen years
earlier. Well, of course, Eerv cups in It believe these claims were
absolutely ridiculous and staunchly maintained that neither he nor his daughter had any knowledge of
a conspiracy involving the Kennedy assassination. Andrew Prine claimed on the evening of November
twenty second, he and Karen had traveled the Palm Springs with two other friends,
and even though Karen was visibly upset by JFK's death, she gave off
no indication that she had any inside knowledge or that she attempted to warn people
about it Earlier that day. Two phone operators from Oxnard also stated that the
anonymous female caller sounded like she was an older, middle aged woman and not
a twenty two year old like Karen was. In December nineteen ninety one,
Oliver's Stone released the controversial hit film JFK, which drove home the message that
President Kennedy's death was a result of a massive conspiracy. Herb Cups in it
was a vocal critic of the film, and two months after its release,
he became particularly upset when The Today's Show published a list of mysterious death connected
to the Kennedy assassination and listed Karen Cups in its name. This prompted Cup
to publish an angry column in the Chicago Sun Times which he expressed his disgust
at this and maintained that his daughter's death had nothing to do with the assassination.
Well, that's the thing. I mean, you have this man who's
going wait a minute, I got questioned about maybe telling my daughter, who
you know, gets killed because of this link to JFK, when I knew
nothing about JFK's assassination beforehand. And then all of a sudden he's being part
of a media report on the issue, and all of a sudden, his
daughter, who's now deceased, is named as a potential link to it.
I would be absolutely furious too. You guys are making these insane claims about
not just my daughter but about my family that you know, if you really
go back and follow the link to Karen, it's because Dad supposedly knew and
told the wrong person, aka his daughter, And it just all seems very
heavy for someone to have to deal with, To say, I already had
to bury her, someone hurt her. We didn't know anything about this,
you know, like this is something that kind of through the whole world for
a loop, and you're saying maybe my daughter and myself inadvertently had something to
do with it. It's beyond stressful, and it dishonors his daughter's legacy and
puts blame on him for her death too, which is very harmful and hurtful
too. Yeah, that's why I think is the worst thing is just trying
to put yourself in the shoes of a victim's family where she's been murdered and
it's been nearly thirty years and you still haven't found the real killer or god
any insights into her death. And then all these conspiracy theories are coming out,
which not only like distract the investigation and try to link your daughter's death
to a major historical event, but they're implying that cup was somehow complicit because
he told her the secret information that God or killed and that must be very
difficult to hear when you know that there's no truth to it whatsoever, and
that it's just distracting from trying to find out who was really responsible for killing
your loved one. In the years following Karen's death, her parents seemed certain
that Andrew Prime killed her, and see Cupson had even waged a personal of
endetta against Prime and attempted to destroy his reputation. Pride's acting career wound up
suffering for a little while, but he eventually recovered and amassed a large filmography
of over one hundred and eighty credits before he passed away in October of twenty
twenty two at the age of eighty six. In nineteen eighty eight, earth
Cupson had published an autobiography about his life, in which he stated that he
no longer believed Pride had anything to do with his daughter's debt. Up now
believed that the prime suspect was David Lange and believed that Lang's wealthy family used
their influence to prevent him from being properly investigated until his death in two thousand
and six. While Lang's acting career never went anywhere, he wound up working
for acclaimed director Alan J. Pakula, and even co produced Pakula's nineteen seventy
one thriller which are In Jane Fonda an Academy Award for Best Actress. Earth
cups in It passed away in two thousand and three at the age of ninety
one, two years following the death of his wife, Essie. It's also
worth mentioning that Karen's brother, Jerry cups in It, became a successful television
director who won two Daytime Emmy Awards and was credited with creating the look and
formula of the popular courtroom show Judge Judy before he passed away in January of
twenty nineteen at the age of seventy four. But unfortunately, after nearly sixty
years, there are still no concrete answers about the unsolved death of Karen pups
in it. So I guess you could say the path went chilly. I
have to agree. When we talk about everyone who's been involved, Lang does
seem to be the one who's most suspicious. I don't know who jokes about
killing somebody, And then when you think about the fact that his family was
incredibly wealthy. You see this very frequently where you have a wealthy suspect who
is not just air I get, but almost plays with investigators like it's a
joke to them, and the person's life is not valued or important. The
victim's not seen as a person. It's an object. This is a game.
It's funny, and there is this entitlement, especially especially back in the
sixties, but even today when there's you know, in the sixties there was
far less transparency of what would happen in an interrogation or interview. But I
could see Lane sitting there knowing that my family has plenty of money. I
will get out of anything these people throw at me. Money buys a lot
of leeway and power in our justice system. And I remember the days when
I'd be like, Oh, that didn't happen, right, Like, that
doesn't happen, and oh my lord, you can't read true crime or listen
to true crime and not know that wealthy families, that people with money do
get preferential treatment and somehow dodge justice. And so Lang's a very probable suspect.
I'm not so sure or that Prime didn't have something to do with it.
It doesn't feel like he would have because he was getting stalked by Karen.
He was still in communications with Karen, and it seems like he was
very forward about Yes, I talked to her that morning, I talked to
her that night. This is the last time I saw her. So it
sounds like he tried to cooperate. Doesn't seem like a stand up man.
But that does not make him her killer. I'm not quite convinced he's completely
innocent yet, but laying for sure on the surface seems like the best fit
at this point. Being a dick doesn't make you a murderer, and so
I agree with you. I don't think he's the likeliest suspect. I can
understand why he would be frustrated with her, but I really can't understand why
he would go back and murder her. It just seems unlikely. I mean,
it would seem more along in the lines of what somebody would do.
You go to the police, and you would complain about what she's doing and
have the launch and investigation. I mean, even then, even now,
stalking isn't always taken that seriously, and so I'm sure he probably wouldn't get
all that much traction with police, But who knows. Laying On the other
hand, I would really like to know what he is doing, because it
seems an established pattern that he liked to go into other people's apartments without them
inviting him or without their knowledge. What was he doing in those apartments,
what would he do once he was in there? And did this ever make
it to law enforcement? Do we know any of that? Robin, unfortunately
don't. Like that's the only detail I read that he would walk into people's
apartments. But I haven't heard of anything about him, like being charged with
any crimes, him ever being accused of sexual assault. But like they said,
if it's a wealthy and influential enough family, if he did get in
trouble for it, then they could have maybe had the influence in order to
sweep it under the rug, and that's why he was never caught. But
yeah, overall, I definitely think he's the best suspect out of all of
these people we've talked about. But the problem is that there is just no
definitive evidence to point to any of them, which is why this case is
still unsolved. So I think this now would be a good time to bring
an end to one. But join us next week as we present part two
of our series about the death of Karen cupsonant Robin. Do you want to
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