Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime.
Speaker 3: Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: We're back for part two of our episode, in which
we discussed the recent New York Times piece from reporter
Mike Baker in interview with Melanie Coburger AKA. She is
the sister of Brian Coburger, who decided to go on
the record and talk about her brother in the wake
of his guilty plea in the Idaho for killings.
Speaker 2: One thing she mentions in the article which I want
to give her some credit for, which is their decision
to remain quiet during the last couple of years, since
twenty twenty two when his name was first put forward
as a potential suspect. I think they were wise to
remain quiet and not say anything. I'm sure the amount
of media attention and coverage, and I remember even reading
about and seeing how news crews were parked in front
of the house and so on, and yet they didn't
have very much to say. I actually think that was
wise and even kind on their part, because there probably
wasn't much they could say that was going to help
the situation. The Coburger family deserved credit for that.
Speaker 3: No, I agree. If you have not already listened to
part one of this episode, we do recommend that because
otherwise you're coming in the middle of the story, So
please tune into part one and continue with us here
as we move on to part two. When we left off,
miss Coburger was discussing the evening that the police burst
into their house to arrest her brother in the early
hours of December thirtieth, twenty twenty two, while mister Coberer
and his parents were alone in the house. Police officers
burst in with guns drawn, shattering glass and rushing to
place him in handcuffs. In court. Law enforcement officials said
that mister Coberger's DNA was found on knife sheath that
had been left next to two of the victims. Amazon
records showed he had purchased the same style of knife,
And then there was the white Alantra. Investigators determined that
the car seen near the murder house matched the model
he drove.
Speaker 2: It's worth mentioning here because the New York Times doesn't
mention it that this is also a time time when
our friends at Othram were key to helping solve yet
another murder case. Although Mike Baker doesn't mention it here.
The DNA found on the night she was then identified
through work done by our friends at Othram in the Woodlands, Texas.
So it isn't just about the white Alantra, It's about
the DNA as well.
Speaker 3: Ms Coburger said her mother has been praying daily for
the families of the victims. Ms Coburger herself has put
the names of the victims Mevsen, Mogen, Kaylee Genkalves, Zana
Cernadl and Ethan Shapin and their birthdays into her digital
calendar so that she will get reminders about them during holiday.
She said her families felt grief that mister Coberger could
not be with them, but then she would think of
the victims' families and the pain they must be feeling.
The idea is making me so emotional, I can barely
speak to you about it, she said in tears. Stephen Covez,
the father of miss can Cavas, said he had sympathy
for mister Coberger's sisters and the scrutiny they had endured
in recent years, but he said he still had lingering
questions about what mister Coberger's parents might have known or suspected.
Is this a question that ever comes to you as
the family member of a victim if it turns out
that Wilmer is the person who murdered Kathy? Is that
a question that you're going to find yourself asking.
Speaker 2: I'm sure it is, and we still don't know. I guess,
at the risk of sounding like my late mother, will
cross that bridge when we come to it, because I
don't know in Kathy and Becky's murder, if Wilmer is responsible,
one of Wilmer's accomplices is responsible or there are other
perfectly viable suspects, some of whom have been looked at
hard in this investigation. There's no proof yet that they
are responsible for any of the Colonial Parkway murders. It's
still a nebulous concept from my perspective. When I look
at Steve Elvis, some people say gun Salvis with more
of an s sound. I understand why he has lingering
questions about Coberger's parents, and far be it from me
to give him advice. As the father of a murder victim,
I understand why those questions remain. These are the kind
of things that you can make yourself crazy. I don't
know that anybody could have ever anticipated the horror that
Brian Coberger is responsible for, including his parents, and certainly
there doesn't seem to be any history of violence in
his life that would have been a precursor to this
horrible quadruple homicide. I'm very sympathetic to mister Goncalvius and
the thoughts that remain with him. I suppose we'll have
to see when the Colonial Parkway murders are fully solved,
and I still think we can get there. I may
have a different reaction once we know who our killer
or killers might be.
Speaker 3: The article continues. As the criminal case proceeded, the Coburger
family was troubled by the intense discussion around it. Mister
Coberger's and motionless mannerisms, which the family attributed to his autism,
became something people treated as evidence of him being a monster.
And then it's noted in parentheses, research has not established
any conclusive causal links between autism and violent crime. There
were reports that he had interacted with some of the
victims on social media or had gone to a restaurant
where two of them had worked, but investigators later dismissed
those claims.
Speaker 2: I struggle with this one because I still think there
has to be some sort of intersection between Coburger and
these victims. Otherwise, how the would he know to kill
these four people. He has to have seen at least
one of them and perhaps more somewhere on campus at
the University of Idaho where they were going to school,
or in public somewhere, because I have no idea unless
he's picking their house out at random, which I think
is absurd. Investigators later dismissing those claims. I have a
real hard time with this. He has to have known
about at least some of these four young people from somewhere.
I strongly disagree with the idea that they're dismissing those
claims of a connection via social media or this very
popular vegetarian restaurant where I think two of the young
people work. I just want to point out, I think
that's absurd on its face. There has to be some connection.
Like I've talked about with you before. If two guys
get in a fight in a bar, that's why. What happened.
If somebody is out driving and gets involved in some
sort of road rage incident and some idiot pulls out
a gun and shoots another motorist, at least there's a why.
I'm not saying it makes sense or that it's reasonable
or anything like that. But he has to know these
people from somewhere. That's just I have to push back
on that one aspect of the New York Times piece.
Speaker 3: All of the attention, Ms. Koberger said made it hard
to imagine that her brother could ever get a fair trial,
and she could see that the wild speculations surrounding the
case seemed hurtful to the families and friends. Of the
students who died. Once an avid true crime fan herself,
she now looks back on that with regret. It's human
nature to be curious about darker things, she said, that's
how we keep ourselves safe. But I think we should
try and come together for a true crime culture that
is way more protective and empathetic to the families of
the victims. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Interesting, she sounds like Julie Murray here and other friends
of ours who've been promoting the idea of a more
empathetic approach to true crime.
Speaker 3: And I mean as a culture who is engaged almost
to an almost psychotic degree with social media and platforms,
with lots of ways to be connected to everybody all
the time. I think that we have reached a point
where we are at such megasaturation with news and content
and everything else that it almost becomes we almost become
desensitized to.
Speaker 2: It, exactly.
Speaker 3: I think that it's we've reached total saturation with what's
my next true crime thing. It becomes less about the
people and more about what's the story I'm going to
get fixated on next. You forget sometimes if you're not
living inside it, like the two of us are, that
there are humans behind these cases. They're not generated like
an episode of Criminal Minds for amusement and entertainment. I
think people tend to forget that there are real lives
behind every horrible thing that they hear about on a
Netflix documentary or a podcast. I'm glad that people are
infuriated when it comes to the mass murder of college students.
Everybody should be. That does not extend to being angry
enough about the assender to stock his family to docks
his friends. We saw a lot of I guess mania
is almost the best word around the Idaho case, where
you have people outing professors and friends of friends as
potential suspects with nothing more than oh I saw them
on webcam footage at the same time that Kaylee and
Maddie were at a bar. He must be involved. There's
almost a mania to solve it, to get the answer,
to be the person to crack it, and then to
be the person to report upon it. That has to stop.
It really, truly does have to stop, because there's no
prize here for being or forgetting the stoop or for
anything else. It's real people who get added and docksed
and everything else. When people start going nuts, for this
sort of thing. Everybody then suffers, the victims, the families,
the friends, everybody.
Speaker 2: There was some insane stuff in the Idaho four case. Yeah,
I remember when people were reviewing video footage of people
grabbing something to eat at a food truck. Yep, they
were actually identify individuals whose only crime was being in
line in a food truck at the same time that
some of the victims were also there. And look, it's
a big thing. You're out there having a good time.
It was a big party weekend. I think it was
a big football weekend, was my recollection. A fair amount
of drinking and partying going on. And what are the
things you do late at night after you've been out
drinking as you go out and get something to eat.
But these people in these video clips were guilty of
nothing except standing in line near some of the victims.
But to identify these people and say I've figured out
who Joe or Jane is that was in line, What
the heck does that have to do with proving that
someone is involved in a brutal murder of four young people.
It's one thing when the FBI, the Idaho State Police,
and various law enforcement agencies are working towards building a
case that involved tons and tons of video footage and
a search for the white Hyundai Elantra. Ultimately, DNA found
on a knife sheath at the scene, and those things
together plus lots of other evidence, led to them identifying
a suspect. And I am highly confident that if the
Coburger case had gone to trial, he would have been
found guilty of the murder of these four young people.
That's one thing that's responsible law enforcement work towards building
a case to identify an offender. It's a whole other
thing to start just throwing out random ideas and besmirching
people's reputations. Like you said, people that were associated with
Coburger through his school or other work. That doesn't mean
they know something about who's responsible for the Idaho for
murders or anything like that. Yet we all kinds of insane,
irresponsible speculation, and that's probably being polite.
Speaker 3: I think it's also a good time to talk about
something that we've definitely addressed before but always bears repeating.
It's important to be respectful of the victims. It's important
to be respectful of families. It is important to be
respectful of survivors, but that has to be extended to
the families of offenders as well. I have hated the
times that I have been at crime Con, and I
remember very clearly. It wasn't this past year at Denver.
It was at Nashville. Seeing someone walking around with a
BTK Shan Club T shirt on about to walk past
Kerrie Rosston. How the f do you think Carrie Rosson
feels seeing that someone is wearing a T shirt that
says they're a member of the BTK Sayan Club. That's disgusting.
That is disgusting. That's abhorrent. And people just wear this
stuff because it doesn't involve them, or it seems funny
or it seems lighthearted. It wouldn't be funny or lighthearted
to you if that was your father, the same way
that people with the Ted Bundy tattoos. Yeah, you can
have your Ted Bundy tattoo, but please don't walk in
front of Kathy Kleiner wearing it. He bashed her face
in she had to stand up to him.
Speaker 2: In court, killed her friends.
Speaker 3: He killed her friends. It's this whole idea of fetishizing criminals.
Crime Con has done a much better job about tamping
down on that sort of T shirt and other pair
of fernalia. They've done much better on that in the
last couple of years, but of course, because there's so
many people there, it's always going to slip in. I
didn't catch anything egregious this past year in Denver. I
did see a lot more slasher movie Yeah, which slash
slasher movie crossover?
Speaker 2: Crazy about that either, And I know you're not.
Speaker 3: And that's another one of those things that I have
a hard time with because I loved the Scream franchise
and I love the Halloween franchise, and so yes, do
I have Michael Meyer's sweatshirts? Absolutely? Am I going to
wear them in front of you? Now? It really is.
It's a very hard thing as somebody who loves true
crime and slasher movies to be able to figure out
how can I like those things but still be respectful
to the people who have suffered.
Speaker 2: From them understood. It's something I really struggle with. People
have likened the Colonial Parkway murders to a slasher film,
And there was some guy a couple of years ago
that made a slasher film based on the Colonial Parkway murders,
some screamingly low budget thing. Yeah, and then he reached
out to me at some point, and don't expect me
to be our bring you any kind of endorsement or
our podcast platform to talk about your cheap ass horror
film that's based on the Colonial Parkway murders. And at
the same time books that are based on the Colonial
Parkway murders, including best selling true crime books, doesn't sit
well with me. It really doesn't. Maybe I'm just one person.
Speaker 3: You've got as much a right to that opinion as
anybody does. The article continues. The family has tried to
support mister Coberger since his arrest. They've held regular calls
with him, avoiding discussions about the details of the case.
Ms Coburger said she has kept him posted about life
back at home, and he sometimes talks about his latest
interests in psychology, the Meyers Briggs personality assessment and the
bicameral mind theory, in which the two sides of ancient
human brains operated independently. Interesting. For his birthday, mister Coberger
asked his family to make a cake that he thought
his sister Amanda would like. He asked Mel to blow
out the candle through it all. They've tried to reconcile
the son and brother they loved and still do with,
the man depicted by prosecutors and the police, the man
who pleaded guilty to killing four young people with no
apparent motive. For me, when I was writing my notes
for these sessions today, I said, the agony of still
loving someone but knowing they've done horrible things has got
to be so traumatic, because how do you reconcile that dichotomy.
I'm sure that people ask themselves every day, is it
possible to love someone even if they've done something reprehensible.
Speaker 2: I remember reading this when you were putting together the
notes for this discussion today, and first of all, I
thought your notes were extraordinarily good. As always, I really
tried to think about this. How would I feel if
this was one of my siblings? What if I did
something to terrible? How would my brothers and sisters? How
would they have taken this? This is a real struggle.
I know lots of people that have been convicted of
crimes and their families have disowned them. Yeah, but at
the same time I understand that if you've known someone
and loved someone your entire lives. You grew up together,
your brother, your sister, your child. It's difficult to wrap
your brain around the horrible thing that they did, the
person that you knew and loved and shared a bedroom
with for all those years. You can't exactly wipe that
all away. Because they've done something terrible doesn't mean you
support what they did or even forgive it. But at
the same time, they're still your brother, your sister, your child.
I can understand the struggle that the Coburger family would
go through both being awesome extracized. I was shocked when
this article mentioned that mel lost the opportunity to work
in a new role because of all of the media
attention here, or she is now being punished professionally, losing
opportunities because of something her brother did. And at the
same time, there's this very poignant moment when they're making
a birthday cake for a brother who can't even be
there to enjoy it.
Speaker 3: And that question, is it possible to love someone even
if they've done something reprehensible. I think it's a core
of why it is sometimes very hard for abusive partners
abuse victims to leave their abusive partner. Because I hate
what you do, but I still love you is definitely
it's an emotion that you can hold inside of you.
I think we've all had moments with parents or siblings
or something where you said, I don't I love you,
but I don't like you very much. I have I
have experience in that arena with members of my family.
I can love you with my whole heart, but boy,
I don't like you a whole hell of a lot.
I think that's possible to do, but it's still hard.
Speaker 2: This is a real struggle I think for all of
us to wrap our brains around and then I can't
imagine some of what the Coburger family has been through. Yeah,
since their brother pled to killing four people.
Speaker 3: The article continues. When he entered the guilty plea in July,
his parents attended, with his mother's sobbing in the front row.
Weeks later, when he was sentenced, Ms Coburger had hoped
to attend, but she stayed home to care for her father,
who had developed heart problems. They watched the hearing together
on television. Some of the victims' family members, given a
chance to address the court, unloaded their anger at mister Coburger,
who sat largely in blank face silence. You're definitely a
demon from hell. One family member said, through a lawyer,
the truth that is year as dumb as they come. Stupid, clumsy, slow, sloppy, weak, dirty,
said another. The judge said that he could not discern
any redeeming quality in mister Coburger because his grotesque acts
of evil have buried and hidden anything that might have
been good or intrinsically human about him. Through it all,
mister Coberger sat with his hands in his lap, nothing
in front of him but a pen and a piece
of paper that appeared to have a small drawing on it.
On the Internet, some of the amateur slews watching the
proceedings zoomed in to scrutinize the sketch, speculating that it
appeared to be a dark heart. Ran Coburger keeps creepy
drawing close. During sentencing for quadruple killing, a tabloid headline
declared in truth, Miss Coburger said it was a heart
surrounded by vibrant colors that she herself had drawn for
her brother, even if she could not be there in person,
She said she wanted him to know that he was loved.
Speaker 2: Wow, this is, like I said, so so difficult for
them too. Here she is even in this darkest moment
of his trial. She's trying to let him know that
he is still loved.
Speaker 3: Maybe it is as simple as I love you, but
I don't like you very much. I don't like what
you did. I don't approve of what you did, but
you're my brother and I love you. Oh God, that's
got to be so difficult, and it's something like you said,
that they're going to have to live with every day
from now forward.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover Murder. Some of the investigators that we've known and
many that we've read about as well, have talked about
interviewing serial killers and talking to Cereal and Spreek killers
of this type, really working hard to develop a rapport
with those people. But it isn't just for information or
to seek answers in additional unsolved cases or what have you.
I think in many of those examples, those investigators end
up building a real relationship with these people even though
they know they've done absolutely horrible things. Many of these examples,
we're talking about multiple murderers and senseless crimes not dissimilar
to the Idaho four case. None of this makes sense.
This isn't an argument that escalates ends up in tragedy
or anything like that. This makes no sense. I don't
know what Brian Coberger could even say that would make
this make sense. Yeah, it might be worth studying him
from the perspective of law enforcement and psychologists to help
prevent horrible crimes like this from happening again. But I
don't think that he or any of these killers is
ever going to be able to provide us with an
answer that satisfies there's a lot of why in our case,
the other families in the Colonial Parkway murders, we're still
wondering why we recognize that in a case that's thirty
six to thirty nine years old. There's a good chance
that if we identify the killer or killers in the
Colonial Parkway murders, that they may never see a trial.
But we want to know why what happened now. Ultimately,
I think we will know why. I'm not saying that
answer is ever going to make sense to us, no,
because it may just end up being a senseless act.
This feels that way to me in the Idaho four
case as well.
Speaker 3: When you and I were discussing that we were going
to talk about this week. One of the things that
we kept coming back to was this idea that people
have that how could the Coburgers not have seen this coming?
How could they not have known? One of the things
the through lines that you and I had in our
discussion is that it is very possible not to see
it coming, and whether that is in big or small ways.
In the course of our conversation, we both revealed to
each other that we'd both had experiences of people who
were committing financial fraud against us, people that we never
would have guessed and people who we would never in
a million years have seen it coming. It is very
possible to be a smart, knowledgeable, savvy person and still
not be able to see it coming. Whether it is
someone who's stealing your information or taking money out of
your bank account or whatever, it is very possible not
to see it coming. Did you want to share a
little bit about the experience that you had with someone
in those lines? Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sure. Years ago, I had moved in with a woman
I was dating, and it was a unique situation because
I was in my late twenties, she was about the
same age. She had three kids from a previous marriage.
I don't know what the heck I was thinking, but
I ended up moving in with this woman. We rented
a house in a beautiful town called Harvard, Massachusetts, out
in the country, and to this day I can't figure
out what the heck I was thinking. So I ended
up with this sort of instant family. She had three
kids who were in elementary school, and they ended up
transferring from the Lowell, Massachusetts school system where they were
currently studying, into Harvard's very nice, much smaller school system.
This is a very affluent, rural, beautiful town. But over
the course of that year, I ended up in this
bizarre situation where this woman was stealing money from me,
and I was too stupid to realize that I had
fallen for all of these bizarre lies. I guess that's
what good sex will do. The rest of your brain
is just clearly not working. At the end of the year,
as we got towards the end of our lease, I
remember our landlords were getting increasingly worried because word had
gotten back to them that my girlfriend had written all
of these bad checks all over Massachusetts where we were living. Fortunately,
she wasn't paying the rent. I was paying the rent,
and she kept promising to make good on money that
she owed me, and it just never happened. And I
remember I was pressing because she was saying she had
money in this bank account and she couldn't get a
hold of anybody from this bankrupt in New Hampshire, and
once that was all settled, she'd get the money and
she'd make good on all these steps to me. In
the meantime, I'm covering all the household expenses for our
house and really being stretched financially because I wasn't really
in a position to be paying for a household of
five people, herself, me and her to be kids. It
finally dawned on me. I kept pressing her about this
bank in New Hampshire, and of course it was all
a lie. You could see that one coming, although somehow
I couldn't. I remember she gave me this phone number
when I really pressed hard about you need to sort
out the situation with this bank. I want the phone
number of this bank, and she gave me a phone number,
and then I finally reversed, engineered the phone number and
realized this isn't the bank's phone number, where no one's
ever answering the phone. This is her parents' house in
New Hampshire, where no one is living at that point.
Remember this is before cell phones and before the internet.
It all just fell into place and I realized this
whole thing is a lie. Now she didn't kill anybody,
and I survived. At the end of this debacle, she's
pregnant by another man, oh geez. And I find out
that this money that she's supposed to be coming into
is a lie, and that everything about this relationship seems
to be a lie. She just saw a live one
meeting me with a good job, and she figured she'd
take advantage of the situation. I don't know if she
thought she was going to be able to pull this
whole thing off somehow, but I remember at the very end,
just every single thing she told me ended up being
a lie. I ended up with my parents' garage being
filled with her furniture because she had nowhere to go
out of This furniture ended up filling my parents' garage
at their home, and I remember reaching out to her
and saying, I'll give you until such in such a
date two weeks later or something, and then I said,
if you don't come and get your stuff. I'm going
to drop it all off at the place where she
was staying, and I'm going to leave it on the
curb because I am done. Man, think back. It was
a long time ago now, but I think back, How
could I be this stupid? How could I be this naive?
How could I have let her steal thousands and thousands
of dollars from me, none of which she ever paid. Yeah,
our relationship fell apart. She ended up having this baby
with this other idiot. Good luck to him, by the way.
And it was one of those things where years later
I actually wondered, in one of my darker moments, could
that have been my child? Now later, when I did
see DNA testing, it didn't appear to be the case.
But you just end up thinking to yourself, how could
I be that stupid while she was doing all of
this stuff, writing bad checks, stealing money from me. But
you realize that you can't know what's going on inside
that other person's head, her decision to commit multiple acts
of fraud. I'm just lucky I got out of the
situation reasonably intact.
Speaker 3: Well. One of the other things that I think is
important to discuss that we haven't really talked about here before,
is once you've been the victim of a crime, or
you've been taken in like you were, because you kept saying,
how can I be so stupid? And you're in your twenties?
Everybody stupid when they're in their twenties.
Speaker 2: You can't move past the great sex covers a multitude
of sins.
Speaker 3: Sure, that's true, absolutely, but it's one of the things
that I think comes back over and over, and this
goes for anybody inside the true crime space. I think,
is this feeling of shame. How can I be so stupid?
Why didn't I see it sooner? How could I have
fallen for that? That covers such a wide variety of
experiences inside the space. Why didn't I say something? Why
didn't I do something? And the answer is exactly what
you said. You can't really know what's actually going on,
and even when you're in the middle of a situation,
sometimes you can't know it. We're just going to do
true confessions Kristin style this episode. Yeah, I had already
said last episode that I did not talk much about
what had happened with Lynn, but I did then. And
the other thing that I have not really had a
chance to go into here, but I think I will
a bit going forward with our audience's patients and forbearance
is that I am an abuse and assault survivor. One
of the great challenges that I have faced in the
last couple of years going to trauma therapy for what
happened to me was asking myself that question, how could
I not have seen this? How could I not have
been aware of this? Why did I stay? And how
can someone who is as smart as I am? Because
I feel like my intelligence is my hottest commodity. How
can someone as smart as I am be so damn dumb?
And that is a question that I come back to
over and over again.
Speaker 2: But even you being yourself up, yes in a way
that this has happened to millions of people.
Speaker 3: Christ, Yes it does. And that is I think one
of the biggest things that I want to make sure
we start talking about on the podcast more for people
who have survived. When you survive something like this, there
is no shame to be had on your part. The
shame is in the people who have perpetrated what was
done to you exactly. But boy, did it take me
multiple years of going to trauma therapy for that one
to sink in, and there are many times when it
still hasn't. There are times when I feel like I
let myself down when I needed myself the most, and
I'm ashamed and embarrassed for that. But I think there
is not a single person inside the true crime space
that hasn't felt something along those lines, whether it's financial
fraud like what you experienced, not being able to leave
an abusive partner like I experienced, or anything in betwhether
it's a romance scam or anything else. Shame is really
at the heart of those sort of negative, ugly feelings
that come along with surviving something like this, and it's important,
I think, to be able to talk about it and say,
you know what, someone who commits these sort of crimes
against others, they are wired very differently from the rest
of us, and they don't feel those same senses and
those same emotions as the rest of us do. I
do not think my abuser had any shame whatsoever for
what he did to me.
Speaker 2: No, probably not.
Speaker 3: Even though I'm spending a lot of time thinking about
him and the relationship that we had, I can guarantee
you he's not given a thought to me. I'm fine
with that, by the way, Yes.
Speaker 2: But you're working through that through therapy has great benefit
for you as a person. He doesn't matter anymore. No,
if he ever did, your mental health and healthy outlook
on life with all of his challenges is incredibly important.
This is about you, It was not about him. Yeah,
And this is you living your life in the most positive,
healthy life affirming way that you can and learning these lessons.
I hope I have done the same. I think it's
real important that this be about you and your ongoing
positive outlook and good healthy relationships in all facets, whether
it's a romantic partnership, or work, or school or all
these things you want to try to have healthy relationships.
And that effort that you're making and have made over
the last several years, I think has been incredibly beneficial
for you in terms of you returning to a place
where you know love and respect yourself and expect other
people to love and respect you in a way that
you deserve. Yeah, but that takes a while. That isn't
a matter of a five minute pep talk from me
or anybody else, or even even that first hour of
trauma therapy. It takes a while to get there, you're
trying to make changes and break patterns.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly need to be.
Speaker 2: Broken and reaffirmed in positive ways. And I see a
lot of strides on your part, and you're to be
congratulated for that. You think you've worked hard. I think
you've gotten to a better place.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If there's anything that I want our listeners to
take from us as we move forward into this here,
it's that when we talk about all facets of true crime,
we want to talk about it in all of its
all of it its many faces, whether that is talking
to the authors who write about it, the people who
survived it, the people who study it, the people who
prosecute it. But we also want to make sure that
we're making more of an effort to address how you
work to overcome it, how to survive it, and how
to thrive in spite of it, because it is possible.
I want to take a second just to shout out
to of the women who have been most instrumental in
helping me believe that I can survive and thrive in
spite of victimization on my part, and that is Jane
Carson and Sandler Total Badass and Kathy Kleiner Rubin, who
have both been nothing but endlessly supportive of me as
I've gone through this journey in the last couple of years.
For every woman out there who is going through something
like this, for every person who is trying to cope
and come back from dealing with a crime perpetrated against them,
a bad relationship, whatever else, there is hope out there.
And one of the things we would like to focus
on this year is acknowledging that you can survive, you
can thrive, you can move forward, and you can do good.
The abuse that was done to you, or the crime
that was committed against you is not what defines you.
And that was the best thing that I took from
Crime Con Denver this year was the group that made
sure everyone who had gone through abuse understood you are
not what happened to you. You are bigger than that.
So our hope for this year is that we spend
a little more time focusing on that. Any final words
on this article with regard to the Coburger family or
about anything else that we've talked about, Bill, because this
was a lot and it delved into some really deep issues.
Speaker 2: I think the article was a great jumping off point
for us for this discussion over these two episodes. And
it's not my place to tell the Coburgers what to do,
but I have a feeling that this is a family
that could probably do with some counseling. Mel's struggle mel
Coberger's struggles here are very evident. They're right here on
the page. You can see the pain and the struggle
that she is going through. I hope that she's able
to work this through and that the whole family can
move past this. This is going to be very difficult.
If Brian Coberger lives a long life, he will be
her brother for decades. With their very distinctive last name
and the infamy, if you will, that's attached to this case.
I think this is going to be a struggle. So
I would urge her or any of us to take
steps to try to manage these challenges and see their
way through.
Speaker 3: Agreed, that is going to do it for this episode
of Mind over Murder. If you like the work that
we're doing here, please leave us five star ratings and
reviews wherever you review your podcasts, and please make sure
that you do check out our live events. We have
a couple that are coming up later in the year.
Crime Con Las Vegas is going to be one of those,
and we are also speaking again here locally at Chesapeake
Library is Murder, Mystery and Mayhem, and we'll probably have
some other live events up our sleeves too. To start
marking your calendars for April and May. If you want
to have a chance to see Bill or I live
and in person, it's going to do it for this
episode of mind Ever Murder. Ky so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
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Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.