Speaker 1: Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is
not intended for all audiences.
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: Shouldn't happen.
Speaker 3: It shouldn't happen, And anyway, I just wanted to be
known that I didn't kill John.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Season thirteen, episode three hundred and forty two
of Sword and Scale show the reveals that the worst
monsters are real. In the early hours of May eighteenth,
twenty seventeen, in Parma Heights, Ohio, a working class suburb
twenty miles south of Cleveland, which sounds like a lovely place,
I might add, like the rest of the state. Burrow
Road cuts through the town in a long stretch of
strip plazas and small storefronts, hair salons, nail studios, pizza shops.
You know, the kind of useless strip ball that inhabits
pretty much every city in America. Well, those shops are
usually owned by locals in These businesses open early, close late,
and no they're regulars by name. The strip is dark
and small shops are locked up for the night. The
early morning is called except for one thing. A burglar
is ready to do his thing. He grabs a landscaping
stone hauls it up and hurls it at the front
door of Classic Hair Studio. The glass explodes, the stone
breaking apart into chunks across the floor. He doesn't hesitate.
He ducks inside, head straight for the counter, and he
yanks the entire cash register, loose, the drawer, jerks free,
cords snapping, and he's out in seconds. Inside the cash register,
he finds almost three hundred dollars in cash, and the
machine itself is probably worth a couple hundred more.
Speaker 5: We're here, Hi, it's in Carmania. I'm not going to
say it's an emergency, but I was driving to work
and I noticed that the door on a beauty shop
is totally smashed on Pearl Road. The address is sixty
four twelve. It's called Classic Studio and their front doors
is totally smashed. I mean anybody can go inside.
Speaker 6: At this point.
Speaker 5: Okay, I noticed yet, and I Turnerrund went back, thinking
did I really see that?
Speaker 7: And sure enough I did so.
Speaker 1: Okay, with God, I'd recorded a.
Speaker 4: Few doors down. He does it again, another front door smashed,
this time at the Nail Studio. Instead of taking the
whole register, he opens the drawer. This one has fifty
dollars inside, but it doesn't matter. Any amount of money
is worth it. He's desperate. The glass crunches under his
boots as he walks away, leaving two shops in ruins
behind him.
Speaker 7: And I'm the store manager here. Just count drug mark
right next to us. There is a it's sixty four
eighty eight your road. There's the Spine Nail place right
next to the drug mark here that I'm I'm in
charge of. There's the glasses broken out on the front
door here at the Nail and spa place.
Speaker 6: All right, I believe we just clear it there.
Speaker 7: Oh oh, okay, I'm sorry. I just I didn't know
if anyone was out or anything.
Speaker 8: I believe the address is.
Speaker 7: It's just sixty four eighty eight on the door here.
Speaker 9: Okay, then that's a different one.
Speaker 7: It's called Spy and Nails.
Speaker 4: By sunrise, both storefronts are cordoned off with yellow tape.
Patrol officers sweep glass into piles while the owners pull
up the surveillance video. A white male short with a
bald spot and tattoos on his arms. The time stamp
on the camera is wrong, but they already know the
crimes happened overnight. The owners are terrified, and one vows
to shut down the business. She wonders how this could
happen in such a family friendly town. Parma Heights has
one of the lowest crime rates in the nation, at
least that's what the statistics say. Whoever the perpetrator is,
he probably should have worn a mask. His face is
front and center on the surveillance camera. Not only that,
the outside cameras catch him speeding off in a white jeep.
It doesn't take long to bring in Thomas enough for questioning.
Speaker 10: Okay, all right, do you have any day parmaitches here
to speak with you? No, well, I had a couple
of breakings in my city at his spawn ales and
then another Classic care studios.
Speaker 11: You know anything about them? No, nothing at all?
Speaker 10: All right, why I get surveillan's video of the vehicle
and the person breaking into their business. Okay, so let
me pull this stuff up here. Recognize that person looks
like it could be all right.
Speaker 11: So let's do this.
Speaker 10: Recognize them Pa twos Yeah, huh yeah, do you remember
doing this or No?
Speaker 4: Tom seemed like your average guy next door. He just
didn't have that typical criminal look about him. If there
even is such a thing. You look more like a
dad sitting on the bleaks of his son's football game.
And Thomas did have a son, a good kid who
unfortunately had to be raised by Tom's sister. During the
last fifteen years he was in prison for aggravated robbery.
So looks can be deceiving, that's what they say.
Speaker 10: Anyway, you're running, you take a cash register from the
one place and some cash from the second place, okay,
and then you're in You're in a white jeep that
looks like it blowing to you your son, but registered
to your sister.
Speaker 11: Maybe okay, okay, But a more more recent photo of
be would be this. What the hell happened to it?
Speaker 12: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Smash the window?
Speaker 11: Did you do that?
Speaker 2: Ever? Yeah?
Speaker 11: Okay? What happened?
Speaker 1: I mean, just went off road? Did a true branch?
Speaker 11: Did you mean to go off road? Or was it
kind of yeah, okay, trying to hurt yourself or what?
Speaker 3: No, just just went off was off road on the
spot where we used to go off roading.
Speaker 11: So you're just gonna go out there and be like
maha or what? I don't know. I don't know, man.
I appreciate you being honest.
Speaker 4: Tom tried to be a good dad. Well maybe not,
but he really did love his son and old habits
die hard that included going on benders, robbing businesses, and
off roading. This time, it just happened to be that
he had no vehicle, so he took his son's jeep
and damaged it.
Speaker 11: How messed up were you during this time?
Speaker 1: I don't know, sir?
Speaker 11: Okay, all right, but well there's you know what.
Speaker 10: Unfortunately you know, due to this and the video and stuff,
I got half of you. And then how it got
to you is we actually the news of hold of
it because I put something on our Facebook page and
then your sister did action want to call it and said, hey, listen,
that's my brother in my car.
Speaker 11: You know what I mean?
Speaker 10: So kind of let us see you. But I had
some previous things allowed to you. It looks like you
had a history of Brunswick can readily called me. He says, Hey, listen,
I know that guy. You might you might want to
give him a call. Everything he did is what he
used to do when they used to deal with you
a lot.
Speaker 13: Huh.
Speaker 11: So what mean when you were you were in jail
for a little bit, you get out and what happened.
Speaker 3: I just I don't know, man, I just got how
and things weren't like I thought it was going to be.
Speaker 11: You know, I had nowhere to go, Okay, no family
was helping here.
Speaker 1: What my mom passed?
Speaker 4: You know, a lot had changed in the fifteen years
he was on the inside, y'all see shawsh ink right.
Think about how smartphones didn't even exist in two thousand
and two. Everybody was still using a flip phone. There
was no social media, at least not like today. Facebook
launched in two thousand and four, YouTube in two thousand
and five, and Twitter in two thousand and six. Instagram
came around in twenty ten, and uh, I won't even
mentioned TikTok. In two thousand and two, when he went
into prison, people were still using Aol instant messenger and
MySpace wasn't even a thing yet. If you wanted to
go somewhere, you couldn't just tap on your phone and
have directions show up or even rent out to you.
You had to print something out from a site called
map quest. I shit, you not on your ink jet
printer and hope that the directions were accurate. Kids nowadays
can't even figure out what gender they are. Could you
imagine if you took GPS away from them. If Tom
repeated as little heist today, he'd be lucky to find
one dollar in the cash register. People don't even use
cash anymore, just their Klarna debit cards, which they have
no intention of ever paying back. Another big difference in
two thousand and two is that we weren't all spying
on each other. No one was lurking nearby to film
you on their phone, waiting to post it somewhere for
the world to see. Security cameras existed, but we're reserved
for big businesses. No wonder Tom didn't wear a mask.
Not only was he too shitfaced to even think about
a security camera, but he just wasn't expecting these tiny
businesses to own one. In two thousand and two, voicemail
was still a thing and people actually checked it. Tom
felt like he'd been swallowed up by time, but it
wasn't just the tech that had left him behind. While
he was on the inside, his world fell apart his
mom died. She was the family anchor. There were some
rough years between him and his stepdad, but his mom
was always there for the kids, probably almost too much.
Speaker 14: My mom struggled for the last three or four years
before she passed, trying to keep the house afloat and
still help my sister with bills and with her kids.
Speaker 1: And as soon.
Speaker 14: As my mom dies, you know, I told my sister
well here to take my money and paid a banknote
all on borrowing money against the house or her court.
Speaker 1: Her husband had allowed.
Speaker 14: It to go into such disappeared that she didn't want
to fuck with it all, and so she led the
bank habit. And uh yeah, I told her, I said,
you know, I feel like you.
Speaker 11: You don't spit on her grains.
Speaker 8: You know what I mean?
Speaker 11: You should have let him.
Speaker 14: You should have let the bank habit four years ago
instead of moving them on the roll of stretch.
Speaker 1: She didn trying to.
Speaker 14: She was the only one that ever had a solid
career and a working a steady work, you know what
I mean, with good money. So you know she's painting
like everybody's cell.
Speaker 1: Phone bill, everybody build baby.
Speaker 10: Sit or certain sys have got a good relationship or no. No.
Speaker 4: His sister took over the money, and according to Tom,
she mismanaged it. She also failed to get the car
Tom had wrecked from the impound because it was too
much trouble. Tom was pissed because the car belonged to
his son, Tommy and still had some of his personal
belongings in it. According to Tom, his sister helped raise
Tommy and had been a good fluence, but ever since
their mother passed, she was all about herself. His sister,
of course, had a different story. There was a time
when they partied together as teens and acted more like
friends than siblings. But then Tom got a girl pregnant
when he was nineteen, and things changed. His sister had
lost a baby boy, and now she found herself stepping
in to parent Tom's son. Tom continued to party and
went to rehab at least once.
Speaker 15: It was like usually every time he went to rehab,
this stuff would come out. Missy does everything well, Missy
has a job, Missy went to school. I paid for it.
He always, I guess, felt like I got everything. But
in reality, my grandparents were draining their bank account for him,
and their whole life revolved around him. And then what
was going on? But he always and he still will
and recently that when my mom died, he wrote Tommy
letters the same old stuff like Missy got.
Speaker 4: This, and his sister Missy remembered that their mother practically
enabled him.
Speaker 15: She was always their form, and even if he stole
from her, he could still come home. I don't her backward.
I think I told you when I found out when
she died, that she had all these check cashing and stuff.
When I'd found all the.
Speaker 9: Receipts commissary and to people like Latasha, Maquisha and some
of my brother's crowd, you know, and Akron and Youngstown
and you know wherever, and it was always, well, he
needs hygiene products.
Speaker 15: It's like he doesn't need three hundred dollars.
Speaker 4: We've all experienced someone in the family like this, right.
It always seems like the one who gets in trouble
the most, or is the least productive, gets all the attention,
doesn't it. Yeah, Fuck the productive one who pays his
bills and minds his own business. Let's focus all of
our baby bird attention on this idiot over here that
can't get their shit together. Tom was about twenty five
when he went to prison, and now he was forty two,
with no home to go back to, no mommy to
run to, and a son who was almost an adult
now ready to live his own life. He had a
lot to figure out and even more to make up for,
and yet here he was back at the police station.
Since he got out, he'd been looking for a place
to stay, but his parole had restrictions, no guns, no drugs,
on and on. His anxiety was increasing. In the previous
night's drunken binge was going to land him in jail again.
Things were about to get worse.
Speaker 10: I don't see your son wanted to be baitchful against
you at all, you know what I mean.
Speaker 11: I think he just wants to had around, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 16: Unfortunately, listen, and like I said, I mean, this mom
was letting me stay.
Speaker 1: There and until I got a place and.
Speaker 16: That didn't work out for the roll, and then she
kind of wanted to start a relationship again.
Speaker 1: And then when I didn't.
Speaker 3: Because I had a girlfriend, she kind of flipped on me.
Speaker 11: Okay.
Speaker 1: And then, like I said, my sister, you know she enhurges.
Speaker 11: Was that girlfriend, the girl we were looking for that
was missing?
Speaker 1: Oh have you heard?
Speaker 11: Do you know where she's at? By any chance?
Speaker 1: It's just an old friend of mine, Okay.
Speaker 11: Still never heard any content of anything where she could be.
She I don't know.
Speaker 2: She was like when I was writing from jail, we
lost contact, but she's stayed in touch with my mom.
Speaker 11: Okay, so when my mom.
Speaker 1: Died, she kind of come back in the picture.
Speaker 14: Then her mom died, then she took off the Texas
and came back and her and her friend actually picked
me up from jail.
Speaker 1: But who was it?
Speaker 11: Who was her friend that came with you?
Speaker 1: An old, same old guy, John John Mayn. Yeah.
Speaker 4: In that clip they were talking about the mother of
Tom's son. When he got out of prison, he was
hoping to stay at her house, but that didn't work
out because she wanted to rekindle the relationship and he
had long since moved on with two different women. Forty
nine year old Regina Capo Bianco was one of them.
About fifteen years earlier, she had signed up for a
prison pen pal program where she met Tom. Yeah, she
was one of those weirdos. They constantly wrote each other
and promised they would meet up once he was out.
The problem for Tom, at least, was that he was
looking for stability, and before he even got out he
started to see that she had issues. I wonder how
he found out. Could it have been maybe the fact
she was writing inmates Maybe that was it there, Tom,
Maybe that was the whole problem.
Speaker 11: Anyway.
Speaker 4: Regina had been living at home with her mother, but
at some point in their friendship, her mother also tied,
leaving her without a home. Her life took a downward
turn into alcoholism. This was the last thing Tom needed,
and besides, he had already started seeing someone else. These
inmates can really pulse a puss, if you know what
I mean. When Tom was released, Regina was living with
a partner, an older man named John Mann. This was
a quid pro quo situation, if you know what that means,
a friends with benefits sort of relationship where she would
help take care of him and his house in exchange
for a place to stay. She was a househore basically.
Regina and John had generously offered to let Tom stay
there too until he got on his feet, But Tom
could already see the writing on the wall and knew
this would be the worst environment possible for him. It
was true that he accepted Regina John's offer to pick
him up from prison upon his release, but he told
him he planned to find his own lodging. The last
he'd heard of Regina, she was about to celebrate her
fiftieth birthday.
Speaker 13: And one one what's the address of the emergency?
Speaker 6: So we have a neighbor across the street and they
just got home and there's a lady that's like on
the ground and can't get up, and they're like hovering
over her. So in the front yard, in the front yard. Yeah,
she's an older lady in her fifties with dark go
brown hair. Wait, they're picking her up and carrying her
into the room into her white female waite female. So
can barely stand up, so they're walking or in carrying her.
Speaker 4: Now, it's one thing to get a little carried away
for your fiftieth birthday, But when was the last time
your neighbors called nine one one on you because you
were passed out in your yard? And I hope you
weren't in your fifties?
Speaker 7: Sure, three joke ahead Regina's birthday.
Speaker 6: She apparently had too much.
Speaker 7: Drink, but she was up, walking around and talking, able
to answer some simple questions. So she's been a durle
guy ar and keep an eyeron for the night before me.
Speaker 4: Coppy Tom remembered warning Regina to get up that day,
but when she wasn't able to, he and John literally
had to drag her into the house.
Speaker 1: On her fiftieth birthday.
Speaker 16: She got trashed and was puping up her faked teeth,
and I'm like, come on, Regina, I'm like an old
lady and saw that, and I told her too, I'm like,
please get up. You know you're laying in your puke.
I'm like, it's nice area. Someone's gonna call the police. No,
sooner than I said it. They're coming a couple of
farm tops. And yeah, so it looked crazy like you
got an older guy and you got this guy tattoo's
dragging this girl in the house. I mean, especially after
all that shit that happened in Cleveland with them girls
being known for all that years.
Speaker 1: You don't know, She's always been like that.
Speaker 16: She's a good heart, good girl through writing, like as
much as we wrote.
Speaker 4: In prison, Regina may have had a good heart, but
she was a wild card. Though he did stay at
Regina and John's a couple of times since he got out,
he mostly bounced around hotels with his current girlfriend. He
was right to steer clear of Regina as much as possible.
The last thing he needed was to get roped into
another bad situation. But Tom, the guy just trying to
keep his head down and reconnect with his son, was
about to be pulled into something a lot bigger than
a stolen cash register and e wrecked jeep, something that
would change his life forever.
Speaker 11: It was late.
Speaker 4: June twenty seventeen in Parma Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb
with a reputation for safety not violent crime. In the
last few weeks, police responded to a string of late
night burglaries. The suspect, Thomas Nuff, was quickly caught. He
admitted to everything, saying he was broke and desperate. Hotels
were getting expensive. Tom had just been released from prison
after serving fifteen years. Since then, he'd bounced between hotels,
old girlfriends, and temporary stays with people willing to help,
including a penpal named Regina Capobianco. My boyfriend even gave
him a ride from prison. He stayed at her place
a couple of nights, but mostly kept his distance. She
had a good heart, but she was a little unpredictable.
Then Regina stopped answering her phone. Her sister worried I.
Speaker 11: Miss her every day.
Speaker 17: I miss sending her pictures of the girls of my grandkids.
Speaker 1: And calling her.
Speaker 11: That was all taken from me.
Speaker 17: Anne Berkeley, can't do that anymore.
Speaker 1: I call Regina Reggie.
Speaker 17: Reggie had a contagious laugh. If you would ask anybody
what they remember most about Reggie, it will be her laugh.
Speaker 4: The police had been to her house already, but they
didn't execute a full search. Neighbors had seen stickers on
the door about a potential foreclosure and just assumed John
was evicted. Now weeks had passed, they go back, and
what they find inside is worse than anything anyone's imagined.
What they walk into is a hoarder's nightmare. Trash banks, boxes,
rotting food. The air is thick and sour, the kind
of stench you think is garbage until you realize it's not.
Specialized agents are called in along with cadaver dogs, but
even the dogs refuse to go inside. The odor of
decomposition is overwhelming. They stubbornly sit outside, like, no way, man,
I ain't going in there. We ain't touching this. That's
kind of what I imagine dogs sound like. You can get
into their head, yo, bro, we ain't going in there,
That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 11: Dog.
Speaker 4: The search stops here. I think it's kind of cute.
Imagine a Doberman talking like that. Anyway. Fortunately, agents come
prepared with full protective masks and oxygen tanks. This is
a full hazmat situation we got going on. They enter
through the back door of the ranch home, past the
shattered window, dead flies, carpet the floor. The second bedroom
is by far the worst. Flies swarm in the air,
the stench pools in the room. Maggots wriggle in a
disgusting puddle at the foot of the bed, a puddle
they trace to amount of trash and blankets. When they
start to move it, they see skin, then bone, then
what looks like a leg, then a skull. The hallway
carpet has been cut away, and blood stains stretched from
the kitchen into the living room, where the carpet has
also been removed under trash and clothing. In the second
bedroom they find John Mann's body a mire of decomposed,
rotting flesh, unrecognizable, and behind him, up against the wall,
they find a second figure wrapped in a wet Harley
Davidson blanket. The blanket is form fitting. They can see
the outline of Regina's head before it's even pulled back,
She's face up, sweater rolled up above her eyes, one
foot exposed, and the rest of her body hidden beneath
layers of filth. A purple condom wrapper is found near
her head. At first, Tom wasn't the obvious suspect. Even
though he had a criminal background, his crimes didn't involve
violence against anyone, and he had a son he desperately
wanted to reconnect with. Why would he risk throwing that
all away? He already messed up by getting stupid, drunken
breaking into the salons, stupid and sloppy, but not murder.
But because he was one of the only people who
had a connection with both Regina and John, they started
to dig where else had Tom been staying since he
got out, who else was helping him? And that's when
his current girlfriend came up, Alicia Stoner. She wasn't just
his girlfriend, she was a social worker at the prison.
Imagine that you realize.
Speaker 12: How serious certainly last going on with him, and we
understand that we time to talk about it yesterday. So yeah,
I understand if things don't come back to he at
certain times, but we just want to have that line
of communication of what good we can get through some
of this information today.
Speaker 11: Most of it.
Speaker 4: Alicia was working at the same prison that Tom was
serving time in. Tom was attractive to her for some reason,
probably for the same reason why some women right to inmates,
some particular crazy bitches take that extra step and get
a job at the prison. It's one hell of a
world we're living in, I'll tell you. Maybe it was
the bad boy prisoner thing. Maybe it was his charming
gift of gab who knows who cares. Whatever the case,
he was writing to multiple women, including Regina, and they
were all falling for it. With Alicia, he had the
added pleasure of interacting personally. That is until she quit
due to an obvious conflict of interest. She chose Tom
over her job and they continued their relationship. Imagine choosing
a criminal over your job. These two lovebirds wrote poems
to each other, long handwritten love letters. They were soul mates.
When detectives interviewed Alicia for the first time, she didn't
want to say much, But after she realized that she
could be implicated and ultimately served time, that's when she
started to talk.
Speaker 8: I just want to clarify some things that I wasn't
direct with Okay, okay.
Speaker 12: But maybe this dream of minimizing some of this so
that it's oh, I did lesser issue.
Speaker 8: I avoided, I minimized, irrationalized, I did all the defense mechanism.
Speaker 12: Guy, Now it just comes down to telling us the truth.
Speaker 4: On paper, Alicia didn't look like the kind of woman
who'd ever be connected to a double homicide. She was
a mental health worker, and she was married, But somehow
she was charmed by this asshole. After his release in
April twenty seventeen, Alicia became more than just his girlfriend.
She was his driver, his banker, and his safety net.
When parole rules barred Tom from living with her, she
paid for his motel rooms. When he needed money, she
wired it, and when he called her in the middle
of the night, she came. On May twelfth, twenty seventeen,
Alicia drove to pick him up after he made a
desperate phone call. She remembered his left index finger was
badly cut, a fresh wound he couldn't easily explain when.
Speaker 8: We discussed about initially me getting the phone call from Thomas,
and he called me, and he did say to me,
if I ever meet you with now, and I know
he gave me, this is where I'm going to tell you.
Speaker 11: Just okay. I know he gave me directions at some point.
And here's what I see.
Speaker 8: When I'm driving and I'm crossing over Meander, I'm on
the phone with him and he tells me Regina and
John are dead.
Speaker 11: Okay.
Speaker 12: That helps spark so memory of the conversation, that of
him telling you when you got there, was there anything more?
Speaker 11: That there's more?
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 8: So it's accurate with him with the hood coming out
and he gets in my car where I tell you,
I me park where I tell you and does let
me say this The story I was supposed to tell
was that he got into a bar fight for the finger,
because he says to me, all you know is that
I got into a bar fight for the six Okay.
Speaker 11: So that's what I told you.
Speaker 4: Tom's version started with his relationship with John. He felt
sorry for John because Regina was taking advantage of him.
What started as a partnership had turned into a one
way street that ended with Regina being the only happy partner.
She came and went as she pleased. She took John's
money and did little in exchange. She even started seeing
other guys and bringing them back to the house.
Speaker 3: So when I met John, you know, he might have
been a dirt bag and a lot of things, but
I just took him as an old hippie, nice guy.
He was going to get kicked out of the house soon,
but he needed someone to motograss.
Speaker 1: And first of.
Speaker 3: All, you know, I want everybody to know that, you know,
I've never had any sexual relationships with Regina. We met
in two thousand and five his pen pals, and for
about a year and a half we kind of were
writing a lot and had ideas of getting out being together.
Of course, then I felt a lot different than I
knew now about what I wanted.
Speaker 1: In life and a woman.
Speaker 3: And she's always been super wild and told me a
lot of crazy stories I never realized. And of course
she's probably progressed and got worse, you know what I mean.
So I never realized, you know, like until her fiftieth birthday,
how she was drinking.
Speaker 4: If he wasn't convinced at her fiftieth birthday party that
she was an out of control partier, an incident that
happened at a gas station confirmed it she'd been drinking.
He says she came out of the restroom with toilet
paper hanging out of her pants. When he politely brought
it to her attention, she says, watch this, and she
pulls it out and plasters it on the chest of
a little old lady who's walking pie. Gross.
Speaker 3: So we didn't talk for a while, you know, a
few weeks, and I ended up when I needed a
place to stay, and I knew that, you know, they
were still entertaining that idea when I was in jail.
So I called her up and she said, well, you know,
she was mad at me, but I said, hey.
Speaker 1: You know, what are you mad for? You know what
I mean, the way you were acting, and I can't
have that.
Speaker 3: Well, so I had met John a few times and
he had confided in me that he kind of wanted
her out, but she told him like, welly I get
mail here, so you got to evict me. And then
he was kind of like, well, I've known her for
a while. I kind of love her. But at the
same time, he's like, you know, she don't talk my
dick no more.
Speaker 1: She don't do this.
Speaker 3: And for her, you know, she i'd seen her drunk,
like you know, you can't get it hard, real nasty,
you know, what I mean.
Speaker 1: So I'm like, I feel bad for him.
Speaker 4: You know, he felt bad for John, so he started
coaching him on how he could get rid of Regina
by evicting her. It would be a bonus that he'd
get to live there with John. In effect, he planned
to replace Regina. Tom said he didn't have much, but
he would help him in any way he could, just
not sexually. John wasn't getting that anyway.
Speaker 3: Ended up, you know, taking some of my stuff there
because you know, she didn't know it.
Speaker 1: At the time, but John was going to try to birthday.
Speaker 11: He took some stuff there, okay, all right.
Speaker 3: So I took my blue bin and had my clothes
in it, okay, And I had it like a duffel
bag that had like my little homemade tattoo shit in it,
lived brown tan bag. And you know, I wasn't like
trying to like move in or nothing yet. I didn't
know what the status was going to be as far
as John getting her out of the house. I kind
of was like, I'm not gonna lie to you. I said,
you know, I can get you good, bud, I'll keep
you smoking, I'll give you fifty bucks a week, but
I can't live here with her. And another reason why
I really blame myself is just for entertaining the idea
and telling him about this stuff about being elderly and
being able to evict her that.
Speaker 1: That's I guess why she loved the fuck out, you
know what I mean?
Speaker 3: And you know, I hear them outside yelling and arguing,
and the dogs are barking and the little you know,
they're loud, and I'm like, I could hear it outside.
Speaker 4: So the day this all went down, John had confronted Regina.
She laughed it off and said she was going to
go out and meet a guy at a bar and
they might come back to the house. While she was out,
John had fallen asleep, so she texted Tom asking him
to put the dogs away because she was bringing this
guy back. Tom didn't want to be around for that,
so he says he left.
Speaker 3: Well, I just chose to leave, you know. I took
a walk in the neighborhood, so I didn't want to
be there listening to him in a sex whatever was
going on. Well, I had come home and whoever the
guy she had there was gone, and hearn John were arguing,
and she's drunk. I mean probably didn't take her musk
get drunk anyway. She's such a little person, you know
what I mean. And they're fighting and I'm out in
the backyard. Dogs are going crazy. I'm surprised nobody called
the police, you know, And something just changed in the tone,
and I come in, you know what I mean. I
didn't come in, and really I didn't want to interrupt nose.
Speaker 1: I didn't know what was said.
Speaker 3: And I came in and Regina was attacking him with
a knife, and I stopped her. I actually got pictures.
It took me to believe me. As little she is,
she was pretty strong, you know what I mean. And
I had a little mark here where I had a
little cut, and I got a bunch of cuts on
my hands trying to pull the blade from her. And
that's actually how I ended up cutting my fingers so bad.
Speaker 4: This is when the lies started. Every person he saw
got a different explanation for why he got this cut
on his finger, from his own son, to his ex
at the house with his son, to his girlfriend Alicia,
and finally to the police who interviewed him the night
of the burglaries. By that point, his finger was barely
hanging on After he tried. I had to superglue it gross,
but he knew it was bad because it was trending
green and starting to smell funny, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: I know shit happened.
Speaker 3: It shouldn't have happened, And anyway, I just wanted to
know that I didn't kill John.
Speaker 4: The one part of the story that always stayed consistent
was that he didn't kill John. He freely admitted he
killed Regina, just like he freely admitted several weeks later
that he robbed the salons, but he was adamant he
didn't kill John.
Speaker 3: And none of this shit was planned or premeditated or anything.
But I ended up ripping a knife from Regina and
I threw up in a chair and she took off,
and I went a night checked John and he was
still making sounds and on the floor, and she ends
up coming back with another knife, and I don't know,
regular stayed nice whatever from the kitchen, and that's when
she ended up. You know, staffn't have me cut my
finger real bad again. I'm tussling with her and I'll
get her to the group, to the ground and I'm
trying to hold her down, and you know, her other hands,
she's clawing in my face and my eyes, and I've
ended up getting a knife and using honor, you know
what I mean. And not only I'm having nightmares about it,
you know what I mean. It's so much to fucking
live with, you know. And I wish I would have
ran out of the house, you know what I mean,
because now I lived with it. She was a friend,
you know what I mean. And I mean I'd be
stupid to even tell my pro officer, I'm about to
stay here at this house.
Speaker 4: Tom maintained he never met for any of this to happen.
He just wanted to get out of prison and start over,
be a good dad, continue his relationship with Alicia, except
she was still married, and get back to what he
loved to do. Tattoos, of course, but he also loved
drinking and talk it. Those two traits somehow led to
him committing crimes that involved the very people he loved most.
In the aftermath of those crimes, even his youngest son.
Speaker 2: It was my phone. I was letting him borrow it
for the night that night. The next morning I woke up,
my phone was gone, my kids were gone, and my
jeep was gone, and I didn't talk to him for
a couple of days.
Speaker 4: Tom Son thought he was helping his father, but every
time tom took more. The next morning, Tommy's phone, his jeep,
and even his trust were god.
Speaker 2: When he did move there, he cut his finger open,
and he said it was from the hedgehog with my
mom and my ample said it was too clean of
a cut to be not a hedgehog, but like hedge clippers.
And my mom and my ample said it was too
clean of a CUTZ. I think it was from a
knife for a glass or something.
Speaker 11: What do you think.
Speaker 2: I'd like to believe him, but I don't know. I
haven't seen a cut like that before. It was cut
pretty bad. Yeah, it was like hanging off and stuff.
Speaker 11: Oh jeez.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He said he was going to try bluing it back together,
but when he was in the hospital, they just took
it off for him.
Speaker 4: Tommy Junior would later learn the truth, if he didn't
already suspect it. The story was shady, so was his
story about why he needed Tommy to buy him duct
tape and garbage bags for the finger. Poor Tommy. Since
his dad got out of prison, he was invading all
aspects of his life, and Tommy led him because he
loved him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, since he's been out, my life's been so stressful,
Like I've been.
Speaker 1: Afraid at my house, an't you afraid?
Speaker 2: I don't know if like he got dropped off by
someone and he owes them money and they're gonna like
come inside or something. I don't know, Okay, I just
don't know. Like I thought I knew him a little bit,
but I guess I didn't.
Speaker 4: Okay, Tommy had a right to be afraid. His dad
was a criminal murderer. The only thing the police didn't
know was exactly why he murdered.
Speaker 11: We think you know more to someone's telling us.
Speaker 12: Sitting there conversation, things were brought up about what your
dad did. That we're pretty serious and if he told
you what he did, then we need to know.
Speaker 1: Tom He did tell me he heard two people. Didn't say
he killed anybody.
Speaker 11: He said he heard him, though, tell us what he
told you.
Speaker 2: He said that he heard him, and he said he
cut his finger on the hedge clippers, and that he.
Speaker 1: Was trying to fight him back, and.
Speaker 9: I was it.
Speaker 11: He told me that he took Regina.
Speaker 2: They got her a hotel, and then two black people
came and were beating them up, and that he was
trying to defend themselves.
Speaker 12: Say that again, when was this Did he give you
any time frame on when this happened.
Speaker 2: He said it happened late at night, late at night,
and they were sitting He was in the He said
he was in the basement cleaning, and that he heard
John Yellen and he went upstairs and he started like
trying to fight him with him, and then they left.
Speaker 11: And that's what a couple of black males, he.
Speaker 2: Said, two black men. He didn't he didn't use those words.
He used they.
Speaker 12: Raised this turn for them, okay, And then he was
fighting with these blackmails and he.
Speaker 2: Said, that's how he had a scratch on his head.
He said, that's how he got a scratch on his
head was from them.
Speaker 4: This was just one more version of Tom's lies. And
when he couldn't cover his tracks with his lies, he
simply told Tommy not to look. Like the time he
asked Tommy to pick him up at John Mann's house,
this time it was to get rid of the dogs inside.
Speaker 2: He went back to the house, he went in and
grabbed the dogs. I didn't see the dogs, he told
me not to look, and we drove out there. He
hadn't pulled around the side of the street, and he
shussed them out. Yeah, he just told me they were
John's dogs and that he didn't want him anymore. Knew
that John was going to hurt out early, kill him
and get rid of them, so he was going to
give him a chance at life and just let him go.
Speaker 4: The detectives didn't want to have to press Tommy. They
knew he was a good kid. In fact, one officer
had also been Tommy's rugby coach and had nothing but
great things to say about him. Somebody did something right,
but it sure wasn't his dad.
Speaker 12: And the last thing I want to see is anything.
And this isn't trying to pit you against your dad,
but you're in this position.
Speaker 11: Sadly.
Speaker 12: He put you in this position, he did, and it's sad,
and we feel for you, you know, I do. You
know what I think of you, and it's wrong, but
I just want the truth one hundred percent, and you
walk out of here, and you know your conscious is clear.
Speaker 2: If I tell you, guys now, tell us now, you're
not Eddie Trump.
Speaker 11: He said he killed him, kill Regina John.
Speaker 2: Just Regina He said he was in the basement cleaning
and he heard John upstairs screaming, saw Regina stabbing him,
tried giving the knife away from him, and then he
said he took the knife and stabbed her.
Speaker 4: Tommy's story matched the version his father gave police that
Regina had attacked Jawn, that Tom wrestled the knife away
and stabbed her. There were no other people at the
house that day, black white or otherwise. If they could
just get Tom to admit to killing both Regina and John,
it was their gut feeling, and the coroner's reports backed
it up. John Man's body was pierced with multiple sharp
force injuries, including to the neck, ribs, collarbone, and defensive
wounds on his hands and arms. Regina stood under five
feet tall and didn't weigh much. Besides. Tom's version was
that he intervened after only one or two stabbings. Then
there was the elaborate cover up, including commissioning a guy
named de Lugo to burn the house down after he'd
remove the dogs and the carpeting. He used Alicia for
contact because he was already in jail. Delugo said no,
he wouldn't do it, and the defensive wounds on Tom
indicated a serious altercation where Tom lost control of the blade,
not to mention the lie. The overwhelming number of lies,
so detectives had one more card to play with Tom,
the polygraph, and when the subject turned to John Mann,
Tom's story started to crack. It was May of twenty
seventeen in a suburb of good old Cleveland, Ohio, the
home of the Browns and a whole lot of killers
and even wor Ohioans. Tomis Enough had been out of
prison for just a few weeks. He was drifting between motels,
borrowing from his sons and leaning on his girlfriend, Alicia Stoner,
who drove him, gave him money, and even picked him
up the morning after he killed at least one person
inside the house on nell Wood Road. So yeah, you know,
Tom was just living his best life. John Mann lived
in that house with his partner, Regina Capobianco. By then,
Regina had long since given up her part of the
bargain for living there and was dating other men. She
had also been writing to Tom while he was in prison.
In fact, it was Regina and John who picked him
up on the day he was released. Regina may have
expected to carry on a relationship with Tom, but he
already had Alicia, and he also realized that Regina's drinking
and other bizarre behaviors could land him right back in
prison on parole violation. John was fed up with her too,
he wanted her gone, and Tom was all too happy
to help. If Regina were out of the picture, it
meant Tom couldn't move in and finally have a stable
place to reconnect with his son and have a girlfriend.
On the night of May eleventh, twenty seventeen, something violent
happened inside that house. John and Regina were both killed,
their bodies hidden away. Police wouldn't discover their decomposed remains
until June. In the meantime, Tom was getting rid of
evidence and roping his loved ones into helping him cover
his tracks.
Speaker 3: You know, I've always tried to tell him, even though
I've done fucked up shin or I've been in jail,
I always try to.
Speaker 1: You know, do the right thing.
Speaker 3: A lot of things that you know I did with
past it was reckless, you know, out drunk and doing
stupid shit and just being wild.
Speaker 1: But you know, for the most part, you know he knows.
Speaker 3: To do the right thing, you know, so that's I
just if I can only be that example to him,
you know what I mean, that's what I want to
do for him.
Speaker 4: What he wanted to do for his son and what
he actually ended up doing were two vastly different things.
By May seventeenth, his life was spiraling. He was walking
around with a finger that was barely hanging on, and
his freedom was also barely hanging on. In the weeks
that followed, Tom didn't lie low. He went right back
to his old ways. He broke into two salons, leaving
a trail that would put him back on police radar.
At the same time, he told everyone a different story.
He told his son, he told Alicia, He told the
police a story about a drug dealer, a fight, Regina
stabbing John, and Tom stabbing Regina in self defense. But
there was one part he never changed. He swore he
didn't kill John Man. You know how you've heard that
polygraphs are unreliable. Well, police departments across the country insists
they yield a success rate of eighty six to one
hundred percent, and Brunswick police were counting on its reliability
and listening.
Speaker 10: I don't want your son to be around this, but
right now, he is smack in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: You know, listen, I know, but that's why as much as.
Speaker 10: You know, if he's telling us, you can fight it
in him, then you know you killed two people, and
then you know you're confiding in him.
Speaker 11: As both both the people we found in the house.
Speaker 1: Okay, I told him the black people.
Speaker 3: And then when I ended up telling him the truth
after the truck incident, I told him what it was,
and I told him I was just embarrassed because I
had killed the girl, and.
Speaker 1: That's when I told him the truth of the matter.
Speaker 10: No, I want to bring this thing back up from
this machineer. Okay, it says you me and your failed.
They say you'd stick John. All right, So I want
to talk about some similarities and some stuff in the
injuries of both.
Speaker 11: I want to talk about that.
Speaker 18: This is gonna be exactly what I was told, all right, Okay,
Regina stab wound in the back, two stab wounds to
the right side of the neck, crushed Adam's apple. Right
corotid artery was cut her left hand near her index figure.
The webbing was cut.
Speaker 11: Cause him down.
Speaker 18: The defensive booms caused this sharp force injury and a
crushed damn sample, neck compression, strangulation.
Speaker 4: All of these injuries included or were in addition to
the stabbings, and the polygraph had confirmation.
Speaker 11: Didn't you mentioned that?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 10: You know you several times that John was over there
making gurglings as they did, and stuff like that. Okay,
this machine says that you had had stabbed John. Yeah, okay, something.
John had one stable right here? Did you help him
stop every by doing it?
Speaker 11: Is it the one?
Speaker 10: Did you do one stay up woman of John to
help him out, to put him out of measurement?
Speaker 11: If you did that, you couldn't understand.
Speaker 1: If I did.
Speaker 4: Detectives kept giving Tom an out. They told him maybe
it was an accident, an act of mercy, self defense,
and maybe things got out of control. Any of those
versions could have given him a softer landing, even a
shot at claiming self defense. But Tom wouldn't take it.
He stuck to his one line over and over. I
didn't kill John.
Speaker 11: You've got to.
Speaker 10: Help yourself out in this. You gotta tell us what
the hell happened in that house?
Speaker 12: You know.
Speaker 10: He brings up a good point. I'm gonna let you
explain him to about it. Where he thinks something happened
in the argument. I'm gonna let him go ahead with that.
You know, it brings up a good point as we talked,
You don't, Mike, wouldn't be getting beat up with you.
Speaker 18: Tell me a little bit about your your stepfather right
right and your mom abusive relationship, Yeah, something about.
Speaker 11: Hap him quite frequently.
Speaker 1: Well, when we were younger.
Speaker 11: You know, what's your feelings on that.
Speaker 3: I just loved my mom and I hated him at
the time. You know, even though there was times where
he was a good guy and I liked him, you know,
for certain things, he would drink and used drugs, and
you know, he took all his aggression on her, and
you know, she's just such always a good person and.
Speaker 1: Being a kid.
Speaker 3: You know, that really hurt you know, I want to
see her go back to him.
Speaker 13: You know, how did that make you feel? It hurt me,
you know, make you angry? Well, sure, I mean it
wouldn't be angry. You know I was angry that. You
know she put up with it, but I mean obviously
she felt it.
Speaker 3: You know, she loved him and worked through it, you know,
and they'd separated for like a year and we got
back together.
Speaker 18: And what do you think should happen to somebody that
beats their their wife or their girlfriend?
Speaker 10: George, no woman to jump one with you.
Speaker 11: What do you think should happened to somebody?
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't feel like they should hie, you know,
I mean I could understand why some women do that,
you know, because they feel like there's.
Speaker 1: No other way out.
Speaker 11: They feel tripped.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I feel like, you know, women even
deserve that to when a man does that.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean, that they should be able to.
Speaker 11: So, so what was John doing in Virginia? What was John?
Speaker 1: He wanted her out?
Speaker 11: What really happened?
Speaker 1: He wanted her out? He wanted her out?
Speaker 11: Was her? I don't know her.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 11: Did you see him?
Speaker 1: I never seen him, Herbert.
Speaker 11: Did she tell you here's her?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: She told me many stories about punching on her boyfriends.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean. She never said John heard her.
You know, she said he was dirty and never changed
its clothes.
Speaker 11: And I think you know that he. I think she
could fighting and.
Speaker 19: You were trying to protect her, and then she get
angry with you for what was.
Speaker 11: Going on with your Joss. Is that what happened? Listen? Man,
I get it.
Speaker 4: This was their best hypothesis. It was the only time
they'd seen Tom get this emotional, other than when he
was talking about his son. They had tapped into his
past to find a trigger. John was abusing Regina and
Tom was going to stop him. But Regina was used
to the chaos and abuse, so she tried to stop Tom.
Speaker 10: You do realize come Monday morning during this ring to me,
he's gonna be there. They're gonna paint you his monster,
don't you Yeah? Do you want them to paint.
Speaker 1: Do you want you're gonna have any money?
Speaker 11: The difference is if we if we can tell our story.
We're gonna have news conference.
Speaker 10: We're gonna give a press conference Monday morning before you're raingment.
We're telling everybody you're here, you're being arranged. The news
is gonna be there. How's it gonna be? You know
what I mean?
Speaker 11: Did you sit in this chair with us?
Speaker 10: Did you talk to the detectives, and did you tell
us everything that happened one hundred percent to the team.
Speaker 11: Which right now I don't believe. Okay, And your son
is going to watch this news conference. Sure, you know
what I mean? Your son is gonna watch this news conference.
Speaker 10: Pretty soon he may be watching it with you somewhere
else because of the trouble he's in and Alicia as well.
They're both in trouble right now with this. Too much
is going on because you put them in this position.
The only way for you to help them and not
paint yourself as a monster. I mean, come on, I
know that you love your kid, and your kid does
love you, Okay, he does, but he's going to have
to live with this cloud of the immediate pain in
my father as a monster, and people know that you're
his father.
Speaker 11: Would you rather just have them him be known as
my dad made a mistake. He fessed up to it.
He did, He did jak who he is. I still
talk to my dad in jail. Do you want Dad
or do you want everybody going on look at as
a monster?
Speaker 4: If Tom had accepted their version of what happened, would
he have gotten away with it? I mean, there was
no way he wasn't going back to prison. He robbed
two salons and killed a woman. These were indisputable facts.
But was it chivalry gone way wrong? Or was it
a premeditated attempt to secure a place of his own.
Speaker 11: It's possible.
Speaker 4: No one will ever know, but the jury would seal
his fate. No matter what. Tom would probably spend the
rest of his life in jail. But Ohio also has
the death penalty, which is a good thing, but they
should use it a lot more. The relationship Tom wanted
with his son was never going to happen, at least
not outside of prison walls. Thomas Enough Junior was convicted
of two counts of aggravated murder for killing John Mann
and Regina Capo Bianco, along with multiple other charges aggravated burglary,
gross abuse of a corpse, kidnapping, conspiracy, tampering with evidence,
and theft related offenses.
Speaker 20: There was, of course, a jury recommendation that the sentence
of death be imposed. The court finds by proof beyond
a reasonable doubt that the aggravating circumstances the offender was
found guilty of committing outweigh the mitigating factors. Therefore, on
count two, the sentence of death will be imposed upon
the offender.
Speaker 4: This met Tom's son lost to father.
Speaker 3: Well, and that's what I hope just by being you know,
straight up with you guys, it the things that you
can control to help with, you know, I appreciate.
Speaker 1: So I'm not here to fuck nobody around or be
a bad guy.
Speaker 11: And no, no, nobody's nobody's things said at all. You
know what I mean.
Speaker 3: I'm saying, it's enough to have to live with my
faults and all the mistakes I've had in the past
and letting my family down, and you know, not being
there through my son's high school years when you know
other people had her dad's there at the football game.
Speaker 4: And because of Tom's actions, he would never get the
chance to go to one of his kid's games and
walk him out onto the field. But his son wasn't
the only one who suffered. Two lives were lost. Regina
may have been a bit of a wild card, but
she mattered to her family, to her friends. She was
a person and no matter what her life choices, she
didn't deserve what happened to her.
Speaker 19: This monster took my sister from me.
Speaker 11: My heart is broken.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I will ever reap here.
Speaker 17: I miss her every day. She would not get to
see her sons get married, she would not get to
call her Grandma.
Speaker 2: And his.
Speaker 17: Oh because of trying to help somebody that I told
her that I thought.
Speaker 1: She should stay away from.
Speaker 2: I have.
Speaker 11: Horrible visions, and I hope someday will get out of
my head of the murder.
Speaker 17: And no one should ever have to have these visions
of a family member. I am glad he has the
death penalty. I think he deserves the death penalty. He's
had a chance to plead for his life, and I'm
sure my sister pleaded for her life that.
Speaker 1: He chose to ignore.
Speaker 4: John Man's son and sister both gave incredible heartfelt statements,
and John's son spoke for more than ten minutes.
Speaker 19: My dad was a goofy, bright and sensitive man. He
loved the Cleveland Browns, watching Mash re runs, and doing
community theater. He had a full scholarship offer from Heidelberg
University in astrophysics. He ended up floating into electrical contracting
from his interest in solar power. He loved the idea
of cheap, renewable energy. He even studied to be an
architect because he thought it would help him develop solar powerselves.
Later life, he became a computer programmer. He truly had
a gifted mind and could do just about whatever he
wanted to with properly motivated people tended to like my
dad he had a gregarious and colorful personality with an
oddball sense of humor.
Speaker 11: You took my dad from me.
Speaker 19: You robbed him of the golden years of his life
and the time we had together. I miss him terribly.
Speaker 4: He proceeded to lay out how Tom had failed as
a man, as a human being, and as a father.
He sympathized with Tom's son and thanked him for his
bravery and enduring the trial and doing the right thing
by testifying against his own father, whom he loved. But
then he's surprised everyone.
Speaker 19: You do not deserve to live. You do not deserve
a humane death. You butcher two people for reasons I
cannot begin to comprehend. I have wanted you to die,
yet I am faced with the reality that it will
not and cannot be enough. In order to heal, I
must accept this and find a way to reconcile it.
Against my own a feelings. I will continue to beg
for his life to be spared. However, if possible, I
want you all to hear it from a man that
wanted him dead, as a son to a man whose
life was ended his father. I will beg to anyone
who will listen to spare his life. I don't think
we should do it for me or him. I think
we should do it because it's the right thing to
do for our society.
Speaker 4: Of course, Tom is appealing, and the legal fight will
go on for years. But what lingers isn't just the
courtroom drama and a peals. That's the contradiction. Tom wanted
to be a good father. He wanted to prove he
could do right by his son. He stayed in touch,
leaned on him, even dreamed of settling down in a
house where they could reconnect. But instead he fell back
into every pattern he swore he'd left behind, the lies,
the violence, the selfishness that burned through everything in his path.
And maybe the hardest part to make sense of is
the question of whether Tom could have been telling the
truth about John Mann. Maybe John was abusing Regina like
the detectives had suggested, and it triggered a traumatic reaction
from Tom. Or maybe what happened is exactly as Tom described.
John tried to do evict Regina, and she went at him,
so Tom intervened. Even if parts of his story are
true and noble, all following actions say the most Tom's
choices after that night, spoke the loudest, He hid the bodies,
tried to hire someone to burn the place down, dumped
the dogs into someone else's neighborhood, manipulated and lied to
those he loved, dragged them into something horrible, and most importantly,
never called police. Whatever happened in that house might have
started with good intentions, but what followed were really, really,
really bad choices, and only a complete fucking idiot would
make Then again, this is Ohio. At the end of
the day, we all have to be accountable for our choices.
We all have to be responsible for what we decide
to do. Otherwise, what the fuck are we doing here today?
Thomas Nuff's son is brown. He's built a life that
has nothing to do with Parma Height or with the
crimes his father committed there. He's well adjusted, stable, and
in twenty twenty three he got married. Whatever cycle Tom
was trapped in, his son has escaped it good for him,
And maybe that's the real ending here, Not the death sentence,
not the deaths, not the appeals, but the fact that
even out of something so violent and tragic, like a
phoenix rising from the ashes, a different kind of life
is actually possible. That's gonna do it for another one.
Thanks for joining us. If you like the show, head
on over to sword and Scale dot com, get the app,
get Plus. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 11: Stay safe,