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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 5: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 2: We like to think of women as nurturers, not murderers,
Speaker 2: but women do kill. California's Deadliest Women is The Definitive
Speaker 2: Guide to the Murderesses of the Golden State, a horrifying
Speaker 2: compendium of women driven to kill by jealousy, greed, desperation,
Speaker 2: or their own inner demon From Berne Hartman, who killed
Speaker 2: her husband comedian Phil Hartman, to chemist Larissa Schuster, who
Speaker 2: dissolved her husband in acid, to dominatrix omema Arie Nelson,
Speaker 2: who cooked and ate her husband. The twenty eight women
Speaker 2: profiled in California's Deadliest Women show that the fair sex
Speaker 2: can be as evil and as deadly as any man.
Speaker 2: The book that we're featuring this evening is California's Deadliest Women,
Speaker 2: Dangerous Dames and Murderous Mums, with my special guest journalist
Speaker 2: and author David Colchik. Welcome back to the program, and
Speaker 2: thank you very much for this interview. David Colchick.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks love for having me. So he's a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Another very fascinating, as you say,
Speaker 2: compendium of stories from California, and this time some deadly women. Now,
Speaker 2: let's get right into some of these stories, because there
Speaker 2: are so many and so many ones that I had
Speaker 2: never heard anything of, and amazingly i'd never heard of them.
Speaker 2: So let's get right to a couple of these, and
Speaker 2: let's start, I guess, just to get the audience prepared
Speaker 2: for some of the stories that are in here. Let's
Speaker 2: start off with She's a man Eater.
Speaker 4: Well, that's one of my favorite favorite chapters in this book.
Speaker 4: I didn't know about it when it happened. I stumbled
Speaker 4: onto this while I was doing the research. It's a
Speaker 4: sad story. All these are sad stories. There are no
Speaker 4: happy stories in this book. There are no happy endings.
Speaker 4: Everything is horrible. It was tough writing this book in
Speaker 4: some ways because there was no letup of There was
Speaker 4: no joy in this book. In She's a Man Eater
Speaker 4: omani Irie. She was born in Egypt in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 4: which could have been one of the worst years to
Speaker 4: be born in Egypt. There was the war going on
Speaker 4: with Israel, and everything was just a big mess in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty nine, especially over there. She there's not a
Speaker 4: lot known about her growing up, but we do know
Speaker 4: that she had she was forced to have female circumcision,
Speaker 4: and that's pretty common back then. There's a lot of
Speaker 4: things about it now to stop it. But when she
Speaker 4: was eighteen she immigrated to America. She was ip but
Speaker 4: one beautiful woman, just very exotic and attractively built, as
Speaker 4: the Beatles would say, being young and beautiful in this country.
Speaker 4: She never liked for male companionship, and she probably really
Speaker 4: didn't even go to school, So we have no idea
Speaker 4: what her education level was, or even what her language
Speaker 4: skills were, how good she was speaking English. But one
Speaker 4: thing that she managed to do when she got to
Speaker 4: America is that she kind of became because of her
Speaker 4: good looks and everything she's she became not necessarily a prostitute,
Speaker 4: but she was an I candy for rich people's parties
Speaker 4: and things. As we know now.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: Extremely you know Hollywood functions or you know Donald Trump functions.
Speaker 4: He hired beautiful women just to stand around and and
Speaker 4: just make it seem like it's a better party than
Speaker 4: whoever they were trying to impress. She she got her
Speaker 4: sexual thrills though through bondage and one of her favorite
Speaker 4: uh virtual things to do, and especially because of her circumcision,
Speaker 4: she sex was painful and traumatic for her. You know,
Speaker 4: like I said, no one really knows what her life
Speaker 4: was like in Egypt before she came to America, but
Speaker 4: one of her favorite things to do would be to
Speaker 4: take guy and tie him up to their bed, to
Speaker 4: his bed, and then she would take his wallet and leave.
Speaker 4: And no one knows how many times that actually happened,
Speaker 4: but there were at least two cases where guys called
Speaker 4: the police and filed charges and then dropped them before
Speaker 4: they went to court because they probably got teased really
Speaker 4: badly at work and things about that. And it's kind
Speaker 4: of funny because I read one thing is that one
Speaker 4: guy was like two days he was tied up to
Speaker 4: his bed, and so it was quite a mess when
Speaker 4: his friends filed him and stuff. So she fell in
Speaker 4: love with this pilot who was convicted of drug smuggling
Speaker 4: in the eighties. But he was just middle aged guy
Speaker 4: and he's like fifty six years old at the time
Speaker 4: they got married. They only knew each other a few
Speaker 4: days and they got married. So they seem to be
Speaker 4: getting along fine. And November twenty second, nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 4: that's Thanksgiving Day in America, when everyone else was around
Speaker 4: having turkey and watching football games and hanging out with
Speaker 4: their relatives, both student decided to have a little bondage gate,
Speaker 4: and so she tied up Richard Nelson to their bed,
Speaker 4: and then she took a clothes iron and beat him
Speaker 4: over the head with it. And to make sure he
Speaker 4: was dead, she took a pair of scissors and stabbed
Speaker 4: him a bunch of times in the chest. So that
Speaker 4: put her in the holiday spirit, and she dressed up
Speaker 4: in her favorite bondage clothes, which were like red, and
Speaker 4: put on her red high heeled shoes, a red hat,
Speaker 4: put on blood red lipstick, and she started to cut
Speaker 4: up her husband. Now, the police showed up at her
Speaker 4: apartment on December second. One of her former boyfriends called
Speaker 4: and told the police that she asked him to help
Speaker 4: dispose the plastic bags of leftover turkey and body parts.
Speaker 4: So the police showed up at their place. And you know,
Speaker 4: it's almost a cliche, but his head was cooking on
Speaker 4: a pot on the stove, his hands were fried in
Speaker 4: cooking oil, they were in a pan, and he had
Speaker 4: basically his guts were all in different garbage bags. One
Speaker 4: of the bags was in the back in the trunk
Speaker 4: of Nelson's corvette. And she told the psychiatrists that she'd
Speaker 4: cooked his ribs and dipped them in barbecue sauce and
Speaker 4: ate them. And she told the investigators nothing tastes as
Speaker 4: good as the man I married. It's the sauce that
Speaker 4: does it. WHOA, yeah, that's that's really getting out there.
Speaker 4: So at her trial, she claimed that she was defending herself,
Speaker 4: but it didn't really fly because he was tied down
Speaker 4: and there's really no way that he could have threatened
Speaker 4: her physically, at least when that happened. So she's currently
Speaker 4: doing twenty eight to life in prison right now.
Speaker 2: Was there any explanation why? I know you don't have
Speaker 2: it in here, but was there any just that just
Speaker 2: begs the question what was her motivation to to eat him? Yeah?
Speaker 4: No, one knows. She was pretty tight lipped about it,
Speaker 4: you know, when she was arrested, when she realized how
Speaker 4: far she actually went. Now, you know, that's definitely a
Speaker 4: mental illness on her part. I would say, I think
Speaker 4: it'd be pretty hard to to try to prove that
Speaker 4: she wasn't mentally ill by you know, eating her husband
Speaker 4: over a period of four or five days.
Speaker 2: But she had she had to claim that Nelson had
Speaker 2: beat and raped her. So it was a self defense
Speaker 2: or provocation defense, wasn't it. Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, she she claimed that. But from from what all
Speaker 4: their mutual friends said, they have bet they were actually
Speaker 4: uh pretty. He treated her with respect and didn't seem
Speaker 4: that there was any kind of you know, problems with
Speaker 4: them doing what they did. They enjoyed a different kind
Speaker 4: of sex than most people, he used to. I guess.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: I don't mean to laugh, but the story actually got
Speaker 4: when I tell it in front of a live audience,
Speaker 4: it gets pretty good laugh. In some places, for some reason,
Speaker 4: people are fascinated with cannibals. Oh yeah, absolutely taboo, you know,
Speaker 4: as bad as you can go, you.
Speaker 2: Know, sure, And yes, sir, and you don't normally hear
Speaker 2: people make that kind of claims about the ribs and
Speaker 2: the sauce. So that's unusual. So let's talk about the
Speaker 2: Shopping Spree Killer. Another fascinating case, even more incredible this one.
Speaker 2: The former Dana Sioux Armbrust was born in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: seven in Orange County and her mother was Beverly Armbrust,
Speaker 2: and she was a model. So tell us a little
Speaker 2: bit about Dana Sioux and how she grew up before
Speaker 2: we talk about what her lifelong dream was to be.
Speaker 2: And so we can just explain a little bit about
Speaker 2: this very complex character and this very fascinating tale called
Speaker 2: the Shopping Spree Killer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the Anna sue her mother was a
Speaker 4: former fashion model, and she always wanted more.
Speaker 2: She was.
Speaker 4: Seventies eighties party animal in the Los Angeles area. She
Speaker 4: had married Russell Ambergs, who was a hairdresser, and I
Speaker 4: guess they did pretty good together. She spent the money
Speaker 4: and he made it, and she always spent more than
Speaker 4: what they earned. And for some reason, Dana picked up
Speaker 4: on that. When she was a little child, she had
Speaker 4: this odd obsession with money, and she knew what it
Speaker 4: was worth, even when she was a little kid. And
Speaker 4: I recently gave one of my great nieces a dollar,
Speaker 4: and she's about four years old. She didn't know what
Speaker 4: to do with it. She just looked at it like,
Speaker 4: I don't even know what this is. But about Dana,
Speaker 4: she knew what it was. Her mother they got divorced
Speaker 4: and she was a scientologist, and she spent all their
Speaker 4: money on churches, classes and things like that. So she
Speaker 4: rented out her driveway to some men that were in
Speaker 4: RV vehicle and this is about in nineteen seventy three
Speaker 4: or something like that. Beverily would go out nightclub and
Speaker 4: all the time and have parties at her house. And
Speaker 4: that's how Vana grew up seeing this kind of stuff.
Speaker 4: She had a boyfriend who lived with her in that
Speaker 4: so she misbehaved in school and got in trouble, got
Speaker 4: in fights, shoplifted, and she hated taking orders from anyone.
Speaker 4: She'd sneak out of her bedroom at night and wander
Speaker 4: the streets and things. And I think she lost her
Speaker 4: virginity at age twelve to one of the guys that
Speaker 4: lived in an RV in her driveway almost been about
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy or so. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer
Speaker 4: in seventy one, and she saw how her mother suffered
Speaker 4: going through of her chemo and things, especially back then,
Speaker 4: she decided to become a nurse. And Beverly had a
Speaker 4: knack of if she decided to do something, she would
Speaker 4: she would be totally successful at it. She would go
Speaker 4: beyond beyond what most people could do. Just anything she
Speaker 4: tried she was great at. So after Beverly died, she
Speaker 4: moved in with her father and his new wife when
Speaker 4: he had had quite a few wives, actually I think four,
Speaker 4: and when it came down to it and she had
Speaker 4: to share a bedroom with her stepsister, and you know,
Speaker 4: a girl like that, going back to living with a
Speaker 4: strange stepmother and a strange stepsister, she was getting in
Speaker 4: nothing but trouble. So her brother, her stepbrother from the
Speaker 4: first marriage, introduced her to skydiving, and she became excellent
Speaker 4: at skydiving. After her step mother found some marijuana in
Speaker 4: her room, they kicked her out and she just moved
Speaker 4: in with her boyfriend, who was twenty three years old.
Speaker 4: She was sixteen and her boyfriend was a jumpmaster at
Speaker 4: the skydiving club. So she grew up being really athletic.
Speaker 4: Blonde haired, blue eyed California girl went to Newport Harbor
Speaker 4: High School and she graduated. She started going to college
Speaker 4: to be together a nursing degree, and she at the
Speaker 4: same time she started playing golf, and she also got
Speaker 4: into windsurfing, which is, you know, the pioneering days of windsurfing.
Speaker 4: Nineteen eighty one or so. She graduated from nursing school
Speaker 4: and became a nurse, and you know, I was making
Speaker 4: good money being a nurse at that time, and she
Speaker 4: started going to windsurfing competitions and golf tournaments all over
Speaker 4: the West Coast in Hawaii and was enjoying pretty good life.
Speaker 4: So the thing was stayed that way. That would have
Speaker 4: been good, but she always wanted more. Her father got
Speaker 4: divorced and married again, and she wasn't sure about what
Speaker 4: to do with her life. She went to New Zealand
Speaker 4: or no, she went to Australia and she went there
Speaker 4: to see if she could get work and it didn't
Speaker 4: work out. There was this guy named Tom Gray who
Speaker 4: went to high school with her. She had moved in
Speaker 4: with her father in a Canyon Lake, California, which is
Speaker 4: about one hundred miles east of Los Angeles in the
Speaker 4: deserts they called the Inland Empire area. So this guy
Speaker 4: that lived nearby was a guy who went to high
Speaker 4: school with her, and he always had a crush on her,
Speaker 4: and it was like, hey, you know, it's kind of good.
Speaker 4: She doesn't know anyone out here in that And this guy,
Speaker 4: Tom Gray, he was in a band called Long Shot
Speaker 4: and they played all the Los Angeles clubs and seemed
Speaker 4: to be doing really good. But the band wasn't serious.
Speaker 4: They didn't want a record deal or anything like that,
Speaker 4: so he kind of put that away. He was also
Speaker 4: an ultra light aircraft pilot and he would fly over
Speaker 4: you know, races and things like that, heeing banners. And
Speaker 4: his real job with a construction heavy equipment operator, so
Speaker 4: you know, that's good paying jobs. So she went to
Speaker 4: she went to Australia then, and she just couldn't get
Speaker 4: work without having the just empty bedpans. And she had
Speaker 4: a lot of experience by then, so she came back
Speaker 4: and Tom Gray picked her up at the airport and
Speaker 4: she they fell in love and got married and she
Speaker 4: got a job a little in Catalina, the Catalina Islands
Speaker 4: off the Los Angeles, which is she'd come home for
Speaker 4: the weekends. And they started a They bought a house,
Speaker 4: and they started a marriage all in one company where
Speaker 4: he was a Universal Life minister, and they had the band.
Speaker 4: They had a print shop and they would do everything
Speaker 4: that you needed to do to have a wedding. So
Speaker 4: you know things are going good. Money it's coming in,
Speaker 4: and this is kind of hot.
Speaker 2: Dina.
Speaker 4: She didn't know how to play any instruments, and once
Speaker 4: that came up that they were going to have like
Speaker 4: a wedding band, she almost immediately learned how to play
Speaker 4: guitars and keyboards and things. She just had this neck
Speaker 4: that she could just pick up anything and do it.
Speaker 4: So you know they were having a wife. They bought
Speaker 4: a house and things, and it was in Kenyon Lake,
Speaker 4: and Kenyon Lake is like a gated city and it's
Speaker 4: not like these lagoons and lakes. You can't just drive
Speaker 4: in there. You need a card pass or you need
Speaker 4: to know the combination. People feel pretty safe there. They
Speaker 4: were living beyond their means and they had a second
Speaker 4: mortgage on their house. Then the house in double broke
Speaker 4: and there were no more jobs for heavy equipment operators.
Speaker 4: It became pretty tight, especially with their double mortgage, and
Speaker 4: her credit cards were all maxed out, and Dana never
Speaker 4: stopped going to her weekly hair appointments and manicures and
Speaker 4: spat dates. She had a gold Cadillac. She kept on
Speaker 4: going out and buying clothes and accessories, just like they
Speaker 4: were fully employed. So she started getting really mad about
Speaker 4: the lack of money that they had and that Tom
Speaker 4: would ask her not to spend so much, and she
Speaker 4: just would not have it. No one could ever tell
Speaker 4: her what to do, so she asked her stepbrothers for
Speaker 4: money and other relatives, and she angered her old family
Speaker 4: when she tried to change a will of her stepbrother's
Speaker 4: great aunts, who she was not related to at all.
Speaker 4: She had nothing to do with them, and she, you know,
Speaker 4: her relatives were just just having it with her. They
Speaker 4: just couldn't couldn't deal with her anymore. She got a
Speaker 4: job at the Inland Valley Regional Medical Center as a
Speaker 4: labor and delivery nurse, and she took extra shifts and
Speaker 4: by all accounts, she was really good nurse, but she
Speaker 4: didn't get along with her coworkers at all, and she
Speaker 4: had been reprimanded for or not getting along with them.
Speaker 4: She wanted to have a baby. Couldn't happen. They just
Speaker 4: couldn't have. They just couldn't do it.
Speaker 2: So she.
Speaker 4: Here in his time, Tom discovered that he really wanted
Speaker 4: to keep his band, start a band together. He really
Speaker 4: loved his music. So we started a band. And the
Speaker 4: guitar player in the band is this guy named Jim Wilkins,
Speaker 4: and she immediately got an eye for him. He had
Speaker 4: a six year old son, and she really found that attractive.
Speaker 4: It would be her surrogate son that she that she
Speaker 4: couldn't have. And also during this time, she was pingpong
Speaker 4: and between her husband Dan and between this guitar player guy,
Speaker 4: and you know, Dan pretty much just threw his hands
Speaker 4: up in the air and just looked, you know, make
Speaker 4: up your mind someday. So she got fired from her
Speaker 4: job for stealing demole and other opiates. You know, you're
Speaker 4: supposed to just stray what she don't use. And she
Speaker 4: was a false false buying a narcotic inventory. And she
Speaker 4: said that she'd these were files that fell on the floor,
Speaker 4: but they didn't believe her and they fired her. So
Speaker 4: Tom At this time, they were separated and she had
Speaker 4: taken out a life insurance policy on him and he
Speaker 4: didn't know about. On Valentine's Day in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 4: she called him and asked to meet him, and he
Speaker 4: just didn't think it was a good idea and he
Speaker 4: stood her up. So she instead that she was in
Speaker 4: the area where they lived. Their house was now in foreclosure.
Speaker 4: She still had her pass key for the gate of
Speaker 4: that air of that town, and she drove past her
Speaker 4: old house and she saw eighty six year old Norma
Speaker 4: Davis who lived nearby, and she was the former mother
Speaker 4: in law of her latest stepmother. And it gets pretty
Speaker 4: pretty complicated in a way, but she's no relation to
Speaker 4: this person, but she knows her through her stepmother's through
Speaker 4: her stepmother. So she went over to her house and
Speaker 4: Norma was recovering from a triple bypass surgery, and she
Speaker 4: let her in, like, oh, how you doing, And she
Speaker 4: sat down in her chair and Dana snuck up behind
Speaker 4: her and strangled her with a phone cord that seemed
Speaker 4: to be like her favorite weapon. It just started. After
Speaker 4: she was done strangling her, she stabbed her eleven times
Speaker 4: or two knights and broke the knights off.
Speaker 2: To the hilt.
Speaker 4: She was almost decapitated. They didn't find her for two days,
Speaker 4: so you know, the police are wondering who would do
Speaker 4: such a thing to this helpless old woman who hadn't
Speaker 4: never done anybody rock. There was hardly any evidence around.
Speaker 4: Small shoe print, smear, blood, phone cord that was with
Speaker 4: vala wall there. They didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 4: Two weeks later, she goes to the same place in
Speaker 4: Canyon Lake and there's sixty six year old June Roberts
Speaker 4: and she she was She would strive through the neighborhood
Speaker 4: and she saw somebody outside, she'd pull in and say,
Speaker 4: she said, hey, do you have a book about kicking
Speaker 4: alcohol edition addiction? And you know, can I borrow it?
Speaker 4: And she got up to go use the to go
Speaker 4: up to go get the book, and she came up
Speaker 4: behind her and strangled her with another phone court and
Speaker 4: she took cash and two credit cards from her.
Speaker 2: Some left.
Speaker 4: She went over to this high end shopping center and
Speaker 4: got a massage and got her hair done and her
Speaker 4: nails done and went shopping with the money. So a
Speaker 4: couple of weeks later, just like two weeks later, she said,
Speaker 4: Lake Elsinor It's is a little town near by that area.
Speaker 4: She goes into this antique store and there's only one
Speaker 4: woman there, Dorinda Hawkins. She's fifty seven, mother of eight,
Speaker 4: and she was just you know, the store just opened.
Speaker 4: She was vacuuming whatever, straightening up things. And Dana came
Speaker 4: in asked if she had any antique picture frames, and
Speaker 4: they walked to the back of the store where they were,
Speaker 4: and she grabbed the phone cord and starts strangling her,
Speaker 4: and while she was fighting for life, Gray was whispering
Speaker 4: to her, just accept it. You know you're going to die,
Speaker 4: and she thought she she killed her. She left her there,
Speaker 4: laid dead. She got five dollars in a credit card
Speaker 4: for that for that murder, she took twenty dollars out
Speaker 4: of cash register. So she left her laid on the
Speaker 4: floor and uh she she was unconscious for an hour
Speaker 4: in the phone ring and it brought her out of
Speaker 4: her out of her coma as she had, and she
Speaker 4: was able to call the police and she gave a description.
Speaker 4: So when Dan found out that she didn't kill her
Speaker 4: and that she was able to identify her, she went
Speaker 4: out and got her hair cut short and dyed red.
Speaker 4: But the same time, Riverside County there, you know, they
Speaker 4: had like a sheriff substation. Riverside County is the largest
Speaker 4: county in America and it's you know, almost as big
Speaker 4: as New England. It's just incredibly huge. And there it's
Speaker 4: actually pretty poor county too, so they have their their
Speaker 4: resources are stretched pretty thin. This cop was talking to
Speaker 4: to her step her father's new wife, and she was
Speaker 4: shunging to the police detective because you know, her grandmother
Speaker 4: was killed, and they said that she told the cop
Speaker 4: that that Dana had a key to her house into
Speaker 4: the Canyon Lake subdivision, and so they were starting to
Speaker 4: look at her. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna watch what
Speaker 4: she does. So she does it again March sixteenth, just
Speaker 4: another two weeks. It seemed like every two weeks she
Speaker 4: had to about every time she had to get her
Speaker 4: nails done or her hair done, she would go out
Speaker 4: and kill somebody and steal their money. So she goes
Speaker 4: back to Canyon Lake, the same street where Norma Davis lived,
Speaker 4: and she saw eighty seven Dora Bbie come home from
Speaker 4: a doctor's appointment. And I guess Dora didn't really like
Speaker 4: her that much, and she she claimed that she was
Speaker 4: lost and wanted to look at a map, and so
Speaker 4: she let her in her house and she got the
Speaker 4: thumb cord tied it around her neck again, and this
Speaker 4: time Dora really fought she was a scrapper, and they
Speaker 4: totally trashed out the living room, broke things, some lamps
Speaker 4: fell down, and she eventually Dana grabbed a clothes iron
Speaker 4: and smacked her in the head until she was dead.
Speaker 4: That's the second murder. There's two murders in this book
Speaker 4: that are by clothes iron, of all things.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. Now let me ask a question here.
Speaker 2: Let's go back just a little bit because part of
Speaker 2: this we just missed a really key part here a
Speaker 2: little bit is this he talked about Jerry Amherst talking
Speaker 2: to detective Greco. What really, which movie asked about this thing?
Speaker 2: Here is that by the time detective Greco gets a
Speaker 2: search warrant and is staking out the house at the
Speaker 2: boat at the same time she is, Dana is already
Speaker 2: killing Dora Bebe and has already killed her and then
Speaker 2: gone on a shopping spree. So just take us a
Speaker 2: little bit back, because that's an incredible sort of meanwhile, well.
Speaker 4: Mean yeah, meanwhile, while she was killing Dora, they were
Speaker 4: getting the search warrants for the house, and she went
Speaker 4: out shopping and the cops were waiting for her to
Speaker 4: come home. And when she came home, the police she
Speaker 4: had her car was filled with shopping bags. They came
Speaker 4: to search her house, and they didn't know that she
Speaker 4: had just killed another person just a few hours before that,
Speaker 4: so they went through her thing. Yeah, it's like they
Speaker 4: could have been a little bit sooner, but when they
Speaker 4: put the time, they put these things together. Yeah, she
Speaker 4: had killed somebody while they're way for her to arrest her.
Speaker 4: So they found you know, purses and wallets and credit
Speaker 4: cards sitting in her house, two thousand dollars in cash
Speaker 4: which was taken out of June Roberts bank account. I
Speaker 4: found that, you know her she had not Briana clothes
Speaker 4: and jury and you know, some of these things weren't
Speaker 4: even opened or used. They stud their tags on it.
Speaker 4: So so they put the cups on her and arrested her.
Speaker 4: And she seemed to be just as hard to interrogate
Speaker 4: and interview in jail as she was just in her
Speaker 4: life as she was.
Speaker 2: You talked about that about the strip keeys part telling
Speaker 2: our audience about this odd.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she caught trouble with all the inmates and guards
Speaker 4: and they separated her from general population. So when the
Speaker 4: detectives and even reporters, when they came to her, she
Speaker 4: would do a strip tease behind the bars, just to
Speaker 4: throw those guys off. She also made money selling pictures
Speaker 4: of her, naked photos of her to people. She had
Speaker 4: all these pen pals in jail that were all writing her,
Speaker 4: sending her gifts and things. She never let up on that.
Speaker 2: And what was did she admit or deny the crime?
Speaker 4: She ended up leading guilty to the murders of June
Speaker 4: Roberts and Dora bb and the attempted murder of Darena Hawkins.
Speaker 4: She was not charged with Norman Davis's murder. They already
Speaker 4: had so much honor. And when she saw that she
Speaker 4: was going to get the death penalty for all this,
Speaker 4: she fled guilty and she was given life with no
Speaker 4: chance of parole.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yes, it's a very fascinating tale.
Speaker 4: Now let's say, you know, okah, but oh, I just
Speaker 4: find it odd about how the death penalty is dealt out,
Speaker 4: because there's some people that would just killed one child
Speaker 4: got the death penalty. Then there's people like her who
Speaker 4: killed four, killed three and almost killed a fourth and
Speaker 4: they don't get the death penalty, right, It's just a yeah.
Speaker 4: It made me think a lot about how the death
Speaker 4: penalty is issued here in America.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, there's this disparity in how it's applied.
Speaker 2: But what kind of system do you have where one
Speaker 2: state doesn't have one and a death penalty one does.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's a definition of unjust. If you can
Speaker 2: put your toe over into another state and the same
Speaker 2: crime would be a death penalty in another state, it
Speaker 2: isn't right. So that's the ultimate disparity, I would think.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, all the way around, because you know, I
Speaker 4: write in the introduction there was only four women that
Speaker 4: have been executed in the history of California, and there's
Speaker 4: only been about one hundred women convicted of murder in
Speaker 4: the entire history of California. And compare that to probably
Speaker 4: eighty thousand men who have who committed murder. Yeah, over
Speaker 4: only men, Yeah, overwhelmingly, and with the death penalty. Out
Speaker 4: of the four women that were killed, only one did
Speaker 4: an actual killing, the other one did the planning in
Speaker 4: Barbara Graham was completely innocent. And I've kicked off a
Speaker 4: few criminal historians about this, but I've done my research
Speaker 4: in Barbara Graham. She was like a third generation Oakland prostitute.
Speaker 4: She had never had a chance. She grew up in
Speaker 4: the Foster homes and she was a heroin addict at
Speaker 4: a young age. She was just kind of like just
Speaker 4: kind of a good time girls. She was in the
Speaker 4: wrong place at the wrung time. This guy named Jack
Speaker 4: Santos and EMMITTT. Perkins were the ones that really did
Speaker 4: commit the murder. And those two had a criminal ring
Speaker 4: in northern California for about twenty years up until they
Speaker 4: got caught in the late fifties. They would just go
Speaker 4: up these lonely highways here in northern California and they
Speaker 4: would see somebody at a rest stop or something, usually
Speaker 4: a salesman or something, and they would rob and kill
Speaker 4: the guy and dump his body in some ravine and
Speaker 4: steal the car and maybe dump the car in a
Speaker 4: ravine or whatever. But there were all these unsolved murderers
Speaker 4: and people disappearing, and they think that Santo's and Hurrikins
Speaker 4: could have been responsible at least his game were maybe
Speaker 4: fIF fe murders that happened between nineteen thirty nine nineteen
Speaker 4: fifty nine, but Barbara act Made made a movie about her,
Speaker 4: I Want to Live and as great as their last
Speaker 4: words when when they put her in a gas chamber,
Speaker 4: guard said, just take a deep breath and hold it.
Speaker 4: You won't feel anything, and she said, how the hell
Speaker 4: do you know?
Speaker 2: Wow, let's segue into talking about one of the most
Speaker 2: interesting stories in this book, hands down, and what I'd
Speaker 2: never heard of before, and this is the Acid Queen,
Speaker 2: Larissa Schuster, and we alluded to her in the introduction
Speaker 2: just as a former Larissa Foreman was born in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty in Clarence, Missouri, and she studied biochemistry and she
Speaker 2: met Timothy when they were both working at a nursery home.
Speaker 2: A nursing home. Pardon me, now, this is a tale
Speaker 2: that you have gone quite in depth and to show
Speaker 2: the character change, and this is very complex transformation that
Speaker 2: this woman goes through to become this Acid Queen. So
Speaker 2: tell us a little bit about Larissa Foreman and this
Speaker 2: very successful person and talented person as well. That ends
Speaker 2: up being one of the more interesting stories in your book.
Speaker 2: Acid Queen.
Speaker 4: Oh, thanks, This was a real cohitted story to write too.
Speaker 4: It probably it took a lot of my time writing
Speaker 4: it because there wasn't much written about it other than
Speaker 4: these paper articles and things like that. And this just
Speaker 4: happened in two thousand and three in President of California.
Speaker 4: And you might think of President of California. It's actually
Speaker 4: the fourth largest city in California, and it's basically an
Speaker 4: agricul cultural city. They do a lot of packaging and
Speaker 4: canning of food products they grow, you know, in the
Speaker 4: rich San Joaquin Valley. You know, anything can grow there.
Speaker 2: So she was a.
Speaker 4: Missouri girl, lived in one of the most dullest places
Speaker 4: you can ever imagine, just flat bean fields. And she
Speaker 4: met Timothy Schuster, and he was from an equally boring place, Golden, Illinois.
Speaker 4: And so they met, like you said, they met at
Speaker 4: a job that they worked at together, and they got
Speaker 4: married in nineteen eighty two and had a kid. And
Speaker 4: then Larissa got this job offer at a research lab
Speaker 4: in Fresno, and they packed up and moved there, had
Speaker 4: another kid. Timothy found a job as an administrator at
Speaker 4: Saint Agnes Medical Center. I'm doing pretty good, you know.
Speaker 4: Resno is also a very poor place, and to have
Speaker 4: a good job in that area. You know, you live
Speaker 4: in high you have a nice house, you have a
Speaker 4: nice car. You know, everything is at your fingertips, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, settled into a regular middle class life. Belonged
Speaker 4: to a Lutheran church and Tim was a Mason and everything.
Speaker 4: And Lewison noticed that the lab looked like it wasn't
Speaker 4: doing too well. She said to open her own, and
Speaker 4: she started Central California Research Labs. And it's still there.
Speaker 4: They this was all done and done, it was sold.
Speaker 4: So you know, you can't have a they have a
Speaker 4: successful ag lab in Fresno. Is is uh, well, not
Speaker 4: necessarily difficult because that's where you know, the nation's farming is.
Speaker 4: You know, Fresno it's the number one Fresno County is
Speaker 4: the number one agriculture county in America. And again it's
Speaker 4: you know, the size of Etquta or something that's just
Speaker 4: the same. She got really successful at this, and.
Speaker 2: She went through success.
Speaker 4: She became very mean and she was at work a lot,
Speaker 4: and so her husband became the caretaker of the family.
Speaker 4: He took to kids to school and made dinner, you know,
Speaker 4: took them here and there, and all that. And in
Speaker 4: the meantime, Larissa, you know, she was chasing keeping up
Speaker 4: on scientific breakthroughs and techniques and things, and she was
Speaker 4: hiring scientists and directing lab workers and you know, very
Speaker 4: busy persons. She had to travel a lot to speak
Speaker 4: with clients and conferences and things. And so as her
Speaker 4: company was getting more successful, she got more obnoxious. And
Speaker 4: she was used to being the boss, and she treated
Speaker 4: her family the same way. And she would make fun
Speaker 4: of her husband's section little prowless in front of people
Speaker 4: at you know, little parties and things like that, and
Speaker 4: she dragged about an affair she had and how much
Speaker 4: money she made. And yeah, everyone, no one really liked her.
Speaker 4: Everyone liked Kim. Tim was a good guy. They all
Speaker 4: liked him. And you know, he had a good job himself.
Speaker 4: He was making over eighty grand a year, so you know,
Speaker 4: that's that's not like he's pumping gas at a gas
Speaker 4: station or anything. So their daughter, be Castine, she started
Speaker 4: having problems in teenage years and she just chipped her
Speaker 4: out to her parents back in Missouri. And in the meantime,
Speaker 4: their marriage was on the rocks. They filed for divorce
Speaker 4: and they lived in separate fictions of their house. But
Speaker 4: Melissa wanted everything. She did not want Tim to get
Speaker 4: a single thing, not even the blender out of their
Speaker 4: divorce when they got divorced, so she went out to
Speaker 4: Missouri and fourth of July holiday in two thousand and two,
Speaker 4: and Tim moved out of the house, which angered her.
Speaker 4: And here's here's a person that she's done nothing but
Speaker 4: push out of her life. And then when he moves out,
Speaker 4: she got totally angry and she did not want to
Speaker 4: want to, you know, split the money that they made together,
Speaker 4: which is California law, you get fifty to fifty. So
Speaker 4: she got custody over their son, Tyler, and he got
Speaker 4: Every other weekend they would meet at the place where
Speaker 4: she got her nails done, and she would always like
Speaker 4: yell and scream at him, and then she'd go and
Speaker 4: get her nails done and then she'd make fun of
Speaker 4: them some more. So she's just got this big mouths
Speaker 4: and she's telling people that, you know, you know, if
Speaker 4: he died, my life would be great, and things like that.
Speaker 4: She started doing some really odd things. She ordered hydrochloric acid,
Speaker 4: sulfuric acid, and some other kinds. They her company used
Speaker 4: maybe a couple of gallons a year. He was buying
Speaker 4: it by the box full, and the shipping and receiving people,
Speaker 4: they at first thought something was wrong, and she said, no,
Speaker 4: that's what we're getting.
Speaker 2: We need it for for.
Speaker 4: For the business, so they didn't think anything of it.
Speaker 4: She's the boss. So somebody broke into Schuster's condo while
Speaker 4: he was gone, and it was Larissa and one of
Speaker 4: her employees, this twenty one year old guy, and they
Speaker 4: stole some stupid things and just trashed out his house.
Speaker 4: And he was like, you know, wow, he knew that
Speaker 4: it was her. He couldn't prove it. He moved into
Speaker 4: another place, got cameras and motion sensors, all these things,
Speaker 4: and Larissa would leave these long, scene obscenity laden messages
Speaker 4: on his message machine. Back then they had him and
Speaker 4: got must have been one of last time. But she
Speaker 4: then bought from her company a fifty five gallon of
Speaker 4: blue plastic barrel, and she jokingly asked her warehouse staff
Speaker 4: if they think it was big enough to put a
Speaker 4: body in, and you know, everyone just kind of laughed.
Speaker 4: You know, it's like some of humor. But Luisa was
Speaker 4: really making plans.
Speaker 2: So she trapped.
Speaker 4: She trapped ten by calling him and saying that she
Speaker 4: needed him over his house. You know, she was injured
Speaker 4: and outside of his house. And when he came outside,
Speaker 4: the twenty one year old guy fagon stunned him with
Speaker 4: a stun gun, and they put chloroform on him, rendered
Speaker 4: him unconscious. They tied him up, tossed him in the
Speaker 4: back of a pickup truck, and drove to Russ's home
Speaker 4: where they put him head first into the barrel and
Speaker 4: then poured eleven gallons of hydrochloric acid and three gallons
Speaker 4: of sepheric acid over him. And he was still alive.
Speaker 4: He was unconscious, but he was still alive. That's how
Speaker 4: she killed him.
Speaker 2: Now what happens. She thinks that he's not going to
Speaker 2: be missed, but why is it that he's missed so quickly?
Speaker 2: And as a result, what happens.
Speaker 4: And she was so self absorbed with her own life
Speaker 4: that she didn't know that he had gotten laid off
Speaker 4: from his job and he was going to meet a friend,
Speaker 4: a coal worker for breakfast to discuss, you know, just
Speaker 4: to hash out some things and you know, do a
Speaker 4: little networking and stuff. And he didn't show up and
Speaker 4: he didn't enter his phone, and they knew that he
Speaker 4: would always do that. Sprinted his drove over to his
Speaker 4: house and he looked inside me saw that he had
Speaker 4: cell phone, his wallet and watch. We're all sitting there
Speaker 4: right in plain view. And he knew that he would
Speaker 4: never leave, you know, you know, fairly meticulous guy. He
Speaker 4: would always do the same things. So Melissa took her
Speaker 4: son to meet just like she was going to drop
Speaker 4: him off for the weekend, and he didn't show up,
Speaker 4: and she was, like she thought. Larissa said to her
Speaker 4: manicurists that I haven't feeling this divorce is going to
Speaker 4: go my way, and that you know, oh, he didn't
Speaker 4: even show up to pick up his son and on
Speaker 4: this day that he's supposed to have him. But the
Speaker 4: manicurists noticed that her hands were so sweaty that her
Speaker 4: fake nails wouldn't stay in. So his friends called the police,
Speaker 4: and they didn't know, you know, what was gonna You know,
Speaker 4: missing people get missing all the time, and you know,
Speaker 4: they go to Vegas or they go to you know,
Speaker 4: Tequoia or King's Canyon and all the wilderness out there,
Speaker 4: and thought, oh, maybe he just went off there and
Speaker 4: stuff but never did show up.
Speaker 2: What was the pardon me? The when the police have her?
Speaker 2: It's very very interesting when you put this in the book.
Speaker 2: You talk about the strategy that the police employ once
Speaker 2: the idea that that Schuster is their their person, but
Speaker 2: they they have the thing with the cell phone and
Speaker 2: then the contact they have with thegone. So tell us
Speaker 2: how they figure that out in quick order and as
Speaker 2: a result, what do they do? Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so she said. When they had her come in
Speaker 4: for the interview, she said she didn't have her phone
Speaker 4: with her, and they told her she could leave. They
Speaker 4: walked her to their car, and when they got to
Speaker 4: her car, they saw that her cell phone was in there,
Speaker 4: so they took it. And because she said that she
Speaker 4: never even called him forever, she just never did. And
Speaker 4: they looked at his phone, her phone, and saw that
Speaker 4: he was now only had speed dial, but she had
Speaker 4: called him like multiple times. They also noticed that she
Speaker 4: had abrasions on her legs, and they thought, okay, this
Speaker 4: isn't right. They let her go. They thought, okay, we're
Speaker 4: gonna give her some rope and let her hang herself.
Speaker 2: And what does she what does she do? Well? When
Speaker 2: I'm talking about is the strategy that they employ once
Speaker 2: they have an idea that Forgone has something to do
Speaker 2: with this. So, as I say, a veteran police will
Speaker 2: go with the weakest person, the person that they think
Speaker 2: that they have the most information over, and then target them.
Speaker 2: So it's very interesting how you capture that. So tell
Speaker 2: us how they what they do as a result, and
Speaker 2: what information they get from Foregone.
Speaker 4: All right, Well, when Shuster left, she called the Gone
Speaker 4: and they went to her house and took the barrel
Speaker 4: and took it to a rented storage area which she
Speaker 4: had an employee rent for her so it wouldn't be
Speaker 4: in her name. They popped open the lid and it
Speaker 4: was just, you know, just wretched. They had to make
Speaker 4: more room in the barrel, and they cut off his
Speaker 4: feet and poured two more bottles of acid and resealed it.
Speaker 4: She went off on vacation. So these cops knew that
Speaker 4: for Gun, he's only a twenty one year old guy.
Speaker 4: He lived with his parents, and they brought him into
Speaker 4: question and the relationship with her just kind of innocently,
Speaker 4: and they knew they could sweat this guy out. You know,
Speaker 4: he's basically just a kid. And he ended up telling
Speaker 4: by the third interview, he ended up telling them that
Speaker 4: he had been paid two thousand dollars for helping with
Speaker 4: the murder and he had to ditch everything in the
Speaker 4: stun gun and a porter John at a construction site,
Speaker 4: and they went and found it, and then they got
Speaker 4: a search warrant to go through her property and they
Speaker 4: found they found out about the storage locker. Sweating this
Speaker 4: guy out, You know that that would be the easiest
Speaker 4: thing because you know Larissa was you know, she's educated,
Speaker 4: she's a savvy businesswoman. She's always planning like five steps ahead.
Speaker 4: You know, this Tigan guy, he was just, you know,
Speaker 4: just a kid, just a just a hic kid who
Speaker 4: got a job at this research place. So the police
Speaker 4: went into the storage unit and opened it up, and
Speaker 4: you know, the whole place cleared out. It was horrible.
Speaker 4: Only his legs and hips were the only part of
Speaker 4: his body that wasn't dissolved.
Speaker 2: Man, Now they're looking for for Dana. Dana sue again,
Speaker 2: she's very very cocky and confident. So what what happens
Speaker 2: with you know again? Does she deny? How does she
Speaker 2: does she confess? Does she break down? Tell us what
Speaker 2: happens with Dana sue when she's confronted with some of
Speaker 2: this information, and now she respond she was.
Speaker 4: She was pretty pretty pretty cold, would be the best
Speaker 4: way to describe it. They they used every trick in
Speaker 4: the book to delay and to write derailed the trial.
Speaker 4: It ended up being held in Los Angeles County and
Speaker 4: Vegan wouldn't have anything to do with it because he
Speaker 4: was appealing his conviction and his lawyers told him not
Speaker 4: to do anything, but he used to. You know, the tapes.
Speaker 4: They put all the evidence out in front of her
Speaker 4: and had a lot of their friends come up who
Speaker 4: said that she spoken openly of her hatred and she
Speaker 4: wanted him dead. And you know the people that she
Speaker 4: her employees told about how you know, she asked if
Speaker 4: a body would fit into it. Another one talked about
Speaker 4: renting a truck for her. The day to barrow was
Speaker 4: moved about the the uh storage unit and all that stuff,
Speaker 4: And they played two dozen phone messages that they discovered
Speaker 4: on Tim Tim's answering machine from her that were just
Speaker 4: totally foul and she was threatening him. They even had
Speaker 4: a dust outline of the barrel that was in the
Speaker 4: garage and yeah, she uh, she let's see she she
Speaker 4: just made everyone came up and just said, you know
Speaker 4: that she was. That's how she was. She was, uh,
Speaker 4: just totally hated that guy. So she took the stand
Speaker 4: and she was just charming and articulate, and she kept
Speaker 4: her wits and temperate. Bay She had two days of
Speaker 4: cross examination. She had an excuse for everything from the
Speaker 4: purchases from the lab to her foul mouth messages. And
Speaker 4: she admitted that she helped Bargu move the barrel to
Speaker 4: the storage unit. That was the only thing that she
Speaker 4: would admit to. But she said that she did not
Speaker 4: kill him. And when she was sentenced to life without parole,
Speaker 4: she just sat stone faced while you know her her
Speaker 4: kids were crying in court and things, and she just
Speaker 4: didn't affect her it off. She just sat their stone
Speaker 4: face and there you know, six hundred dollars dress and
Speaker 4: dance hairdoo.
Speaker 2: Incredible story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it did not affect her off. She got life
Speaker 4: without parole.
Speaker 2: And yeah, absolutely, And what happened to the accomplice.
Speaker 4: He got thrown in prison for I think twenty years
Speaker 4: at least. I'm not sure if he got appealed or anything.
Speaker 4: I wrote this book last summer. It was actually wrote
Speaker 4: it pretty quick and did what I could with the
Speaker 4: research that I found, But he was in prison as
Speaker 4: a last year when I wrote this.
Speaker 2: Now we have time for one more story, and I
Speaker 2: think it's appropriate that we have a very interesting tale
Speaker 2: for a woman that and you put the story as
Speaker 2: Backgirl because she was referred to as Backgirl in the press.
Speaker 2: First off, tell us this is about Michelle Cummings sky
Speaker 2: Minsky Minsky, and tell us about her early life. You
Speaker 2: talk about a hard mentally and physically a life, sexual abuse.
Speaker 2: She lived in New Liberty, Iowa. So tell us about
Speaker 2: this real troubled youth Michelle, and as you write in
Speaker 2: the book, about what it led to in her early life,
Speaker 2: talk about background. Yeah, Michelle O.
Speaker 4: Kaminski was the only person I really felt sorry for
Speaker 4: in this entire book when I wrote it. She grew
Speaker 4: up in a really bad house. She was physically, mentally,
Speaker 4: possibly sexually abused. She ran away from home when she
Speaker 4: was fourteen years old, immediately became a stripper, dancer, stripper
Speaker 4: prostitute all over America, from Hawaii to New York City.
Speaker 4: You know, at a time when when most teenagers are
Speaker 4: concerned about acne. You know, she was snorting cocaine and
Speaker 4: dancing naked on stage and stuff. She got married a
Speaker 4: couple of times, you know, never worked out. She never
Speaker 4: got divorced either. When she's twenty years old. So for
Speaker 4: six years she was basically a stripper slash prostitute. You know,
Speaker 4: she was very good looking, beautiful, beautiful woman. She had
Speaker 4: a pat two of a vampire fight on her neck
Speaker 4: and this is nineteen ninety one, with a little drop
Speaker 4: of blood, and then on her arm she had like
Speaker 4: a bats flying like out of a belfry type thing
Speaker 4: when they got bigger and smaller. So she was working
Speaker 4: at the Mustang ranch in Nevada, and she kept a
Speaker 4: little apartment in a suburb of Sacramento. She had a
Speaker 4: you know, it was all done up like a vampire
Speaker 4: house and stuff. She just really liked all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: One of her favorite boyfriends was this retired Air Force
Speaker 4: lifer named Philip in Hawker, and he was divorced. Just
Speaker 4: a little guy, used to like the square dance and things,
Speaker 4: but his alcohol problem started getting the best of them.
Speaker 4: He worked as a civilian employee at McCallan Air Force
Speaker 4: Base and lived in a pretty bad neighborhood, well, pretty
Speaker 4: poor neighborhood and Joe by Mercedes Benz and looked out
Speaker 4: of place at there. But in Hawfer and Michelle liked
Speaker 4: each other and she actually was very fond of him,
Speaker 4: and she was over at his house one day, March fifth,
Speaker 4: nineteen ninety one. She took a bunch of LSD. And
Speaker 4: Michelle had a pretty serious drug problem. It wasn't that
Speaker 4: she had to take drugs, It's just that she wanted
Speaker 4: to take drugs, and she would take whatever drugs are
Speaker 4: just around. She'd take LSD, she'd take pout, she'd snort
Speaker 4: you know, anything, and was stoned all the time. So
Speaker 4: she took some LSD and she was at his trailer
Speaker 4: home and she went berserk. She thought that in offer
Speaker 4: an evil spirit, and she stabbed him to death and
Speaker 4: over thirty times in the shower, and then she stuck
Speaker 4: him in a bag and put him in his bedroom
Speaker 4: and took off in his car. So this then finds out,
Speaker 4: you know, when work calls up, and so say, you know,
Speaker 4: your dad hasn't been around a couple of days, a
Speaker 4: kind of he went and he found his father dead.
Speaker 4: So Batgirl disappears. The press called her Batgirl because of
Speaker 4: her tattoos and because of the vampire thing, and she know,
Speaker 4: she went for the heavy eye makeup and all that
Speaker 4: kind of mortitia goth girl. And she disappeared and old
Speaker 4: Time offered her low life drug dealing friends and co
Speaker 4: worker were just they were they were using her to
Speaker 4: get out of their own problems with the cops. They
Speaker 4: were just telling them anything she had a bomb, or
Speaker 4: that she had guns and all these things, and they
Speaker 4: meet her a lot worse than what she really was.
Speaker 2: So, you know, she was in the.
Speaker 4: Weekly World News and inside her current Affair and court
Speaker 4: CV and all this stuff words bat girl, and they
Speaker 4: finally found her two months later in Bilisi, Mississippi. She
Speaker 4: was sitting on the beach and the Mercedes she had
Speaker 4: painted silver was in the back of a truck, a
Speaker 4: rented Uhaul type truck, and topped Joe by and thought, well,
Speaker 4: that's kind of odd. He just studied talked to them,
Speaker 4: and he found out that that it was you know,
Speaker 4: this wanted bat girl. So she took a day or
Speaker 4: two for the sacrament of police to get there and
Speaker 4: take her back, you know, and go through all those things.
Speaker 4: And when they got to the airport, you know, after
Speaker 4: two months of you know, batgirl hysteria. You know what
Speaker 4: they saw was this twenty year old girl, had little
Speaker 4: nose and freckled faith, and you know, she was just
Speaker 4: a frightened twenty year old person. She looked more like
Speaker 4: a college student than I wrote a murdering coke loving
Speaker 4: weed smoking, I could drink and and iterate good time girl.
Speaker 4: And she tried to explain what happened, but she had
Speaker 4: not had any kind of education at all since maybe
Speaker 4: she was twelve or thirteen years old. Her brain in
Speaker 4: all the drugs that she thuck just stunted her emotional
Speaker 4: and psychological growth. She was basically like a thirteen year
Speaker 4: old as far as a reasoning ghost. And you know,
Speaker 4: at her trial, they brought up her two ex husbands,
Speaker 4: and you know, when they searched her apartment, they found
Speaker 4: she was doing these love letters to airmen and failures
Speaker 4: and stuff, making them think that she was in love
Speaker 4: with them, and made Sunder money and gifts and things
Speaker 4: like that. She ended up doing a plea bargain for
Speaker 4: his murder. And yeah, you know, he was the one
Speaker 4: person that the press made to look out like she
Speaker 4: was this you know, vampire girl, and she was really
Speaker 4: just this innocent person really had no chance in life.
Speaker 4: Even when they contacted her parents, they were just like,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I haven't seen her in years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, incredible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Now you know the odd thing about her. I
Speaker 4: feel bad she's she's still in prison. I guess she
Speaker 4: wasn't the best inmate, and she's had more time put
Speaker 4: on her.
Speaker 2: Well that's unusual, certainly. Yeah, in very troubled youth and
Speaker 2: then turned into a very troubled adult obviously. Here now,
Speaker 2: I just want to ask to we you've talked one
Speaker 2: of the stories we won't get to we won't have
Speaker 2: enough time as the Doctor's Wife Part two. It's a
Speaker 2: well known story about Betty Roderick. Uh, you have The
Speaker 2: Doctor's Wife Part one, two and three. So before I
Speaker 2: let you go, tell us a little bit about some
Speaker 2: of the stories that you that you have in this
Speaker 2: book before I let you go, some of the ones
Speaker 2: that people can look forward to reading and finding out
Speaker 2: about this book Deadly at Women.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've had actually there I read about four doctors wives,
Speaker 4: and there's actually about twice that many that that their
Speaker 4: stories just weren't as interesting as the ones that I
Speaker 4: wrote about. But there's something about doctor's wives. A lot
Speaker 4: of them put their husbands through school and then they
Speaker 4: get dumped, you know, once they get successful. So it
Speaker 4: seems to be something that happens quite often. One of
Speaker 4: my favorites was the first one that happened in nineteen
Speaker 4: forty five in San Francisco and she killed her her
Speaker 4: husband's girlfriend, and then when her husband found out, he
Speaker 4: went and committed suicide. But at the trial she had
Speaker 4: been in small plays or local San Francisco productions, and
Speaker 4: the prosecutor said, she's an actress. Everything she says is live,
Speaker 4: and this is Irene Mansfelt. Her attorney went up there
Speaker 4: and brought in all these people that she worked with,
Speaker 4: all these actors and directors, and they all said to
Speaker 4: a tea that she was a horrible actress, which is
Speaker 4: something that really backfired on the prosecution. There's another one
Speaker 4: case like that too, where the prosecutors just put in
Speaker 4: too much into one thing and they ended up getting
Speaker 4: a really small sentence for what happened. That woman only
Speaker 4: got twenty five months in prison. But one of my
Speaker 4: favorite ones is it Smelled one too, and it's this
Speaker 4: couple that were a little down of their luck. They
Speaker 4: were seasonal workers up in vacation land up in the Sierras,
Speaker 4: and they had saved the nest egg of five thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: They were going to open a bar. They're going to
Speaker 4: buy a bar in Alaska. But the husband ended up
Speaker 4: spending all the money gambling while they were waiting out
Speaker 4: the winter up in Sonora, and his wife killed him.
Speaker 4: They were living in a little cabin. She killed him,
Speaker 4: chopped him up, and buried him alongside the cabin in
Speaker 4: two graves only in six inches deep. And then she
Speaker 4: told the people that I got this job. I'll be
Speaker 4: going on moving on down the road. Hobby he went
Speaker 4: fire how to get things done. So later, like three
Speaker 4: four months later, in the summertime, some people were renting
Speaker 4: out that cabin and they just smelled it just smelled funny.
Speaker 4: They started poking around and they found the two graves.
Speaker 4: One had his body a torso and the other one
Speaker 4: had like his arms and legs in it. And they
Speaker 4: ended up finding her fairly easy. And she had a
Speaker 4: really rough life too. It's the thing, you know, in
Speaker 4: these stories, either the person had a really horrible upbringing
Speaker 4: or they were brought up you know, with all the
Speaker 4: lecturies you could ever dream of. There's really no rhyme
Speaker 4: or reason for any of us.
Speaker 2: Two extremes. Certainly, what other stories do you have in
Speaker 2: here in terms of sort of that offer a range
Speaker 2: as we did offer in this is talking about These
Speaker 2: four stories are quite different than each other. So tell
Speaker 2: us just a few more that people could look forward
Speaker 2: to in this book.
Speaker 4: Well, I have a couple, maybe three or four stories
Speaker 4: about very young women like fourteen fifteen years old, who
Speaker 4: commit murder. One was in Fresno where a twin killed
Speaker 4: her twin sister and had no problem about it. She
Speaker 4: even told the court she would do it again if
Speaker 4: she had the chance. She could not stay and her
Speaker 4: twin sister. Another one is a murder in King's Canyon
Speaker 4: National Park, which you know, you would think is just
Speaker 4: the most most serene, beautiful place center, but you know,
Speaker 4: murders do happen there too. Also a couple of mothers
Speaker 4: that killed or were trying to kill their daughters, or
Speaker 4: did kill their families. I got a couple of them
Speaker 4: like that. Of course, I had about Phil Hartman, the
Speaker 4: great comedian whose wife yeah murdered, And I also have
Speaker 4: about this happened a few years ago when I first
Speaker 4: moved here in two thousand and one, and that was
Speaker 4: Elsa mcnabby, who was a lifelong gricter and she finally
Speaker 4: married a rich attorney and spent all his money and
Speaker 4: then ended up killing him and burying him in a
Speaker 4: greape field a vineyard, along with this young woman who
Speaker 4: just didn't know anything. She was just probably the most
Speaker 4: native person in the world. And her husband, after he
Speaker 4: was dead and all, he never did know his wife's
Speaker 4: real name because she had used so many fake names
Speaker 4: in her life. He really had no idea that who
Speaker 4: he was married to didn't matter because he was dead.
Speaker 4: But she ended up committing suicide in prison, and then
Speaker 4: tried to pitch the whole thing on her accomplice, who
Speaker 4: was just her office. Basically, she was mostly the upper
Speaker 4: love and greed, love and money and things.
Speaker 2: Ye incredible. I want to thank you for coming on
Speaker 2: David once again. It's been a pleasure talking about California's
Speaker 2: deadliest women, dangerous names, and murderous moms. For those that
Speaker 2: might want to look into your rather work, do you
Speaker 2: have a website? Facebook? Tell us how people might look
Speaker 2: into that other work and contact you if they.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have a Facebook page just my name, David
Speaker 4: Cultick author page, and I also have a Amazon page.
Speaker 2: I have four books.
Speaker 4: This is my fourth book of California crime history, and
Speaker 4: this is my most focused one. This one is really
Speaker 4: uh you know, razor focused on women who.
Speaker 2: Kill mh and for those things. Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 4: By the same. And I'm coming around and doing book
Speaker 4: shows on this, mostly in California between now and February
Speaker 4: or so. Well.
Speaker 2: Congratulations. I just wanted to spell your last name for people.
Speaker 2: It's k u l c z y K.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you very mu. Back in the eighties, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 2: I had that Ukrainian I'm the Ukrainian guy with vowels
Speaker 2: in his name, so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I feel well, we're brother little bit way.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you very much, David. You have
Speaker 2: a great evening. Thank you very much. It's been great
Speaker 2: speaking with you. California's deadliest women. Thank you very much,
Speaker 2: have great Thank you for having me on good Night
Speaker 4: Kaya