The Cheat Sheet: Manhunts and Mistrials

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[00:01:50] Content warning. This episode contains discussion of domestic violence, suicide, and murder. Today on the Cheat Sheet, we're going to be covering four different cases. One is actually abroad in England. Another is in our backyard in Indiana. And then two are in

[00:02:07] our nation's capital in Washington, D.C. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney. And this is the Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're the Murder Sheet.

[00:02:25] And this is the Cheat Sheet, manhunts and mistrials. So this first case that we're going to cover, we're going to have to go abroad. We're going to have to head over to England. And this is a really sad and disturbing case. It's currently

[00:03:26] ongoing and we're sort of learning more details as time goes on. But I'll go into more detail I'll go into the basics of what we know so far. And for this, I'm going to be using the sources of

[00:03:38] Sky News, The Sun, The Mirror, and I'll also be citing something from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics. So on BBC 5 Live, the British Broadcasting Corporation, I believe, it's like one of England's major channels. There's a man named John Hunt. He's a former police officer who now

[00:04:02] serves as the BBC racing commentator. So he's going on TV and talking about racing, right? That's his job. Well, unfortunately, on Wednesday, July 9th, he returned home to his house in Ashland Close in Hertfordshire and discovered his wife and two daughters severely injured. They'd been

[00:04:30] tied up and shot with a crossbow and also harmed with other weapons. And emergency services responded very quickly, but they all died at the scene. So the victims were Hunt's 61-year-old wife Carol, his 28-year-old daughter Hannah, and his 25-year-old daughter Louise. Hannah had her own

[00:04:54] business, Hannah Grace Cosmetics, and Louise also had her own dog grooming business called Groom and Glow. And according to media interviews with neighbors and whatnot, they're all very considered very nice people, just nice, normal women going about their days. People noticed

[00:05:10] something strange on that Wednesday when they heard what sounded like screaming around 6.30pm and sort of seemed like maybe it's just kids running around the neighborhood. Then it seemed to get more concerning. And very shortly after, police responded, ambulance responded, the whole

[00:05:29] area is in chaos. And so that's something. So pretty quickly, the word went out. Unfortunately, it's my understanding from some of these statements that close relatives may have learned of these women dying through the media, not through official channels. So that's very unfortunate. But

[00:05:50] a suspect emerged, and that was 26-year-old Kyle Clifford. He's from Enfield in North London. He's a soldier. He's a former soldier, at least. He was in the Queen's Dragoon Guards. And then a former colleague talking to the press said that they thought then he switched over to

[00:06:06] private security. And he was known to the victims. He was Louise's ex-boyfriend. They had broken up pretty recently, and she was apparently very stressed and distraught about that. And so there was a large-scale manhunt, helicopters looking for this guy. Police were informing the public.

[00:06:26] They gave a lot of details about the case early on because he was a suspect saying, watch out for this guy. He may be armed with a crossbow. He may do other crimes.

[00:06:34] He's dangerous. And basically, let us know if you see him. So on July 10th, 2024, Clifford was captured at the Lavender Hill Cemetery in Enfield. He's captured on footage being sort of stretchered

[00:06:47] out of the area. And that is what we know for now. But of course, for John Hunt and I believe Hannah and Louise have one surviving sibling. I believe he had three children. Their family has

[00:07:02] been ripped apart by this really horrifying and brutal crime. And it's shocking. I'll say this, just given that Louise's connection to this man was that he's her ex-boyfriend, it makes me, I mean, I certainly have felt this covering true crime the way we do. But

[00:07:24] we need to have a better understanding of things like domestic abuse, things about who is more likely to lash out against an intimate partner or a former intimate partner and anyone who might get

[00:07:35] in their way. That can mean a new partner. That can mean the partner's family. We have these dangerous situations arising where you have aggrieved people going after exes or even current partners. And it's really, I feel like this is kind of an issue that kind of pervades across

[00:07:58] different countries, pervades across societies. And I'll say this, I've used the language of people intentionally because women do kill their male partners too. We're actually, we've covered cases like that. But in fairness, not nearly as often. Well, but I don't want to, women can kill

[00:08:17] their male partners and men can also be victims of domestic violence and domestic abuse. So not to minimize that, that's important to talk about too. But when we look at the Bureau of

[00:08:29] Justice statistics, just looking at the year 2021, so this is, in the United States, it's not England, but again, or I'm saying that this, I think this pervades countries of around the, there were about like 4,900 female murder victims and non-negligent manslaughter victims. 34% were killed by an

[00:08:49] intimate partner. When you look at the 17,000 male murder and non-negligent manslaughter victims, only 6%. And that doesn't even get into how many of those were women. So this is a problem. I don't know what the solution is. I don't know if it's education of young men,

[00:09:12] kind of intervening early. I don't know if it's harsher, stricter sentences and monitoring for people who are accused and convicted of domestic violence-related crimes. I don't know what that is, maybe more resources for victims. But when you have something like this, it underscores,

[00:09:33] why are men going out and doing this to women that they were once romantically involved with and their families? I mean, how can this happen? How can something so heinous happen to people who

[00:09:47] obviously were just, did not deserve it and just were living their lives one day and now they're gone and a family is left shattered because... It happens again and again and again. It rarely gets a lot of attention unless it happens to be a high-profile case, but it's

[00:10:04] unfortunately something that while perhaps some of the links to a well-known BBC presenter, the links to kind of a bizarre type of crime with a crossbow may be different. This kind of scenario

[00:10:21] plays out again and again. And I feel like we need to, especially in true crime, shine a spotlight on it because something like this, I think most people are much more at risk of getting involved

[00:10:31] in a situation like this than they are being the victim of a random serial killer. So I think it's important to talk about, I feel so bad for Mr. Hunt and his family. This is just horrible. I

[00:10:41] feel so bad for the people living in this area. It sounds like kind of a close-knit place. And I imagine this is incredibly traumatic. And I just hope that there can be some healing eventually and that we can have a wider discussion about some of these issues,

[00:10:57] but very sad all around. Dave Let's move on to a case that originates in our nation's capital, Washington, DC. And so perhaps not surprisingly, I found it in the pages of The Washington Post. And I also relied on an opinion issued by the Court of Appeals.

[00:11:17] And the reason this case jumped out at me is I think a lot of us hear certain legal terms and principles, and we really don't really think about what they mean or what the real-world consequences

[00:11:30] of them could be, including sometimes the people who don't really quite understand what they mean, as we will see, could be judges. And this concept we will be discussing in this case is double

[00:11:44] jeopardy. And I think we all know that double jeopardy means that a person can't be tried for the same crime more than once. There are some limited exceptions to that, but basically that's

[00:11:58] the principle. And the reason for that is we want to protect the right of the defendants. Just think back, for instance, on your own life, any skill or anything you've learned, you get better with practice. Guess what? The same applies to prosecutors and prosecutions.

[00:12:18] And so if prosecutors come in the middle of a trial, say, well, we really screwed up, we won't make these mistakes again. Let's just start all over. You're really giving the prosecution a pretty big advantage. Yeah. Also, you might just go burn through the jury pool,

[00:12:37] and hit on the right jury. Finally, we got him. It raises all sorts of really troubling concerns. Right. And so it is the right belongs to the defendant to protect his interests.

[00:12:52] Okay. So in this particular case, it involves a man named Alfonso J. Walker, who was on trial for shooting 44-year-old Antone Brown and 23-year-old Delonte Wilson. At one point in his trial, a woman goes to the stand. She takes the stand. She's a prosecution witness. And in the

[00:13:19] course of her testimony, she says, oh, the talk in the neighborhood was that Alfonso J. Walker definitely did this. He's definitely guilty. Everybody knew it. Now, the problem is you can't do that. That's hearsay. You don't convict people based on rumors that are going through a neighborhood.

[00:13:40] You convict them based on actual evidence that you can bring into a court and show the jury. So everybody agrees that when this woman got on the stand and said in front of the jury,

[00:13:54] he should be convicted because of what the people on the street were saying. That is wrong. We all agree. There's no dispute there. Are you with me on that? Yes. So the question is, what do we do about it?

[00:14:12] The defense attorneys felt like, well, we like this jury. We like the way this case has been going so far. So we think all we need to do is have the judge instruct the jury,

[00:14:25] just disregard everything this woman said. That's kind of what I would feel would be relief. I don't know. The prosecution said, no, we don't need to do that. Let's just have them disregard the specific things she mentioned that were hearsay. So there was a little bit of a

[00:14:42] dispute there. These things can get worked out, frankly. Yeah. This doesn't seem like something that should sink a trial. Yeah. But basically the important thing is both sides recognized there was a problem

[00:14:55] that needed to be fixed and both sides felt that it was fixable. The only question was, how are we going to do this? Well, then the judge says, well, here's what we do. Why don't we just

[00:15:09] start all over and it'll be like this mistake never happened. We'll have a brand new trial. So this was done over the objections of the defense. So the defense subsequently takes

[00:15:20] this to the court of appeals and says, this isn't right because now the defendant is going to have to be tried again, even though he liked the other jury, he wanted to stick with that. This is a

[00:15:34] violation of his rights. And to make a long story short, the court of appeals agreed and said this judge really screwed up. And it is the right of the defendant that needs to be protected.

[00:15:49] So in most instances, he has to be completely in the driver's seat as to whether or not a mistrial can be declared. I'm sure you're all thinking about the Karen Reed case. So one of the exceptions is

[00:16:04] if there's a hung jury. If there's a hung jury, even if the defense wants to carry on forever, at some point a judge has to call it. But other than that, or if there's like an act of God,

[00:16:20] if there's a COVID thing going on and courtrooms have to be closed, it has to be pretty extreme for a judge to declare a mistrial over the wishes of the defense.

[00:16:35] And this crossed the line. And so the court of appeals found no, the judge was wrong to do this. And it would be a violation at this point of the principle of double jeopardy for this man to face

[00:16:51] a new trial. So he's now a free man. And obviously the family is upset. The families of both men. Families of the victims. And I can understand that. It's a frustrating conclusion in the case, but I do feel it's the correct one. What do you think?

[00:17:12] Well, I think the court of appeals seemingly had no choice, but the judge in the original court didn't. They could have done things differently and seemingly had a better outcome. I saw that the defense in this case was also sort of accusing the prosecution of sabotaging their

[00:17:27] own case in order to get a mistrial and basically get a do-over. Do you think that's a fair accusation or do you think the blame for this lies squarely upon the judge? I think ultimately it doesn't matter because in either case, it's wrong.

[00:17:39] No, I want to know what to be mad about. Tell me. No. A prosecution is not allowed to make... Let's say theoretically a prosecutor feels, I'm losing the case. I know what I'll do. I'll do something egregious. I'll violate the rights of

[00:17:58] the defendant so the defendant will be upset and say, I want a mistrial. And then everything's okay and I can have my do-over. We're not getting in trouble. But no, that's not how it works. You don't get a mulligan.

[00:18:10] You don't get to force a new trial by intentionally making a mistake. Yeah. But I don't even think in this case you need to get to that issue. It doesn't matter if the prosecution intentionally solicited hearsay testimony from this woman. It doesn't matter

[00:18:30] if it was a mistake. All that matters is the defense, for their own reasons, were happy. They wanted to stay the course and keep on going. And it was the defendant's rights that really should have been paramount in this case.

[00:18:49] Yeah. I don't understand why the judge did this. It seems really egregious and concerning. And I do feel very sorry for the families of these victims. I mean, I don't know,

[00:18:58] maybe it wasn't a good case against him. Maybe he's an innocent man. But I think when you see something like this happen, it feels, even though it's necessary on the part of the Court of

[00:19:09] Appeals to do this, it must feel to them like this is a man who may have killed their loved ones walking out on what seems like a technicality rather than a jury coming together and saying, we don't feel the evidence was there. We're going to acquit him.

[00:19:22] Yeah. I think if someone close to me was killed and someone was put on trial for that, I would really want to see the jury weigh in after hearing all the evidence. I would not

[00:19:35] want to see the process short-circuited, which is what happened here. So the families are the ultimate victims here. I think this is a case that's going to be looked at and studied. One

[00:19:46] of the articles I read about it said this is going to be taught in law schools. It's kind of a cautionary tale. For judges, future judges, don't do this. Yeah. I think, yeah. And it should because ultimately when you have the weight of the state

[00:20:02] against you, you have to defer to the defendant's rights because that's the way our system works. And that is how we kind of keep things even keeled, hopefully, when the system is working.

[00:20:14] It is up to the defendant to decide if things are so egregious, there's no way I can get a trial moving forward. And he was really happy with his jury for whatever reason.

[00:20:26] And I just find it so odd on the part of a judge. You think normally the stereotype about a judge is like, let's keep going, kind of hold the line unless something really bad happens,

[00:20:36] that you'd be reluctant to start the whole thing over. So it just seems really weird. Particularly in this, it seems like what happened was very fixable. Like, yeah, everyone just, you know, this stuff happens. Here's say, you know,

[00:20:50] because people kind of, I think people who don't understand how this works sometimes think like, oh, this minor issue happened or this mistake happened or this thing, it wasn't ideal. Throw the whole thing out. That's not how it works. If cases and trials had to be perfect,

[00:21:05] nothing, we would just be backlogged and litigating the same things over and over again. What matters is, does it rise to the level of essentially throwing, making it an invalid situation and throwing everything into disarray? So something like this is something that I think

[00:21:21] is probably fairly common. Oh, that's hearsay. Get that out of here. The jury should not consider that. Let's move on. And I'm concerned that some people might blame the witness for making this mistake and saying things in court that she shouldn't have said. But the fact

[00:21:38] of the matter is very few of us have the experience of testifying as witnesses in criminal cases. It's easy to make mistakes. And ultimately, the blame for what happened is not on her shoulders, but on the shoulders of the judge. Yeah, it's disturbing. Yeah. Shall we move on?

[00:22:04] Yeah, to your second D.C. case. You're all over D.C. today, which is great because it's one of my favorite cities. You love Washington, D.C. I love Washington, D.C. Great town.

[00:22:16] So this next case is, I found some coverage of this in Fox 5 D.C. and also in D.C. now. And this concerns a man named Zach Freeling. And I want to talk about this case because

[00:22:39] it's a case where a family kept on fighting for someone after that person was dead and they got good results. Well, maybe I don't want to get too far ahead of myself because the fight continues,

[00:22:53] but they're making progress. And sometimes it's important to remember that if you keep trying, sometimes things do go your way. This is a case, as I say, involving a man named Zach Freeling.

[00:23:08] He was a 26-year-old man who, back in October of 2021, died as the result of a gunshot wound. And the police originally determined the manner of death as undetermined, which is a way basically

[00:23:31] of suggesting that this young man killed himself. And there was, in fact, a family history of some suicides. And so that may have potentially swayed or biased the medical examiners as they made their conclusions. This man's family and friends were convinced just because he had relatives who killed

[00:23:55] themselves doesn't mean that he killed himself. We don't believe he did kill himself. They spent a great deal of time and money working the case, advocating for Zach. They hired a PI. They gathered a bunch of evidence, including some ballistics evidence, which made it pretty clear

[00:24:23] in their mind that this couldn't possibly have been a suicide. And as a result of their hard work and constant effort, it has indeed been reclassified as a homicide. And so this means

[00:24:37] now there is a crime to be investigated and a crime for which someone can be held accountable. And I note that Mr. Freeling's family indicate that they have a suspect in mind who they believe

[00:24:49] is responsible for the death of their loved one. And so they are going to continue to work for the memory of Zach and to bring justice for him. – Have the officials in this case given any indications as to why this wasn't classified

[00:25:05] as a homicide immediately? – They haven't. There's talk about resources. Sometimes it's really hard to work a case. Sometimes things might seem ambiguous. And they say, well, you know, sometimes when new information comes forward, we do go back and reassess. And that's what they say happened here.

[00:25:26] – Well, I give them credit for reassessing. Honestly, to be blunt, and I'm certainly not speaking about this case in particular, but when it comes to cases like this where a family denies that a person could have died by suicide, I'm inherently skeptical because I do, I mean,

[00:25:44] the research bears out that there's a lot of denial that can happen in these situations where people feel that, no, I know this person. They never would have done this to me. And, you know, suicide is oftentimes a highly impulsive act. It's not something that you can

[00:25:59] always predict. And there are so many different complicating factors with mental health that sometimes when people use language like it couldn't have been this and all of the forensic evidence indicates that it is, I'm inclined to be skeptical even though I imagine it's still

[00:26:16] very painful and I still sympathize with the families involved. But in this case, if there is indeed – – People can have mental breaks. – Anything can happen. Also, people can be good at compartmentalizing and not showing their pain.

[00:26:29] And that doesn't mean that, you know, they weren't close to anybody else or whatnot. It just means people can hide stuff. And again, oftentimes the decision is very impulsive. But, you know,

[00:26:44] I don't know. In this case, it sounds like there was forensic evidence, ballistics to be looked at and that that bore out the family's theory. So I really commend them for pushing for it and – – I think the attitude you mentioned where you're skeptical of some of these claims,

[00:27:00] I think police also are often skeptical of those sorts of claims. So it really takes a lot to convince them to change their minds on something. Here's what you could do to avoid situations like this. And I think this should be done. And,

[00:27:14] I mean, I'm sure in some places it is, but I don't know if it's universally done. Treat every case, even one that seems like it's on the margins, like it might be a homicide

[00:27:24] or like it is a homicide until you rule it through evidence of suicide. You can always go back and say actually the evidence bears out that it was a suicide. But if you sort of walk into a room,

[00:27:36] say it's a suicide, you're probably not going to investigate it as much because there's no perpetrator to catch. You don't need to canvas. It's this person did this to themselves. And so kind of leaning towards homicide automatically at first and then letting the evidence show

[00:27:56] otherwise, I think it's a better way of doing things. And I'm not saying lean towards like it's a homicide and this guy is the suspect. I just mean like being open to it being a homicide

[00:28:06] to start out with. And then when there's evidence that's like, okay, no one else could have gotten in this room or this gunshot residue is on the person's hands, be piecing it together. But don't just close the door just because something resembles a suicide at first. Just

[00:28:24] be more open-minded at first and then you can save families the anguish of kind of having to go through this and advocate in this way. But yeah, it's obviously very troubling. And I hope

[00:28:35] that they're able to put an investigation together even though so much time has passed. That's what's troubling about this because it's like in those years instead of investigating it like a homicide, evidence has potentially been lost. Things may have gotten, you know, I don't know. It's not

[00:28:54] good for an investigation to be starting on this back foot. Shall we move on? Mm-hmm. So now we're going to go back to our home state of Indiana. And this is a case that occurred in the southern part of the state, specifically New Albany. This is in Floyd

[00:29:15] County and that's just if you're picturing Indiana, that is right across the Ohio River from Kentucky. So that's near Louisville. And what happened was, well, first of all, so Wayne.com and WHAS 11. And this all started at night in front of a Meijer grocery store.

[00:29:40] For those of you who don't live in the Midwest, that is a grocery store chain. And police got a call in Jeffersonville around 730 at night about a young woman possibly being suicidal in the Meijer parking lot. So they showed up and they found 26-year-old

[00:30:00] Terza Linsen. And based on that interaction, police called in for a welfare check for a home on East 11th Street in New Albany. And when police investigated there, they found the body of 68-year-old

[00:30:16] Gary Reed. He was on the floor. He died seemingly from a head injury, although an autopsy is still pending at this point. And Indiana State Police has said it is a murder case and they have begun processing everything, investigating. And Linsen, who actually is from Clarksville,

[00:30:36] was arrested and booked in the Floyd County Jail. So early days in that case, but that is something that is happening in our state. So we will keep an eye on that. Also, we will keep an eye on the Zach Freeland case we mentioned

[00:30:53] a moment ago. And now I believe you have a series of announcements to make and you've indicated they should be made in a very particular order and that I need to respect that.

[00:31:04] I did not. You make me sound like an insane controlling person. I don't think I said that. So you can't see it, but I'm looking at Kevin askance. Why are you always putting me on blast in front of the listeners? May we have announcement number one. Jesus Christ.

[00:31:26] There is no, I'm going to mix them up now just to spite you. So the first one, this is something we've kind of think about a lot. In case you've ever seen us on a Patreon live or when we've

[00:31:37] done an interview on TV, we own a lot of books. We love books. We love bookstores and we want to do our part to support independent bookstores in particular. How can we do that? How can we, the average consumer, the average man on the street,

[00:31:56] how can we support the independent booksellers of this great nation? This is not an ad. We just want to do this because we love bookstores and we just realize like,

[00:32:05] we're always telling you to buy books, but now we're going to try to do it in a way that actually benefits independent bookstores. So we actually talked to the American Booksellers Association. That's right. We did.

[00:32:15] And they gave us a sense of some of the challenges bookstores are facing. It's a very low margin business and oftentimes independent bookstores can't necessarily raise prices to keep up with all the rising costs of doing business. Basically, when you shop at bookshop.org,

[00:32:39] you are supporting local bookstores, local businesses with each purchase. It's also a great way to find new bookstores where you can go in and actually form personal connections. That's where actually the Indiebound website comes out. You can look at their search

[00:32:56] tool and find out where you can go to get cool new authors, cool new events. This is all great. So going forward in our episode, in our show notes, we are going to be exclusively linking to bookshop.org links when we're encouraging you guys to purchase a book.

[00:33:16] Yeah. And I don't mean my silliness to detract from that. We both love bookstores. We'd like to see bookstores continue to be healthy. And I've certainly had a lot of great times going to

[00:33:28] bookstores and hope to continue to have many great times going to bookstores in the future, which means we need to support them. Not suggesting we change the order of the announcements at all,

[00:33:38] but just in passing, I will note it's perfectly acceptable to go to a bookstore wearing a t-shirt. But now go to your next announcement. Go to your next announcement. Oh my God. Okay. Announcement number two.

[00:33:57] Jeez Louise. Okay. So the next thing you probably know if you listen to the show a long time, we frigging love Peru, Indiana. This town back in the day used to be the circus capital of America.

[00:34:09] I'm not kidding. The circuses would come in via train and winter there. So these, I love Peru. I love the people in Peru. Everyone's descended from the circus. Not really, but you know what I mean? It's really cool. And they actually kind of keep that tradition alive

[00:34:26] through their Peru amateur circus. And right now- It's coming up, right? Yeah. It's actually, I think there's shows going on- Even as we speak. Even as we speak. So it started July 13th and it's ongoing until July 20th.

[00:34:42] And this is probably pretty much word for word what I said last year, but it's like a circus where the performers are kids. And I'm so old and pathetic that when I heard this, I thought,

[00:34:56] oh, it's going to be like an old art gang comedy where maybe there's going to be a circus in a garage and there's going to be kids wheeling around dogs in outfits and wagons and things

[00:35:07] of that nature. But no, this is like a real honest to God circus in a real honest to God performing venue. There'll be people, there'll be kids jumping through fire. There'll be kids swinging on trapezes really high up, hopping around on high wires. Yeah. We went last year-

[00:35:23] It's dazzling. We didn't know what to expect and we definitely did not expect that. It's crazy. These kids are- It is dazzling. It's really cool. And so if you are free and you want to go up to Peru, it's a good time.

[00:35:36] It's fascinating, but it's just also a cool history, I think too. And when we were there, I did see many people wearing t-shirts. But announcement number three. We're doing this in a very specific order designed by when Anya came. What is announcement number three?

[00:35:55] Well, announcement number three is we just want to thank- So when we got started out in podcasting, we were very small at first. And one of the first people to really kind of, I feel, reach out to us

[00:36:09] and sort of believe in us was Frank Raciopi. And he started this Earworthy Indie Podcast Awards. It's all for independent podcasters. And he, for some reason, gave us the Best in True Crime Award for 2024, which is really sweet. And I just like, thank you.

[00:36:29] For some reason? We did it because of the quality of our work. I just feel really like- It means a lot because, I mean, it's just really nice. He supported us from the beginning. It's really, really nice.

[00:36:41] We really appreciate his support. It really has meant a lot to us. It meant a lot, yeah. Especially if you ever have the bad judgment to start a podcast. Early on, you're just sending your episodes out into a voice.

[00:36:57] You're screaming into the night and you have no idea if anyone's listening to you. And it means a lot. And he was there listening and that means a lot to us. So I thank him for giving us that award.

[00:37:09] I've never had the pleasure to actually meet him face to face, but I bet at certain points in his life, he probably has worn a t-shirt. So what is the concluding announcement of the episode? I have no idea.

[00:37:24] That's it. I think we're done, right? We can just wrap it up now. What's announcement number four? Announcement number four is, I feel like we're at church or something. You're always doing announcements before you can get out of there.

[00:37:39] This is a t-shirt. Now, you may have heard this. I kind of set the table for it. You set the table for this? Didn't I do it very subtly? No one had any idea what I was doing.

[00:37:53] No one. You really snuck up on us with this one, Kevin. It was very artful. Very artful. Wow. God, you're so full of yourself. That's what you say you want. You say, Kevin, we need to have artful transitions.

[00:38:08] And we need to do announcements in a very specific order, which must be respected. I don't think I said that. I just said I wanted to do the announcements before you delved into roasting me about t-shirts because otherwise we're just going to get too silly too quick. Okay.

[00:38:26] So tell us about these shirts. So we got beautiful shirts. We got a house of them. Please buy them. Please take them out of our house. They're very colorful. The printer did a great job.

[00:38:40] They say Murder Sheet People on them, which I think if you know, you know. It's just a fun thing and you get a cool shirt and it really helps us out because it kind of

[00:38:53] goes towards our fund of like things around filing for FOIA requests, traveling to go on, you know, reporting trips. And we just really appreciate it. And we really are grateful to everyone who bought so far. And if you'd like one, they're 30 bucks. And if you join our

[00:39:09] Patreon at the $5 level, free shipping. So what's this Patreon you speak of? Now we're doing an ad for Patreon all of a sudden? Jesus. It's five more hours of ads. Don't worry, everybody.

[00:39:21] So our Patreon, Patreon is like a cool website where you can like support creators that you like. And we have a Patreon and we give benefits to people who join. And at the $5 level, you get ad free episodes. You get, why am I blanking?

[00:39:39] And that's it. No, I'm just kidding. That's not it. Early release. Early release episodes. You get two monthly lives where Kevin and I are more unhinged than we normally are on the show.

[00:39:50] And you get free shipping on your T-shirts. It's really fun. Oh, we also have a book club through the Patreon. It's called The Red Sheet. And we just read Fatal Vision. And we like read books and kind of all chat about it together.

[00:40:04] I don't know if you remember, we picked out where the next step is. We have not picked out the next one. We are still seeking inspiration. So you're still in the winnowing process.

[00:40:13] We've read The Onion Field. We've read Fatal Vision. We've read I'll Be Gone in the Dark. We've read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which is a rare fictional choice for those. That was one that I picked.

[00:40:23] Kevin picked that one. Charles Dickens, one of your favorite guys. But yeah, it's really fun. And it's a fun community. And so, you know, we're never, I feel like our show,

[00:40:35] I don't see us ever going behind the paywall. I want everyone to listen to our stuff. But this is just a way, it's kind of like a bonus little community if you want to be a part of it. So

[00:40:44] it's very fun. And we enjoy chatting with our patrons every few times a month. And I think they have a good time too, hopefully. Maybe they're all shaking their heads and frowning right now. I don't know. But don't say that! You're trying to convince people to join.

[00:40:56] Well, I mean, they haven't left en masse, so I'm assuming they're pretty happy. I'm not a good salesman. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I never pretend to be one. Anyways, thanks so much for listening. And we will see you next week. Hope you have a great weekend. Bye.

[00:41:14] Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

[00:41:33] If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com slash murdersheet. If you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www.buymeacoffee.com slash murdersheet. We very much appreciate any support.

[00:41:56] Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for The Murder Sheet. And who you can find on the web at kevintg.com. If you're looking to talk with other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join The Murder Sheet discussion group on Facebook.

[00:42:14] We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.