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The Prosecutors
The Prosecutors
01:27:51 10/16/2023

Transcript

At Pizzey, we know our customers needs are evolving, so we're evolving to by bringing the best of technology and people together. Every interaction, every innovation and every connection is built upon a better understanding of you, and it all comes together to create a banking experience that's altogether more human. PITTSBURGH Altogether, more human. Permanent TSB heals him treating his PTSD is regulated by the central Bank of Ireland. Guys, we are back to talk about Butcher Box, one of our favorite sponsors of the show. You guys know that I love me. Just recently, I made some ribs that I got from Butcher Box and they were amazing. They absolutely fell off the bone, and my wife, who is not a huge rib person, love them just as much as I do. But that's what you can expect from Butcher Box. You will easily find higher quality meat and seafood that you can trust. It's 100 percent grass fed, free range organic chicken, pork raised crate free and wild caught seafood, and it's all humanely raised with no antibiotics or added hormones. Brett, I just love Butcher Box for so many reasons, and one of them is that it is the ultimate convenience. It's delivered right to your doorstep, and there's free shipping always and curated to customized box plans. And Butcher Box is giving us a special deal. Sign up today using code prosecute to receive ground beef for life, plus $20 off your first order. That's two pounds of ground beef free in every box for the lifetime of your membership, plus $20 off your first order when you sign up at Butcher Box..com/ prosecute and use code prosecute. Hello, this is a prepaid call from Cerise Moore, an inmate at a Florida Department of Corrections institution. My name is Jack Lawrence and this is one minute remaining. Hi, I'm David Charlie. I'm out of St. Lucie County, Florida. My name is inventing a car. My name's Aaron Kidwell. My name is Jessica Lange. See Kimberly Burn, a podcast released weekly where I'll talk to multiple inmates, all serving lengthy prison sentences for some very serious crimes. Well, about AK 47 and we'll go outside of the house. They kind of caught me off guard there where you just casually said he pulls out an AK 47 right into the trunk, that it's just an everyday occurrence, one minute remaining wherever you get your podcasts from. You have one minute remaining. And and and and I'm Bret and I'm Alice, and we are the prosecutors. Today on the prosecutors, a local family falls victim to a crime so gruesome it's assumed to be a Halloween prank. Unfortunately, this is no prank. It's a Halloween massacre. Everybody and welcome to this episode of the prosecutors, I'm Bret, and I'm joined, as always, by my spirited co-host Alice spirited like Casper. That is definitely the first word that pops to mind. Thanks, Bret. And you know, we are here today to talk about an incredibly tragic, sad story. This is just straight up murder. But yet some of you out there listening because you now think that we only do creepy horror like episodes at Halloween. Hang tight because this is just straight up murder three times over. It is quite horrific, like most of the cases we covered throughout the year. It's one of those things. This one happened to happened on Halloween. So that's really the connection. But yeah, I mean, the thing about this case, and we're going to talk about this a lot. This is one of those that feels. Like everyone involved was in denial so deep because the warning signs were all there until finally the absolute horror occurs. But you know what? We'll circle back to this at the end because we're keeping you all in suspense too, as to what we're going to be talking about today. But I will say. As a parent, I really don't know what other steps I would have taken and if there would have been a different outcome if this were my life, and that's the really scary part, because I know a lot of people who are in similar situations and you'll hear about this is a long lead up to what ultimately happens. But it's not very obvious to me that anyone else in the same shoes would have acted differently, and that's why I think this is particularly horrific. Well, let's go ahead and dove into this case for those of you who are not familiar with it. This case takes us to Ottawa County and on the outskirts of that county lay the small town of Martin, Ohio, with a population of just over 1000 residents. It's a community that is straight out of a Dateline episode, right? Close knit and violent crime is virtually nonexistent kind of place, so everybody knows their neighbors and nothing bad ever happens, which whenever someone says that you know, the next thing they're going to say is the really horrible, terrible, awful thing that happened in this place. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. Martin Residents Bill and Susan Lisicki were well known in the community. The pair had met later in life and had formed a strong connection. They shared a common love of all things outdoors, particularly hunting, fishing and gardening. And in 2001, the couple married and they blended their family together. Bill had one son from a previous relationship. William, B.J. Lisk and Susan had two sons, Derrick and Devin Griffin. And though Bill and Susan were very happy together, life in the Lisicki household was far from perfect. B.J. Lynskey was not happy with his new living situation. He had been used to living with his dad and had free reign over the house because his dad worked really long hours. And when Bill and Susan first got married, he was a teenager. He was about 15 16 years old, and so he kind of had this very long reign to do whatever he wanted when he lived with his dad, but not so much when Susan and her two sons, who were around the same age as B.J., moved in. Susan, as probably a lot of mothers, began to establish some rules within the home and creating a more structured living environment. Really, these were probably the same rules that she had for her own sons when she was living with them. Things like, you know, curfews and getting your work done. You had chores, that sort of thing. Nothing out of the ordinary per se, but it was more structured than what B.J. was used to. Now this adjustment proved to be too much for B.J., and thus began a long history of tension between him and Susan, oftentimes ending in violence. And this all came to a head in 2004, about three years after Bill and Susan got married. When, after a series of violent attacks, B.J. was finally forced to leave the risky home and move into a group home in nearby Sandusky. As many of you listening know, when you try and blend a family together in different ways of living and different rules and everything else, there's going to be some growing pains and you see that a lot. But this obviously is an extreme example of that because you go from, I don't like your rules. I mean, this is not mom, I hate you and running up and slamming the door. It's this becomes very violent, very quickly. We're going to we're going to talk about that more to the point that, you know, B.J. is actually moving out of the home and the police are becoming involved and there's all sorts of stuff going on. And as you're going to see soon, there's more to this than just. Two families that aren't meshing as well as the parents would like. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, up until the violence point, I think this sounds like a lot of blended families. There are entire sitcoms written about the tensions that come with blended families. But I think what's different about this particular situation is how violent B.J. gets with Susan and his stepmom, how throughout the years, BJ's mental health continued to deteriorate. He was socially awkward, but his problems were deeper than just that. It wasn't just social awkwardness. He was actually diagnosed as suffering from schizoaffective disorder. And when B.J. would drink, which he did not infrequently, his condition would worsen and alcohol had the effect on him of making him very combative and often violent. And anybody has had to deal with a family member who has this condition knows how volatile they can be, particularly when they aren't taking their medication or when the medication isn't working. And alcohol seems like it is the ultimate sort of accelerant to what's going on here and unfortunately. You know, you would think maybe it's as simple as just he just can't drink anymore, but look it, he's I mean, he's basically a grown person at this point. And so we shouldn't be doing this. But he is. And when he drinks that combined with his mental illness that he's dealing with, leads him to enter into these violent episodes. And as I said, we're going to give you examples and the kind of things that would happen in this family. And a lot of them are pretty shocking. And as Alice said, you read this story, you look at this story from the outside and you're seeing this develop and you know how it's going to end. We wouldn't be covering this on a true crime podcast in October if everything turned out sunshine and rainbows. It's not going to happen that way. And so it's easy to sort of think, Well, I would not have let that continue. I would have stopped it there. I would have stepped in. But so many people who are listening to this right now, you've lived this mean you know how difficult it can be when you have a family member who's who's struggling with this and B.J. was struggling. But his brothers or his step brothers, I should say, I mean, they were thriving. Derek Griffin was an accomplished runner. He was setting records in high school for the relay. He also had a second degree black belt in taekwondo and represented the U.S. and the taekwondo competition in Italy, and he was described as nice and quiet. I'm sure he he lit up every room he walked into. Nevin, who was the youngest of three boys, you know, he was loved by the community. He was an active member of the church. He sang in the choir and it was also a diver for the Oak Harbor rockets. So on the one hand, you got a B.J. He's having all these issues, and on the other hand, his stepbrother seemed to be doing really well. And you can imagine that probably didn't help the situation. BJ probably looked at that and thought, You know, this is unfair. They are treating them better than me. The reason everything's going well for them is because they like them better. You can imagine the dynamic that's beginning to form in this family, and unfortunately, life would be forever altered for this small town and for the Lisicki family on Halloween 2010, when three members of the beloved bunch would be brutally murdered in their own home. Whoo. So that's heavy. And, you know, adding to this entire dynamic, remember these three sons from this blended family? They're all boys. They're all men, young men who are teens when their families being blended, all very close in age. And that's going to have a different dynamic than if you had, you know, very differing ages or different stages of life. But here we have essentially very similarly situated boys with very different outcomes in the home that they share. So let's dive into the timeline here, because we've talked about how this is a long lead up to what ultimately happened on Halloween 2010. So in 2001, Susan and Bill get married and Susan with her two sons move into the Lisicki home. This would mark the start of a long history of issues between B.J. and Susan neighbors who were close to that. Alioski's noted that there were several incidents between B.J. and Susan. One neighbor, Mark, was called over on multiple occasions to try and calm B.J. down because though B.J. is a child, she's still living at home. He's a teenager. He's essentially like a grown man, and Susan is a woman, and he is kind of gets so violent, so combative that she cannot physically control him. And so she has to enlist the help of their neighbor to calm and calm the situation down because she is not able to do so herself. Now, many people will say this, and you can. You can tell as we're telling you what B.J. does, that he is showing signs of mental illness and that drinking that he does, it typically aggravates his already unpredictable behavior, making him even more violent and unpredictable. In 2002, Bill calls the police when B.J. was threatening to hurt himself. So now it's a different dynamic. A lot of that tension had been between B.J. and Susan. But now it's BJ's dad who calls the police because B.J. is not only threatening others in the home, he's now threatening to hurt himself. And when the police arrive, B.J. actually attacks the police and the ends up catching an assault charge in juvenile court. But that charge went nowhere. So this really you begin to see the escalation. Not only are the parents not able to kind of control B.J., they've started to ask neighbors to come help, you know, it's bringing other people into the home dynamic, and that's not even enough to control B.J.. Now the police are being involved in helping to control B.J. and even when the police come. His response to them is violence. And you know, he's being violent. He's being violent with the families, being fine with the police. And yet there's still nothing happening on the sort of official side. There are no consequences for this behavior. And to the extent that the behavior shouldn't have consequences because it's driven primarily by mental illness, there's nothing really being done about that either. And that's one of the things about this case, and we're doing this case in Halloween because it culminates in Halloween. But this is one that I feel like is emblematic of problems throughout sort of our justice system, our mental health system, to the extent we even have one where you have people and families who are in this situation and they love a family member, but the family member is violent and the family member is violent because of these mental issues. I mean, they are not rational and they are acting irrationally, but unfortunately that often presents itself as violence. And what do you do about that? On the one hand, the family doesn't want the police to come. They don't want to see their family member in jail or in prison. They want to see them get help. But sometimes the only way you can even do that is if you start them in the criminal justice system. But once they're in the criminal justice system, who knows how that's going to go and when they get in the criminal justice system and nothing happens, that only emboldens their behavior even more because it feels like there are no consequences for whatever is going on. And, you know, we actually see that dynamic a good bit. Unsurprisingly, when family members or loved ones involve law enforcement because there's a violence, there's no other option for them other than to call the law enforcement. What happens, we see, is that once charges are pressed, they love their family member. They don't want them to get into the criminal justice system, so they drop charges. And we see that repeatedly, especially unfortunately, with battered women like women who are abused by their significant others. We see this on records where it will be like arrest charges dropped, arrest charges dropped. You clearly see a pattern of violence. And you know, it's a really difficult situation when it's your loved one. You may not want to put them into the criminal justice system, but like Brett said, when you keep getting arrested and then there are no consequences. In fact, you know, your loved ones are just going to back down from those charges, or you may threaten them to back down from those charges and they ultimately do. There's no recourse. And it almost heightens the situation where it's like, Why know nothing's going to happen to me because dad loves me too much to really go through with it? And we've talked about this before. The prosecution can always move forward with charges, even if the victim doesn't want to press charges. But it's really hard to do so right optically. It's really difficult in front of a jury. You are usually overburdened with cases to prosecute. And if you have the victim who's like, You know what? This is a family matter, we're going to go to counseling. We will figure this out. You don't want to necessarily drag that family through something that could be very painful, very difficult for the victim who doesn't want to press charges. And you also have a bunch of cases that do have victims who need to be vindicated or who need justice, so you may turn your resources to those cases instead. So it's a difficult dynamic, and this is Alice makes such good points, and it's one of those situations where you have this push to change that dynamic without putting any resources behind it. So for a very long time, police and prosecutors took the position of no victim, no crime. So if there's no victim, there's no crime. We're not going to prosecute it even if there was a crime. If the victim doesn't want to quote unquote press charges, if they don't want to go through with it, we're not going to either. Because as Alice said, there's just way too much on everybody's plate. And a case where the victim won't help you and won't testify is going to be a harder case. It's going to take more time. More resources probably is going to go to trial. There's all sorts of reasons not to do it. We're trying to change that dynamic to try to focus on some of these cases because we know in the end the statistic. Tell us this, that if you have just to talk about domestic violence and this is a little bit of an aside, but I think it makes sense to talk about it. We've talked about this before. Domestic violence, if you have someone who strangles a person, so you have a man who chokes his girlfriend, wife, significant other. If they do that, the chances that that woman will be murdered by that person skyrocket. The chances that that person will kill a police officer skyrocket. When you hear about domestic violence cases that end in police officers responding and dying. If you look back in the history of that person, they probably have been accused of strangling someone before. The statistics are absurd. So one of the things that we're trying to do is when you see that even if the person doesn't want to prosecute, if the police do a good job of documenting the initial incident, you can move forward and prosecute. And that's great and you can prioritize those worst cases. But so many are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to fall through the cracks because of everything Alice talked about. And just because, frankly, it is low level crime, even when it's violent, even when it's assaults like this often just results in a non-prosecution, it often gets charged, the person goes to jail, they get bailed out, and then at some point the local D.A. does what they call no processing it where they just say, we're not going to actually prosecute this and it goes away. And that happens so often. And I think that's what you're seeing happening here. And, you know, I think it's worth mentioning here as well that the family members often try to go the law enforcement route because their hope isn't necessarily that the person has to serve a long sentence in jail. They're hoping it wakes them up. And then maybe through the justice system, they can get the mental health treatment because as you all know, if you have an adult on your hands, it's very difficult to force them to either take medication or get a medical treatment, mental health treatment, medical treatment against their will. And if you are in a state where you are not being treated for mental illness, oftentimes you may not be in the state of mind to recognize you need the medication or the treatment. And so it becomes this downward spiral. And so this is kind of heightened by the fact that we have a medical system, which I'm all for freedom. I don't really want someone to be able to have medical decision making over my body. So it's it's a tension there as well. But I think it's that it's so difficult to get someone who is an adult mental health treatment if they don't want it, that we've somehow kind of turned to the the criminal justice system when things get out of hand, when that may not be the best route to help treat someone who needs mental health treatment. And since we've completely gone off the rails here and are just like somebody wrote us a question and it was what is the one thing you would change about the criminal justice system if you could? And my answer to that question would be to have fully funded mental health treatment up to and including asylums, the sort of asylum type thing because we have no facilities anymore. You know, a lot of times what we see is we see people who come in like we see cases where people will come in and they are obviously mentally ill, often to the point where they're incompetent to stand trial. They can't proceed. But the bar for finding them to be dangerous is really high, because if you find someone to be dangerous but mentally ill, then what you have to do is you have to put them somewhere. You have to put them in a medical facility, basically a prison that is a medical facility and there aren't many beds for that. So the chances of actually getting anyone, even if they are dangerous and even if they are violent, actually getting them declared dangerous or violent is basically impossible. So you end up having these people who essentially have severe mental health issues. They are violent and dangerous, but they essentially have an automatic get out of jail free card until they actually murder someone or commit a violent crime that is so violent that it can't be ignored. There is nothing that anyone can do about them, and you can't get them treatment. You can't keep them away from the public if they are dangerous or untreatable. And it's just it's amazing to me that that this exists, that we just we don't. It's not that we don't prioritize it. We don't put any priority on it whatsoever. And that's not even and that's the worst of the worst. That's not even to say it's sort of like a robust mental health treatment for people who have mental health issues, but not as serious. We've literally no plan. It's not like, Oh, we don't have enough resources to execute the plan. It's that the plan doesn't even exist. And part of it is it's the interplay between like the medical industry and the justice system. And it's it's a very difficult, you know, a lot of constitutional issues and autonomous issues. And HIPA, you know, there's so many things kind of at the interplay, and there aren't a lot of people who have experience, I think, in both. And so then you have medical experts who are having to be like therapists for law enforcement issues and vice versa. You have law enforcement having to act like mental health professionals when neither are really adept to do it. So I agree with you, it's a huge hole in our our justice system. And this is this is not really that big of a tangent for this case because I do think this is a very worthy conversation to be had to see how the outcome could have been different here because what I started with was, I don't know, currently in our society how this could have played out differently. You know, it's not clear to me as we go through the timeline that I can point to are there is the errant decision because dad does call the police, you know, this is it just left between his new wife and his son and he's out of it? No, he's stepping in. He is trying to help his son help his wife. And it only escalates. Yeah. So thank you, Julia, for that question. We just answered your question the middle of an episode. But I think Ali is right. I think it applies here and you'll continue to see that. So we're at twenty four now and things are not better after an incident where B.J. actually crashed his stepbrothers pickup truck while he was drinking. He was charged with underage drinking, domestic violence, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, leaving the scene of a crime and failure to control. He had actually fled the scene. He gets back home. He's confronted by Susan, and he gets into a fight with her and strikes her in the chest. The police eventually show up. They charge him with all these things, but she doesn't want this to stick. She doesn't want to press charges against him. She didn't want to testify against him. She's trying her best, as Alice said, to deal with this and to keep it out of the criminal justice system when it's not very long at all before B.J. is in trouble again. Later that same year, he is charged with felonious assault and robbery after he actually hits season in the head with a coffee mug and steals her car keys. But these charges are later dropped when B.J., as we just foreshadowed, was found not competent to stand trial. And if you are not competent to stand trial and you're not dangerous enough to hold, the only thing left to do is to dismiss the charges. There is nothing else you can do. You can't drop them. You can't hold them. We talked about this and we talked about the Hagel children and how in that case, you have a situation where Katherine Heigl disappeared. Her children will not tell us where they are, but can't be tried for it because she's been found to be incompetent. Now she is in custody because of a dangerousness evaluation. But once again, she killed two children. Ordinarily, it takes a lot. This is a good example. Smashing a coffee cup into your stepmother's head and stealing her vehicle is not enough to get you committed anywhere as a dangerous individual, so the case just goes away. And, you know, I think it's important to note here too. He's he's 18 years old, so he's still a child. But, you know, technically an adult and he is a larger person, right? He is. He's not some small child. He's not a 10 year old, an 11 year old 12 year old. He's a full grown man who is smashing Susan in the head with a coffee mug punching in the chest. You can punch someone very, very seriously in the chest, obviously hard enough to stop. Their heart, as we've seen, unfortunately, on the football field before, but then were escalating to head injuries, I mean, these are strikes not meant to scare. They are meant to do intense damage, but it continues. And in fact, B.J. will eventually attack Susan while she's in the shower. And at this point, the family has had enough. They take action. They kicked P.J. out of the house and he is moved into a group home in Sandusky. But it's one of those places where he's in the group home, but he can kind of come and go and the Linsky family, they're still trying to make a place for him. So even though he's done all these things, he is allowed to come home and stay with the Whiskey's on the weekends. But even during this time when he's in Sandusky and he is coming home, he has three more violent encounters with the police. So now fast forward two years to 2006, and B.J. is 20 years old. So he kind of talked about this before now that he's a legal adult. It's difficult to force him to accept any medical treatment. But his dad, Bill steps in and does all the right steps legally to try and help his son, and he ultimately is appointed as BJ's Guardian. And the goal of this was to get his son to take his medication because as many people who are like B.J. exhibiting kind of violent expressions of his mental illness when he's medicated, he's actually just fine. He's not violent. He can operate. But he did succumb to the same temptation as we see in so many cases of people with severe mental illness. He'd take the medication and feel better being control of his emotions. He's not violent, and no one really likes to be dependent on medication. It might have side effects. You have to remember to do it. You, you know, there could be stigma around it, whatever it is, but the person gets lulled into a sense of security and thinks I'm all better. I needed the medication to get me better, but now I'm all better and I don't need medication anymore. And so they stop taking it. And that's what B.J. did. And what happens when you stop taking it? It's not as simple as an on and off switch where the next day you can just go back on the medication. As those of you who may have medical training, you know that it's a delicate balance with hormones in your body. And when you go off these medications, it's unpredictable how your body reacts. It's not necessarily that you just fall back to the degree of mental illness that you were previously suffering from. Oftentimes, what we see is that you fall even deeper into a mental state than you were before because of the interplay of hormones and drugs that were there and then are taken away and the body compensating and reacting in ways that is not necessarily predictable from patient to patient. So even though Bill was appointed guardian, he was able to get his son to take medication at times. There was this kind of terrible cycle that B.J. would go through. He'd take medication, feel better, stop taking medication, become violent all over again. And it's like we said, it's not as simple as just going back on the medication, and things do escalate. In the summer of 2010, something happens that you can imagine just objectively could cause friction in any family. Derek Griffin, one of Susan's sons, had gotten in trouble with the law. He had a drunk and disorderly charge. And when B.J. found this out, he became extremely upset because even though Derek got in trouble with the law for something to do with drinking and disorderly conduct, something that sounds similar to some of the charges that B.J. has caught in the past, the WHISKEY'S did not force Derek to leave the home. Like B.J. was forced to do, and you can imagine that this caused a lot of animosity between B.J. and the rest of the whiskey household and was one of the only times that BJ honed anger towards his father. Most of the anger had been directed towards Susan, but now he is mad at his dad as well. Yeah, and and this seems to be a real triggering event for him and something that I think from that point forward, he dwells on. And this brings us all the way to October 30th, 2010. So on this day, the day before Halloween, he and his father had actually been out on a hunting trip. They have a cabin in Carroll County and they'd gone out. They gone out hunting and they had killed a deer and they were in a celebratory mood and they decided to have a get together in the barn at their home with their neighbor, Mark. So this is kind of a very small party celebrating the deer going into Halloween, and they're hanging out and they're drinking. And this included being. Which he was known to be agitated whenever he would drink, and he was already in a delicate mental state. But nevertheless. And we we talked about this. You see this so often where people let their guard down. We've talked about this and some of the other mental health cases before where everything seems fine. People start to let their guard down, and that's when something bad happens. And essentially, that's what you have happening here. Everybody's drinking. They're having a good time. Ordinarily, B.J. would go back to the group home on a day like this, but he'd been drinking and everybody was happy, and so the decision was made. He is going to stay at the Lisicki home so they make him his little bed, which he would always have on the couch whenever he stayed over. And the plan was, He's going to stay the night. Everything's fine. This is a Saturday night next Sunday, and that's what they're going to do at 6:30 a.m. the next morning, October 31st, 2010. A neighbor hears a loud bang, which they will later say sounded to them like a gunshot didn't really make sense to them, so they assumed it was something else and just sort of moved on with their lives. At 10:00 a.m., Devin, the younger son of Suzanne, came home so he wasn't at the party because he had stayed the night before at his dad's house. And he was stopping by the Lisicki family home before church on a Sunday to get a change of clothes because he actually had a performance with the choir that day at church. And when he arrived at the whiskey home, he saw B.J. loading up his dad's F-150. He noted that B.J., who was typically socially awkward, was more talkative than usual. You know, he was not particularly chummy with his step brother, Devin. But on this particular day is loading up his dad's truck and was very social with Devin, which Devin just noted to be out of the ordinary. But Devin didn't think much of it. He was just dropping by. He had to be somewhere. He had to be at church. And so he got his clothes and left, and he didn't see anyone else at the home thinking nothing of it. At 11 a.m., Devin is finished with church and he comes back to the whiskey home prior to that time. For the last hour, he'd been at church. He was performing in a choir concert and when he gets home like a lot of teenage boys, he actually goes straight up to his bedroom to play video games. Devin didn't see any other members of the Lisicki household, but again, he didn't really think anything of it. I think a lot of teenage boys probably would go play video games and not register that there was no one else around. So at around 1:30, he's still playing video games. He's just up in his room playing video games, and at this point he gets a call from his aunt, Laurie Morse. And Laurie is concerned because Derek, his brother, was supposed to come over and work with her husband that morning, but he didn't show up. She had been trying to get in touch with Susan and Derek all morning, but had been unable to reach them. So at this point, for the first time, Devin realizes I haven't seen anybody all day. It's already 1:30 in the afternoon and I haven't seen anybody. So he starts going around his house, looking for his family members in the first place. He goes as he goes to Bill and Susan's room, he goes to his mom and dad's room to check on them. When he walks in, he's shocked to find that they're both still in bed and in fact, they have the covers pulled up over their head, which is very unusual anyway and particularly unusual for them. They were always early risers, so the fact that they're still in bed at 1:30 seems kind of strange. He shakes his mother, her foot's actually sticking out of the covers, but she doesn't stir. Guys, we are so excited to welcome NewME to the prosecutors family. You know, the problem with fads, they come and go. So when it comes to weight management plans, you need a long term solution. 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ATSB, we know our customers needs are evolving, so we're evolving to by bringing the best of technology and people together, every interaction, every innovation and every connection is built upon a better understanding of you, and it all comes together to create a banking experience that's altogether more human. PITTSBURGH Altogether, more human. Permanent TSB heals him treating his PTSD is regulated by the central Bank of Ireland. It may be too early to start the Christmas playlists, but it's never too early to start planning your Christmas gifting. The SuperValu gift card is the perfect gift for your team, with something for everyone available in store while supporting a local Irish business. Look after your Christmas shopping today. There's a SuperValu Dorothy forward slash gift cards at this point. He pulls back the covers to reveal what initially his shocked mind interpreted as this must be some sort of Halloween prank. I must be, I don't know, you know, totally rational, right? But nevertheless, when when he sees what he sees, when he pulls back those covers, he thinks Halloween prank, that's the only explanation for this. In fact, Bill and Susan had both been shot in the head multiple times, and it doesn't take long for him to realize this is not a prank. This is something horrible that has happened. He calls his aunt, Laurie, back in hysterics. Oh, that is a really difficult scene to walk into. So at 1:57 p.m. after receiving Devon's call, Laurie calls 9-1-1. I mean, Devin is in such hysterics that he can't even, you know, get his wits about him to call 9-1-1. So she calls 9-1-1 at 1:57 p.m. as she immediately jumps in her car and drives straight to the Lisicki household. She entered the bedroom and was met with the same scene that Devin had described on the phone. This, unfortunately, was not a prank at all. Bill and Susan Lasky were dead. Police arrived at the scene shortly after and upon entering the home. They noted that nothing initially appeared to be out of place. Didn't seem to be some sort of a robbery or a burglary. Nothing was out of place, which would make sense that Devin didn't notice anything when he came home. It's not like the door was kicked in or that bookshelves were pulled over or glass was smashed all over the house. It looked like their normal family home. Now the investigators entered Bill and Susan's first floor bedroom, and they too saw that the bodies of Bill and Susan were in bed with several gunshot wounds to the head. Bill, who was located closest to the door, was believed to have been killed first, with the shooter likely shooting him from the doorway because of the way he's shot. He was shot five times and he did not have any defensive wounds since he was likely asleep at the time of the killing. Susan was discovered in bed with her legs hanging over the side. She had been shot three times and had a defensive wound to her hand, having likely woken when her husband was killed first. It would later be discovered that Susan had also been raped. The police speculated that this had happened after she was already dead. Impossible to know for certain, but given the progression of these murders, it seems like she had been shot pretty quickly after her husband had been shot as well. So as brutal and awful a murder, as you can imagine. Both were shot with a 22 caliber rifle. No shell casings were discovered at the crime scene, so investigators deduced that the killer must have taken them. This is one of those things also that in the future, when you start thinking about insanity defenses, the fact that you took the shells with you is the kind of thing that a prosecutor would point to as you were thinking about the crime and thinking about getting away with it. And it kind of, you know, goes against the insanity defenses. When you have your wits about you enough to know that there will be police officers looking for the effects of your actions because the insanity defense is that you are not in your right state of mind to understand the consequences of your actions and that you do not understand that you are committing a crime, right? And so removing the shell casings is a way to show without knowing, obviously what someone's thinking, but someone's state of mind. The other thing that will be significant there is the order of death. You've already seen this in this instance. If you're someone who was not in your mind and you're murdering people, you might not think to eliminate the strongest person first. But he does that. He kills his father first because his father is the person who's most likely going to be able to stop him, but that's not the only thing he did because the police weren't finished. They continued up the stairs where they found a locked bedroom. They forced the door open and were met with yet another gruesome scene. The body of twenty three year old Derek Griffin was found in bed, but he had not been shot. Instead, he had large, blunt force trauma to his head. His head and his skull had been cracked open with what investigators thought to be a hammer or hammer like weapon. He had no defensive wounds and was likely asleep at the time of the murder. Investigators determined that Derek was likely killed first, and they believed that the gun wasn't used because the killer was trying to avoid waking. Bill and Susan, which yet again is another thing that shows that kind of intentionality and thoughtfulness that's going to preclude some sort of insanity defense later on. And initially, investigators looked at Devin Griffin as a potential suspect. You can understand why they would look to him. He was the one to discover the bodies and you. He's the only one of the four family members who live in this household. On a day to day basis, who was left not murdered. And of course, there is the now after the fact devastating. What we now know to be devastating was a he was in the home with three dead bodies for hours before they were discovered. And before the police were notified, so he was in there, essentially in the crime scene alone with them for a very, very long time. But Devin is quickly ruled out as a suspect. He had an alibi. And you know, you never know how people are going to react. But he was visibly shaken and absolutely just inconsolable about these murders. And he was acting in a way that the police found to be believable. But I think, more importantly, was he was not there he was with his dad, and then he came home for just mere minutes before going to the church, and they could tell that the bodies had been dead for quite some time by the time they found them. Police also found a muddy footprint near a dock on the pond at the property, so they thought, Well, we know that there were weapons used in this triple murder. So had the killer dumped, maybe the guns in the pond, so they drained the pond, but they found nothing. And while locals were whispering about cult murderers on Halloween because remember, this is Halloween Sunday, the police actually had a much more concrete idea of who was responsible. Devin told investigators that he had run into B.J. earlier that morning at the Lisicki home, but both him and Bill's white F-150 were gone by the time he returned from church. So investigators immediately turned their attention into B.J., and their top priority became locating B.J. whiskey. First, they checked his mom's home in the surrounding area, but unsurprisingly, B.J. was nowhere to be seen having no luck there. They quickly moved because here you have a very dangerous person who has a very violent past suspected of brutally murdering three people in their sleep. And so local law enforcement reach out to officers in Carroll County, where the Lisk is hunting cabin was located. Remember, they had gone hunting the day before and were celebrating after a very fun afternoon day of hunting, and they issued a bolo be on the lookout and asked Carroll County to check the hunting cabin for any sign of BJ or the Ford F-150. So at five oh, nine that evening at Carroll County, deputy pulls up to the hunting cabin and spots the white F-150 outside B.J. actually walks outside, sees the officer and is arrested without incident. Does it resist? And unlike so many other encounters with law enforcement, isn't violent at all. But the officer notices there are some things wrong. Number one, B.J. has brown and red stains on his shoes and on his socks that appear to the officer to be blood. Law enforcement would later confirm that B.J. had Bill Susan and Derek's DNA on his clothing. Investigators descend on the cabin and they search it and the surrounding property. They find blood on the outside and inside the truck, and they find a 22 caliber rifle in the cab, which was owned by Bill Lisicki, and would be found to be consistent with the gunshot wounds on Bill and Susan. Investigators also searched the Lisicki home in Martin. In the living room closet. They found a safe that appeared at a place. They removed the safe and found a bloody hammer behind it. The murder weapon in Derek's death. So in other words, they are able to locate PJ relatively quickly. And on November 10th, 2010, just about a week and a half after the murders, this is incredibly swift justice so far. B.J. Lisicki is arraigned. He was charged with six counts of aggravated murder, all of which had death penalty specifications, and Lipski pleaded not guilty to all counts during the arraignment. Attorney Gary Cole was appointed as Lipsky's Guardian. Remember, previously, BJ's father had been his court-appointed guardian, but obviously his father was no longer around, so he needed a new guardian, and the court also appointed two defense attorneys to represent whiskey. His bail was set at $3 million. It was a million dollars for each of the murders, and some time after this, the timing's not not clear. B.J. actually confesses to his mother on a recorded prison line. His mom says, B.J., how could you? To which he responds, I wasn't in my right mind. And I mean, at this point, what more do you need? You've got the guns, you've got the clothes, you've got the hammer, and now you essentially have him confessing to his mother. Now one thing that has to be determined is, is he competent? Remember, he'd been found not competent to stand trial before this time. However, in March of 2011, he is declared competent to stand trial, and the cynical ones of you out there would probably say much more likely to find him competent to stand trial. And it's a triple murder than when it's an assault. And in this case, he is found competent stand trial, and you kind of wonder if that was really the deciding event. Once he was competent to stand trial, you knew what was going to happen. And as a matter of fact, on August 12th, 2011, in a hearing that was initially intended to be a pretrial hearing, B.J. agrees to a plea deal. He withdrawals this not guilty plea and pleads guilty to three counts of aggravated murder. In the plea agreement, prosecutors agreed to drop three of the original six counts, which just goes to one of the things we talk about, sometimes in a lot of state court actions. Three people are murdered there, six counts of murder. I never really understand exactly how that works. I think it has something to do with the way you charge lesser included offenses in certain states. But in any event, they drop three of the counts and most importantly, they take the death penalty off the table. And in exchange, Lynskey agrees that he will take three life without parole sentences. On September 15th, 2011, less than a year after the murders, Lipski is sentenced to three life sentences without the possibility of parole. And during the sentencing, he read a two page apology he had written, citing his mental health and the devil as the reason behind the killings, and two family members, Lori Morris and Lisa Courl, were able to share victim impact statements. I mean, all around this is a very sad situation. The fact that he and we have a lot of sentencings with people who plead guilty where they don't say anything. There's no apology. They don't make any statement to the court because you don't have to say anything to the court. Typically, the judge will turn to the defendant before sentencing and say, Is there anything you'd like to say and it is up to you if you want to speak or not? I would say I see people speak a good bit, and if they apologize, it's usually a pretty generic, sorry, like, I'm sorry that everyone has to be here on my account. Very rarely do you see like a very heartfelt apology to the victims. And this just goes to the fact that he is struggling with so much mental illness that there's there's no winning here, right? Even though there's justice for, you know, Derrick, Bill and Susan in terms of his, they're their murderer being put in jail. But this is this was their family member and he was and is, you know, clearly struggling with a lot of mental illness. And you have other family members who are just absolutely broken because their family members are now dead. I mean, this is all around just an incredibly sad situation. And on March 31st, things don't get any less sad in this case. About four years later, March 31st, 2015, B.J. Lipski is in prison, serving one of his three life sentences without the possibility of parole when he is found dead in his prison cell at Ross Correctional Institution. And he was dead from a self-inflicted wound, and he was only 29 years old at the time of his death. You know, just a life marked by tragedy and violence and ended violently at such a young age and. I mean, there's nothing really good that can be said about this story. This is a horrible, horrific crime that ends with a suicide someone who was very clearly struggling with with some severe mental illness. I'm not excusing what he did. I don't think he was insane. But you know, this is that place in the criminal justice system. We talk about this sometimes where the system falls apart. We talk about how the system falls apart sometimes. We talked about this on legal briefs when we talked about very young juveniles who commit horrible crimes when a ten year old murders his mother or a 12 year old rapes and murders his cousin. And what do you do about that? And the knee jerk reactions some people have where it's like, Well, he's only 10? Yeah, but he's clearly very violent. You know, he's only 12, but he's clearly very violent and dangerous, and the system is just not made to deal with that. It just breaks down when you have those extremes. And here you have a similar situation extremely violent, awful, horrible crime, the kind of crime that ordinarily, you know, you would say the death penalty is too good for this person. But then you know the background and you know the issues, and it's like, What do you do about that? Because on the one hand, you feel like the culpability is lesser, but you don't think this person should ever get out. And as we said, we don't really have anywhere else to put this person except for prison. And so that's where they go. And it sounds like. BJ's mental health treatment never improved, and at this point, this this was almost the inevitable in the inevitable end of his life was going to be in violence and unfortunately, the tragedies that struck this family, it was like cascading things the day after the murder. So go back to November 1st, 2010. Bill sister Susan died in a fire when there was an explosion in her garage. And you can imagine when people first heard this, they thought, What in the world is going on? What did B.J. do? But it was later determined that this was completely accidental. It was caused by a cigarette that wasn't put out correctly, and it was unrelated to the murders that you can imagine speculation. But actually, people would say that of all the people in BJ's life, his aunt, Susan was actually the person he was closest to, but nevertheless just another tragedy for this family. And there is some maybe redemption in this story, some small amount of redemption. Devin, remember Susan's son, who had found all of their murdered bodies later would actually get married at the farm where his family was killed? He said that he didn't want to remember this place, his family home, as just this tragic event. He wanted to turn it into something, you know, a silver lining where he would start the next chapter of his life with his new family. And later he had a son with his wife, and he named him Derrick after his late brother and Devin really had his entire family just taken from him and being the one to actually find his family members in their state. I can't even begin to imagine, but he has been able to be a much bigger person in this story than I think I could have ever been, because others have asked him before about B.J. probably wanting him to. Unleash everything that B.J. took from him. But instead, he said of B.J. quote, he wasn't a monster. We were trying to help him, but we may not have had the opportunity to help him the way he needed to be helped, which is such a beautiful and generous view of a very difficult situation where mental health took root in a really, really tragic way here. But I think that was a very incredible statement that he could make about losing his entire family because of BJ's demons in his head. And look, I mean, I think that it's remarkable that he can be that clear about it because if you just think about what he went through, what he experienced and what he saw. The fact that he can he can take that position now is remarkable, but he's right, you know, he's right. And in so many of these cases, we've talked about the the postpartum depression cases. You know, we talked about the mother in Massachusetts who was in the grips of postpartum psychosis and murdered her three children. And there's been so much debate about what to do about that because you've been charged with three counts of capital murder. That seems right when you strangle your children to death. But on the other hand, you know, there was something going on in her mind when that happened. This wasn't just she didn't want to have kids anymore, you know, and. I don't have the answers for that, and I don't know how you deal with that. But the thing that's sort of amazing to me is these things happen and we never talk about it like these are not debates we have in society. But you don't, you know, when presidential candidates are debating each other, they don't talk about this. You know, when your senators, your governors or whoever, when they're talking about this, this never comes up. You have this very serious situation which affects so many people and we just never talk about it. We don't grapple with this issue. We don't struggle with how to balance these things or what to do in these situations or what our policy should be. We just if things like this happen and we say, Wow, isn't that terrible and that awful? And we just sort of continue on. And like I said, I don't have any answers for that, but we like to think that true crime is more than just entertainment. We like to tell ourselves that this is the kind of case that should make you think and make you wonder what steps can we take to address these issues in the future? Yeah, I mean, that was a question that I started this entire episode with, which is that you've now heard the whole story, the whole timeline. You know what could have been done differently to effectuate a different outcome? I don't think I have an answer right now, except that unfortunately, this kind of trajectory is not a one off. This is this is not some, you know, Halloween cultish murder. Everything about this honestly is so commonplace and something that we see probably in a lot of different people in our lives. We certainly see it in the criminal justice system. And because of that, we know that this is capable of being repeated. And I I hope that, you know, we have those conversations and avoid a situation where there's another linsky family massacre because this is so incredibly devastating. And. If, if nothing else, to have this conversation and begin to see, you know, what can we do about this now? No one's irredeemable. And the fact that BJs life ended in prison from a self-inflicted wound, you know, is just like a devastating cherry on top of a devastating sundae. Yeah. This one's rough guys. Glad you stuck it out with us. I feel like we've had a lot of episodes lately, frankly, that have been a little tougher than maybe some of the others, and we try and make these Halloween episodes a little bit more fun. But this one definitely not it. I've actually had I don't know that any of our Halloween episodes so far have been fun and they've been very dark. Actually, they've actually been very dark and they've dealt with sort of societal issues and it's kind of crazy. But anyway, I would love to hear your guys thoughts on this. I'm sure a lot of you all have stories, personal stories, things that you've dealt with, things that you struggled. I think a lot of you listen to this story and you heard your own stories in it. You you've experienced something similar. You've had family members who struggle with this, who've been violent and you don't know what to do. And if you want to share those stories with us, just know we're always open to hearing to listening and providing whatever comforting words we can. A lot of times, I think just knowing there's somebody out there to talk to helps people and knowing that you're not alone and you're not. If you're struggling with this, if this is going on in your life, you are not alone and it's happened before and there are some resources out there that are available, not as many as there should be, but like I said, just know you're not alone. Let us know what you think. Prosecutors part at gmail.com our prosecutors pod for all your social media. Well, Alex, you want to answer some questions. Maybe some happier questions. Yeah, maybe try to take a lighter, lighter take. Yeah. So I want one person, Sally Sue sent us. Her question was why does my mother hate me? So we're not going to answer that one. That's too dark. Assume that was a joke, Sally C, but I'm sure your mother loves you very much. Your mother doesn't love you. We love you. We love you exactly where your mom now. OK, OK, so this is a good one. This is from Skins Fan, 36, says In 2021, my gem of a husband reached out to the PA to share how you both inspired me to pursue law. He sent me the nicest email and I can happily share. I am three weeks into my well and loving every second of it. My question for you both, if my goal is to work in criminal law, to be decided, if it's prosecution and defense work, what must I do? Whether that be a class experience, job, etc. while in law school, I would say if you want to work in this field, then go get an internship, either on the defense or prosecution side or just go sit in the courtroom and see what the day in and day out is. Because it is, it's a slog. You know, it's a very demanding profession and it's also pretty dark. You see a lot of the worst of everything we've discussed today about the mental health system, about the justice system, about domestic violence and all of these things on a daily basis. And it is incredibly rewarding work. Whether you're on the prosecution or defense side, but it is certainly a decision you need to go into with wide open eyes. And the best way to do that is courts are open. And so there's probably a court near you. State, federal, whatever. And look up the docket, they're public. They're usually posted on their website, and you can go sit in on different hearings and just see what defense attorneys and prosecution prosecutors are doing in that district and grab a cup of coffee with one of them. Ask them about their life trajectory. People, they're humans too. And I've grabbed coffee with a bunch of people who have just come up to me at the courthouses or law students who come up after I give a talk or something because they just want to hear, how did you end up in this position? So see it for yourself. The real stuff, not just the sexy stuff that you see on like, you know, TV and see if this is the type of day in and day out profession that you really want to pursue. Yeah, Alice is a hundred percent, right? Do both, you know, there will come a time where you're going to have to pick a side. You can switch a little bit. But generally speaking, you kind of have to pick a side, but you're not there yet. So go intern with a prosecutor's office, go intern with a defense firm. I mean, here's the thing if you were able to work for free. You will be able to find a job because people need help and they don't always have resources not saying you should lead with your work for free. But sometimes it's hard to find these paid things when you're not yet a lawyer. So if you're open to that and it's something you can do, that's always good. Check with your school. They're not going to be any classes you can take where you get to be a prosecutor, but they're often clinics where you get to be a defense attorney and where you can work with. In a lot of states, you can get it. What's called a practice card, which basically, you know, when you're three l or so you can go to court. You can represent people as long as you're working with a licensed attorney. See if that's available to you. Do that work in both. They're very different. They're very different from what you would expect. Being a defense attorney is is hard and a lot of ways a client management. I mean, I've never done it. I mean, I've done it for a law firm, but that doesn't count. Client management is really hard, and it's the thing that drives defense attorneys crazy is having to deal with their clients who don't understand the law, who have a bunch of jailhouse lawyers who are telling them all this stuff. So just see that firsthand, because it may not be what you want to do. You really have to be a true believer to be like a public defender, for instance. You got to love it because some of the stuff you have to go through is not great. So absolutely doing both get that firsthand experience however you can, and it doesn't actually matter which side you're getting it with. As long as you're getting it, it'll be valuable one day when you're applying to prosecutors offices, U.S. attorney positions, or you want to work as a defense attorney, being in court, seeing how it goes down, seeing how people operate. You just can't overstate how valuable that experience is. And this is a great time to get it, particularly when you're three 00 because you're three, you're doesn't matter at all. So that's my position. OK, let's see. OK. We're going to answer one more question today, and then we're going to give some Halloween music suggestions. I think what we did today. I'm going to ask this question in the hopes that Alex can answer it because there are basically no words in the question that I understand. Other than things like what? And are all the other words, I don't know what they mean. I have no idea what the says. Alice is going to know, though, because she's much smarter than I am. OK, this is from Celeste Michel. And she says, What are your inner gram numbers or what are your tendencies based on Gretchen Rubin's four tendencies? But does it surprise you that you don't know any of these things I know of is, as I'm not going to answer that only because so any a gram is like one of those personality, you know, letters that mean different things. But Gretchen Rubin went to Yale, and so pursuit of happiness or some some happiness. I'm forgetting her like famous book the breakout like New York Times bestseller something about happiness and pursuing your heart. But she came and spoke to the law school, and she basically was like, the darkest time in my life was in this law school. And ever since I've left, I've been so happy and we're like, Is this supposed to be uplifting? So I'm not answering the question, but I just like stuck out of my mind because I was like, I think I was a 1L. And, you know, Gretchen Rubin was coming in. Everyone was like, Oh, the New York Times bestseller. She's she's going to show us the key to happiness. And like, we walk in and she's like, These are the darkest times I've ever experience, and I never want to be back here. I was like, Yikes. But with all that said, OK, the reason I can't give my Instagram is because I think unfortunately, I'm probably such a people pleaser in that every one of these personality tests, whether it's any exam or it's, you know, whatever other personality tests, I kind of just meld to all of them. So it's completely unusable and there's probably at any exam for that as well. And then people who really love any exams will be like, Ah, this is exactly who you are. It's kind of like astrology where they're like, This is everything about who you are in your decision making process. And I'm like, Am I now? I feel like I'm fulfilling a predestination, so I like to just serve it wild. OK, well, I still don't know any of that meant, but I'm going to go with, yeah, my characteristics are, I don't know. You know, it's more fun for other people, though for them to now that this question has been asked for everyone to post what they think our Instagrams are. And then we'll take an Instagram test and then we'll reveal what it is because then people will probably actually get it right because they're pretty distinct characteristics. And I bet when people start posting, they'll be like, You're definitely a, you know, that's great. Yes, everybody guess what my integration is, and then we will get the we will take the what's your what's your son? Sign Alice? My astrology sign? Yeah, I'm a Taurus. But what really matters is the horse. But what really matters is my Chinese astrology side, because like that is the one that matters for like my people. What is that one? Obviously, I'm a tiger. Tiger. There you go. Isn't that so fitting, though? It's so fitting and so fitting. I am a Virgo and a rooster. So a rooster, my brother's a rooster. Yeah, I think that means we get along well, actually does it. You know, they they have like whatever you go, we just prove that Chinese astrology is accurate. Every year works every time. So Alice, do you have any song recommendations for people's Halloween parties that they can play? I'm a huge Michael Jackson van thriller, obviously. I mean, obviously, it's just it's so good. Thriller, so good. Thriller is great, you know? I mean, you can't obviously, you can't just play monster mash over and over again. Thriller is, I mean, monster mash is also great. So when I was like, gripping months pregnant, great. Oh, I mean, the video was a masterpiece when it came out and still is. But I went to like a Michael Jackson impersonator cover. It was the cover. He was like impersonator of Michael Jackson concert when I was like nine and a half months pregnant with my oldest. And I was like, I really hope all this Michael Jackson thriller is like seeping into his head. And he loves the song he does. And he does. Yeah, he does. Yeah, my daughter loves it as well. I haven't shown her the video yet because I'm afraid is gonna scare her. But does anything scare her, though, but it is a great video like the dance, everything is so great. Maybe show her the 13 going on 30 dance version of Thriller. There you go. Then you'll love it. OK, so songs other than thriller thrillers? A great one. I got a whole bunch. I'll give you a few. And you can. You can take it or leave it. So there's a song called Which I love. This is one of my favorite songs called Dixie Drugstore Store by Grant Lee Buffalo. Fantastic song. If you never heard it, it's about a guy who stops in New Orleans, Louisiana, and stumbles upon a voodoo store and has a very interesting meet up in the store. And I love this song and I listen to it a thousand times, and one night I had a dream, and in that dream, there were additional lyrics to the song. There were more lines that I had never heard before, and I woke up in the morning and I thought, I wonder if there are. And so I went out and I tried to find it. And wouldn't you know it, there was a demo of the song before it was released publicly that had additional lyrics, but it was only available in like Denmark. So I bought the demo CD and actually put it on YouTube. So if you, you know you go on YouTube and you look up Dixie Drugstore Juju version, you actually find my other YouTube, my like personal YouTube thing. The only thing I've ever uploaded, which is this song with the extra lyrics, you literally had a dream about it and it exists, and it was true. Did you know the lyrics in your dream? No, I didn't know the lyrics. I can't go there. I would have been really creepy. That would've been a really creepy. But when I discovered that, it just blew my mind. Yes. Yes. The actual lyrics are good. They're amazing. It's like the song is totally different and it's not totally different, but it's different. And like, much longer. And just the lyrics are so great. I just know it's a great song, and it's about one of my favorite subjects in all of history. So like, it's like a historical song, too. So if you haven't heard it, Dixie Drugstore, even if you can only find the original version, find it. Grant Lee, Buffalo like it. That's my first one. Fascinating story. Very different song. All the pretty little horses. The version by current Ninety Three is one of the creepiest songs you'll ever hear because it's just all the pretty little horses. But in this, like in just as incredibly well, my wife, I'll let me listen to it when she's around because it's like, very creepy. Perfect for your Halloween, you know, night experience. Another creepy song that's more spoken word. What's he building in there by Tom Waits? What's he building in? There is a just a great, creepy, eerie thing. Listen to it. It will. It will definitely freak you out. If you're looking for more of this sort of Wiccan thing to go along with your sound celebration. We all come from the Goddess is one of my favorites, having been to a dead supper in Salem, where lots of songs were sung. I really enjoyed that one. So check that out if you're into that kind of thing. And if you're looking for more of an expansive experience, there is a rock opera by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society called Dreams in the Witch House, and it is a rock opera version of the H.P. Lovecraft story Dreams in the Witch House. Amazing, I have it on vinyl. Play it all the time. Incredible. Just just from the very first song til the end. If this podcast ever makes it big and we have a whole lot of money, I am putting that thing on Broadway. That's my goal. So there's anybody out there who wants to find an off-Broadway production of Dreams of the Witch House, but H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society? I am there. Let's do it. It's great. You'll love it. Check it out. I'm just laughing because I will never listen to any of these songs. Oh, it's so good. There's this. There's this one song from it called Legends and Lore, which is just so good. I mean, it's so good. It's just it makes me happy to even just think about it. So those are my my Halloween song recommendations for everybody out there. He wanted a Halloween playlist. And then there's the obvious ones. And we mentioned thriller. But you know, this is Halloween from a nightmare before Christmas, which is really a Christmas movie, but this is always a great song. Very Halloween. My kids watch the video over and over and over again. They love it. So that's a given. Wow. This has been fun. This has been fun. Alice, before we sign off, do you have anything else you want to add? No, but we are like only halfway through my favorite month, their favorite month and next week, I don't know. It's a pretty dark story, but a little less dark, maybe than this one. I don't know. It involves somebody being murdered, so it's going to be dark, but it's definitely Halloween. Oh, our movie for this week. I mean, think about that. Who I think I think actually. Yes, I remember what movie I wanted to watch for, this is an obvious one. I'm not being creative here when I say this Halloween. So this Friday, we're going to be watching Halloween, which also involves someone murdering family members. So Halloween, the original. Hmm. To do the original or should I come back and do the uh, you know, what you're going to do is you're going to watch all of them. Yeah, OK, that's a good point. OK, so this Friday, we'll watch the original. And then what I now consider to be the true sequel to Halloween, which is the one that came out like four years ago. Excellent. We'll watch that one as well. But what we're going to do, we're going to watch how and if you've never seen it, which is possible, there's people out there have never seen it. Terrific movie. You're going to love it, I promise. And it's great. There's a reason. It's a classic. Really good. So check it out on Twitter. We'll be there around 8:30 or so this Friday night. All right. Anything else hours for Rosanna? No. I am beginning to think that three years ago, you rope me into starting a podcast with you so you could really just do a Halloween podcast. Yeah, it's true. It's true. Absolutely. If only if only it ever was every month. OK, guys. Well, we'll be back next week with more Halloween horror. But until then, I'm Bret and I'm Alice, and we are the prosecutors. I don't remember this case happening like at the time. I don't either, and it feels like I don't know. Yeah. You would think would kind of have grabbed all the headlines, but I really don't remember anything about it. You think, OK, I got a word for you. I really don't have broken out. Do you want to? I want to break it up. Sure. It's not a big deal, but I always do it. Yeah, that's that's when we talk about something else while I'm doing that and entertain the guest. Have. We are filing a motion that does ex the motion, should do, should do X, and if it does it, we and that was the thing is like, I don't actually think the people who are being really verbose on the chat listen to a single word we say. I was like, I literally said, take as true, everything written. That's not the point. Dive into true crime on Pluto TV. Unravel the mysteries with forensic files and 48 hours investigate crimes with Dateline 24, seven and Unsolved Mysteries with thousands of free crime movies and TV shows. Pluto TV is the true home of crime. Download the Pluto TV app on all your favorite devices and start streaming. True crime on live channels and on demand Pluto TV. Stream now pay never at ATSB. We know our customers needs are evolving, so we're evolving to by bringing the best of technology and people together. Every interaction, every innovation and every connection is built upon a better understanding of you, and it all comes together to create a banking experience that's altogether more human. PITTSBURGH Altogether, more human. Permanent TSB heals him treating his PTSD is regulated by a central bank department.

Past Episodes

We conclude our look at the Karen Silkwood case. Was she the victim of a tragic accident? Was she murdered? Or did something else happen altogether? 

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01:46:42 3/17/2025

When Karen Silkwood started investigating safety violations at the nuclear facility where she worked, strange things began happening. Unknown men following her, unexplained accidents at work, even nuclear contamination at home. How far would one woman go to uncover a secret? And how far would one company go to keep it?

 

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00:00:00 3/10/2025

We discuss the deaths on Aconcagua. A terrible accident? Or was it murder?

 

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00:00:00 3/3/2025

Four Americans went up the Argentinian mountain of Aconcagua. Only two came down. Everyone assumed it was a tragedy, an unfortunate consequence of a dangerous sport. But then the bodies were found, and everything changed.

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00:00:00 2/24/2025

Strange shadows in the night. Televisions turning on and off. Objects moving without any apparent cause. A tale better told in October? No, something far more terrifying.

 

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00:00:00 2/17/2025

We wrap up our coverage of the Pablo Velez case with a look at the evidence against him and answer the question--is an innocent man in prison?

 

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00:00:00 2/10/2025

We continue our look at the wrongful conviction of Pablo Velez, Jr.

 

 

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01:19:27 2/3/2025

When Pablo Velez, Jr. was convicted of a shooting outside a bar, he steadfastly maintained his innocence. Is he a wrongfully convicted man? Or just another murderer denying his guilt? You decide.

Resources:

#JusticeForPabloVelezJr | Facebook | Linktree

Pablo Velez, Jr. v. The State of Texas--Appeal from 176th District Court of Harris County :: 2007 :: Texas Court of Appeals, First District Decisions :: Texas Case Law :: Texas Law :: US Law :: Justia

Wooley v. State - Texas - Case Law - VLEX 888510539
 

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01:13:10 1/27/2025

We finish our look at this mysterious crime and provide theories on what may have happened to Russell and Shirley Dermond.

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01:33:02 1/20/2025

It's an inexplicable mystery. Two elderly people, beloved in their community, brutally murdered at their lake house for no apparent reason. Who killed Russell and Shirley Dermond?

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01:19:47 1/13/2025

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