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Speaker 9: You are now listening to True Murder, the most Shocking
Speaker 9: Killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 9: written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 9: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 9: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 9: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 8: Good Evening. On September fourteenth, nineteen ninety one, in Anchorage, Alaska,
Speaker 8: a very pregnant Peggy Barnett, along with her nine year
Speaker 8: old daughter, drove to the post office to deliver a
Speaker 8: package to an associate, George Kerre and chug Yik, fifteen
Speaker 8: miles outside of Anchorage. George's father, David Kerr, picked up
Speaker 8: the package three days later and brought it home. He
Speaker 8: and his wife, Michelle, were in the kitchen when David
Speaker 8: opened the package. The explosion was so intense neighbors feared
Speaker 8: there had been an earthquake. David died instantly, but Michelle survived.
Speaker 8: Michelle told us postal inspectors that Doug Gustavson was involved.
Speaker 8: It was no secret that Douglas Gustafson and his cohort
Speaker 8: Raymond Cheeley, despised George care had knowledge of explosives and
Speaker 8: liked to blow things up. However, they had perfect alibis
Speaker 8: they were already in prison for murder. An investigative task
Speaker 8: force was formed led by US Postal Inspection Service with
Speaker 8: assistance from the Anchorage Police Department in the US Department
Speaker 8: of the Treasury Bureau of Alcohol to back when Firearms
Speaker 8: ATF to solve this case. The book they were featuring
Speaker 8: this evening as the Alaska male Bomb Conspiracy with my
Speaker 8: special goals, the legendary Burrel Bear. Welcome to the program,
Speaker 8: and thank you for very much for greing this interview.
Speaker 8: The legendary Burrel Bear.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, a living legend in my own mind. Always
Speaker 5: a pleasure to be on your program, Dan, And I'm
Speaker 5: going to practice being very stoic today to fit in
Speaker 5: with the Canadian vibratory pattern.
Speaker 8: Yes, yes, it's not Canadian, it's just but it emanates
Speaker 8: from a Canadian.
Speaker 5: So than.
Speaker 8: My pleasure, Yes, yes, thank you, it's always a pleasure
Speaker 8: to have you on, Burl. And let's talk about this
Speaker 8: Alaska mail bomb conspiracy conspiracy? How did it come that
Speaker 8: you were involved with this? Why this story? What was again?
Speaker 8: Tell us some of the.
Speaker 5: How did I get this one? How did I get
Speaker 5: so lucky?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 5: Well, it goes back to the book I did immediately
Speaker 5: before I started this. Now, even though if you have
Speaker 5: this mail bomb Conspiracy came out fairly recently, I started
Speaker 5: what was going to be a full length book a
Speaker 5: long time ago, over twenty years. It was the book
Speaker 5: that I was doing immediately after Man Overboard, the Counterfeit
Speaker 5: Resurrection of Phil Champagne, and doing it for the same publisher,
Speaker 5: Northwest Publishing. And it was during my investigation of Man
Speaker 5: Overboard that I met the United States Postal Inspectors who
Speaker 5: were involved in that case as well. They're the ones
Speaker 5: who told me about this horrific, just absolutely awful, awful
Speaker 5: case of this mail bomb conspiracy and what it took
Speaker 5: to solve it. And I thought this was absolutely fascinating,
Speaker 5: and I did a proposal for the book. We got
Speaker 5: a good deal and I started working on it. And
Speaker 5: I tell you, the US Postal Inspector were so thrilled
Speaker 5: to be having a book done about them, because even
Speaker 5: in the United States of America, where people are so
Speaker 5: astute and knowledgeable of government issues, people were totally ignorant
Speaker 5: of the US Postal Inspectors. In fact, Jim Bordenay, who
Speaker 5: I must credit with being absolutely fantastic in his help
Speaker 5: in putting this thing together. He made sure that this
Speaker 5: book or audio book, however you want to call it,
Speaker 5: is one hundred percent factual. I mean, he made sure
Speaker 5: I made no mistakes, and if I did, he maybe
Speaker 5: correct him. So you know, you're getting a real deal
Speaker 5: story here. But he brought this to my attention and
Speaker 5: we started working on it. And then I didn't get paid,
Speaker 5: and I didn't get paid next or the next and
Speaker 5: they called and said, Burrell, how's this book going on
Speaker 5: the US Postal I said, well, here's the problem. I
Speaker 5: haven't been paid in about two or three months. And
Speaker 5: that's kind of brought everything into a screaming halt. Well,
Speaker 5: I went fishing for a couple of weeks with my
Speaker 5: kids at a loon lake, Washington, and I got back
Speaker 5: and there was a facts on my fax machine, remember
Speaker 5: those I had a fax machine, And there was a
Speaker 5: message from the US Postal Inspectors saying, dear mister Behar,
Speaker 5: you will appreciate this press release pages of the United
Speaker 5: States Postal Inspection Service or office whatever they're called. Rated
Speaker 5: the offices of Northwest Publishing confiscated their computers and they
Speaker 5: went down. Turns out the true crime was allegedly the
Speaker 5: publisher and his son, who allegedly were spending the money
Speaker 5: rather than paying the bills. Over that he was like
Speaker 5: three million dollars in corporate checks cashed at the money
Speaker 5: tree in the mall, paying over two hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars in check cashing fees. So for a while,
Speaker 5: the Alaska mail bomb conspiracy was one of the assets
Speaker 5: of the company that was in the litigation, and it
Speaker 5: took a few years for me to get the get
Speaker 5: the material back and the wrights back because it was
Speaker 5: considered an asset of the company. And then what am
Speaker 5: I going to do with it? Well, several years later,
Speaker 5: let's fast forward to the wonderful author and editor R.
Speaker 5: Berry Flowers got hold of He had asked if I
Speaker 5: would yes go ahead? Did you say something there, dad?
Speaker 8: No? No, sorry, no, I was just saying yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 5: H R. Berry Flowers, who he cranks out books faster
Speaker 5: than I can read him in a variety of genres.
Speaker 5: He said, bo, would you like to be a master
Speaker 5: of true crime? And I said, well, I'd like to
Speaker 5: be the master of something. And slavery is no longer
Speaker 5: legal so sure, because I got to be in a
Speaker 5: verified atmosphere of all these really great true crime writers.
Speaker 5: So I figured I was snuck in there somehow, you know,
Speaker 5: a mercy credit, and so I couldn't pass that up. Well,
Speaker 5: then what was I going to do? Well, I already
Speaker 5: had all the research on the Alaska mail bomb conspiracy,
Speaker 5: and I found the still had Imbordinate's phone number tucked
Speaker 5: away somewhere, and even though he'd retired, he's still well
Speaker 5: connected within the department and had all the information, and
Speaker 5: he volunteered to help me make sure I got it
Speaker 5: right and got it accurate. And we launched into this thing,
Speaker 5: and I'm really happy with the way it came out. Now,
Speaker 5: while it's shorter than a traditional true crime book, I've
Speaker 5: always had the feeling, in fact, I have Frank Gerardo
Speaker 5: and I put this in writing. I think, well, we
Speaker 5: said it out loud when we did the book, A
Speaker 5: Taste for Murder and Betrayal in Blue, and that is,
Speaker 5: to put a mandatory word count on a true crime
Speaker 5: book isn't really rational because if you have to do
Speaker 5: one hundred thousand words on a story that takes eighty
Speaker 5: thousand to tell, it, really well, what are you doing
Speaker 5: with the other twenty thousand words? And that's always bothered me.
Speaker 5: So when you read a really fast moving mystery such
Speaker 5: as so say mine to bias my novel Headlock, it's
Speaker 5: going to check in between fifty five thousand, maybe sixty
Speaker 5: five thousand tops. You know what, a good quick read,
Speaker 5: perfect for the beach. But sometimes you go with a
Speaker 5: lot of true crime or what they call him now
Speaker 5: non fiction thrillers. You find yourself reading the reviews and go, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm sure he padded this with unnecessary facts. We don't
Speaker 5: just tell us who killed who and have lots of pictures.
Speaker 5: So Frank and I just said on that book, let's
Speaker 5: just write the book, and when we've told the story,
Speaker 5: we've told the story, and we did very well with that.
Speaker 5: I think this is kind of the same theory on
Speaker 5: this this book. This could have been expanded to whatever
Speaker 5: word count anybody wanted, because it was. Let me tell
Speaker 5: you how extreme this was in the investigation, and I'll
Speaker 5: tell you a little bit about the crime too, that
Speaker 5: would be helpful. But almost everybody in the state of
Speaker 5: Alaska was wire tapped, and I'm not exaggerating. They'd get
Speaker 5: federal authorization to wiretap almost everybody in Alaska it could
Speaker 5: possibly have any connection to any of the people that
Speaker 5: they thought may have been involved in They may have
Speaker 5: been involved, so that meant everybody. So as a process
Speaker 5: of elimination, if we can eliminate as many people as
Speaker 5: humanly possible, then we could get down to who may
Speaker 5: have committed this absolutely horrifying crime. Now you mentioned that
Speaker 5: Michelle survived, I think there have been many times when
Speaker 5: she wished she hadn't. Not only was her husband killed
Speaker 5: and her house destroyed, her face was melted, her eyes
Speaker 5: were filled with glass, almost horrifying, and it's cruciating pain
Speaker 5: for this woman, not only physically, but emotionally, psychologically, financially.
Speaker 5: I'm sure there are many times when she wished she'd
Speaker 5: been a thing forgotten and forgotten, quite very tragic. And
Speaker 5: no one was trying to kill her, and no one
Speaker 5: was trying to kill her husband. The two people who
Speaker 5: actually it comes down to about three or four responsible
Speaker 5: for this horrible crime. We're trying to kill a cute
Speaker 5: little puppy dog, George the teenage boy or you know,
Speaker 5: young adult boy, because they were mad at him because
Speaker 5: he testified against them in the murder trial, and so
Speaker 5: they decided to kill him from prison and Pegy, the
Speaker 5: sister pregnant as you mentioned, drove to the post office
Speaker 5: over a very bumpy road. Could have been induced labor
Speaker 5: right there on the spot and for two dollars and
Speaker 5: twenty two cents. Male's death and destruction to the home
Speaker 5: of George and his father and stepmom really horrible. I mean,
Speaker 5: they found his knuckles the roof. That's how powerful that
Speaker 5: explosion was. And it's just a horrifying thing. So so
Speaker 5: ask me something and I'll answer it.
Speaker 8: Let's go back to the characters responsible here, the main
Speaker 8: characters and the ones. You paint a very vivid portrait
Speaker 8: of Raymond Smiley Chili and you can tell us Whyley
Speaker 8: call him Smiley. And Douglas Lizard Gustafson, you tell us where.
Speaker 5: The name is. Uh. Raymond Smiley Chile and Douglas Lizard
Speaker 5: Gustuson are neither bright men nor endearing characters. They're convicted
Speaker 5: teenage murderers. Now. Chile's nickname derives from his continual grin.
Speaker 5: He looks as happy just as if he had brains.
Speaker 5: Gustuson earned his reputation by his lack of human warmth. Naturally,
Speaker 5: they became the best of friends. They went to Chugak
Speaker 5: Heights School, a well known educational institution where they dissipated
Speaker 5: their mid teen years and repeated displays of antisocial behavior.
Speaker 5: And they had a bunch of buddies that hung out
Speaker 5: with them. There was Travis and Eric and this guy
Speaker 5: and that guy, and they did all sorts of typical
Speaker 5: fun teenage things like blowing up mailboxes. You know, there's
Speaker 5: not too much to do in Shoegiac. Everyone liked Chili
Speaker 5: because he had a big suburban and he'd organized parties.
Speaker 5: He could get a lot of people in that suburban.
Speaker 5: And they were also known for as the Burden Brothers
Speaker 5: because they used to put out their cigarettes in their
Speaker 5: arms apparently a shortage of astrays in Shoegiac. They didn't
Speaker 5: think to show they were tough or nuts. We're both
Speaker 5: or one of the two. They were fairly fearless. They
Speaker 5: would rob places, do all sorts of stupid stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they would get arrested to get in trouble for things.
Speaker 5: They were juveniles, and he can't do too much to them.
Speaker 5: You know, you don't want to because with the law
Speaker 5: enforcement theory, if a juvenile's a linquin can make it
Speaker 5: to the age of twenty four, you got nothing more
Speaker 5: to worry about because usually by then they've either grown
Speaker 5: up or they've got married, and that'll usually slow them
Speaker 5: down tremendously when they've got a ball in chain if
Speaker 5: it's not the president's spouse, so that usually takes care
Speaker 5: of him. But with Chili, not Raymond Chili, but rather
Speaker 5: Lizard Gustus. And if they wanted to give me the
Speaker 5: nickname Lizard, I wouldn't be that pleased. But apparently didn't
Speaker 5: bother him. He always wanted to be a sniper, whether
Speaker 5: officially or unofficially, so he mail ordered I believe a
Speaker 5: nice sniper rifle. Of course, what's the kid going to
Speaker 5: do with a rifle like that? Except he was it recklessly.
Speaker 5: He apparently didn't take very many gun safety courses, or
Speaker 5: if they did, they totally ignore them. For driving along
Speaker 5: in the car Smiley is driving, Lizard is in the
Speaker 5: passenger seat, and little George is in the back seat.
Speaker 5: Lizard has his brand new weapon and he decides he's
Speaker 5: going to fire it, and so he does. That sniper
Speaker 5: rifle arrived October nineteenth, nineteen ninety and They had a
Speaker 5: funny evening set up. They had some prostitutes meeting them
Speaker 5: at a motel where they're all just going to you know,
Speaker 5: smoked open ab sex, which sounds perfectly fine to me,
Speaker 5: except that on the way to this old party, Lizard
Speaker 5: decides he's going to take a pot shot with the rifle.
Speaker 5: The bullet comes out of the rifle, goes through the
Speaker 5: rear window of another car and kills this kid in
Speaker 5: I don't mean a little kid, but you know, a
Speaker 5: young man in the passenger seat. Now that's fairly shocking
Speaker 5: right there.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you talk about this Jeffrey Kane. He was the
Speaker 8: passenger of a shot. But they don't stop, and they
Speaker 8: don't realize that they've actually killed anyone, despite targeting this
Speaker 8: car that they used the premise that they had cut
Speaker 8: him off, so they shot.
Speaker 5: But every time someone cuts me off in a car,
Speaker 5: Lord knows, I get out of sniper rifle. Sure sure, yeah, So.
Speaker 8: They don't really, they don't realize immediately and that they've
Speaker 8: actually killed this guy till George care the next morning
Speaker 8: reads the paper. What does he read in the paper,
Speaker 8: and then what does he decide to do?
Speaker 5: Well, he has more fics and brains and the other
Speaker 5: two put together. The next morning, he gets up, he
Speaker 5: asked to get to work, gets a cab home, butus
Speaker 5: he's the morning newspaper and he realizes that guests hasn't
Speaker 5: hadn't missed. He calls the guys at the hotel, told
Speaker 5: them what happened. They told him to keep his damn
Speaker 5: mouth shut. Well, he figured if he didn't take immediate
Speaker 5: action to protect himself, his life and future were in
Speaker 5: immediate danger because he was in the car when the
Speaker 5: gun was fired. Hanging out with teenage the tough guys
Speaker 5: is one thing, but murders something else entirely. And that's
Speaker 5: when he told his boss what happened. Now by Shirk Wittens,
Speaker 5: his boss's attorney was there at the same time, and
Speaker 5: he told the kid to go to the police and
Speaker 5: do it immediately. So he did, and he told the
Speaker 5: cops everything and agreed to wear a hidden recorder to
Speaker 5: tape incriminating conversations with she lead Gusterson. So oh well,
Speaker 5: David Carratt thought his son was at work. He was
Speaker 5: really out with the police getting wired up. Long story short, Uh,
Speaker 5: he got them on on wire, you know, blatantly talking
Speaker 5: about killing. Uh, shooting either intentionally or intentionally this uh,
Speaker 5: Jeffrey Kane Fellow and the media attention on this, as
Speaker 5: you can imagine, was beyond extensive. It was Anchorage's first
Speaker 5: drive by shooting and uh, you know what else you
Speaker 5: got to talk about up there, you know, Uh, and
Speaker 5: it became really a big story.
Speaker 8: You have a scene in this in this story, though
Speaker 8: again very movie esque, where Chili doesn't was at the
Speaker 8: house of Georgeia with his dad, and so they they
Speaker 8: were there to make sure they were on a premise
Speaker 8: there that they needed David to help them with their vehicle.
Speaker 8: But really was there, you right, that was really basically
Speaker 8: there to make sure he didn't write out and at
Speaker 8: the same time tell us what was happening while they
Speaker 8: were there to ensure he didn't rite out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you know what, David cared about the zones
Speaker 5: of work. George was really with the cops. Finally, he
Speaker 5: calls his dad explaining what happened the night before and
Speaker 5: how we planned to help the police. Now, as you say,
Speaker 5: when George called his dad, he had no idea that
Speaker 5: Chili was right there at the house. Chili was obviously
Speaker 5: there to make sure that George had rolled over on him,
Speaker 5: and you know, like you said, he made up this
Speaker 5: nonsense story about anything helped preparing the truck. Well, here's
Speaker 5: his dad standing there listening to his son tell him
Speaker 5: about this murder while the perpetrators are standing right there
Speaker 5: next to him. So he has to do it best
Speaker 5: to cover up what he's saying, what the conversation is about,
Speaker 5: without tipping off Chili. The George has already gone to
Speaker 5: the cops. Now as a precaution, the cops sent George
Speaker 5: to talk to Doug Augustus, And meanwhile the police contacted
Speaker 5: everyone on the fringe of Chili Shrinking gang and got
Speaker 5: all of them to wear wires, so everybody's recording everybody else,
Speaker 5: and the fans to authorize wiretops on everybody in Alaska's phone.
Speaker 5: I mean, this comes up later, you know, this comes
Speaker 5: up after the after the kid puppy dog George is
Speaker 5: attempted murder, when his father is killed and his step
Speaker 5: mom has melted. So you've got this big story, a
Speaker 5: big trial. Chili and Gustus and are sent to prison
Speaker 5: for life. Now this doesn't stop Chili from gritting constantly,
Speaker 5: and it doesn't stop lizend from being cold. But Chili
Speaker 5: puts together a hit list of everybody he's going to
Speaker 5: get even with, and he's going to kill him. He's
Speaker 5: gonna blow him up. He's gonna do something horrible to him,
Speaker 5: everyone from the judge to the prosecutor. But most of all,
Speaker 5: who they most despise, who they most hate, is George,
Speaker 5: Little George, puppy dog, George, cute kid. They want to
Speaker 5: kill him more than anything because he rated him out
Speaker 5: and he did it smartly, needd it immediately. Well, the
Speaker 5: question is is how do you get a mail bomb,
Speaker 5: how do you make it, how do you mail it?
Speaker 5: And how do you kill your victim? Well, they did
Speaker 5: everything except the last part. They killed I can't say
Speaker 5: the wrong people because it's not right to kill people,
Speaker 5: but they killed George's father and destroyed the life pretty
Speaker 5: darn much of his stepmom.
Speaker 8: Michelle. When she was questioned by Anchorage police and by
Speaker 8: later by the Inspector's US Postal Inspectors the task Force,
Speaker 8: she somehow knew and thought and was adamant that it
Speaker 8: was Augustin is responsible.
Speaker 5: Because there was no secret that Gusta said. And chi
Speaker 5: Lei absolutely hated little George because He was the kid
Speaker 5: that you know, was in the back seat when they
Speaker 5: pulled the trigger. Uh, he'd been with him, you know,
Speaker 5: the night before party at the Botel and Uh, they
Speaker 5: figured that we bought better make sure George doesn't rat
Speaker 5: us out on this. He's got to keep his mouth shut. Well,
Speaker 5: George didn't keep his mouth shut. He told the truth.
Speaker 5: And they, I mean, they didn't blame themselves for what
Speaker 5: resulted in this innocent guy's death. They shot on the highway,
Speaker 5: but they blamed George for talking about it, and so
Speaker 5: their big revenge was to kill him. And the way
Speaker 5: they're going to endure it is a mail bomb.
Speaker 8: You write that two hours after the explosion, the investigative
Speaker 8: Task Force was formed. We mentioned in the introduction Anchorage
Speaker 8: Police Department, US Department of Treasury, Bureau of Alcohol to
Speaker 8: back when firearms ATF and Inspector Russell Mabray is task
Speaker 8: force leader. They spent a couple of weeks at the
Speaker 8: crime scene to establish that this was an actual What
Speaker 8: found materials that you only find at radio shacks, So
Speaker 8: they had all kinds of forensic evidence. But they also
Speaker 8: you talk about an Inspector Matthew Allen. We all know
Speaker 8: that well that most or I think all prison will
Speaker 8: record on cow call but are reported.
Speaker 5: But that doesn't mean anybody who listens to him they're
Speaker 5: in lies. The crux of the matter, this guy must
Speaker 5: have had the patience of two saints, because he sits
Speaker 5: and he listens to hours upon hours upon hours of banal, boring,
Speaker 5: useless prisoner phone conversations. Chili gustuson not saying anything. I mean,
Speaker 5: I gotta tell you I had in my position thanks
Speaker 5: to the United States Postal Inspectors. They gave me absolutely everything.
Speaker 5: And when I say everything, I mean everything. I received
Speaker 5: his giant box of transcripts of wire taps on these characters. Now,
Speaker 5: just listening to their conversations is bad enough, but reading them,
Speaker 5: if you have any command of the language, is a
Speaker 5: horrifying experience. I'm at a loss for words. As a
Speaker 5: word smith, I'm a loss for words. I got so
Speaker 5: tired of a four letter word that begins with F
Speaker 5: and ends with K that if I never saw that
Speaker 5: word again in my entire life, I'd be perfectly happy.
Speaker 5: Every every word was prefaced with some form of that.
Speaker 5: So it was like George Carlin is a comedy Boutino
Speaker 5: and how useful that word is. It could be now
Speaker 5: a verb, an age, and an averb. They used it
Speaker 5: in ways even Carlan never mentioned. And I'll tell you,
Speaker 5: their conversations were as blunt as their vocabulary, devoid of
Speaker 5: any depth, and there was just just even to read it,
Speaker 5: I mean, have to get too deep. I mean, these
Speaker 5: guys weren't famous for the use of metaphors. It was
Speaker 5: it was all right there, you know, but every other
Speaker 5: word was an expletive. They just like rained on it constantly.
Speaker 5: So this is an example of how cooperative everybody was
Speaker 5: in this case with me. And one reason for that
Speaker 5: s the fact that one of the story told and
Speaker 5: sold well was that the US Postal Inspection Service hadn't
Speaker 5: been the subject of anything since nineteen forty nine movie
Speaker 5: Post Office Investigator, starring what male lead was, but Audrey
Speaker 5: Long was the female lead, and she was the wife
Speaker 5: became wife of Leslie Charteriss, author of The Saint See
Speaker 5: What a Small World It is? Yes it is, So
Speaker 5: that was kind of an interesting little tie in there,
Speaker 5: But I mean they were really aggravated. I think Jim
Speaker 5: Bordinay when we were first talking about doing this book,
Speaker 5: he said I was watching the news, and he said
Speaker 5: FBI agents aided by postal workers righted the office of
Speaker 5: such and such. That sounded like you visualize, you know,
Speaker 5: these mail carriers rushing in pulling machine guns out their
Speaker 5: mail bags. Well, no, the United States Postal Inspection Service
Speaker 5: has a bigger and better lab than the FBI. That
Speaker 5: usually doesn't incur to people. The US Postal Inspectors Investigative
Speaker 5: Service is state of the art everything. They're ready beyond
Speaker 5: the FBI, or at least they were at the time.
Speaker 5: Now here's the shocking little thing that I uncovered that
Speaker 5: most people don't know. In the nineteen nineties, early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 5: I came who was head of the FBI then called me.
Speaker 5: I think may have been well, I can't recall one
Speaker 5: of the to the average teenager in America had more
Speaker 5: computer power in their bedroom than the FBI had altogether.
Speaker 5: The FBI still didn't have computers with hard drives. They
Speaker 5: had like you know, Franklin A's twelve hundred oms, you know,
Speaker 5: with CPM on floppies. This is what the FBI had
Speaker 5: because there hadn't been a budgetary allocation for computers for
Speaker 5: the Federal Bureau of investigation. Can you imagine that they
Speaker 5: had to bring in someone from the computer industry, which
Speaker 5: they did to testify before Congress. It was imperative that
Speaker 5: the United States come up with the money to buy
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Speaker 8: Inspector Matthew Allen from the US Postal Inspector Investigative Task
Speaker 8: Force on September fifth, he discovered in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 8: twelve days before the explosion, Gustafson called Peggy Yeah, giving
Speaker 8: instructions by fixing her car. What did he find by
Speaker 8: listening to that transcript or reading that transcript and listening
Speaker 8: to that phone call? What did he determine that those
Speaker 8: instructions actually were?
Speaker 5: Okay? I think I got it right here. As a
Speaker 5: matter of fact, I wrote the book that's thought. This
Speaker 5: isn't because of perfect memory. It's because I got the
Speaker 5: book here, Alan called it Inspectors Babery and Polling. The
Speaker 5: more they listened, the more they learned. The conspiracy to
Speaker 5: murder Kerr involved Pagy, Doug, their brother Craig Raymond chee Ley,
Speaker 5: a mutual friend Joseph Ryan. Doug told Peggy that when
Speaker 5: it was all done, he'd sit back and he'd sell quote,
Speaker 5: smoke a nice juicy cigar, down a glass of spirits
Speaker 5: and laughed so hard. That's not a good sign. Now.
Speaker 5: The phone recordings also revealed Peggy's erotic dream in which
Speaker 5: she kills George with her bare hands after hitting it
Speaker 5: with her car. That extra was actually included the original
Speaker 5: charging documents final against Pegy, which formed the basis for
Speaker 5: her initial arrest. Those are pretty wild, and you know,
Speaker 5: I started off the book with that, with that dream
Speaker 5: where she because it was really weird, because she's telling
Speaker 5: her brother about this herotic dream she has where she
Speaker 5: shits George on purpose with her car and then he's
Speaker 5: laying there on the gravel with blood coming out of
Speaker 5: his mouth, and she breaks his neck with her bare hands,
Speaker 5: and she's got blood on her hands and she almost
Speaker 5: has an orgasm telling this story. And so does her brother.
Speaker 5: He just loves to listen, but he reminds me be
Speaker 5: careful about the blood. After all, word Jehovah's witnesses. We
Speaker 5: got to watch out for that blood. And they were
Speaker 5: Jeovah's witnesses. As a matter of fact, no bad reflection
Speaker 5: on the witnesses. They don't need Peggy and Doug reflecting.
Speaker 5: I'm sure.
Speaker 8: You talk about too that once the from the again
Speaker 8: from this phone line, and from some of the things
Speaker 8: incriminating things that Peggy said and other people said, and
Speaker 8: you say there was more than there was not just
Speaker 8: George ca wire tap, and that was very effective getting
Speaker 8: incriminating evidence. There was also other evidence presented at this trial.
Speaker 8: There was also another person named Joseph Ryan. What was
Speaker 8: his rule in this? And tell us a little bit about.
Speaker 5: With him, Poor Joseph Ryan. I can't figure this went out.
Speaker 5: This is one for the legal books that I'm sure
Speaker 5: it's reference somewhere in fact. Aaron Moriarty, who does the
Speaker 5: CBS forty eight Hours, she was a guest on my
Speaker 5: show a few times and I said, Aaron, can you
Speaker 5: imagine a case where someone is found guilty and sentenced
Speaker 5: to fifty seven months in prison for a crime they've
Speaker 5: never been charged with. She says, no, that's impossible, And
Speaker 5: I said, well, you got to meet Joseph Ryan. Joseph
Speaker 5: Ryan had absolutely virtually nothing to do with this. He
Speaker 5: was just a buddy of Chili's. And he said, hey,
Speaker 5: you go over to the yard like that. If you've
Speaker 5: ever been to Alaska or be sure, Washington. That much difference.
Speaker 5: He got people who've got yards, they've got cars and
Speaker 5: trucks and all sorts of stuff, you know, out there,
Speaker 5: and pick up a couple of these items for me
Speaker 5: that her mind has stored over there. And you know
Speaker 5: this individual items, there's blasting caps and you know, nothing illegal.
Speaker 5: And yet he was found guilty of possession of what firearm?
Speaker 5: Illegal firearm position? He was never charged with it. As
Speaker 5: a jury came back and he was found innocent of everything,
Speaker 5: but still sentenced to fifty seven months in prist for
Speaker 5: a crime that he was ever charged with. That is
Speaker 5: unique in the annals of American law. Now you think
Speaker 5: that he would get paid minimum wage for every hour
Speaker 5: he spent in prison after being found innocent and a
Speaker 5: letter of apology just did go to the appeals court.
Speaker 5: The Court of Appeal said, yes, this is a really
Speaker 5: ridiculous error, but we don't care. We'll just let us slide.
Speaker 5: Which isn't very substanti of supportive or legal system where
Speaker 5: people could be found guilty of crimes they've never been
Speaker 5: charged with. But it happened absolutely positively. Now, of course
Speaker 5: Peggy actually did have very direct involvement aside from me.
Speaker 5: There's no crime to have erotic dreams about murdering someone
Speaker 5: or listening to them, But knowing that you're delivering a
Speaker 5: male bomb, that's culpability for sure. And she knew, she
Speaker 5: knew exactly what she was delivering, she knew what it
Speaker 5: was supposed to accomplish, and she thought it was absolutely
Speaker 5: wonderful idea.
Speaker 8: What was Craig's rule in the bomb making and delivery?
Speaker 5: Okay, I got to refresh my memory here of being
Speaker 5: it has been more than a week or two since
Speaker 5: since I wrote wrote the book.
Speaker 8: But he.
Speaker 5: He was going to cooperate, I believe, the other the
Speaker 5: other brother, but he came up with a brilliant idea.
Speaker 5: He ran away. Yeah, he ran away from Alaska. And
Speaker 5: you know what's interesting is that in the United States,
Speaker 5: if someone is involved in murder or another Henus crime
Speaker 5: almost without exception. Guess where they run away to and
Speaker 5: you guess Las Vegas, Nevada. For some reason, people believe
Speaker 5: that if you go to Las Vegas, no one will
Speaker 5: find you. That's not true. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 5: following some murders where the prison vanishes, they know who
Speaker 5: they're looking for. They will send detectives first and foremost
Speaker 5: to Las Vegas, Nevada, because they know. People say they
Speaker 5: can't go to Las Vegas and not be found. It's
Speaker 5: not that big a city, for aven sakes. Serial killers
Speaker 5: will travel across country to go to Las Vegas to
Speaker 5: get caught. And people also think they can take counterfeit
Speaker 5: money or counterfeit money orders to Las Vegas and no
Speaker 5: one's going to notice, not really realizing that the United
Speaker 5: States Secret Service has with the biggest office in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Speaker 5: You know, law enforcements, you know, they may have a
Speaker 5: ITQ cap at some local department, but when it comes
Speaker 5: to federal as you're talking about some pretty smart people. Anyway,
Speaker 5: he runs off not to Las Vegas, but to Los Angeles.
Speaker 5: And this is where again it gets very strange. This
Speaker 5: is like something exactly right out of a movie. He
Speaker 5: calls back home to his wife or girlfriend, whatever she is,
Speaker 5: and says there's a was it a ten thousand dollars
Speaker 5: reward for his capture? So he tells his girlfriend, I
Speaker 5: want you to get the reward, so turn me in
Speaker 5: and get and get the money. Well, she keeps him
Speaker 5: on the phone long enough for them to trace the call,
Speaker 5: and they trace it to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California,
Speaker 5: which is fairly close to Grauman's Chinese Theater as a
Speaker 5: matter of fact, and there's a movie being filmed at
Speaker 5: the Roosevelt at that time. The technical advisor to the
Speaker 5: motion picture happens to be good buddies with the real
Speaker 5: raw enforcement officer who comes crashing in to arrest the
Speaker 5: kid who's going from the phone booth, but they have
Speaker 5: to pass through the movie set to get to him,
Speaker 5: and the advisor on the movie thinks it's a practical joke,
Speaker 5: but they really are there run to arrest somebody, and
Speaker 5: that's the kid in the phone booth. So that was
Speaker 5: a very very strange scene, as you can imagine. Now.
Speaker 8: That was on what.
Speaker 5: March twelfth, I guess, Well, that's when Craig gust Is
Speaker 5: called and confessed of his role. But they know they
Speaker 5: didn't arrest him right away, and they hadn't arrested him
Speaker 5: until uh, he was down down here in Hollywood. In fact,
Speaker 5: none of these people were arrested. Now you might say,
Speaker 5: why weren't theyre arrested, Well, a couple of reasons. They
Speaker 5: wanted to keep their offices open on who all was
Speaker 5: involved in this conspiracy and who was a conspiracy not
Speaker 5: like some of the ones that people make up, but
Speaker 5: I mean, this was a real one and they weren't
Speaker 5: through all that were involved. Also, investigations of this nature
Speaker 5: are horrifyingly expensive cost of fortune. Who is going to
Speaker 5: pick up the tab for this? The uh, the police
Speaker 5: in Shugiak, the police in law enforcement and Anchorage, or
Speaker 5: the federal government. Well, who's gonna who's gonna pay for everything?
Speaker 5: This is a big issue. And as I'm sure you recall,
Speaker 5: the reason why you're you're a wonderful serial killer up
Speaker 5: there Vancouver, the guy with the hog farm, and the
Speaker 5: reason they didn't go after him, even though they knew
Speaker 5: it was him and he knew it was going on,
Speaker 5: was because, well they have three reasons. They said, well,
Speaker 5: we can't afford it. We don't know what we're doing,
Speaker 5: is number three, and we're not trained in doing this,
Speaker 5: so we'll let it slide. You know, after all, who
Speaker 5: cares how many people get murdered? We just can't afford this. Well. Finally,
Speaker 5: I believe the wise Canadian government coughed up some cosmic
Speaker 5: cash to pay for the investigation, very similar to what
Speaker 5: happened in Spokane with the investigation of the Spokane serial killer,
Speaker 5: which dragged on longer practically than reruns the Isle of
Speaker 5: Lucy millions and millions of dollars. Finally, the US government
Speaker 5: had come up with eight million dollars I believe to
Speaker 5: pay the expenses of the Homicide Task Force. People don't
Speaker 5: stop and realize how expensive these coordinated investigations are. So
Speaker 5: there was an agreement made between the FEDS, the federal agencies,
Speaker 5: and the local investigators that they will all work together,
Speaker 5: but the Feds would handle the actual arrests, prosecution, etc.
Speaker 5: So they have these several federal agencies involved, as you mentioned,
Speaker 5: and they didn't really come out and arrest anybody or
Speaker 5: press charges until they had all their proverbial culprits together,
Speaker 5: and there wasn't a change of venue. I mean, and
Speaker 5: I can certainly understand that is, how in the world
Speaker 5: are these guys, the girls, men and women going to
Speaker 5: get a fair trial when this has been so extensively
Speaker 5: covered in media that everybody I mean, I mean, it
Speaker 5: always stuns me. Of course, it's a little different there
Speaker 5: in Canada, were not allowed to talk about it. Ongoing
Speaker 5: case tell us resolved. We're here in the USA. All
Speaker 5: you gonna do is go on Facebook and listen to
Speaker 5: these people with absolutely no knowledge of anything, saying I
Speaker 5: know so and so is guilty. I know, so everybody
Speaker 5: everyone knows they did it. Well, how do they know
Speaker 5: they did it? They haven't seen it. All they know
Speaker 5: is they saw the person's name, you know, as being
Speaker 5: a suspect or not being a suspect. Oh, I know
Speaker 5: who did it. I know we'll never get out a jury,
Speaker 5: of course of that attitude, but I mean, people do
Speaker 5: win the conclusion jumping competition in the twenty twenty Olympics
Speaker 5: every time there's a high profile case. Well, so they
Speaker 5: moved it, I think, moved it out of Alaska down
Speaker 5: in San Francisco to try to, you know, get an
Speaker 5: impartial jury, which is which can be difficult in any
Speaker 5: situation where is a great deal of cover, which especially
Speaker 5: if you have someone. I think it was when Manson
Speaker 5: was charged the President of United States referred to as
Speaker 5: being guilty before the trial. That was a little much. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but you understand what I mean. So they've got to
Speaker 5: change your venue. The wound up of course, everybody being
Speaker 5: found guilty of something and even people who were found
Speaker 5: innoc and went to prison. Which is a Festol hosted
Speaker 5: a spin on American justice.
Speaker 8: Let's use this as an opportunity, birl. Just for a second,
Speaker 8: we're going to talk about that trial because there's some
Speaker 8: dramatic evidence put on the big screen at that trial. Again,
Speaker 8: another very movie esque scene with stuff for a second
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Speaker 8: bit about what I alluded to was the dramatic prosecution
Speaker 8: showing a photo of the Michelle and two photos. So
Speaker 8: tell us about the two photos that almost made somebody.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one of the jurors almost vomited in the court
Speaker 5: room because it was just so horrifying. First they put
Speaker 5: up a picture of David and Michelle's wedding, their wedding picture,
Speaker 5: you know, their happy, smiling faces on their wedding day.
Speaker 5: And then he cut directly to a picture of his
Speaker 5: totally mangled burg corpse and her melted face. And it
Speaker 5: was so horrifying and graphic that one of the jurors
Speaker 5: had we restrained Chase of from actually vomiting right there
Speaker 5: in the courtroom.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you have also, yes, you have also that his
Speaker 8: behavior in well, actually we won't talk about Doug Gustafson.
Speaker 8: We got to go back a little bit to both
Speaker 8: of these people's behavior. Doug Gustafson and then later Raymond
Speaker 8: Cheley Smiley. Chiley didn't have the smile on his face
Speaker 8: when he went to travel. Let's first talk about Doug
Speaker 8: Gustafson readily admits what he did. Yeah, tell us why
Speaker 8: why you think he did that? And what exactly did
Speaker 8: he say about that?
Speaker 5: Well, he said that if people would have followed his directions,
Speaker 5: if they would have done things the way he wanted
Speaker 5: it done, David and Michelle would be alive today. He
Speaker 5: only wanted to kill a little George, and he has
Speaker 5: no plans to send any more bombs. But he was
Speaker 5: proud of the work he did and that mail bomb
Speaker 5: ready and instructing Peggy. And he felt bad that David
Speaker 5: was killed, and he felt bad that Michelle had her
Speaker 5: face melted and her eyes filled with glass. That wasn't
Speaker 5: part of the plan. No, the plan the way he
Speaker 5: wanted was George gets killed. George didn't get killed, and
Speaker 5: these two, in his mind, innocent people didn't. He said,
Speaker 5: he felt really bad about that. So, as you may know,
Speaker 5: this bizarre twist and the tail here is that Doug
Speaker 5: Gustusson teamed up with Michelle to sue the state for
Speaker 5: negligence in not stopping the mail bomb. Right. He felt
Speaker 5: sorry for her, and he wanted to cost to state
Speaker 5: a lot of money. But he adding more tragedy to
Speaker 5: this story. Insurance had offered her a settlement. I think
Speaker 5: it was two million dollars. She didn't feel that was enough,
Speaker 5: and I think she was right. But when they went
Speaker 5: to court, there was judgments against the state, judgments against Chile,
Speaker 5: judgments against Augustus, and judgment against Ryan, who was quite
Speaker 5: wondering while they all. He wound up at all this,
Speaker 5: and that the state was only responsible for twelve percent
Speaker 5: of the total cost which came out by the time
Speaker 5: he got done with her legal fees and one thing
Speaker 5: and another, she got less than the two millions she
Speaker 5: would have got up. She was just taken the deal
Speaker 5: of the insurance company. So she broke down in tears
Speaker 5: right there in the court rum when even though she won,
Speaker 5: she didn't win anything. And that was even more tragic.
Speaker 5: It was not one thing and something else, you know,
Speaker 5: he did Douglas and said he wanted to cost him
Speaker 5: millions of dollars. And so the state added Augustus and
Speaker 5: Chile and Ryan as co defendants to share the costs
Speaker 5: should she win her case. Well she did, but they
Speaker 5: didn't have any money, of course, and so that meant
Speaker 5: she got, as my father said, hay Cocks Bolovinis didn't
Speaker 5: get anything, you know, next to nothing.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you talk about July fifteenth, ninety two, because the
Speaker 8: Department of Justice decides to go for the death penalty
Speaker 8: for Raymond Chile and July fifteenth, nineteen ninety two, Craig
Speaker 8: pleads guilty. Craig gusts and pleads guilty to mailing the
Speaker 8: bomb or being involved with the bomb and testifies against
Speaker 8: Ryan and Raymond Chile, and for this deal he gets
Speaker 8: twenty two and a half years. You talk about also
Speaker 8: jail house informants and their importance in this what oh yeah, informance.
Speaker 5: The prosecution dragged out prison in foremant so quickly they
Speaker 5: couldn't lie straight in bed, and these guys would change
Speaker 5: the stories with this concerning rapidity, and when they were
Speaker 5: confronted with her, dishonesty didn't seem to bother him. One
Speaker 5: of them testified under oath that Chili was involved in activity.
Speaker 5: The simple fact check showed that he wasn't even there
Speaker 5: at the time, and so they you know, the jailouts
Speaker 5: and formants are not exactly reliable witnesses. But I think
Speaker 5: what really did it was the pictures, which I would
Speaker 5: imagine the defense probably objected to the prosecution showing those
Speaker 5: pictures as would have so much of an emotional impact,
Speaker 5: But the facts of the matter were still fairly clear.
Speaker 5: One error that prosecutors make I've noticed, and I'm sure
Speaker 5: they notice it too, or maybe they don't beause they're
Speaker 5: not true crime writers. Maybe we have the blessing of
Speaker 5: being a little farther removed, since the perspective is going
Speaker 5: for the typical one, is going for a common scheme
Speaker 5: or plan when it isn't and that blows up in
Speaker 5: their face. Or trotting out unreliable witnesses, paid informants, and
Speaker 5: people with no veracity to them whatsoever. Then instead of
Speaker 5: bolstering the prosecution's case, makes them look like they're desperate
Speaker 5: by bringing out all sorts of people who lie on
Speaker 5: the witness stand and blatantly. So I don't think that's
Speaker 5: ever a good idea. If your case is strong enough,
Speaker 5: it's not a matter do you think you can win
Speaker 5: it is? I don't know what about up in Canada,
Speaker 5: but the United States, it's not so much. The system
Speaker 5: of true justice in most cases is can we win it?
Speaker 5: Whether the person is guilty or not, can we win it?
Speaker 5: And that becomes the contest. I think we can win
Speaker 5: this one, not, you know, And then that's not what
Speaker 5: the prosecutors. People think it's the prosecution's job to prosecute people.
Speaker 5: It's not. It's to prosecute justice to get justice done
Speaker 5: of the person's not the one, you know. It doesn't
Speaker 5: matter if you can build the case, is it true?
Speaker 5: It says it's really a difficult situation. I'm sure you're
Speaker 5: aware of the one. And I had the woman on
Speaker 5: my show too. Maybe you had her on as well.
Speaker 5: She wrote a book about a case in San Diego
Speaker 5: where the woman was convicted of poisoning her husband with
Speaker 5: a heart snack and then using some of the insurance
Speaker 5: mind you get a book job and having sex with
Speaker 5: every marine in San Diego, well not every but every other.
Speaker 5: She was innocent, but they found her guilty because they
Speaker 5: were able to push this thing through with enough smoking mirrors,
Speaker 5: and they won it on appeal. However, the arcstic evidence
Speaker 5: experts came forward and said, I told them she didn't
Speaker 5: do it, but they said they could win it anyway.
Speaker 5: They'd be a true crime book as heroes versus you know,
Speaker 5: sending this woman away. Finally, it was allowed that the
Speaker 5: woman could sue these San Diego prosecutors for twelve million dollars,
Speaker 5: which she did plus her heart. So, you know, some
Speaker 5: of the desire to be partially famous in a true
Speaker 5: crime book by being the winning prosecutor. If you're prosecuting
Speaker 5: people who didn't do it, there's no glory there.
Speaker 8: You're writ in the book though, that Peggy and Craig
Speaker 8: Gustavson both were testified at trial against Raymond Chiley and Ryan.
Speaker 8: And then Craig is now hasn't assumed identity and is
Speaker 8: in witness protection in prison. So there was clearly whether
Speaker 8: they gave him that evidence or he gave them the
Speaker 8: evidence that they needed for the prosecution. And when you
Speaker 8: talk about again and again, another movie esque scene in
Speaker 8: this is that Raymond Chile Chile's response when he gets
Speaker 8: sentenced tell us about what happens at the trial in
Speaker 8: terms of guilt or innocence, and then what does Raymond
Speaker 8: Chile do in response to the sentence.
Speaker 5: Well, I was there in person for the sentencing. I
Speaker 5: flew up to Alaska and because I was working on
Speaker 5: the book back then, you know, twenty some years ago
Speaker 5: as a guest of the US Postalist Spectures, who again
Speaker 5: I cannot compliment enough on how gracious uh they were
Speaker 5: to me and continue to be. I think if I
Speaker 5: ever get in trouble, I'll call them, you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: helped me out, you guys, I did a poke about
Speaker 5: uh yes, And I was there when Michelle gave her
Speaker 5: you know, victim's impact statement, and she just gave him hell.
Speaker 5: I mean how they destroyed her life, their face, her
Speaker 5: vision or future, or her husband or home. And Raymond laughed.
Speaker 5: He didn't just smile, he laughed, Well, she was a
Speaker 5: nervous laugh. What you got to be amused about. He's
Speaker 5: going to be sent off, you know, and he's already
Speaker 5: in prison for murder. What else are they going to
Speaker 5: do to him?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 5: You know, like there was a counterfeiting case that uh
Speaker 5: I was informed about where they were looking for this
Speaker 5: master counterfeitter and they finally found him in prison. What
Speaker 5: we're gonna do? Send him home? What do you do
Speaker 5: when the criminal new catch is already in prison?
Speaker 8: Yeah, you talk about Peggy's sentence twenty four years and
Speaker 8: four months. What if she's talking about her husband?
Speaker 5: Pardon we should she out now? Has it been twenty
Speaker 5: four years and six months?
Speaker 8: Could be it is, yes, yes, it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she's probably working down a walmart.
Speaker 8: Wow. Her husband, Dennis didn't have anything to do with this, Didy.
Speaker 5: No, he had had nothing to do and he was
Speaker 5: disgusted by the entire concept. I mean, you know, it's
Speaker 5: it's upsetting enough to have your your spouse maybe having
Speaker 5: an affair with the local grocery clerk or the pool boy.
Speaker 5: Of course, you gonna have pool boys in Alaska, and
Speaker 5: if they have an ice boys, uh, pool breeze is over.
Speaker 5: But to find out that your wife was joyously committing
Speaker 5: murder and one of the most heinous, discussing crimes in
Speaker 5: Alaskan history, You're not going to be amused by that
Speaker 5: at all. I mean, he announced that he was getting
Speaker 5: a divorce. He didn't want to stay married to her,
Speaker 5: He didn't want to be faithful to her for twenty
Speaker 5: four years and six months while she languished in prison
Speaker 5: for the horrible murder that she helped take place, and
Speaker 5: weighed on her. I mean, I don't know how much
Speaker 5: it would have waited on her for the killing of
Speaker 5: the person she wanted to kill, which was George Contemporary,
Speaker 5: the only guy with the ethics practically in this whole story.
Speaker 5: Said maybe for Craig and Joseph, who was innocent of
Speaker 5: everything and yet did all the time in prison. Maybury
Speaker 5: told me that he saw her after she'd been in
Speaker 5: prison in a while well, and he could see that
Speaker 5: it was eating her alive. You know what she had done,
Speaker 5: the pain and suffering and death and destruction, that she
Speaker 5: had participated in. I'm sure had a negative effect on
Speaker 5: her self image. You know, it's hard to think well
Speaker 5: of yourself. And it wasn't that she accidentally fell into it,
Speaker 5: like a clean kid into a coal shoot. She joyously
Speaker 5: participated in what she envisioned as the horrifying murder of
Speaker 5: George Carr, when instead it was the horrifying murderer of
Speaker 5: George's father, in the complete disfiguration of his stepmother.
Speaker 8: Did Michelle Was Michelle present when they flashed the photo
Speaker 8: of her wedding and then of her of the crime scene?
Speaker 8: Was she there to witness that?
Speaker 5: I don't know the answer to that one, Dan. I
Speaker 5: was not in the court room for the trial. I
Speaker 5: was only there for the sentencing and the victim's impact statement.
Speaker 5: But I can't imagine that she'd that she'd be there.
Speaker 5: I can't imagine that if I was her, I wouldn't
Speaker 5: want to see that. She was lucky if she could
Speaker 5: see anything, and she was mostly blind. She still like
Speaker 5: glass in her eyes long after this had happened. Because
Speaker 5: she's standing in the kitchen when this explosion went. It
Speaker 5: was amazing that she was able to say, Doug Gustafson,
Speaker 5: you know, and I point that she knew who would
Speaker 5: have been behind it, that that's how much she doug
Speaker 5: hated her stepson. But I mean there was firstly nothing left,
Speaker 5: but her face was gone. She was blind shere ear
Speaker 5: drums exploded.
Speaker 8: Really yeah, and you you saw it was she was
Speaker 8: she there? Was she there at the sentencing? Well obviously
Speaker 8: she wasn't yeah to get back statement, yeah, obviously.
Speaker 5: Yeah. The whole thing was fairly horrible and shed you know,
Speaker 5: dark glasses and face kind of covered. I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: what do you do in that situation? Who was to
Speaker 5: no fault of her owness, who's so horribly disfigured? I mean,
Speaker 5: gover only. I mean, I've got a friend of mine
Speaker 5: who was held captive by some guys that should have
Speaker 5: known better, but it was drunk and disorderly. He beat
Speaker 5: her face in a took ten thousand dollars worth of
Speaker 5: surgery on her face to reconstruct it. I mean I
Speaker 5: saw her the day after she got away from this guy,
Speaker 5: and she'd just been beaten, and what her face looked
Speaker 5: like van and then the surgery and I mean now
Speaker 5: actually actually looks she did before and gave her a
Speaker 5: nice new face. It's not the face she starts did with.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 5: I can't relate to the emotional despair that someone could
Speaker 5: go through in that kind of terrible situation, and it's
Speaker 5: just beyond my I mean, I can sympathize, but I
Speaker 5: can't empathize. I can't imagine what they were, how hawful
Speaker 5: that would be.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, you talked about Michelle's bills at that time,
Speaker 8: that it accumulated by the time of that civil trial,
Speaker 8: that four hundred thousand, so over.
Speaker 5: Four hundred thousand dollars medical expenses, and that that was
Speaker 5: what nineteen ninety Yeah, but that twenty eighteen dollars and
Speaker 5: it's you know, well over a million, one million and
Speaker 5: a half.
Speaker 8: Well, what it seemed is that even though of the
Speaker 8: four hundred thousand, they were not ending, I mean, there
Speaker 8: was more surgeries to go, it was more work. Oh yeah, Augustly, Yeah,
Speaker 8: it was. That's the disappointment with the settlement too. The
Speaker 8: settlement was both here, you won the.
Speaker 5: Case, and you get less than what we offered you
Speaker 5: in the first place.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah, you talk about how big the
Speaker 8: media response was to this, how far reaching it was
Speaker 8: in terms of people being interested in this story, How
Speaker 8: did they portray this story? And just tell us a
Speaker 8: little bit more about the media and its response.
Speaker 5: Well, you got to figure what is the population of
Speaker 5: Alaska relatives anywhere else, and how many media outlets do
Speaker 5: they have. Well, you've got the Anchorage newspaper, but I
Speaker 5: got the two g X shopping News. You got your
Speaker 5: network affiliates. And when I was up there, I think
Speaker 5: the biggest news was if there was a bear walk
Speaker 5: in the J C. Pennies. You know, that's the thing
Speaker 5: that surprised me so much about Anchorage is that it's
Speaker 5: it's smaller than Spokane, Washington. Now, I was at the
Speaker 5: prosecutor's office. They were really great too, meeting with the
Speaker 5: federal prosecutor there. And then I got my rental car
Speaker 5: and I was driving to the home of one of
Speaker 5: the US Postal inspectors. And I got to tell you
Speaker 5: it was summertime and it was gorgeous up there, and
Speaker 5: the sun never said it always looked like it was
Speaker 5: dusk when the sun went down, it didn't go down.
Speaker 5: It was like seven o'clock at night, dusk, my favorite
Speaker 5: time of day. All night and they'd been out hunting
Speaker 5: and they were making reindeer meatballs. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 5: there was no deer in Alaska. It just rein deer,
Speaker 5: Okay anyway. So I went to drive to this guy's house.
Speaker 5: I kind of space out. Next thing I know, I'm
Speaker 5: in the middle of nowhere. Bam. I was out of
Speaker 5: town that past. You think you're in a capitol city,
Speaker 5: it's gonna have some streets to it, but it's a
Speaker 5: small town and everything else is smaller. So when you've
Speaker 5: got a major story like this, it saturates everything. It
Speaker 5: saturates every radio broadcast, every TV broadcast, every pair run
Speaker 5: of the newspaper, and individuals conversations, and the majority of
Speaker 5: those conversations were recorded with federal wiretaps.
Speaker 8: Well, you do single out and the US Postal Service
Speaker 8: Inspection Service is really happy to be able to work
Speaker 8: with you to highlight the work that they did do.
Speaker 8: And it wasn't impressive, as you say, the budget that
Speaker 8: they have and the technology that is available to them.
Speaker 8: But also as an investigative arm of the government, and
Speaker 8: I didn't realize their importance and as a result, what
Speaker 8: they have in place in case they need the investigative
Speaker 8: UH services of the US postal team. So hence this
Speaker 8: task force was put together with a lot of people,
Speaker 8: a lot of investigators, and a lot of emphasis and
Speaker 8: no constraints in terms of budget for this, did.
Speaker 5: They No, I mean this was this was top priority,
Speaker 5: and everybody cooperated with everybody else. So we're in the
Speaker 5: game playing power trips, you know, uh, boundaries barriers. In fact,
Speaker 5: they gave the it was a Inspector of the Year award,
Speaker 5: uh to the chief of police of Anchorage, who wasn't
Speaker 5: part of the federal team because it was so cooperative.
Speaker 8: Uh it was.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's the kind of dedication you had. This
Speaker 5: crime was so horrific and so threatening that I mean
Speaker 5: just time to think of it. We all go to
Speaker 5: you know, pick up our mail every day and shuffle
Speaker 5: to the bills and the junk mail and to about
Speaker 5: to think about it. We don't think about someone destroying
Speaker 5: our home, murdering our wife, husband and children whatever at
Speaker 5: the mail and so they uh, you know, when you
Speaker 5: in the United States, when you put a letter in
Speaker 5: the mailbox to go out, it is no longer your property.
Speaker 5: It then becomes the property of the United States government.
Speaker 5: Un tell us delivered. And so if someone's messing with
Speaker 5: it got big problems and the next chiste I wanted
Speaker 5: to do this post the spectas shourwed me onto which
Speaker 5: was absolutely fascinating, but no publisher wants it because no
Speaker 5: one's murdered. Was I'll just take a minute to tell
Speaker 5: you this. I think you'll find it interesting as a journalist.
Speaker 5: A lady writes a letter to the Posts Spectrums and said, boy,
Speaker 5: I'm really mad. I paid twelve dollars a classified ads
Speaker 5: in the paper to how to figure out my winning
Speaker 5: lottery numbers. That was going to get you know, doctor
Speaker 5: Svendrick's secret lottery, you know whatever, but I never got it. Well,
Speaker 5: that's a violation of postal law, not selling how to
Speaker 5: win the lottery. But not if you're charging someone twelve bucks,
Speaker 5: you better deliver it.
Speaker 8: Sure, And so.
Speaker 5: They noticed that the po box that he was supposed
Speaker 5: to mail was in some other ads as well. And
Speaker 5: as you may know, it's against the law in America
Speaker 5: to buy tickets and foreign lotteries. If you're having a
Speaker 5: lottery in Canada American citizens, we can't buy a Canadian
Speaker 5: lotto ticket.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 5: Well, there was this guy who would target widowers and
Speaker 5: widows who had just lost their spouse, had befriend them
Speaker 5: on the phone and convince them to buy foreign lottery
Speaker 5: tickets and then tell them that they'd won and wanted
Speaker 5: to reinvest them and more tickets, and I'm sending you
Speaker 5: a form designed to make that easy for you. And
Speaker 5: the forum was a power of attorney over all their
Speaker 5: bank accounts, and he looked them of every cent they
Speaker 5: ever had. And they was doing it out of Canada,
Speaker 5: where it was a misdemeanor. Oh well, And they finally
Speaker 5: finally got this guy who was in India or something.
Speaker 5: He had several million dollars stashed in Seattle Bank. They
Speaker 5: were able to seize that. But his total punishment for
Speaker 5: this most heartless of crimes, which he was making millions
Speaker 5: and millions of dollars looting these people. He's only people's
Speaker 5: life savings is he did I think it was eighteen
Speaker 5: months minimum security in federal prison and then was released
Speaker 5: that he had millions stashed all over the world. The
Speaker 5: only way they were getting it was civil judgments against him.
Speaker 5: By Ireland I think went after him for thirty three million.
Speaker 5: The UK went after him for I think an equal amount.
Speaker 5: Whether they got it or not, I don't know, but
Speaker 5: you may know heartless someone would be to do that.
Speaker 5: And he wasn't doing it alone. He had another woman,
Speaker 5: another guy working with him, befriending these lonely, sad people
Speaker 5: who just lost her husband or wife and then robbing
Speaker 5: him of everything.
Speaker 8: Sure. Well, it's this example of people taking advantage of
Speaker 8: the very the most vulnerable, and we see that with
Speaker 8: in these murder cases all the time. I mean, they're
Speaker 8: mad at the world, so they take it out on
Speaker 8: somebody else that has been victimized by society.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they say, the people's like bullies. A friend of
Speaker 5: mine runners campaign, you know, stop bullying. They say, bullies
Speaker 5: don't care to be told to stop bullying. Who's going
Speaker 5: to stop it? Bullys don't care because all bullies are afraid.
Speaker 5: It's a fear of response. They were bullied, they were abused,
Speaker 5: and when they see someone weak, it triggers that whole
Speaker 5: fear response of when they were weak. And just that's
Speaker 5: the thing, if they're asking for it, you see that
Speaker 5: person was asking for it because that's what they were told.
Speaker 5: That being weak is asking for it. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 5: a tragic situation. Until we stopped the whole thing of
Speaker 5: abusing each other. We'll have bullies.
Speaker 8: Yeah, what was interesting in this book, whereas in a
Speaker 8: full length book we would get a little bit more
Speaker 8: of I'm just curious because we never mentioned there was
Speaker 8: a person named Robert Chamberlain was the person driving the
Speaker 8: truck that passed Raymond Cheley and Gustafson and they decided
Speaker 8: he had cut them off. So Jeffrey Kane, as we mentioned,
Speaker 8: was the passengers, was shot in the back of the head.
Speaker 8: We never really you don't really mention, but it'd be
Speaker 8: very interesting to know the fate of Robert Chambers what
Speaker 8: he felt.
Speaker 5: And you are absolutely correct. If this had been a
Speaker 5: larger it's a big enough story. If it had been
Speaker 5: a larger book, and it is available as an audio
Speaker 5: book standalone, and it's available in print in the book
Speaker 5: Masters of True Crime, edited by our Berry Flowers, I
Speaker 5: would have followed up on that for sure, and there'd
Speaker 5: be a lot more about the investigation. I couldn't put it.
Speaker 5: I wanted to put in a picture of the uh,
Speaker 5: the agent who listened to all the hours of the tapes, right,
Speaker 5: and they said no, because he works undercover. Hello, Yeah,
Speaker 5: and they didn't want his picture.
Speaker 8: This call well, it's a theme of true crime uncensored.
Speaker 5: So yeah, interesting, that's the theme from the Saints.
Speaker 8: Yea, let's talk about your incredible true crime podcast as
Speaker 8: I did.
Speaker 5: It's a strange thing you've been doing these podcasts, who
Speaker 5: you were much hip to the hip or to it
Speaker 5: that I ever was in terms of how to build
Speaker 5: that audience. I can remember calling you up and said,
Speaker 5: how do I get this thing on iTunes? I couldn't
Speaker 5: figure it out. But along came Anchor FM, who did
Speaker 5: what mixed cloud these other places or blog talk didn't do,
Speaker 5: and that is that they give all of that plus
Speaker 5: the little hearts. I do my show, which is you know,
Speaker 5: live Saturdays at two o'clock on alfhol RadioLIVE dot com,
Speaker 5: and Douglas Shearer has been recording it for me every
Speaker 5: week dutifully for the past couple of years, although I
Speaker 5: think this coming weeks his last I did recording and
Speaker 5: someone else I simply uploaded to Anchor FM, and they
Speaker 5: upload it to every podcast platform that exists, iTunes, Google Play,
Speaker 5: this one. That one. I don't have to mess with it,
Speaker 5: which was driving me nuts. So it's interesting to look
Speaker 5: at the listenership just on the podcast, not at the
Speaker 5: live audience, because that's really hard to judge. We know
Speaker 5: our old server, the thing would blow up and we
Speaker 5: got to two hundred and fifty thousand, We're gonna sell them,
Speaker 5: blew up and we got a new server on that.
Speaker 5: But since it went up on on iTunes and other stuff,
Speaker 5: I can watch every week, it just goes higher and
Speaker 5: hire and hire and hire. And what's interesting to me
Speaker 5: is what episodes get the largest number of downloads. And
Speaker 5: ironically was calling me just now was Leonard Bouschell, who
Speaker 5: is a former drug smuggler who now produces the Real
Speaker 5: Recovery Film Festivals. He founded Writers and Treatment, which is
Speaker 5: similar the Music Cares as the founder. Writ is a
Speaker 5: nonprofit with Robert Downey to provide financial aid and treatment
Speaker 5: to people who work in the writing and publishing industry
Speaker 5: who may have problems with drug, alcohol, or other behavioral
Speaker 5: problems that they don't have insurance. And he produces the Experience,
Speaker 5: Strength and Hope Awards. And we did an interview with
Speaker 5: him a year ago November, I think October November about
Speaker 5: the upcoming Real Recovery Film Festival, and with everything else,
Speaker 5: that still remains our most downloaded episode.
Speaker 8: Interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and may I just because it says drug smuggler retired.
Speaker 5: I think people want to hear about drug smullers. But
Speaker 5: most and of course we have our friend Punch published
Speaker 5: Santa Meravic, the world's second greatest diamond thief. His father's
Speaker 5: number one, because his dad never got caught, never went
Speaker 5: to prison. He unfortunately or fortunately did get caught. That's
Speaker 5: kind of interesting because well, how did he get caught. Well,
Speaker 5: he got caught twice, once because he made a mistake
Speaker 5: and the second time because someone in the same building
Speaker 5: as the Diamond highs the taking place. It was like
Speaker 5: a gym still manufacturing place. You were not a private home.
Speaker 5: He never did that. It was like a commercial place.
Speaker 5: But there were apartments in the same buildings. And this
Speaker 5: guy went nuts and decapitated the family cat, the family parakeet,
Speaker 5: and the family father and threw his father's head out
Speaker 5: in the middle of the street, so he had homicide
Speaker 5: trying to catch this guy. In the process of trying
Speaker 5: to catch him, they run in where Punch and his
Speaker 5: buddy are doing this multi million dollar diamondized and they go, oh,
Speaker 5: need man, we were just eater trying to buy the
Speaker 5: same place a smoke a joint they tried to pull
Speaker 5: back on. That's so you never know what weird thing's
Speaker 5: gonna happen. You know. It's like I was you ever
Speaker 5: seen that Stanley uh uh Kramer Koberilia the too Confused
Speaker 5: U Kramer filmed the killing starting Stirling Hayden. No. Uh,
Speaker 5: it's a it's a height movie. It's a racetrack robbery
Speaker 5: and they plant it down to the last little detail
Speaker 5: and things. When the things can go wrong, it doesn't
Speaker 5: take much, you know. And uh, it's a great, great
Speaker 5: film if you get a chance to watch it. He
Speaker 5: couldn't remake it today because the way the restrictions aren't.
Speaker 5: Getting on airplanes, you can't just go, you know, grab
Speaker 5: a ticket and get on. That was back in the
Speaker 5: old days when it was still like a America in
Speaker 5: America every week.
Speaker 8: You and Howard Lapiti's producer and manager, Howard Lapites have
Speaker 8: and before that when I was had great honor of
Speaker 8: being on your show the first time with Don Woldman,
Speaker 8: did you have you have had almost a similar format
Speaker 8: to True Murder in that you have live interviews and
Speaker 8: so you get some fascinating stuff when it's live and
Speaker 8: it's not edited, and it's not a couple of guys
Speaker 8: just sitting around talking about a crime. You're talking to
Speaker 8: the people very much like I do. The people that
Speaker 8: are the authorities, the authors, the people that were there,
Speaker 8: the people that are part of the story.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and not too many people tackle the criminals. I
Speaker 5: think we had that exclusively. We had a guy that's
Speaker 5: actually that punched the diamond. Height Sky introduced me to
Speaker 5: in Florida who was in the Russian Mob, and we
Speaker 5: got along famously over dinner and said would you come
Speaker 5: on my show? And he agreed. I think I'm the
Speaker 5: first person they have someone from the Russian Mob. You know,
Speaker 5: there were some things he wouldn't talk about it would
Speaker 5: get him killed. But the things he would talk about,
Speaker 5: like how he wound up in the Russian Mob and
Speaker 5: why he was in it and everything else. With a crew,
Speaker 5: you know, we never know what things are going to
Speaker 5: come your way. And well, ron Chepstick, who also does
Speaker 5: a true crime show, absolutely, he who was the audience
Speaker 5: just breaking of course the way as he well should
Speaker 5: about his show and why he should about yours. You
Speaker 5: guys don't really do a true crime show. You do
Speaker 5: a comedy show that happens to be about true crime. Well,
Speaker 5: he's partially correct for the first five minutes and maybe
Speaker 5: a little later, but we get into some serious stuff.
Speaker 8: You know, you originator. You're the originator though, of adding
Speaker 8: some levity to to murder basically to true crime. And
Speaker 8: and some of your guests are humorous, but Howard and
Speaker 8: yourself and Don just it's a great degree. It's a
Speaker 8: it's a one shows. It's got levity where you wouldn't expect.
Speaker 8: And now it seems like a lot of the podcasts
Speaker 8: that's the format. So you're in many ways the originator.
Speaker 5: Well, you got to figure that I've been doing this
Speaker 5: show for over ten years on the air. That's Internet years.
Speaker 5: It's like dog years. That's a long time to have
Speaker 5: a show that every Saturday two o'clock specific time, I'll
Speaker 5: alreadiolive dot com for over ten years and the reason
Speaker 5: wound up being a true crime true crime show. It
Speaker 5: wasn't my brilliant idea, Matt Allen said, who used to
Speaker 5: work with me at Kyyx Seattle said, Brow, why don't
Speaker 5: you do a show on al Alreadio wants you do
Speaker 5: an hour before me? It's got to figure out what
Speaker 5: you want to do well. One of the l alredio
Speaker 5: listeners said, well, you write through crime books. Why don't
Speaker 5: you do a true crime show? Why do you want
Speaker 5: to do it by myself? Because I like having someone
Speaker 5: to bouncings off of. And right in front of me
Speaker 5: was Don Woldman, family law attorney, but he had brilliant
Speaker 5: man with great experience, and I said, hey, you want
Speaker 5: to do a true crime So I said, I'd love
Speaker 5: to do a true crime show. And we had the
Speaker 5: best time doing it, we really did. And he had
Speaker 5: to take a hiatus because of some legal obligations, and
Speaker 5: Howard stepped into a fill in for him. And then
Speaker 5: after about a year or so, Don said, I feel
Speaker 5: bad if I come back, if I don't want to
Speaker 5: take Howard out of the chair, because he's you know,
Speaker 5: he's in there now. But Don would come back and
Speaker 5: fill in, or he'd come back and join us on occasion,
Speaker 5: and of course when he died, so suddenly we were
Speaker 5: all just completely shocked. A great guy and with a
Speaker 5: joy to work with. And I'll be putting a lot
Speaker 5: of the old Don Woldman shows up on the iTunes
Speaker 5: and everywhere so people can enjoy that I still I
Speaker 5: think one of the most emotionally shocking shows I ever
Speaker 5: participated in was the first one you did about these
Speaker 5: Shall We Dance Murders? That was so shocking. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's an incredible book. I'm not just you know, blowing
Speaker 5: smoke here. That is I think one of the most
Speaker 5: gripping true crime books I've ever read. And the guy
Speaker 5: is so twisted. Did it mess with your head? I
Speaker 5: could interview now, Did it mess with your head to
Speaker 5: deal with that guy?
Speaker 8: Well? Absolutely, And as you know too, why you know,
Speaker 8: coming from you, it's it's great praise because all I
Speaker 8: really did was inspired by authors like yourself. I was
Speaker 8: able to ask the questions. I read books like Broken Doll,
Speaker 8: and I've read books from you over the years, true
Speaker 8: crime classics, and from that you get an understanding of
Speaker 8: that psychopathic mind. So certainly I had read some of
Speaker 8: these things come into life talking to this guy that
Speaker 8: from these true crime books, these classics, I could understand
Speaker 8: the kind of mind that this guy, this person was,
Speaker 8: and he was influenced by the kinds of murderers and
Speaker 8: killers that you and others wanted to be the.
Speaker 5: One most horrible killer in the Canadian history.
Speaker 8: Is his goals. He's got some competition, but that was
Speaker 8: his goal. Yes, his goal was. He was very competitive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, he certainly was. I mean, it was just
Speaker 5: shocking to me the things he's like, I've got a
Speaker 5: great idea what I'll do to this corpse. I mean,
Speaker 5: that guy was the worst. Can't describe him. You did,
Speaker 5: fucking childlate of it. I was unnerved enough when I
Speaker 5: went uh and spoke to Ronda Glover UH prison for
Speaker 5: Fatal Beauty. And when I came out of there and
Speaker 5: I got back in the car in Texas, my daughter said,
Speaker 5: don't worry, Dad, she can't come out of there and
Speaker 5: come get you. She's going to be in there for
Speaker 5: another sixty years or something. I didn't realize it was
Speaker 5: so obvious that it affected me that when I came
Speaker 5: out of the prison, she could tell that I was bothered.
Speaker 5: But you're right, you know, when you know you're dealing
Speaker 5: with psychopaths, which is a step beyond sociopaths, You're dealing
Speaker 5: with people that cannot see beyond themselves. They are the
Speaker 5: center of the universe and reality is at their whim.
Speaker 5: That they can make up anything, say anything, and it's
Speaker 5: just like they're creating the universes. They go along and
Speaker 5: facts and information have little or no importance to them whatsoever.
Speaker 5: And they do not have the ability to feel the
Speaker 5: pain of others, and psychologically or emotionally, and it doesn't
Speaker 5: matter carb a Turkey carbon person the same difference. Well,
Speaker 5: you know what people think I'm hidden about this. There
Speaker 5: is a support website for sociopaths, and I can't recall those,
Speaker 5: called sociopaths dot org or something like that, but it's
Speaker 5: actually maintained by sociopaths as a public service for other sociopaths.
Speaker 5: And they didn't like a short story I wrote called
Speaker 5: Giving Shoulder, which was written for the standpoint of a
Speaker 5: psychopath actually, and they didn't like it. But that's okay.
Speaker 5: I can't please everybody, can't please every sociopath. But there
Speaker 5: was some interesting letters to the editor statements in there.
Speaker 5: They know always this what sociopath says. Okay, everything they
Speaker 5: say about it is true. We only think about ourselves.
Speaker 5: We're incapable of thinking about anybody else. And so I
Speaker 5: realized that if I do all these really sick things
Speaker 5: that other social paths and rip people off, that it's
Speaker 5: not that Gee, I don't want to cause other people problems.
Speaker 5: It's will cause me problems, and I'm the only person
Speaker 5: that's important to me, and being as I don't want
Speaker 5: to have problems like going to prison or being you know,
Speaker 5: treated poorly. I'm not going to do that stuff. Now
Speaker 5: they're not doing it that he's not behaving because he
Speaker 5: has a moral code that says I care about others
Speaker 5: and don't want to hurt him. It's I care about
Speaker 5: me and me alone, and if I do these things,
Speaker 5: I'll be unhappy. So they say that if you can
Speaker 5: get to a sociopath or a psychopath before the age
Speaker 5: of fourteen, you can teach him that, but once they
Speaker 5: get in the system, it's really hard, really good.
Speaker 8: I don't I don't know.
Speaker 5: I know that that.
Speaker 8: Peter Ronsky Sons of Kan just recently described in his
Speaker 8: book that the cycle path can intellectually understand the feeling
Speaker 8: that he's supposed to have, but yet not feel it
Speaker 8: physically or psychologically. But he understands it. So the danger
Speaker 8: is is that whether he's saying he was, you know,
Speaker 8: maybe abused when he was a child, there's always an excuse,
Speaker 8: there's always a blame, there's always that narcissistic focus that
Speaker 8: they're you know, they even want to be liked and
Speaker 8: loved by the police. So we never really know what
Speaker 8: the truth is with a psychopath, even when they are
Speaker 8: being candid and because they can to fool, want to play,
Speaker 8: think that they're smarter at every stage their life.
Speaker 5: The first set of the psychopaths, they'll become their ownan
Speaker 5: defense attorneys.
Speaker 8: Yeah, or they'll take the stand when they shouldn't.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah. Well that's like the situation we have
Speaker 5: down here in the United States right now on whether
Speaker 5: our current president should do.
Speaker 10: An interview with the investigating committee, and even his own
Speaker 10: attorney said, well, we don't want any perjury traps.
Speaker 5: Perjury is lying under oath. Sure, you know, it's like
Speaker 5: it acknowledging that the individual has a mic proclivity for
Speaker 5: making things up, and you can't do that when you're
Speaker 5: being interviewed by the FBI as a crime. And if
Speaker 5: you know, if you just can't, it's like, you know,
Speaker 5: it's your nature. If you can't resist it, you know,
Speaker 5: you're in big trouble.
Speaker 8: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, I know he would. He would be
Speaker 8: well advised, as most people are, to let their attorney
Speaker 8: handle things exactly.
Speaker 5: Because I mean, even if the person is innocent of
Speaker 5: any wrongdoing, if their natural tendency is just to make
Speaker 5: stuff up on the fly, just gonna hurt him, you'd
Speaker 5: have they've done you know, don't do that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that was the case of the Happy Face Killer.
Speaker 8: There was a woman first came forward and then said
Speaker 8: it was her and her husband, and the courts were
Speaker 8: so convinced because she was lucively right on on some
Speaker 8: things that she shouldn't have known, and she was confessed
Speaker 8: and did confess and was convicted of a murder that
Speaker 8: the Happy Face Killer killer jessperson committed. And then, bizarrely,
Speaker 8: his lawyer said, it's the only time I ever had
Speaker 8: to fight to prove that my client was guilty of
Speaker 8: a crime.
Speaker 5: Oh kid, well, well the you got together. Tell me
Speaker 5: more about a delicious recipe.
Speaker 8: No, no, I don't think so.
Speaker 5: Oh okay, I like that last one that was made
Speaker 5: me hungry. But yeah, there was a situation where I
Speaker 5: was attorney here in the US knew that his client
Speaker 5: intentionally set an innocent person to prison for a crime
Speaker 5: that he did, and he thought it was hysterically funny,
Speaker 5: and he would not allow his attorney to let anybody
Speaker 5: know that an innocent person had been in prison all
Speaker 5: these years until he died, if he died.
Speaker 8: First, incredible. Well, like criminals, there are some people without
Speaker 8: any moral or ethical standards or.
Speaker 5: See, that's always the problem is I assume people have
Speaker 5: at least some standards similar to mine, not the miners
Speaker 5: of that exalted alias through. You know, it seemed fairly
Speaker 5: rational to me, you know, whether the line that from
Speaker 5: the big chill. You know, justifications are, you know, are
Speaker 5: the most important thing, more important. Justifications are more more
Speaker 5: than sex. After all, can you go a week without
Speaker 5: a justification?
Speaker 8: Well, you talk about the courts. If you talk about
Speaker 8: the courts though, and you talk about a prosecutor, and
Speaker 8: you right about this, and you are a journalist that's
Speaker 8: fair and balanced, and you say, sometimes a prosecutor just
Speaker 8: wants to win. So why wouldn't everyone, Why would everyone,
Speaker 8: you know go buy those standards?
Speaker 5: Well, because that's that's not what they take an oath
Speaker 5: to do. Sure, Well, there they get elected, they run
Speaker 5: on how many convictions they got. That's really sick. I
Speaker 5: don't like that idea. You know, how many times did
Speaker 5: I win? You know, right or not?
Speaker 8: Yeah? Absolutely, Well, it's tied in with political unlike Canada,
Speaker 8: it's tied in so heavily with politics that it's not
Speaker 8: it's political rather than judicial. And so you do you
Speaker 8: have problems inherent right with that system.
Speaker 5: Have a board system in the United States but don't
Speaker 5: have a justice system.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well don't look now. Canada has different problems, but serious,
Speaker 8: serious problems. Anyway, brol I want to thank you very
Speaker 8: much for coming on and talking about about conspiracy and
Speaker 8: absolutely I just want to mention again this is originally
Speaker 8: from Masters of True Crime Chilling Stories of Murdering the Macabre,
Speaker 8: edited by Rberry Flowers, and your story is in that
Speaker 8: and but now it's available as a standalone audio book
Speaker 8: and available everywhere. I guess tell us a little bit
Speaker 8: about where we might get this.
Speaker 5: It was done by listen up audiobooks dot com. You
Speaker 5: get a direct from them, or if you go to
Speaker 5: audible and you don't have a membership yet, did you
Speaker 5: sign up? You could get that one for free. So
Speaker 5: it's a heck of a deal. Also, Mom said, Kill
Speaker 5: is also now available as an audio book for the
Speaker 5: first time, and it just came out as an audio
Speaker 5: book and you could get that free too, I or instead,
Speaker 5: if you want, if you don't have an account at audible,
Speaker 5: you signed up, you can get a free audio book
Speaker 5: and we're welcome to pick one of mineely.
Speaker 8: I like that.
Speaker 5: I enjoyed listening to these. I enjoyed listening to the
Speaker 5: audio book of the Alaska mailbomb conspiracy. We went on
Speaker 5: a long drive and I listened to it in the
Speaker 5: car and I thought the guy did a great job
Speaker 5: narrating it, so I was very.
Speaker 8: Absolutely oh, thank you very much, Burl. And make sure
Speaker 8: for people to remind them of True Crime Uncensored. Every
Speaker 8: Saturday at four o'clock.
Speaker 5: Is it No, it's a two o'clock Pacific time, five
Speaker 5: o'clock East Coast time at ten o'clock the UK. And
Speaker 5: if you're where would you be uh oh, in Pakistan,
Speaker 5: it's exactly twelve hours later. We do have listeners in
Speaker 5: Pakistan any afternoon. It's on two in the morning, the
Speaker 5: day after the next day or something. I don't know
Speaker 5: that it gets very confusing when you cross the international datelines.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, thank you once again, Burl. You have a great
Speaker 8: evening and we'll talk to you again soon to this.
Speaker 8: Thanks a lot, Dan, thank you good night,