It's time to Rewind with Karen & Georgia!
This week, K & G recap Episode 37: Liminal Space. They discussed the murder of Peru's Ruth Thalía Sayas after her appearance on a game show, as well as the murderous reign of Sacramento’s Dorothea Puente. Listen for all-new commentary, case updates and much more!
Whether you've listened a thousand times or you're new to the show, join the conversation as we look back on our old episodes and discuss the life lessons we’ve learned along the way. Head to social media to share your favorite moments from this episode!
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My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories, and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
The Exactly Right podcast network provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics, including true crime, comedy, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
Hello, and welcome to Rewind with Karen and Georgia.
It is Wednesday, and that means that we're recapping one of our old shows with all new commentary and updates and insights.
Beautiful insights. And today we're recapping episode thirty seven, which we named Liminal Space.
Remember I love that.
So Jordan is now as we take you back to October six, twenty sixteen. This was a wonderful year for podcasting as well as ironically for Drake. He was dating Rihanna. He had no idea what the future held for him, that he would be viciously, viciously roasted at a super.
Bowl named and fucking roasted, named in shame, and I'm there for it. So let's listen to the intro of episode thirty seven.
Let's settle in.
How do I look from this angle?
It's very odd, it's weird, right, we switch seats tonight. I think it's good.
For the Liminal Space creative upset. WHOA you know about that? No, there's this thing I care. I talked about it. Oh maybe on the other podcast, but I have seven I'm sorry.
Oh I didn't tell you.
We haven't discussed that.
So let's cut cut, can we cut?
There's a thing they call it's the space that you get into when you're unsure or you're upset, or like right after something shocking happens or whatever it's. They call it liminal space. And when you're in that place, your brain is working like a peak at top performance. So that's why, like when they it's good if you're a creative person. If you get too comfortable in anything or feel too secure, it's bad because then you can't, like the thoughts don't come the right way. But if you, you know, like get into a thing like that's why, Like sometimes in stand up when you're on stage, like you know you're going to open with a couple jokes, but then you go into something new and weird because you can come up with something you didn't even know you were thinking of.
That's cool.
So as you're saying, stop going to the same cafe for me every day and ordering two scrambled eggs in a side of fruit and an Americano every single fucking day in my life.
Well, I mean, are you writing somewhere near there or like yes, yeah I would, or you could order something different or go to a different cafe. Just do something that will make you uncomfortably so that your brain works differently.
I love it.
I getting it getting out of a pattern. Okay, and that's what.
This is right now, Georgia.
Is this of you and I looking at each other from a totally different perspective?
Yeah, which is different couches, witch, couches everyone.
Yeah, it's not that big a deal. Actually it is.
Like from the very beginning, that's how we've done it.
So this is sneat, I mean episode thirty seven it's going to be all about like the brand new thing.
Also, now we're talking about the Bible, so.
Open your there's so much the Bible there really is.
We should do a biblical episode. That would be that would be so boring.
That would just put me back to like fucking grammar on high schools.
Like these stories again read my story at issue. The whole story is going to be in.
Caps, like the anger is none in all of Sant Francis grammar school.
Totally.
Okay, this is our first so I was thinking that this is our first episode back from the last episode was a live episode.
Yes, which is fun, so awesome. It went really well.
It was it went well, which I can now tell you that I'm surprised, yeah, because I was like, who the fuck knows what this is going to be? Like you and I sitting here talking about stuff. We know what that with that amounts to. But like having people react in real time and whether or not they were going to I mean, obviously if they were there, they were slightly on board.
Yeah, but those people I'm not worried about. It's like, does it translate to like, I'm not gonna be totally honest, I don't fucking listen to live episodes of podcasts.
No, I don't either, No way, I'm like that.
That doesn't that doesn't translate I'm not going to do that.
I don't want to hear you like pointing out things and talking about them, right.
Or yeah, or just having a whole experience without me, because in these it feels like when I listen to podcasts, I'm like, I'm there too.
Yeah, that's the whole fun of it, I think, Yeah, so.
Yes, I But I also I was just nervous, and I kind of was like, I don't know, I.
Was nervous about me because you've never seen me on stage before.
No, I'm too much of a narcissist. To be nervous about you. I mean, let's I was like, you're on your own. Okay, six sinkers, whim. I gotta get mine.
You know what?
I think?
What if we added Dave Anthony permanently to the podcast.
Well, probably shouldn't talk about this right now, but Dave.
I did a show with Dave Anthony the other night and he was like, I think we should start doing like every three months.
Oh my god, we all we all do all.
Our podcasts together. That was like, that was great.
And also that was my sister's suggestion. I swear to god, she's batting a thousand. She was like, Dave was so funny on your show. I don't think I beat a lot to the doll up. I just like laughing at whatever the fuck garretts I do, though, you do. But here's the thing. It's learning to elbow your way to comedy. Conversation takes a takes a while.
That's scary, it's scary.
And also it's that thing of like, well, am I going to stop? This is the thing I'm gonna say? Going to be worth it to stop totally. It's a really hard thing to do.
Interrupting people, especially people who are like, like fucking legit comedians that have been doing this for years and years.
Is not my thing.
It's well And also if you do it and it's like a like a half tepid responsibly, it makes you never want to say anything again.
Like a stupid idiot.
Yeah, when people would laugh when I said something, I wanted to go hug and eat each and every.
One of them so much.
You guys want to understand how this is for me. But you did great. It didn't seem like you were having a hard time.
Oh, I had a lot of fun. I said, fuck it once you're in the moment exactly.
Well, and it's for fun. Those guys love you. Dave thinks you're fucking hilarious.
That's so nice.
Yeah, and I never say that to my face, but I appreciate you.
No, No, he can't. Okay, he's got emotional problems.
Everyone go the doll Up Live their last fun where guests on it. So if you really fucking love the live episode, yeah, that's how.
We warmed it up. That's how we heated it up. That's nice. Yeah, So the live episode and that was awesome. It was super fun. And also we get to meet a bunch of people, which is very cool. Afterwards, which I have to say, I went backstage because I was like, I don't want to meet people, like I don't I don't think i'll be good at it.
I don't like the idea of it.
And then I was standing back there and said, you were already talking to somebody, And then I'm like what am I doing?
Like that's not allowed?
And then the second I walked out, whoever the first person I was to talk to, I was just like, Hey, what's going on? And they were so regular and normal. It wasn't like I had to do anything. It was just like having a nice conversation with a person that was happy.
I've had years and years of experience of like talking to strangers because Ali and I do the like cocktail like food thing, and you go to these like cocktail parties and food parties and you get to fucking just talk to people and it's scary and hard, but the more you do it, the more you're just used to it and it's not a big deal.
Yeah, especially strangers. But what was I gonna say? I don't know.
I guess this would be a good Oh. And the episode before that was the Jambinet episode. So it wasn't like a regular format, that's right. So this is like the first time we've done a regular format, like we're back for a long time. Yeah, from camp, it's been, that's right, it's been. My legs are really tan. My legs don't tan only in my arm, and I'm burnt on the back of my neck.
It's weird.
And I'm starting to wear this necklace all the time that I never wore before.
You know, friendship bracelet camp stuff. It's camp stuff.
It's good luck when it falls off on its own, fucking bracelets of people.
Fuckala, oh fuck you Madonna.
No. I just mean like when you go to some party like and it's like sponsored by a company and they're like, put this bracelet on, I want to falls off. Your wish will come true, and I just like it's falling off when I rip it off of my fucking arm.
It always that's stuff. That stuff always makes me want to go.
Yeah. Well, since no wishes that I can think of, like stuff like this has ever come true, I don't need your bracelet.
I'm sorry. Wishes aren't a thing.
I'm sorry to tell you.
I'm sorry to tell everyone karma and wishes are not true. Oh god, everyone just hung up on the podcast, Like half the women just hung up on this.
Sorry.
Sorry, mercury is a retrograde?
What can I say?
Wishes aren't true?
It's not actually, Oh well, there's a at work, there's a website called is mercury and Retrograde?
And it either says yes.
Or no, And we look it up all the time because people are constantly making that joke, and then we're like, wait, let's just check and see if it.
Really is you actually no, Yes.
I just almost split this drink out of the astrols when you said because it really is no, because someone made that, and I just love that. That's such a great it's the best eleven people make simple, hilarious stupid things. Kat Sollen, our friend who's a director, is a true come enthusiast, fucking talented as shit person. I begged her to make a send new design for our shirts and she did it and they look freaking incredible. They look like an old, like nineteen sixties pulp fiction book cover and I'm so happy with them.
And we're going to cool.
We're going to keep posting new sayings and people can vote for what the sayings they want it to be. Oh did you know? Did you see the what they voted for? They voted for fuck politeness to be the next one.
Nice?
Yeah cool cool?
Uh yeah.
Anyways, yeah, I didn't know there was voting going on.
I just fucking decided one week.
You went totally rogues. Sorry, what's going to pass it by you? Of course?
I don't, please, Okay, I mean, of all the things I've tried to care about, vote away. I feel like we talked about that a while ago. Yeah, but I just didn't. I I feel like I'm missing out on life. If there was any tone in that, it was not towards you. It was I'm spending a lot of time. And this is not a complaint because I love my job. But it's the kind of thing where everyone once in a while, like I'll pick up my phone and look at email and I'll watch you talking to all.
These people where I'm just like, thanks, fucking.
Go fun because I'm a control of freak and just deal with like.
I mean, just I'm very grateful for you.
You, thank you.
You have a hard job. I can't wait to have you for myself again. I can go get Chuna fucking melts at Cafe one on one for real, it's been so long. I can pick your fries out and eat all your fries.
You can have all the fries. I can't eat fries anymore.
Oh yeah, good. I can't wait until you're free again. I'm happy and I love your job, and I'm so happy for you, and it's great.
I'm lying.
I fucking want you for myself and I want my favorite friend to be the only thing that matters in your life.
I mean, that would be nice, it will be, but it but it's also cool because it's it's whatever. It's I used to have a job that actually takes up all my time and brain. But then it's then there's things like that where we're just like, oh is that what's happening?
Good?
I love that daddy has a job, but we miss daddy. Daddy wants to come home.
That's what I'm saying. Hey, let's take a quick pee break and then get started.
The idea that I stated the words fuck you Madonna is a shame to me. It brings shame to my family. That is not the person I thought I was. That's not how I feel about Madonna.
No, but people, you change, you grow, you stop hating Madonna for whatever reason.
That's true.
I think I was going through a really dark time in my life and I wanted to kind of, you know, forget about who I was and who I grew up as, which was a Madonna want to be from day one.
Absolutely just really.
Changed my life in every way. Don't go for second best.
At least we didn't make fuck you Madonna merch was all I'll say. I was smart enough to know.
Can you?
One time I made a neva joke about Madonna on the Grammys. This was like twenty eighteen or even earlier than that, because it was kind of like the glory days of Twitter. Man, those Madonna fans and I guess I'll just say it.
Gay men came after me, fuck you bitch, where I was.
Like, and then I kind of looked at it. I was like, yeah, you know what, You're right, that's fine.
I take it.
I delete it.
Yeah right, that's peak.
That's peak fame or peak influence influence. That people will come after you for talking shit about someone they don't even know. Yeah, which I feel like murderinos kind of do that. And I'm so grateful for that.
I think they are Madonna level supporters. I think so too, And we're very lucky.
We are so appreciative of everything you guys do, for all that shit talking that goes on on the super Bowl, on Twitter, on Instagram.
To defend the indefensible. You go out there for your girls, knowing knowing you're wrong. Of course I didn't mean fuck you Madonna, She's my hero.
Well, let's blame retrograde, which, by the way, it is not right now, but it will be once this comes out.
Let's blame Mercury on retrograde. Is that what it is, is that what we're supposed to play really spiritual.
If you didn't know that about me.
Actually, Alice Nagasta, who writes these shows up for us, put it in the notes. Yeah, Mercury is not in retrograde right now.
But she said that when this comes out, it will be.
It's currently not while we're speaking exactly, but when you're right, but in next Wednesday, or maybe in three wednesdays, whatever it is.
Whenever this is happening, to your ears, it's in retrograde, so be careful. It's on retro grade, in retrograde, around retrograde don't slip in the shower, is all I'm saying.
And if this is twenty thirty five, that none of this applies to you, and obviously.
And how is your fucking how's your battery pack?
How's your duty jets and skirt?
How are you listening to this?
All right?
Battery pack?
I don't know.
They definitely are wearing big batteries.
Everyone do. Is they charged by a battery pack?
Okay? So now it's time to get into the first story on this episode Liminal Space. It's Georgia going first this week and covering the Ruth Talia Sias murder. So let's see who went first four episodes ago.
Oh my god, I want to say, I don't care you want to go first?
You want me to go first?
Uh, whatever you want, it's your.
Choice, Okay, let me go.
Okay?
Is that rude?
No?
All right?
So this one actually speaking of Cat's someone who made our shirts signe. She sent this to me and I had never heard of it, and it's oh nice, pretty bananas.
Okay? All right, So we.
Start with nineteen year old Ruth Talia Sias sayas.
Let me start. We start with nineteen year old Ruth Talia Sayas.
She was raised on the outskirts of the capitol in a working class area of Peru. So outside of the working class area of Peru, and she was studying at a local university and she lived with her family like normal girl, cute girl, regular, nineteen year old. On Saturday July twelfth, twenty twelve, she was the very first contestant on the new reality show that was like a quiz show called El valor de la verdad, which is translated to the value of the truth.
You knew that.
I just wanted to guess because I've never taken Spanish and I know what dad means.
So it's a new quiz reality quiz show that's just come to Peru. The show's premise is that a contestant is asked a series of personal questions like during an interview, a private interview with a production company on the producers varying seriousness the questions, and they're hooked up to a fucking polygraph. Okay, So the contestant is later asked the same questions but in front of a crazy studio audience, and it's like, what's that The money show?
Do you want to be a millionaire? Who wants to be a million?
Yeah, it's like that kind of seriousness level with lights and shit. So they're given their questions again and their answers are voted like by the polygraph, whether they're true or not. Okay, So for each truthful response that they give, they win money. If they lie according to the polygraph test, they lose all the money they made. So they can keep going with questions and if they're correct and they are not lying about them, they win money. And the questions get more and more personal as the show goes on, and the contestant has the option of calling it off after each answer. So they've only won a certain amount, they can be like and they've answered like some really personal question, they get them done. So she's a very first content on this show, this little nineteen year old university student, and she went on because she wanted to open a salon and she had already saved a ton of money, but she needed the money from the show to bring her closer to buying that salon. And she was like, okay, making a spectacle of herself to get the money. So every contestant gets to bring on her house to bring on three guests to the show, who are like sitting there being interviewed and filmed the whole time. She's answering these personal questions. So she brings her parents. It's Liencio and Vilma, and they're like sweet baby angels. I watched I watched it, and the dad said that he was afraid of what I might learn about my daughter when he was introduced. But they were all jovial. They were all like, you know, this is gonna be fun. We're going to win some money. No one thought it'd be that insane because they thought their daughter was like a normal human being.
I mean, you know.
So.
The third guest was her boyfriend, Brian Leva.
He was a twenty year old cab driver. He was raised down the road for a move Talia, and he'd stuttered since an old boyfriend of his mother had pushed him down the stairs when he was only eight.
Oh so he's just like this normal.
Dude, but he had a stutter. The host says, you seem nervous. What are you so nervous about? And he said that she may have cheated on me. And he was like a very stoneface and like clearly nervous through the whole show.
So here are the questions.
Some of the questions she was asked, have you ever skipped school without your mother's knowledge? If you found one thousand souls, which you return them souls, it's like, oh my money.
Yeah. So she revealed that.
She had a thousand wandering souls.
Yeah, would return them to their homes.
She revealed she had a nose job, and that she didn't like her body, and that she wished she was white, and that she was only with her boyfriend Brian until someone better came along.
The one that was there, the cab driver.
Yeah with the stutter yeah, And that she was ashamed of her parents' manners, and that she didn't actually work at a call center like they thought. She danced at a nightclub.
Oh shit, here we go, Here we go.
So the mom is begging her to stop, and at one point Brian says, I don't want to hear anymore.
The boyfriend.
So, okay, we're at question number eighteen, and she had won at this point with this question, she would have won the equivalent of fifteen thousand US dollars, which is almost ten months wages. Wait, no, no, no, I'm sorry. She could have went up to fifteen thousand US dollars. At that point, she had won five three hundred dollars, which was almost ten months wages in Lima.
With this question, she'll win this.
The question number eighteen was have you ever accepted money for sex? And she answers yes, oh, and the polygraph confirmed that it was true. And she says, just twice, ne need money. We were in a bad situation. It hasn't happened since and it won't happen again. And her parents are like crying and like clearly shaken badly. It's fucked up, man, she said. So at that point she's like, I'm done. I'm not going to win up to fifteen thousand US dollars. I can't do this anymore. I mean, I wonder what the other questions were of I was like, that was the one that was only fifteen.
Or five thousand dollars? Yeah, what were the other questions? Who knows?
She says.
At the end, my mother, my father, my brother and sister are the most beautiful things in the world to me. I love them all with all my heart. Brian, forgive me for making you go through this. And as the credit roll, she goes down on her knees before them and begs them for forgiveness her parents.
What the fuck?
Yeah kind of game show is this?
Yeah?
So the show finally aired on Saturday, July twelfth, huge fucking hit, Like becomes number one, and she becomes like kind of a soelebrity in that world, but not like in a good way. She's just like talked about all the time. And Brian, her boyfriend, becomes a public fool and the Peru in Peru, like machoism is such a big thing, and he was humiliating from all these people, and people people in the small town recognize him and kind of humiliate him, and he's like fucking broken and sorry.
But did she get any of that money?
Yeah? Okay, she got all of that.
She won what she like, she at least got.
She stopped so.
She stopped after that true question.
Okay, so she was she wasn't lying about having had money had sex for money, So she stopped at basically our equivalent of fifty three hundred dollars.
So he's being followed.
Around by like by the media and being asked all these questions. Someone asked him how he felt about making being made of a fool, and he said, I'm ashamed all the things I learned on that show. How would you feel? And the new person said, but they say that if you love someone, you can forgive them, and he says, depends on what they did, the things she said that day, I can't forgive. But then in other interviews, he says that it had all been a setup, that he and ruth Talia had broken up months before the taping, and she had asked him to pretend to be her boyfriend on TV and that she'd share the money with him, and he hadn't given her.
Any of the money.
So it sounds like he's making this shit up to make himself sound a little bit better, right, because he's so fucking humiliated.
Yeah.
Eight weeks after the premiere of the show, on September eleventh, twenty twelve.
Ruth Talia disappears uh so crazy media circus.
All the news programs covered it in Lima, but one of the hosts called her the prostitute of elve Lord de la Verdad, like she was known as like a whore and nobody cared about it because of that, and her parents had like a beg to get me the attention and get this covered and to try to find their daughter. Days after the disappearance, police find a body of a young woman buried in a well and covered by rocks and concrete on a piece of land on the outskirts of Lima, and the land belongs to Brian's uncle. So later that day, oh my god, this is so fucked up, and there's video of this. So the media and the mother, I'm sorry, The father and the sister are at the site where they're excavating trying to figure out if it's their sister and daughter, and the dad is on the phone on a cell phone, like crying and it's awful, and it turns out that it is her, and he's just like losing it and if you're sensitive, you shouldn't watch him break the fuck down. Then a reporter and her cameraman go to the home where Vilma, the mother is sitting vigil with some of her friends and doesn't yet know that it was her daughter that was found.
And the reporter says she gave her CONDI and.
Says and realized she didn't know about it, and then the reporter said, man, they found your girl. So this fucking reporter told her, which is so ugly, So Brian's brought in for questioning and he confesses. He says that he called Ruth Talia as she was leaving school and they made plans to meet up. He says, I waited for her by the bridge. She got into my motor taxi and I said, let's go have some wine. She says, okay, and they went to his house, his apartment that he rented, and they had sex and then afterwards they started to fight, and she says, she tells me, I don't know what I'm going, what I'm doing with a poor motor taxi driver. And he says that's when I grabbed her by the throat, and that he admitted that he choked her for thirty seconds or more, and he says, I thought she had passed out. I listened to her heart, I didn't hear anything. I grabbed her and shook her, but nothing. I got scared. And during the trial, Brian's lawyer tried to pin the blame on the TV show, saying that they had humiliated him and so Beto Ortiz, who's one of the most famous television journalists there, they called him to testify. So it was later found that the majority of his confession was false, and there was a witness who was a young boy from the neighborhood, and he said that the night she disappeared, Brian had paid him fifty souls to let him know when ruth Talia got off the bus, and he said he had seen Brian another man force her into his motor taxi. And the court determined that Brian's accomplice was his uncle, who owned the property where her body was found, and the motive was robbery, and they had tried to get ruth Talia's bank security code so that they can get the winnings from the show, oh for themselves, and they were both sentenced to life in prison. So then the second season of Elva Laura was they only had celebrity contestants because they said they can deal with the media, which is like, how could you even have a fucking second season, But at least that's that. And oh, I wanted to say that a lot of this information and it's really hard to find information. I mean, there's no this isn't like a stort I ever heard about before. So the California Sunday magazine by Danielle el Er Cohn, he wrote this really great story about it, and that's why I got a lot of this information and then all over the internet as well.
That is fucking crazy, the idea, the idea that that show continued on after the first contestant was murdered.
I mean, that's intense.
Remember when Jenny Jones, the Jenny Jones Show that a lot of young people won't remember. It was like one of those like nineties talk shows like Jerry Springer had on. Like it was like a confession episode of I'm in Love with You And a guy brought on his friend and told this guy that he was gay and he was in love with him.
Yep.
And the guy he told shot and killed him.
Yes, I do know that story because my old boss was one of the EPs on that show.
I had to go to court.
H That was like a huge scandal at Telepictures, breaking the company for that. No, it was horrible. And it's that kind of thing of like what's the line when you're producing TV? Everything is two numbers? Who butts in seats, eyes on screens? How do you do a show that's going to make people watch it? And especially in those days of like the early days of spreading and Jenny Jones.
All that shit.
Let's keep going with that.
But also why did they have a hit?
Oh they had a hit because it's a girl who is exposed that it wasn't hit, that's not the baby daddy, and blah blah blah, and now they're in a fistfight and all that shit, and like that was the norm.
So like you had, you had.
They were trying to think of shows and produce shows that were.
Exploiting people most exploited. Well, the art scandalous.
The article I got a lot of this like basic information from uh was really interesting. So the show that the article that this is from, where they talk a lot about the actual show and how much it had to do with it and what like about reality shows in Peru was called the Contestant from California Sunday Magazine and so they talk a lot about that, and it's just like, I mean, who who would agree to say those things? But if you're in a poor fucking city and you need money, I mean, you'll do anything exactly.
It's total exploitation of people. And also that is such an ugly version. I think there was an American version of that show, and it wasn't on for very long I didn't know that because you can't. The nature of a show like that is is scandal. So like, if people are admitting things that no one gives a shit about and no one wants to talk about and that aren't that isn't like borderline, then you don't have a good show.
And they're not gonna heard someone who's like, no, I've never had, never got paid for sax.
Nope, I work in this place. You know, they find the most.
Yes, they are only going to have people on there that are going to tell them what they want to hear. And and more so, the one of the weirdest things that I ever experienced in working in television is there is this very strange subset of people. And if you work in casting in like any kind of reality version of television, you know there are people who try to get on every single show and they're not. It's like, if it's a show about couples, they'll submit for that. If it's a show about you know, whatever the fuck it is, they want to they want to be on.
TV making or whatever the fuck, they'll do.
Yeah, and they'll try to like they know TV well enough to know that they have to be interesting in certain personality types and and because it's it is a good way to make money if you, you know, if you're the right person.
But obviously just get one chance.
Yeah you would think, but I mean these are people that are just like, well we'll go over here, Well we'll try to be on the Amazing Race, Well we'll try to be on the Marriage ref. Well we try to be on this. And that's what when I worked on the second season the Marriage Ref there was this one tape where they were like, brought us down to casting because they're like, you're never going to believe what you're about to see. And it's like this weird couple that like it's there's sexual overtones who are like this is they don't know that this is inappropriate, that like this isn't going to get them. It's just this weird shit. And one of the people in that casting department was like, oh, yeah, we had them.
They tried to be on whatever.
Show she had worked on before WOA, And it's just like these people that are kind of like, we know, we're kind of interesting and kind of weirdos and that that works.
Yeah, we're very different and we're wild, and let's get on fucking tell I just want to get on television.
Do you see that the real World?
This season is like everyone thinks they're just going on the real world, but for each each person on the real world, they find they're like enemy.
Oh and they have to live in the house too.
And it's like, this show is interesting enough if you cast it well, these people are just going to make their own fucking and and you edit.
It back and say, because no one's watching TV anymore, so they don't have good ratings, so it's not interesting enough to make a ratings hit. And that's all anybody cares about. And because all of television is owned by like four companies, Yeah, they have this insane grasp on the money.
Who gets the money?
The story is like nobody has any money, but that's actually not true. They're making millions of dollars because even in like a depression, people still watch TV. People still you know, advertising still works. But it's it's this, it's really sick and crazy, that kind of shit where you like that thing where you're watching TV and you're just like, oh, this isn't I don't feel like who I'm seeing is what I'm really seeing. Yeah, So the idea that your story is about a person who actually did the thing really and suffered by it.
Yeah, but she I don't know if she felt it didn't seem like she was. I mean, I guess she was kind of embarrassed and stayed at home a lot, But it's.
Like she didn't seem like she was.
She seemed like confident about having done it for the right reason and for the reason, which was to make her life better, even though she like you know, tore her family apart.
Yeah, well you'd think that that makes your life way worse. Also being murdered, Yeah, I mean because that shame. Shame is the thing people can't deal with, Oh Jesus, shaming people, especially like you were saying, like like that culture where men have to be men, you can't come out and be like, h yeah, yeah sometimes I do this, which is like, you know, yeah, not in a judgmental way of that person's lifestyle, but this is like a cultural thing of where women are supposed to be like wives and mothers.
And especially in Peru, I feel like it's you're not supposed to.
It's not.
It's like so much less accepted and understood than it is here as it is here.
Well, crazy, crazy, right.
I Mean that's the thing too. When you were saying, like you should you should watch it because he's all upset or whatever, I would never watch it.
No, it bothered me a lot. I never watched that.
The fact that the cops didn't keep him away from the from the cameras is upsetting. Like his daughter, his other daughter, tries to shield his space a couple of times, but there's nowhere to turn, Like there's cameras on every on every single angle of this man telling someone on the other line that they found his daughter, Like there's nowhere for him to go to get out of the fucking.
Out of the camera. That's disgusting. It's just really sick and sad. And then the woman who uh told the mother in invertently the reporter, Yeah, the reporter.
She quit doing news after that. Wow yeah, yeah, esuching in this.
Up someone's life. Yeah, like to get that story here, we're like.
Go talk to her now, go up to the room.
After she started crying and trying to get a conversation with her, and there's some quotes in her from in this article.
It's like how awful she felt and that she quit.
Yeah, oh that's yeah. Yeah, you don't want to sell your soul for one paycheck? Uh huh one byeline.
Okay, okay, and we are back Georgia. Any updates anything about this case you can talk about.
No updates on this case.
It is just so sad because like I feel like, as I was telling it, you just knew what was going to happen and what a mess was going to be, and it's so heartbreaking. I will say though, that we mentioned the Jenny Jones show where romantic confession leads to murder, and I actually go on to cover that case in episode forty, which is called squad Gords, Yeah, which we're getting close to. Also, Daniel Aller Khan, who wrote about this case in the California Sunday magazine, now teaches a column be a journalism school, and in twenty twenty one he was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant.
Wow, would you know how hard that is to get?
No? But I bet it's very hard to be a genius. So I feel like I can be like, well, I knew him.
First, and that kind of your genius.
Yeah, that kind of like I'm the genius who knew that he was a genius.
Your genius spotter, And I think that's that you're like a really good casting person, where like they do not get the credit for literally making the movie come together the way it's supposed to come together.
Do you know what I love doing though I watch a movie is talking over the movie. But one of the things I like to do is say, I wonder who auditioned for this part. Yes, I'll like feel like, can you imagine so and so on this part? It would have been totally different, yes.
You know, which also was kind of a point. We shouldn't be talking about this, but here this is my sidebar acting class tip.
Okay, that's what people should be thinking about.
As a person who was very bad at acting and auditioning, it was because I could not keep my eyes on the prize, which is you are supposed to be bringing something to the role that makes the role come alive. You're not supposed to be reciting the words so perfectly whatever. Yeah, Like I was always like I'm sweating my upper lip. Is my upper lip sweating or whatever? Where they're like, no, you're supposed to I saw.
I think, is she who is Pam from the office?
Why is she so Uh yeah, but like when you see people like Johnny. I saw an audition tape for Johnny Pemberton one time, and it was like that guy that was the character walked in and sat down and was doing stuff.
He's like, this is mine, this is me.
It's just brilliant. Yeah. I can't act for shit, so that's really impressive for me.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's get into some dark, deep shit because this is a famous one, and I feel like I've heard about this story, like i'd never heard about it when you told it, and since you told it, I hear about it all the time, right, because it's just brought up a lot because it's so mind boggling. This is Karen telling the story, the famous story of Dorothea Puente. You're ready for your Mariner, it's the same one.
Yeah, turns out mine is the shit.
I can't think of the what's the Howie Mendel show with all the suitcases?
What suitcase number seven? What's on? I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
I was going to try to make a joke about that, but I can't remember what it's called.
I can't remember it's called don't care?
What's in the Suitcase, you know that show, What's in the Suitcase?
All right?
So I picked my story this week.
Actually, my sister suggested this our number one fan, our newest and number oneest fan, And she suggested it because when I was in high school. When I graduated from high school, she had gone to the JC for two years. So by the time I was ready to go to college, she was too, and so we both went to Sack State, which is Sacramento State University. It was precious. Uh. So we both lived to and lived in Sacramento for like the same amount of time. And I've of course talked a massive show about Sacramento on this podcast. Wonderful things happen there, but not to me. And so near the end of right before I moved back home with my parents as an abject failure in my early twenties, I lived in this house on f Street and it was in this weird like Sacramento is weird because as you go downtown closer to the capitol, it's like all the old houses, they're old Victorians and stuff, and some of the streets are really gorgeous, but the neighborhood itself is really bad and it's a very strange combination because it doesn't look like it should be bad. But then there's like we one night in this apartment across the street there was an empty lot that people would just dump garbage in, and two homeless people got into a fight and one of them was beating the other one with a vacuum cleaner that someone had dumped in this empty lot. Oh my god, it was like that kind of area. And it was a horrible time in my life because I had flunked out of college. I think I worked at like two different cafes, so I was making like five dollars an hour, remember those days, and you like you couldn't get any hours, so you were just like always just scraping together money. I remember at one point we would we would rent a VCR from the video Story.
We did that when I was a kid too, Yeah, because we didn't have one, but we would be like, we I want to watch a movie. It was like just really dark.
And then it was also summertime in Sacramento, so it's always one hundred and ten degrees, so everything's just awful in a special way. Also, at the time, the person I was a room roommates with, she she had this friend, I think she was from high school, and together they were two of the most annoying people. Like I'm surprised I didn't try to punch one of them because it was like this obnoxious, like like hard girl act but like but it was like the the Sacramento version, so there's a country element to it, and it was really like just kind of ignorant and.
Rude, the kind of girls that are like, I don't get along with other girls.
Exactly, Yeah, I only led guys or it's like, well, then go fucking hang out with some guys and get away from me. There was, Yeah, it was a lot of that kind of stuff. For like, babe, come home at four in the morning from a club and like knock on the door and be like let me in. It was just everything was I was livid. I was either livid or scared to death all the time. So it turns out, come to find out living in this apartment for a little while that somebody who came over put it together and goes, don't you realize that that is doroth Two doors down is Dorothea Puente's house.
Who's Doronia Wendey.
Well, Dorothia Puente's is the old lady in Sacramento that got caught. She ran a boarding house for old people and like handicapped people, and and it turned out, oh my god, that she had been murdering them, taking their social Security check, taking it across the street to the dive bar. That was so scary we never even tried to go there.
So Dorothy A.
Puante is basically I'll tell you. So here's her story, let's hear it. She had a very sad childhood. When she was eight, her father died of tuberculosis, and the next year her mother died in a car crash. Fuck.
Those are like two of the worst ways to die.
So she was in an orphanage for a little while, and then eventually she had to go live with family members in Fresno.
No, it just gets sad.
That's one of the worst places to live, I mean.
So in nineteen forty five, when she was sixteen, she got married for the first time, so she had Between nineteen forty six and nineteen forty eight, she had two daughters. One she sent to live with relatives and Sacramento, and the other one she go up for adoption. So she was not able to deal with any kind of family situation at all. And I think she definitely has some kind of mental disorder, as you'll see, so I'm sure she probably had it then being a sixteen year old newlywed mother.
Yeah who I growing up in an orphanage, not good, who had two huge traumatic experiences when she was young, with her parents dying back to back, back to back.
So yeah, fact.
That husband that married her when she was sixteen left her and left her in nineteen forty eight, like a couple of years later, so she started telling people he died of cancer. So oh no, sorry, died of a heart attack a couple days after they got married. So it was like even more tragic for her. Yeah, So she's also in throughout this. It's like she's basically a compulsive layer. Yeah, and she started forging checks, which she ends up doing throughout her life. That's kind of her forte. That's her favorite. That's her favorite crime. Such a weird crime. It's super weird. And the funny thing is that you get caught and then you get sentenced for like a couple of years, then you get out because it's non violent and it's I don't know, maybe it's kind of arty. So they're like, no, all right, it's.
Such a weird you paid your duce, like you hear about so many people are like they never had a violent offense, they just forged checks. And it's like, well, that's I would never think to do that.
It's still a crime.
I mean, yeah, you might have great penmanship and all, sure, but you're still a criminal. In nineteen sixty she based and then she remarried a Swede named Axel Johansson, which fuck you know that that was a party Oh yeah, waiting to happen. Of course, a violent alcoholic. They were married for fourteen years and then they ended it and then eight years late or sorry. During that marriage, two years before she got divorced, she was arrested in a brothel. She told the cops that she was there siting a friend. We don't know what is true about that. One of the articles I read said that she ran the brothel. Fuck, but it seems more likely since she only she was arrested and served ninety days. I think she was probably just there, either visiting her friend or visiting some friends whatever you might.
Doving a brothel ain't an easy task. That's a big job.
And you don't just you don't just bail no at the first arrest. So what she ended up doing is going into she became a nurse's aid, and she started caring for the disabled and the elderly, and price she turned her life around. Well you would like to think that kind of story, yeah, end of story. So in nineteen eighty two she did that for a while. In nineteen eighty two, her sixty one year old friend and business partner, Ruth Monroe, who was living in so Dorothea had this house on f Street, Big Victorian.
Two doors down from Karen Keltic.
Tutors, down from the future Miserable home of Miserable Karen Kilgarf. So there was an upstairs apartment that she would rent out. So she rented it out to Ruth Monroe, and there were business partners, which I guess means that they were working together taking care of old people and disabled people.
In private homes.
But Ruth died from an overdose of codine and essida menafin, and Dorothea told the police that Ruth was very depressed because her husband was terminally ill, so they ruled Ruth's death a suicide. But then a few weeks later, the police had to come back because a seventy four year old pensioner named Malcolm Mackenzie had accused Dorothea of drugging and stealing from him. So he had gone to the police and said that he had met Dorothea at a local bar called the Zebra Club and that they had several drinks together, which I bet means in the fifteens. Then he invites her back to his apartment and soon after they arrive, he gets dizzy and even though he's conscious, he can't move and he has to sit and watch as she searches his house for valuables, takes his rare penny collection and forces the diamond ring off his finger.
Rare penny? Can we go back to rare penny collection? And I mean fucking cool?
That is? Yeah, you know it was like you know, hardboard book like this with all the years underneath the slots.
That makes me happy.
That's well.
So she gets convicted of three charges of theft in August eighteenth of nineteen eighty two, and she gets sentenced to five years in jail for that.
Wow, what happened to the rare penny collection?
We haven't been able to trace it.
So we're starting a foundation called Find the Rare Pennies dot gov. So she's in jail, okay, and she starts being pen pals with a retiree, seventy seven year old retiree named Everson Gilmouth, and they become friends through the mail. And when she's released in nineteen eighty five after only serving three years, he was there waiting for her to pick her up from jail in his nineteen eighty red Ford pickup and everything was okay, and everything turned great. So soon they were making wedding plans and they opened a joint bank account, and they were back in her house in Sacramento. Now we're cutting to five years later. Dorothea hires a handyman to come and put in some wood paneling in her apartment. And for that work, plus he paid her an additional eight hundred dollars. She gave him a red nineteen eighty eight nineteen eighty Ford pickup that was in good condition, almost totally not used, which she said had belonged to her ex boyfriend who lived in Los Angeles.
Yeah, where'd she get that?
So she asks this handyman that she hires to build her a six by three by two foot box for her to store you know, books and stuff as you.
Do in a fucking coffin.
Yeah, but a box that you want to store stuff in.
And then she asks them once she fills it with her books.
I'm doing air quotes. You can't see.
She says, I please take this to my storage depot, and he agrees, and she goes with him, and then on the way she has him pull over and just has him dump it on a river bank. Yeah, at a kind of unofficial dump site with books. It sounds unlikely, but again, we did have an unofficial dump site across from our.
Apartment right where you put coffin with boxes.
Yes, books, you know, or or beat another person with the vacuum clear whatever needs to happen. So a lot of dumping going on up in Sacramentos and Sutter County. So they dumped that, and um oh, she just told him the stuff in the in the box was junk. Well. On January first, nineteen eighty six, a fisherman spots the box and it's sitting three feet from the bank of the river. So he calls the police and they open the box and find a badly decomposed unidentifiable viable body of an elderly man inside. Well, it turns out that Dorothea was still collecting ever since Gilmouth's pension, and she would write letters to his family explaining that he hadn't contacted them because he was ill. And so he was basically one of her first victims. Now this was no She was renting this apartment all the time. This was her business, and she had forty new tenants in the house. In the whole house. She was actually approached approached by a social worker named Peggy Nickerson. She approached the social worker and just explained to her, just so you know, if people on fixed incomes, people on social security, elderly people, you can they can come and stay in my boarding house.
Everyone's welcome.
Yeah, because she had the best system to offer her, prices were really low, and she took quote unquote took care of the people that work that lived there, because people are nice. She made dinner every night, She had everybody come down and sit at dinner together. You know, she like made sure there were people that stayed there that were homeless or like had mental problems. She made sure they showered and clipped their nails, and she was real.
If it was real, that'd be so beautiful.
I mean, yeah, right, that's the that's the whole lure of it is people need that kind of care, and she's saying that she's going to be able to provide that for them. Uh so, sorry, keep making that mistake.
So she uh.
She also she was known for taking tough cases, like all the social workers were like, you, if it's a person that can't get placed anywhere, you can take them to Dorothea's.
She will take them in.
And she collected their monthly mail before they saw she paid them in stipends, and then she pocketed the rest of their like social Security check or whatever their check was, for expenses quote unquote yeah fucking so. Parole agents would go to visit her, and she had been ordered to stay away from the elderly and to refrain from handling government checks. Oh my gosh, but no violations were ever noted. And they think it's because she was known in the social welfare circles as being so good that they would go in and check and be like, you can't be around old people, you can't stay away from security checks. But nothing official would ever go in.
Yeah.
Well, in May of nineteen eighty eight, neighbors started complaining of a sickly sweet smell, so she blamed the aroma on applications of fish emulsion. Her on her perfectly tended lawn and tended to the point where if people walked on her lawn, she would scream at them and swear like a sailor. So she was very protective of her lawn and she did a lot of gardening. So there was a man that stayed at the house and people around the neighborhood knew him as chief. He was schizophrenic, and he was an alcoholic, and he was homeless. He went and stayed with Dorothea. She made him her handyman, and she clear him all up, made sure that he took a shower all the time, like, made him presentable, made him come and eat dinner with everybody, made him take his his antipsychotic medication or his meds. So she had him digging in the basement and carting soil and rubbish away with a wheelbarrow. And he basically there was a concrete slab on her basement floor.
He was basically digging up the basement floor. What do you need it for? Sophia.
He Uh soon afterwards disappeared, and so when UH there was a second tenant disappeared, a developmentally disabled man who had schizophrenia. When his social worker reported him missing. His name was Alberta Montoya. The police came and realized this is this, this keeps happening here. So they were looking around and they noticed in the backyard there was some ground that was had been recently disturbed. So these investigators went to the car, got the shovels that were in their car, and they started digging and quickly turned up what looked like shreds of cloth and beef jerky.
The report.
And so as they're trying to sell my lunch find out what's under there. One of the investigators said that he thought that he hit a tree route and so he was whacking at it and jabbing at it with his.
Shovel and it wouldn't move.
So he decides to climb down into the hole where that they had dug up to get to pull it out, and he wrapped his hands around it, braced himself, started pulling and it broke loose and it was a leg bone out of the socket.
They had to suspect that at that point where they wouldn't have been digging, right, yes, so why are you fucking yanking?
He thought it was a tree root?
Come on though, like you're looking, but if it's.
Well, but I mean they're looking, but a tree root is the most likely thing that's going to be there, Okay, So if I'm sure that they'd done stuff like that before, and it's like, yeah, I mean, that would be there twenty percent of the time, but most of the time it's that. And also I think when bodies that aren't that are buried just straight into the ground, they turned black and brown, so it would have probably looked like a tree root too. So then they start digging up her whole backyard and uh oh, she came out when he was down in the hole, and he had this bone. She came out and when they turned around, they were like, we just found a human bone. She did They said this, She did this thing where she slapped her hands on her face like really over the top and in like trying to act like she was surprised. And they immediately were like, there's something going on, Like that's the weirdest, like.
Straight up home alone style, home alone style exactly. That's where they got that from.
And apparently neighbors said that she always talked about wanting to be an actress and planning on moving to Los Angeles.
She's a bad actress. Yeah, yeah, she needed to take some classes.
So this body that they eventually dug up was a woman named Leona Carpenter who was seventy eight years old and one of her very Dorothya's very first victims that stayed in that house. They basically had the corner's office, came in with heavy machinery and a whole work crew and just started and forensic anthropologists and started digging up this entire backyard. And that I've seen the news footage that basically taken from the angle of because they couldn't get in. Yeah, so it's basically taken from our back porch.
Holy shit.
I mean not literally, I don't know because it was nineteen eighty eight, but they they shot it over the fence and you see these cops walking around and it's just like the you see a lot of sheets and like the when they put out the string and the steaks.
Yeah, you know, like this will be the next area. Oh my god, it's so crazy.
Sea So since Dorothea Puentez. Wasn't immediately point to a singular, wasn't immediately a suspect. She I mean, like they didn't when they were doing that first digging. It wasn't like keep her right there.
Yeah.
Yeah, So she said she was going to go get a cup of coffee at the hotel up the street while they were doing that, and then she fucking high tails it to.
Laws as well, now they know it's you, dude.
Yeah, but she I mean she left, so she thought she was out of there. Yeah, And she and she didn't think they were onto her the way that they were. So when she gets to Los Angeles, she goes to a bar and she starts making friends with an old pensioner sitting at the bar. She introduced herself as I think it was Donna Johansson. Well we know it didn't. Oh god, I wish it didn't. The articles I read didn't say it's got to be something that we know, something Divy picked. Maybe the frolic room.
Frolic room first, That's exactly what I was thinking.
Yeah, uh.
But luckily this old pension nerd probably been sitting at the bar watching the news.
A bunch.
From the news and called the car. So they got her down in LA and brought her back up. Eventually, seven bodies were found buried in her backyard.
Wow.
She was charged with a total of nine murders because they uh, they traced back the apparent the apparent suicide of her old.
Ruth and row and then uh, the other guy, the other the missing guy.
Chief oh Man. Do you think that the frolic realm got a reward?
I don't know, nobody did. Here's what's interesting.
When detectives were in that backyard, they realized that they were only blocks away from the home of serial killer Morris Solomon, where they had dug up from that house a bunch of dead bodies in nineteen eighty seven.
Was he I don't know him.
I have never heard of him either. WHOA and Sacramento. I just got to say, I mean, like I've talked about it, I've complained about it, but like I must be a little bit right because we've already had I think four serial killers from Sacramento on this show alone.
It's chock full of murders.
It's nutso so basically at the end of the day, she went to trial in February nineteen ninety three, she was convicted of three murders, sentenced to two life sentences, received life without the possibility of parole. She went to chow Chilla, the ladies facility. She always said that all those people died of natural causes and she just buried them there, and that she herself, at age eighty two March twenty seventh, twenty eleven, died of natural causes in prison.
Wow.
Yeah, that's our girl, girl, Dorothea, that's our hometown girl. She would take their checks, walk across the street to that dive bar and get her money.
The cash checks at dive bars.
They cash checks at they're so ye.
Certain bars that are so divy they will cash your social Security.
Check for you.
So like they're like second Friday of every month is like cue, you got to get a couple of bartenders on staff.
That's right because well and also it's Sacramento, like literally the state capitol was blocks away, so they know they're getting their money.
If it's a government.
Check, yeah, they know that thing is good. So they don't If it's that little old lady that runs the boarding house, of course they're going to do her favorite.
It brings everyone over and she takes her portion, and then she's so nice.
She's taking care of all those people inside that building.
Thank god. What did it smell like in that fucking building? Oh?
In that dive bar too? I mean, I bet it was carpeted that house.
No, the dive bar, Oh, yes, for sure, yet like dark maroon.
Yeah, like thin dark moon, like bowling alley carpet.
I bet they had like a It was a pretty small and they had a pool table that was too close to one wall, so then they had to cut a pool queue in half so you could shoot from that side of the table.
Is that what they do?
I've never seen that.
I've seen it in dive bary. I have not been in like real dive bars.
Then you gotta become a full blown alcoholic. It is so fun.
I went to one full blown like real real dive bar in Savannah, Georgia, but like on the outskirts of it, and I was like, oh, this isn't an charming la dive bar. There's a Confederate flag on the wall and I the only Jew who's ever been in here, And I'm just.
They should have taken your picture and put it up behind the bar.
That was terrifying.
Wow, yeah, it's so sad. I mean it's crazy.
And when you sit when you saw her on the news, like she was on the news all the time. Her picture, I totally remember it. She looks like a cartoon of a little old lady.
No, like not even big glasses. She's really short, gray hair. The whole thing. You have to never think, how did she kill everyone?
Just she just druk poison them Ordison, I mean I think, so wow.
Yeah, man, well it's fucked up, pretty fucked up.
Okay, So now we're ending the show on We're ending on a positive. Now, that's right. One really great thing that happened to us this past week, right, right, So do you have yours?
Do you give yours? Sure?
Uh? A really great thing is that I hung out out Sunday evening with a girlfriend that I like a lot, and we've gotten to know each other a lot, but we like had this great deep comm like we hang out a lot of people together. Her name's Crystal, but she and I sat at a bar and just fucking talked and we're like, I'm not very happy and just like we're very open with each other in a way that's like hard to do find when you're an adult is someone to be really open with and and just you know who understands you when you guys can get each other, and that's that's hard to do. And we just had this really great conversation and I felt a lot better after it and kind of feel like I've made a friend.
Oh I don't have for a long time. It's kind of a deeper connection.
It was nice. That's great. Yeah, that's very good. It's toious. It's all that matters.
Yeah, they say in human connection is really it's nothing else makes people actually happy except for connecting with other human beings.
Really.
Yeah, well, shit, I guess mine is that.
I don't well I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about that because it's it sucks because all I've been doing is working, so most of mine are work based, which is a little bit lame.
But well you know what, I'll I can say, you're proud of yourself.
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, just chat. But I mean it's like when you have one thing to talk about where it's people are like, hey, what's up with you? It's like, just don't bother asking. It doesn't matter. But there's a guy that's a guest star. I guess I just won't say his name, and then when when the show is actually on, I can say it. But yeah, he's on my episode, and he's so funny. It's like the most delightful thing in the world. I mean, everybody on this show is really good, and I'm very excited for this show to come out because I think people are really going to like it. But this one guy is hilarious and he looks like the guy that I adored in high school, so it makes it even more fun to watch him because it's like it almost looks like a weird mick, like a.
Mashup, like you're rooting person already, because yes, nice.
But then on top of that, it's the kind of thing where you can't it's like single camera, like you can't laugh out loud when things are happening because they need like perfect quiet, and I have to keep my hand over my mouth.
He's so funny.
Oh and that's the shit you've written too.
Yeah, some of it. Yeah, I mean some of it.
But at one point I went up. I had to finally introduce myself because I was actually he was so funny that I was nervous to. I didn't want to be like, hey, what's up, I'm a writer or whatever. I was just kind of like trying to stay away. And when I finally did go up to introduce myself, I said, I in my head, I thought I was going to say, you know, like, you're great or today has been so great or something like that, but what came out was you're being so funny. And the second the last word of that sentence came out of my mouth, I just turned and walked away.
So I was just like, hopefully I just won't have stopped it.
I can't wait tell this cuts and I get to find out who it is.
Yes, I mean it's not Some people may have seen him before, but it's not. He not well known.
Okay, I feel like I'm not telling you in tile it airs either, you won't tell me.
Yeah, we'll keep it a huge secret until next spring because it's a mid season replacement.
Well, thanks for listening, you guys. This is Oh we never introduced what the show was.
No one knows.
Oh that's too bad. This is my favorite murder is what the fuck with Mark Bren Thanks for listening. I'm Maren.
Go to Twitter my Favorite Murder Instagram, my Favorite Murder. We're on Facebook at MFM podcast our shirts, my favorite Murder shirts, dot com everything.
Thank you so much for listening and supporting and being active involved people.
We love it. It's very fun.
You guys are the best and this is so great.
Stay sexy, don't get murdered, Elvis. Do you want to cookie?
Cookie awesome?
Yes?
Yes, Okay, we are back from your story, Karen.
Any updates on Dorothea Puente.
Well, I do have an update, which is that I'm blown away that I started this by saying that my sister is the show's newest listener and number one fan, and she's the one that suggested this story. Yeah, my sister has never listened to this podcast.
No, not once.
I think she used to listen in the beginning when we were just chatting, but she has so much anxiety she cannot listen to true crime.
Like she can't do it.
And so that's just really funny because there's like I will have full conversations with multiple people and she'll just be sitting there like smiling, where I'm like, you could get in here, you could support me at any time.
No, thank you, She's like I know you.
Yeah, I'll never give you that satisfaction, I'll say. The other one is that I just want to update this for my own credit. When I was talking about the person that I was working with on the show that I was working with, and I had to keep my mouth covered because he was so funny that I did. You can't laugh out loud on set, obviously, Huh. That whole story was about Tim Robinson from I Think You Should Leave?
Oh my God? And what show is it?
It was the show called Making History. I think there was only five episodes. It was very very short run. I was lucky enough to be the writer on the episode where he showed up as al Capone.
Oh wow, oh my god.
It was a true hang with Tim Robinson before I Think you Should Leave came out.
Yeah, you were probably also covering your mouth because you hadn't had your teeth fixed yet.
Remember that I was very like demure, a demure giggler, because my teeth were insane, irish teeth.
What crazy is that?
That? Like, your life is so different now because you have these beautiful pearly whites.
I can't wait to see Tim Robinson again.
And show him look at these motherfucks. Look at my GAFA now.
Okay, So but then there are also case updates. Okay, so for the Dorothea Puente case, which will is kind of my college hometown. It was a real joy and that conversation went on forever on Twitter, like people from Sacramento being like, why do you have to be like this to us? And you know, there's a lot of motion.
That was where the beef from Sacramento started it.
Yeah, I started and ended that beef all all by myself, and people in Sacramento are like, we don't care about you. Shut up. So in twenty ten, Dorothea Puante's house was sold at an auction. So this was the house, a boarding house where she was killing the borders and taking their social Security checks and cashing them across the street at the Dive's Bar. My eyes have ever set their eyes upon. The house was sold at auction for two hundred and twenty six thousand dollars. Wow, twenty ten.
Still that still sounds cheap.
It's a bargain. According to the Sacramento be the couple who purchased it outbid one other contestant in a packed room.
And everyone was like, stay away. From them.
Yeah, they're like, so you do want the house where the bodies.
Were buried in the backyard. You're going to fight someone over winning.
It over living in a haunted house.
God.
So today the homeowners lean into the house's macob history and there's you know, they basically have made it a little bit of a museum. There's frame photographs on the wall documenting Puente's history. There, there's like a mannequin that looks like her on the front port. And yeah, but the owners are very clear they think she obviously was an awful, horrible person.
But it's like people are.
Gonna they're gonna come by. They're gonna come by.
Yeah. I like that. They're like, look, we know this is weird.
We're going to go with it instead of like just pretending everything is by and la la lah, right, you know.
Because you can't have a story like that. And I think that was, you know, obviously what I was talking about when I told it where it's just like we always hear those kinds of horror stories, but when it's two doors down, right, Like when these things happen, the block is affected. The neighbors are affected. There, the price of their homes are affected.
Yeah, that's like I saw it recently, like a whole slideshow on Instagram of person going like house to house in la of like the Brady Bunch House, the Et House, the Wonder Years House, and you know, people in that neighborhood have to get so sick of that, probably, And I wonder if I don't think i'd move into a house that people would be taking photos in front of all the time.
I don't think so I would want to unless the windows were all in the back.
Right and it was really cheap, in which case this was so. Yeah, good for them, I mean, and I think it's a great area. I think now it's even better.
Good for them. Yeah, all right, let's stop talking about ourselves.
Let's stop talking about ourselves through Dorothea poise. Yeah, and instead rename this episode.
I love Liminal Space though the idea of it is fun. But if we were naming it today, perhaps we would call this episode back from Camp, because that's what we had joked about in the beginning. Oh right, so back from Camp.
Yeah, we're going to the normal format that.
Bought me these teeth.
Yeah, Or we could rename it Daddy Wants to Come Home, which is what I said to you when I was complaining about having two jobs and wishing I had more time for this podcast.
You're going to have more time for this job, and it's going to be the most time consuming job you've got, like more than having three jobs at once. It turns out true.
So true. I have I had to hire people to help me live the rest of my life so I could get this stuff done.
Totally. It's not I want to warn her, it's not going to get better.
Oh she knows, she can feel it in her bush.
She'll have the money for new teeth.
So that's really the here's the Yeah, the teeth have always been the goal. Yeah, huge piece of derrida in the corner of my mouth. But I had to say this, and I'm I hope and I'm pretty sure you feel the same exact way. What an insanely rewarding experience, like all of it has been. But to now have a job on par with the job I used to have for a different person, all of the energy, all of the creative ideas, all of the everything getting poured into somebody else that just walks away, like here's my thing, which is what a writer does for a loving it is what you agree to. But to sit there kind of broken hearted, like I wish it could have been me. Yeah, And then now.
To be here you're hustling for yourself, it makes.
It like truly a lovely, joyous thing. And then to be able to hire people that it's like, yeah, let's not hire the people we've worked in the past and permanently traumatized us. Let's give the jobs to the people who are like other versions of ourselves, right, people that you know, like Danielle Kramer, who is Georgia's recommendation, knowing her from like Meltdown is our coo and like, couldn't have been a better match.
It's like, and we want her to not feel like she's hustling for someone else and it's like, fucking she hates it. We want it to be like fun for her and to feel like she's getting something out of it. It's bigger than just like this fucking guy is walking away.
We want to control her and everyone else is around us as feelings and we're going to and we do and we will, and thank you for listening and yours too, and stay sexy.
Don't get murdered.
Goodbye Elvis Do you want a cookie
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