Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)

Summary

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: Christopher Whitcomb (on the Idaho murders)
Date: August 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this riveting episode, Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, and Kristen Bell sit down with Christopher Whitcomb—a former FBI agent, sniper, investigative journalist, and author—to explore the complexities surrounding Whitcomb's new book, Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders. The conversation traces Whitcomb’s extraordinary law enforcement career, discusses infamous historical operations, and dives deep into the baffling unsolved questions about the 2022 Idaho murders, challenging the sense of certainty around the headline-grabbing case.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Christopher Whitcomb’s Extraordinary FBI Career

• [04:03-13:00] Whitcomb's unconventional path: from New Hampshire to Capitol Hill speechwriting to the FBI, ultimately serving on the elite Hostage Rescue Team.
• Recounts involvement in pivotal American events: Ruby Ridge, Waco, Kosovo, 1st World Trade Center bombing, and more.
• Quote:
  “I ended up as an FBI agent and working with the CIA...I had a very unusual FBI career. I worked cases for about four and a half years in the Ozarks…white nationalist stuff...primarily bank robberies and fugitives.” (Whitcomb, 05:26)

2. Hostage Rescue Team & U.S. Counterterrorism

• [09:23-15:10] Explains the origins of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, its training (alongside army Delta Force, SEAL Team 6), and differences between military and civilian special ops in U.S. law.
• On mindset and the dark sides of the job:
  “There’s a mechanism in training…you create a human entity that is not subject to many of the same stresses that other people are. Because if you’re gonna fly to Yemen…go in and kill the bad guys to save the good guys…it's a different skill set.” (Whitcomb, 17:27)
• Recounts being on-call for urgent deployments ("888" beeper code).

3. Deconstructing Historic Operations: Ruby Ridge & Waco

• [15:11-38:10] Whitcomb shares firsthand details from Ruby Ridge (1992): lack of preparation, incomplete information, problematic rules of engagement, and the consequences of error.
• Moral burden and trauma:
  “If you make a bad call in law enforcement…you're gonna pay for it the rest of your life…you might go to jail…consequences are life and death…” (Whitcomb, 36:26)
• On learning from mistakes & the evolution of rules of engagement.

4. The Idaho Murders (“Broken Plea”)—Summary of the Case

• [44:07+] Whirlwind summary: In November 2022, four college students in Moscow, Idaho, were brutally murdered in a house. The case received massive media attention.
• Suspect (Bryan Kohberger): Arrested, indicted, and ultimately pled guilty to avoid the death penalty (firing squad in Idaho), receiving consecutive life terms.
• Whitcomb’s angle:
  "This book is not...attempting to say he didn't do it. It's not a wrongful conviction case—but there's a lot of stuff...that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial." (Dax, 48:41)
• Whitcomb says he was pulled into investigating by a persistent friend, initially reluctant because he was finishing another crime book on “The Springfield Three.”

5. Key Problems and Anomalies in the Prosecution’s Case

The Investigation & Evidence

• [49:10+] Whitcomb’s book builds analysis from primary sources: police reports, bodycam footage, autopsy, toxicology, phone records, etc.
• Timeline:
  Prosecution claims all four murders happened in a three-and-a-half to five-minute window—“Which stands out immediately” (Whitcomb, 50:52)—as implausible given the complexity of the attack.

Surviving Witnesses: The Dylan Mortensen Statement

• [59:04+] Dylan Mortensen, a roommate, claimed to have seen the killer (masked, clad in black) face-to-face at 4:15am, but didn’t call police until nearly noon, after spending hours with another surviving roommate, Bethany, in a downstairs room.
• Whitcomb scrutinizes their interview statements, noting inconsistencies and police reluctance to question them as suspects: “They were never interviewed as anything other than witnesses. Nobody ever asked them hard questions about what everybody asks as reasonable questions.” (Whitcomb, 65:31)

Blood Evidence and Crime Scene Clean-up

• [66:25-70:24] Whitcomb highlights major discrepancies:
  • Inexplicably, the bloodstains on the second floor common areas were diluted with an unknown substance (“cast-off” blood), yet the bedroom scenes were not, despite apparent pathways of the killer.
  • Prosecution’s blood-spatter expert claimed saliva mixed with blood explained this, which Whitcomb firmly rejects as impossible based on locations and forensic analysis.
  • “I'll just say it's impossible. First of all, she suffered those wounds on the floor of her bedroom. None of the blood spatter in her bedroom were diluted with an unknown substance.” (Whitcomb, 69:55)

Timeline and Logistics

• [77:03+] The idea that a single person committed four brutally violent murders on two floors, managed to avoid blood trails, “cleaned up” en route, and evaded detection—all in under five minutes—is, according to Whitcomb, “implausible.”
  • “Supposedly this all happened in three and a half minutes...and kind of doing some cleanup in there?” (Monica, 77:01)

Proving Motive—Or Not

• The prosecution never provided a clear motive.
  “We talk...you have to have motive, means and mechanism, right? Why, how and what actually happened. [But] everyone’s looking at it and saying, well, who killed these people?” (Whitcomb, 83:21; 85:08)
  • The crime shows extreme rage focused on one victim (who didn’t even live at the house at the time), suggesting possible premeditation and personal connection not established by evidence.

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6. Cellphone, Vehicle, and DNA Evidence: Are They Enough?

• [94:52-104:31] Whitcomb unpacks the three pillars of the prosecution:
  • White car (Hyundai Elantra): Several vehicles matched the description, no hard link to Kohberger.
  • Cell tower data: Flimsy due to limited towers—matches hundreds in the area, not precise.
  • DNA on knife sheath: Chain of custody issues; initial lab (Othram) did not report a match to Kohberger or his immediate relatives; court testimony indicated the FBI told the lead detective his result “should be treated as no more credible than a tip.” (“Why in all the photographs...is it found in the bed under her thigh? ...so many anomalies like this...” - Whitcomb, 101:22)
• Exculpatory evidence:
  • The Brady disclosure in this case filled terabytes, but crucial elements never tested or properly included in the state's case.

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7. Why Did Kohberger Plead Guilty?

• [104:36+] Whitcomb is openly skeptical:
  • “Do I think this is over? No, I don’t think this is over.” (Whitcomb, 105:44)
  • Raises the problem of confessions under duress, precedent for wrongful convictions and false pleas—especially when facing the death penalty.
• Quote:
  “We as citizens...have an obligation as a society to say, when something stinks, we should look at it.” (Whitcomb, 106:52)

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8. The Broader Principle: Justice, Scrutiny, and Public Confidence

• [93:18+; 106:52+] Whitcomb urges for continued scrutiny of high-profile criminal cases, especially when prosecution narratives do not fit physical evidence.
  • “If you can say at the end of reading this thing that there aren’t major, major, major problems with what's gone down…” (Whitcomb, 108:03)
  • Dax: “If someone was, you know, you’re gonna be tried...and we’re gonna seek the death penalty, we’re in a very peculiar game theory situation...everything’s got to be bulletproof if someone’s in that position I think.” (107:00)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the stress and moral weight of special operations:
  “There’s an intimacy in being a sniper that I’ve never experienced...that connection is so artificial and so real and it’s so intimate...somebody's gonna die all at the same time.” (Whitcomb, 36:12)

• On behavioral evidence and motive in the Idaho killings:
  “She suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her....There is this individually focused rage based on some very strong emotive violence and there is a familiarity that you knew this person was going to be in that place at that time in order to attack them.” (Whitcomb, 90:49)

• On the obligation to question official narratives:
  “If we don’t say, we are the people and we are doing this among ourselves...then we deserve what we get. And that could be you, it could be me...” (Whitcomb, 73:03)

• On possible police error/oversight:
  “I respect the process. We need it in order to society...But I go back to it and say this. You’re talking about a police department in a town of 25,000 people that are used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints and frat parties...the cast of characters in this thing is staggering.” (Whitcomb, 93:18)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | Importance | |-----------|--------------------------------------|---------------------------------------| | 04:03 | Whitcomb’s early life & FBI career | Unique background, context | | 15:11 | Waco & Ruby Ridge | American law enforcement failures | | 44:07 | Idaho murders case introduction | Transition to book focus | | 49:10 | Structure of “Broken Plea” | Approach: evidence over narrative | | 59:04 | Dylan Mortensen’s witness statements | Key witness, timeline gaps | | 66:25 | Forensic anomalies in blood evidence | Raises doubts about prosecution facts | | 77:03 | Timeline implausibility | Physical/execution impossibility | | 94:52 | Vehicle/phone/DNA evidence | Poking holes in prosecution | |104:36 | Why did Kohberger plead guilty? | Psychological, legal complexities | |106:52 | Broader principles of justice | Justice, public scrutiny |

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Tone & Style

• The episode balances gravitas and approachability, with the hosts bringing their characteristic warmth and humor (“Is there any part that’s fun? ...Talk about novelty” – Dax) even as Whitcomb’s testimony and insights are sobering, detailed, at times darkly reflective.
• Whitcomb is candid, meticulous, and careful to separate opinion from fact—frequently noting when he is speculating versus reporting.

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Conclusions & Takeaways

• Multiplicity of Unanswered Questions: Despite a guilty plea, glaring evidence gaps and strange forensic/pathological details are left unaddressed, raising doubt about the completeness and certainty of legal resolution.
• Systemic Warning: Whitcomb’s “Broken Plea” serves as a case study against rubber-stamping high-profile convictions without persistent scrutiny—reminding listeners that justice is a process, not a foregone conclusion.
• Civic Duty of Skepticism: The episode urges listeners to remain vigilant, informed, and willing to question, especially when mortal stakes (such as the death penalty) are involved.

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Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard. Hi, Lily Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi, Dax Shepard.

[Dax Shepard]

Hi.

[Kristen Bell]

We.

[Dax Shepard]

Boy, you can't lose with these FBI agents. When we have FBI agents on, boy, are they. Do they not have the craziest stories.

[Monica Padman]

I told everyone about this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Christopher Whitcomb is a former FBI agent and an author. He was on a task force within the FBI that was at Ruby Ridge, was at Waco, was in Kosovo.

[Monica Padman]

He was at Sniper.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

What a story. And that's not even what he's here to talk about. He is also an investigative journalist and he has a new book called Broken Plea. The explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders.

[Monica Padman]

Most of you have heard of the horrible incident of the children. Yeah, the. The college kids who were murdered in Idaho at their school.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, not at school, at an off campus housing.

[Monica Padman]

And this is that story. And he's poke. He's doing some investigating and he's poking some holes. It's really interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Really, really interesting. And he's just a fucking party.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Dax Shepard]

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[Christopher Whitcomb]

I grew up in New Hampshire, but I moved away after high school and I never really went back.

[Dax Shepard]

Lake Winnipesaukee is my only. And where's beach is my only.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Straight north of there, town called Franconia. It's a ski area called Cannon Mountain.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

My dad ran the ski area. Small town, like 200 people.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But no easy stories in my life. Guy that worked for my dad shot and killed the number two guy in the FBI two weeks before he was gonna testify that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy alone.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah. And then a guy I grew up with, a guy named Harold Jeanine who was kind of like the first Elon Musk.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And he tried to overthrow the Chilean government. He gave the CIA, I don't know, a couple million dollars to overthrow the Chilean government.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

They killed Salvador Allende, the president. So they put a hit on him. They blew up his offices in New York and he went to his estate in New Hampshire.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So I grew up with him and the CIA.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Then I ended up in both. I ended up as an FBI agent and working with the CIA.

[Dax Shepard]

Before we get off of New Hampshire, have you ever been to Boston? Bike Week at.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, I'm a Harley guy. You can't tell by my appearance probably, but I have been for a very long time. Are we on now?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Oh, wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Sorry. No idea.

[Dax Shepard]

It's disarming.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. That's what we do. We kind of sneak snuck it on,

[Christopher Whitcomb]

realize that we were on feel Free

[Dax Shepard]

to use these interrogation techniques in any future consolation.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly. I did teach interrogation at the FBI Academy for a couple years.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, that's in Quantico.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's in Quantico, yeah. I had a very unusual FBI career. I worked cases for about four and a half years in the Ozarks, actually. The Ozarks of a. Another guest you've had not too recently. The same town in Missouri.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Doing like white nationalist stuff or what was happening.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

There was a lot of that. Actually. There was a lot of that. There was a group down there. I can't remember what they were called now, but there was that group down there. I worked primarily bank robberies and fugitives. And unlike most FBI agents, who never even carry. Well, everybody carries a gun. I don't mean to understate that, but many don't have any course to use them. It's not that type of a law enforcement job for the most part. I don't want to piss off my former colleagues.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a lot of investigation.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's a lot of investigation.

[Dax Shepard]

Very few raids.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right, exactly right. But I got in a. Not a gunfight, but an armed alteration. Pulled my gun very first day on the job, which is very odd. So my career went that way.

[Dax Shepard]

Hold on. Why did you have to pull your gun on day one?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You go to the academy. At the time, it was 16 weeks. You graduate and they send you someplace in America. You have no say where you go. There's a ceremony the 10th week, maybe 40 students and trainees. You announce the class, where you want to go, where you think you're going to go. And then you open an envelope. You walk down front. They open the envelope, and there's a big thing where you actually go. So I think. I thought maybe I was going to go to New. I wanted to go to who knows where. They said Kansas City. And at that point, growing up on the East Coast, I really didn't know much about the Midwest, so they sent me to Kansas City. They assigned me to a bank robbery squad. So I roll in in a Jeep. My wife was pregnant and had another kid in the back. Just had a baby.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And I go into the office the first day, and I had gone to the FBI from Capitol Hill. I was a speechwriter on Capitol Hill,

[Dax Shepard]

Congress and all your organizing.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, A guy named Sylvia Conti. He was the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee from Massachusetts. I mean, that was kind of a crazy story too, because at that time I was 24, 25 years old, and he had a 1968 GTO called the Judge.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Factory flames on the sides. You're a car guy. You know the Judge.

[Dax Shepard]

I know the Judge. They made a movie about the Judge.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay. Well, he had the Judge and a white boater cap. Straw boater cap. And I used to get in the passenger seat of the gto, drive from Capitol Hill. He was in the Rayburn House Office Building to the White House before they turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a walkway.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And we drive up to the gate to Oval Office, turn left, go through the gate, drive right up front.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And go in to see Ronald Reagan.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

At 24.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's crazy. It was a great experience. And then really had no interest in joining the FBI. And I got knocked out in a fight, boxing out of a gym. 10th Street. Finley's Boxing Gym. Very, very famous gym in D.C. but it was above a body shop. So you're working out. Getting intoxicated with solvent from paint strippers downstairs. So I got knocked out. This guy named Big Bob something or other. And I went home and I was knocked out good. Right? I was pretty loopy.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably had a concussion.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, sure.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I had a concussion. So there's this big letter from the FBI. I said to my wife, what the hell is this? Who wants to get a manila envelope from the FBI?

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And it was an application. She had seen it sent away, and I think she actually filled it out for me, now that I think about it.

[Dax Shepard]

So she instigated this whole.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

She started the whole thing.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I think she filled out the initial application.

[Monica Padman]

She just knew you'd be good at it, that you'd like it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

She's the coolest.

[Dax Shepard]

She's hoping you get killed in the line of fire.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

She's just the coolest chick you've ever met in your entire life. I mean, she's just a really great human being.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Somehow she figured that was my path. It ended up being my path or part of my path, my way into the FBI. Not that anything is normal, but mine was writing. I was a newspaper reporter, as a high school English teacher. I was a speechwriter. I ended up in the FBI.

[Dax Shepard]

Wow. That's crazy. And then you end up as a sniper. Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay. So they sent me to the Ozarks for four years. And there's a rotation after being there for about four years, four and a half years. You get this note. Something comes down, and they say, hey, bud, you're up on the list. You're going next. So I knew they were going to Ship me somewhere. I had no idea where and I didn't want to go to New York or la. Not that I didn't like New York or la, but you get paid the same amount of money. And I was in Springfield, Missouri.

[Dax Shepard]

You were best dollar to dollar in the world.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It was a brilliant place to live. It was fabulous. The work was fantastic, the people were fantastic. I love. So anyways, I said, well, what am I going to do now? Had two kids and I knew about this team. Like when you go through the academy at Quantico, Virginia, there's this guys that kind of sneak around and they fly around in helicopters and this bomb's going off all the time and you go, who's those guys? Yeah, yeah, you know, you see them in the gym, see them in the chow line at the cafeteria. It's like a small campus. It's like a community college. They're called a Hostage Rescue Team. They're very little known, even though I've written a book and a half about them. They were very little known at the time. But the US government now knows about Seal Team 6 because they got bin Laden.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And they know about Delta because they were the first group in the Army. But they kind of share the responsibilities. But they were formed prior, long before, in the late 70s, early 80s. They were formed as a special component as a counterterrorism attack force, basically primarily hostage rescue. And when 911 happened, it changed everything. Prior to 9 11, terrorism was considered federal law enforcement.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so like CIA?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Nope. Well, okay, CIA definitely part of it. But I don't know how much you want to talk about this, but the US government has all these different tools more now than before. So you got the intelligence community, which I think right now is 18 agencies. The CIA, the NSA, all these other groups that you may or may not have heard of. Yeah, at the time it was very simple. You had the FBI, you had the CIA, you had the nsa. Then you had military entities, but mostly the military Special Operations Command. I don't even think JSOC existed back then. And I'm talking like 1990, 91. So the world at the time had a lot of threats from terrorism. There were armed hijackings, there were bombs all over the place. When I left the FBI, the US government had 66 different terrorist organizations. Oh, God. And bin Laden was. Al Qaeda was, I don't know, way, way down the list. So I was there. You remember the USS Cole bombing? I was there for that.

[Dax Shepard]

They drove a dinghy into the side of it that exploded right yeah, they sure did.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It was horrible. It was awful. But terrorism was a big deal. But it was very different. Everything changed on 9 11. Have you heard of renditions?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

They're very controversial, but it's a big part of the last 25 years. The US government would say this bad guy is in Yemen and we want to get him. But you can't tell the government you're going to get them because they might be part of the problem. So you'd have to sneak in, get them and bring them back to the

[Kristen Bell]

United States for the kidnapping.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I gotta be careful what I say. Many, many people would say, so is a kidnapping allegedly not saying that. Whatever we think they were a reality. And I was a part of them for a time in my life. So we would go and get them. Sometimes they go, well, sometimes they don't. But you know, that was a fascinating time in American history. That's never really been discussed very much prior to 9 11, what that world looked like. What I was trying to explain to start with is that because of a law called the Posse Comitatus post Civil war, the United States government didn't want the US military to be used in response to a civilian crime.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So you had a riot in Chicago in 1867 or eight or whatever the timeline was. You didn't want to send the army because civil war were going to be right, right back at it again. So they started this law, posse comitatus. Fast forward 130 years. By the 1990s, they the US government post Munich Olympics. Remember the, how horrible that was. And the Princess Gate incident in London in 1980 where the Iranian embassy was seized and they had the first big terrorist assault by the British 22nd SAS. I was there, oddly enough. I was in London as a college student when the whole thing went down. I lived around the corner from Princess Gate, just south of Hyde Park. All these weird coinc. I suppose, but the point of the story is in preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics, the first one, the government needed somebody to go in and save things if we ended up with another Munich. And because of Posse Comitatus, they could not send Delta or Seal Team 6. So there's a very famous incident where the attorney general went to Fort Bragg, watched a demonstration from Delta, who has tremendous military capability and special operations capability. They're one of the most extraordinary groups on the planet earth. But they did the exercise. The attorney general looked at the targets they shot and said they all had two right here. But he said, I don't see Any handcuffs. And famously one of the operators said, handcuffs we don't carry, we don't carry handcuffs.

[Kristen Bell]

We have no need for handcuffs.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

We have no handcuffs. No need for handcuffs. So they started a third at the time component that was roughly the same thing, gave them the same mission. So when Delta started, nobody knew what those techniques were and they were being developed by the civilian SWAT community. So Delta sent their initial operators through the FBI academy undercover, some of them, maybe all of them, I can't remember. And then sent them to SWAT teams. Like the LA SWAT team had a big part in forming those organizations. Then they developed what we now know as close quarter battle of cqb. All the stuff that you see in Call of Duty and all these video games, they invented that. Even the shoes. I mean a guy on the hostage rescue team reinvented the shoes we would wear based on basketball shoes so they could pivot better on ship decks and things like that. So when the Olympic Games came about, the US government decided to they needed a third team on the civilian side. So they went back to Delta and said, hey, we helped you form your team. How about a little payback? So they created this team I was on called the Hostage Rescue Team, more or less in a model of Delta prior to 9 11. Got a lot of the work. We got a lot of the classified work because of the posse comitatus. After 911 we went to war. They took over that mission and my team went with them and they went to Afghanistan and Iraq and various places.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So anyways, how did I end up as sniper? I've never been in a military, but I've been through many of the military schools including the Marine Corps Scout Sniper School. So I'm a Marine Scout sniper by training, but I've never been in the military. So I don't stand up on Veterans Day. But that is the training that was most of the rest of my career in the FBI.

[Kristen Bell]

Monica.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Chris.

[Dax Shepard]

Chris was at Waco.

[Monica Padman]

Oh wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Ruby Ridge.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

This is kind of a semi rotten onion. And you keep pulling off the leaves.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You were in Kosovo. There's a third big domestic one.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You were up the coal bombing. Kosovo, the first World Trade Center.

[Kristen Bell]

I mean Waco. I can't believe you were at Waco.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You know what? Have you ever met Taylor Russell, the director? Taylor Russell?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Amazing documentary filmmaker. He did a show on Netflix called Waco American Apocalypse. He brought in four narrative, not just voices, I mean on camera, to tell the story of Waco, which for me it was two months in My life, I didn't realize ever that it was going to become like the Jimmy Hoffa thing or the Kennedy assassination. The people would talk about it. It's 34 years ago.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Also I think I watched that, Doc. And the fact that Timothy McVeigh was sitting there watching across the fence like

[Kristen Bell]

the Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, all that

[Dax Shepard]

shit is all hyper connected.

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You know, I'm both of those.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And I hate to say that because it's a lightning rod for abuse and I understand that. But they are parts of American history. And if you're gonna talk about American history, why not talk to the people that were there and that were responsible for better or for worse? And I accept both.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I ask a sensitive question?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There was six snipers at the Ruby Ridge.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Seven.

[Dax Shepard]

Seven.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And obviously he was shot.

[Monica Padman]

Can we remind people about that one?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay. America was a different time in the early 1990s. 1992. You asked me about the white separatist movement. Domestic terrorist organizations were a thing back then. And it was based on a book, your book people called the Turner Diaries. The Turner Diaries was basically a white supremacist manifesto which led to the creation of many groups. There was the Covenant, the sword.

[Dax Shepard]

It's their bible.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I'm on this team, 50 shooters at a compound in Quantico, Virginia. We were air mobile anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And back then the technology was primitive. We carried beepers like we were the top team in the world, you know, in the United States. And the code was 888.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

If you get a beep on your buzzer and you look down and it's 888, that means call home now no matter where you are.

[Kristen Bell]

I would love for your body to

[Dax Shepard]

be hooked up to sensors and for us to get rid of real time cortisol readings.

[Kristen Bell]

When you would see 888. Like the body converting motion.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It goes down like a calm. You want a nap and a, you know, bottle of milk and a blanket and then you're going to get up and go. But it's a very odd mechanism what they build into that world. These operators that you see and talk about that have gone to war. There's a mechanism in training and in selection that creates. I don't know if it's. It's proper to call it a tool, but you create a human entity that is not subject to many of the same stresses that other people are. Because if you're gonna fly To Yemen. And you're gonna wrap into a window at 4:00 in the morning, hit the windows with a slap charge and go in and kill the good guys to save the bad guys. You know, it's a different skill set.

[Dax Shepard]

Reverse. You're gonna kill the bad guys and save the good guys.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, well, sometimes they get a little mixed up. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

People lie.

[Monica Padman]

It's a little freudy in what you

[Christopher Whitcomb]

did, but thank you for that, Dash. I just say that in front of everybody that's watching this right now. So you got to find that person.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And then you got to train that person. Because we're all human beings, we all could do the same thing interchangeably within certain parameters. But there are psychological models for how you turn somebody into a. A steeple chase racer or into a motorcycle racer or whatever the thing may be.

[Dax Shepard]

Childhood trauma is a great foundation for all of these.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Childhood trauma.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Being calm in chaos is a good start.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Mine was named Bucky Corliss, who used to beat the shit out of me in third grade. That'll do it.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, that'll do it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It did it.

[Dax Shepard]

It'll set you on a lifetime fucking.

[Monica Padman]

And maybe we can thank him now.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Look where you're at.

[Dax Shepard]

Sorry about you.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

What I was going back to is you gotta create that person and then you've got to develop that person. And it's a continuum, right. You have people. Let's look at law enforcement, military, writ large. Like people that stand up and say, I'm gonna save society. It starts with somebody who says, I'm gonna be a crossing guard. Then I'm gonna be a proctor at a sat. And then they're gonna be a dog, cat. It works up a long line, but it's the same underlying component that you want to save society. Say, I'm going to put myself at risk to save society. And then you end up at Delta, where you end up at the hostage rescue team, which are people selected along that line. It gets a smaller and smaller subset who prove themselves in different ways. So it's the same underlying motivation. You have a different commitment of resources, which is taxpayer dollars buying boats and planes and helicopters and machine guns. And you have a descending network of skill sets that will lead to that person, if that makes sen. So I ended up doing that. Now that brings us to Ruby Ridge in 1992. I was new on this team, relatively new. So the way it was in those days is you're always ready to go. And we were mobile. You go home every day like a regular job You've got a car, a truck or whatever. I had a Dodge Power Wagon with a toolbox and a back full of hand grenades and tire explosives and machine guns, right? So anyways, you go in, you go to work, and you train, doing all of these different things. And I was gone. I think in the early days, I was gone maybe 250 days a year, something like that. You're always out. We had an aircraft training facility at Davis Month in Air Force Base in Arizona. So you go out there every three months and you do a workup on shooting on planes, or assaulting planes. You do mountain training.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're either training or you're deploying some kind of.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's exactly right. But you're gone all the time. Many years. It was 300 days or more a year. You're on the road, and many times your spouse doesn't know where you are. That's kind of the construct. So I remember it was a Friday afternoon. You go home on the weekends, most weekends. And I was getting ready to go, and the word kind of whispers around, hey, we got a gig. The beepers hadn't gone off, but I was there at the building, at our compound. And they said, we've got a thing in Idaho. So you go, okay. The only reason you need to know geography is because you gotta take a desert bag, you gotta take a Caribbean island bag, dive gear or whatever else. So you take kind of a cold weather mountain bag. Because we knew it was in northern Idaho. They said it's mountainous, it's cold. Bring this bag, you put your gear together, you drive it up to military planes. We loaded everything, helicopters, everything. We loaded on a plane. We might have flown to Spokane, Washington. This place was called Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. It was way, way north. You work all day Friday, you fly all night, you get there in the morning. And we drove out to this potato field and we had a briefing somewhere, but it was a National Guard armory. And you go in and they say there was a shootout with some US Marshals up on a mountain. We don't know anything.

[Kristen Bell]

Good luck.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Good luck.

[Kristen Bell]

We trust you'll figure it out.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean, that's literally. Now people would go, well, wait a minute. Yeah, what about this? And I said, we didn't know anything about this guy. Somebody thought he was a former Special Forces guy that was living as a separatist on a mountaintop. That's literally all we had. So now you drive out to the potato field, you got to set up all the tents, you got to fly in the helicopters, you got to bring in all the gear. You know, it's 50 guys put our gear together, and then headquarters starts making all these decisions. We're not privy to them. They say, go, stop. Go, Stop. Go, Stop. It's pouring rain. It's about 35 degrees.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot of footage of all this. It looks hostile.

[Kristen Bell]

The environment, it doesn't look like a place.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The nature of the job is hostile. But at the time, you know, we're making this stuff up. By the way, the world was a very, very different place back then. It's like, we're the good guys, you're the bad guys. Hold my beer.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's the mentality. It was a cowboy approach because nobody knew anything different, Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Exactly.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Now we'll get to what happened. As a result. That makes the world a better place. Now, at that time, this is not a defense. This is just reality of what it's like.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not how it should have been. It's how it was.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's exactly right. Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep. All you know is this dude was shooting at Marshalls. So came on. Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean, it was a bad gunfight. If somebody gets hurt.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And that's all we knew.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So they say, gear up. So you put on a ghillie suit, which is this giant rag that makes you look like a stump in a swamp. And we had a guide that walked us up this mountain. So we walked up. I don't remember how long it was. Maybe like two hours, two or three hours or something like that.

[Monica Padman]

It was already too much.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's called Ruby Ridge because it was literally a mountain ridge. So you walk up through this cloud, 35 degrees, carrying whatever the load. The bosses told us not to bring anything more than we needed for a couple hours because we were going to go up and surveil the place and report down. They were going to make the decisions, and then the rest of the guys were going to come up and do whatever. So we provided a perimeter, and nobody knew what we'd find when we get there. I grew up in the mountains, northern New Hampshire. And it was all very comfortable till we finally get to the top, and this guy goes, okay, you're on your own from here. And he left. And we just kind of snuck, like your kid, sneaking up through the woods, you know, like, what's over there?

[Dax Shepard]

Is that part fun? Is there any part that's fun? Yeah, yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

I feel like I would dig that.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You would dig that?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, talk about novelty. You're doing something you've never done before and other people haven't done before, and we don't know what's on the other side. Like, this is high arousal.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, that's right.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Everybody likes something different. We like that.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So people would say thank you for your service over time. And I'd always feel terrible because I'd say I enjoyed every second of it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's who I want doing that job.

[Kristen Bell]

P.S.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

well, I mean, you have to have a respect for. And I'll say this. The FBI Hostage rescue team is dramatically different from other elements because the army and Navy entities, as brilliant as they are and as much respect as I have for them, they have a different mission. You don't go into combat and say, I'm going to shoot that guy, not his twin brother, standing six inches away. Totally different circumstances, different rules of engagement.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Collateral damage is expected and accepted.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's bad. And that's why we're talking about this 35 years later, because of that collateral damage. So then. Then humanity kicks in and you go, okay, we've got to do this job. And you're literally on a mountaintop. And I remember there were three teams. There was two guys. Two guys, and my component had three. There were three guys from my sniper team. Sniper teams were typically seven members, and it was basically half the team had a sniper component. So seven guys went up because others were busy doing other things that came in. So my team was three, and we were highest above the cabin and furthest away. So I was looking down so I could see the cabin. There was a roof sloping off the back. And many people know what the photographs look like after all this time. And I couldn't see the porch itself. The teams down below could. They were more or less level. We were up above it. You find a hide. You try to find a place that they can't see you. And mine was in this rocky outcropping. And then the next thing you deal with is the weather. So your scopes fog up, you start to cool down from two and a half hours of exertion.

[Dax Shepard]

You're doing a lot of calculations too, right? You're in, like, high barometric pressure. The round's gonna fall.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Everything shooting. Angle of incidence makes a big difference. A flat shot is one. You're doing all of the math. You're doing all the stuff that's going on. And you've been toting a load up this mountain, and then all of a sudden you've got to start doing all of that. And I was just doing all of that and I just got eyes on and it happened. It happened that quickly. And what basically happened, Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris lived in this cabin with his wife Vicki and with a daughter Sarah, a son Sammy and a baby. And during the initial firefight with the marshals, Sammy was shot and killed. But nobody knew that. The marshals didn't know that. They didn't tell us that. We didn't know what had happened and we didn't know where these guys were.

[Dax Shepard]

But by the way, that's very impertinent information. If someone's loved one just died, your level of commitment as that person just quadrupled 100%.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

This dude's willing to die right now.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Just imagine from their standpoint and we have to, we're talking about this. I'm not an ideologue. I'm not tied to one another. But just imagine you are in this cabin, you hear a noise, you run outside and somebody shoots your 14 year old son.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And it goes down to hell.

[Dax Shepard]

Bets are off. All bets are off.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I don't care who you are, all bets are off. We did not know that. This is all just my opinion. I'm not speaking for the guys I worked with. They can tell their own stories. Mine was I'm here to do a job. These guys got in a shootout with the marshals. Bill Deegan was killed. We went to get him. I mean to bring justice. Our job, my job was to contain the cabin so they didn't run away and to provide intel back to the office. Right now, here's where, where Ruby Ridge becomes an issue. As everyone talks about this case, they talk about one thing. The FBI rules of engagement. When you graduate the academy, they give you a gun. In my case, they gave me several. And they say this is their policy. Deadly force shall not be used except in the threat of death or serious bodily harm to you or an innocent party. That's basically it. So it's not when you can use deadly force, it's that you can't use deadly force unless this very small thing, somebody's going to kill you or hurt you really badly. Yeah. Ruby Ridge was different. And I don't know why, I don't know how it happened. I know what my attitude was when we went up there. We had two supervisors at the time. I'm not going to say the name of ours, even though it's been published. But they read different rules of engagement and they said basically if somebody comes out of the cabin and you feel threatened, you can shoot them.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, okay. So I don't agree with it, but it doesn't take a lot for me to understand. They already killed one marshal. The rules of engagement have already been made met. They are intending on killing us. They prove that.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Well, again, I can only say what I believe. And I've been saying this for 34 years. I've put it in writing. I've talked to other people about it. And I'll say this. I believed in that shit. When I raised my right hand on the stage in Quantico, Virginia and said, I swear to defend the Constitution, I didn't think to myself, well, you know, except for this, I believe in that. And I figure if I'm going to die for something, and quite a number of people that I worked with on that team have been killed, this is not a fucking joke. And I went up there and I said, if I am going to die in defense of something that or my peers are my friends, these people I really, truly care about, it's gotta be for something. And it can't be for a politician. And it can't be for anger or rage or whatever these people that they hire for these jobs. It has to be for something that we all agree upon as Americans. This is right. This is wrong. Now do things go haywire? Yes. Did this. Yes. So we talk about how it gets to that point and then we can say, I still hate you. But I understand your point in why I hate you.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Meaning me specifically. Because I can tell you, you know, it's been 35 years of hatred. But this is what happened. That became a big story. And the National Rifle association got involved. Because it started with a gun issue. I think it was ATF originally started this over a sawed off shotgun. Apparently Randy Weaver had sold a sawed off shotgun to someone. He said, I don't believe in the US Government. I'm not gonna go to court. And then the court said, well, then we're gonna get you. They sent the marshals up to do a reconnaissance so that they could go up and arrest him safely. That went downhill. So at the core, this is a gun issue.

[Kristen Bell]

Wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

We didn't know any of this. Yeah, I had no idea.

[Dax Shepard]

When you get 888 on your pager,

[Christopher Whitcomb]

it's 888. There's no text.

[Monica Padman]

Why don't you get a little more information?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Because there wasn't anything.

[Kristen Bell]

You don't need it also. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

There is a logic to it. You don't need that information. It's not helpful to you. Who has to execute this thing. Let's seven people dedicated to thinking about it handle that and you're on the ground and you should handle. I mean, I understand why it's compartmentalized.

[Monica Padman]

They could have used it. They could have obviously at that moment used it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Both of you have great points. But I would say that I've been at the far extremes of all these different things over the course of my lifetime. That was at the beginning in a very different world. There were no cell phones. There was no Internet. There were no communications. I mean, you literally have to pick up a hard line. We would carry our own phones for the command post that were hardlined to Washington. Right. It was a primitive world based on what people. Now you just can't go ask these questions.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

You're getting the information you needed, like days later, Correct?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, correct. I mean, it was like the pony express. Yeah, but that was the reality of the situation. So whatever happened up on that mountain when the shots were first fired, we called down with a radio, like a two way radio. I will say that what I saw and heard and did was different than what the guys down below saw and heard and did. And I know that because this became search warrants, this became grand jury investigation trying to get us for murder. It became a civil case. I testified before the Senate. It became enormous. It was enormous.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it was.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It was enormous. Front page of the Washington Post.

[Kristen Bell]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking what the warning light means before pulling out of your driveway. You absolutely convinced yourself it was probably just a sensor thing. Right up until you were standing. Standing on the side of the road waiting for a tow. Yeah. Checking first is the right move. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club incorporated in Allstate Affiliate Affiliate. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace. And I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do. Well, Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas. But he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot, you've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private, it's been yours. But at some point you're ready to put it out there and that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates built in. SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from I've been working on this to here it is, come find me all in one place. No code, no stitching together, a bunch of different tools. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to squarespace.comdax for a free trial trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

[Monica Padman]

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[Christopher Whitcomb]

First year in. I mean literally. I remember getting the Washington Post and there's a picture of the seven of us standing at a Senate hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building. I used to work across the street.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean I could see my office from door where I used to write speeches. And now I'm in there.

[Monica Padman]

You're like, what's happened?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's wild.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But anyways, very little information. The rules of engagement became a thing over time. Going back to your original point, I still to this day have the handwritten rules of engagement on a notepad. So I've read it over time and I still to this day do not remember hearing him read those words to me. I have them. I know it happened. I don't remember that because my mind the FBI has superseding rules of engagement never occurred that there was anything else. So I know it happened. That's not part of my experience. When I radioed down, I said like several shots were fired. And it was different because of the echoes my account. Even when I testified before the Senate, I heard and saw things that other people didn't. It's a human part of it.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But anyways, it went horribly wrong. And I'll say this about the sequence of events. If you're a sniper, your entire world is this big around and at the time it was a 10 power fixed scope, a guy scopes made by a guy named John U. Nurdle who we were the only ones in the world that had them, the Marine Corps snipers. And we had them. But you can see a small but magnified view of the world and all the stuff is happening around you and if you need to engage, it's going to be an intensely personal interaction. There's an intimacy in being a sniper that I've never experienced in any other walk of life in anything else I've ever done.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Because that connection is so artificial and it's so real and it's so intimate and it's so standoff because somebody's gonna die all at the same time.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They're so far away and yet there's a thread connecting you two.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Brilliantly stated.

[Dax Shepard]

You know it's wild.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right. And you can't see anything else outside that world. If you screw up in the military in an active firefight, probably no one will ever know about it. If you make a bad call in law enforcement, no matter how highly trained, no matter what the circumstances, you're gonna pay for the rest of your life. Yeah, you might go to jail. Jail. You're probably going to get sued, you're probably going to get fired. The consequences are life and death, which pale by comparison. That is the consequence. Yeah, but if it's your job to

[Dax Shepard]

exact that narrow margin and if you

[Christopher Whitcomb]

screw it up once, what's an all star in baseball? Like 300? You're a 300 hitter. You get one out of three and you're an All Star.

[Dax Shepard]

It's the ultimate case of Monday morning quarterbacking or whatever they call it. It's like you are now evaluating the scene with all the details. 360 degree view of everything that happened. And yeah, that's a much different view

[Kristen Bell]

of what it is.

[Dax Shepard]

Arriving 10 minutes later, what's going on? They're doing that. What? Oh, I mean, that's not the same thing. But you're going to get judged by it. And in many ways you should.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Absolutely. In every way you should. But anyways, it went wrong. That happened. That led to three years of every investigation you could possibly imagine. Another government agency literally showed at upper offices and did a search warrant. I'm not kidding.

[Kristen Bell]

Wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You're the top.

[Dax Shepard]

You're in the FBI.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You're an FBI agent on this team. Nobody knew what we did. That's a stupid thing. Very few people knew what we did, including headquarters. I remember they didn't do audits because they really didn't want want to know what we did. So they didn't do an audit for, I don't know, an inspection for maybe three years or something. And they came down and they accused us of losing a helicopter and all these guns. I mean, it was a debacle because nobody really knew. But once that happened, it changed everything. Then we get 888 and it's Waco.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. These are back to back to back.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Basically back to back.

[Dax Shepard]

He's also at the LA Riot.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

But I'm not gonna let you talk about that because. Okay, so all that information's in Cold Zero. Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The first book was called Cold Zero. And it's a matter of fact representation of the whole construct, the team and those events and everything else at the time. Yes, that's another story. How I sold that book. I was in a card game with Brad Pitt at the Mercer Hotel in New York.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my goodness.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I had written a novel and I tried to get this novel sold for a long time and somehow. You know who Pete Berg is? Yes, that was a stupid question. What I meant is, do you know Pete?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I mean, I've had meetings with Pete. I tell my first meeting with Pete, he was, like, 10 minutes late. They let me in his office. He came in with, like, tons of tissue stuffed in his nose. He's bleeding profusely. His whole shirt's covered in blood. And I go, hey, what's up? And he's like, oh, if I got my nose broken this morning in boxing.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm like, okay, let's have this meeting.

[Monica Padman]

Also, not a stupid question. Not everyone knows everyone.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Well, it's just I didn't know if you were friends with. You could have been a close friend.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no, I'm not a close friend with him.

[Kristen Bell]

I just.

[Dax Shepard]

I know what he is.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

He's one of my oldest and closest friends. I've known him since 1993, I think.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

92 and 93. More than 30 years. And I've got crazy, crazy stories about. He's a truly remarkable guy. As an artist, as a human being, he's a remarkable guy. But way back in the day, he was friends with all these people coming up. Taylor Yoni, David Duchovny. So many people that were coming up that became household names. But at the time, they were just getting their first jobs, maybe a show. Pete's a legit tough guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Yep.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Anyways, I lived in Quantico and Pete was in New York. I would go up on the weekends and whatever was going on, we'd have these big dinner parties, you know. That was fantastic, right? Yeah. So we go. I go up. We're all staying at the Mercer, which. Which is a hotel in New York, but it was kind of cool in the day. So I go up. We're sitting in that lobby, and I go, okay, dude, what are we doing tonight? I think it's gonna. We're gonna go out. We're gonna have a few beers. We're gonna go to some dinner with, like, Henry Kissinger and Lou Reed and whatever. And he goes, no, we're playing cards. And I go, I didn't come all the way up here to play cards. He goes, whit, we're playing cards. People call me Whit. And anyways, so, you know, it was a knock on the door. It's this guy's. A knock on the door. Knock on the door. It's Brad Pitt with his two buddies. Wonderful, coolest guy in the world. You guys know him.

[Monica Padman]

He's the nicest.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Nicest guy in the world. And he grew up in a town that was my first FBI office. Same town. Same town. So all of a sudden, this thing devolves into tequila and beer, obviously. Yeah, it was. We had a great time. And I won't tell the whole story because too many people get pissed off at me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But we ended up. This was kind of like before Texas hold'.

[Dax Shepard]

Em.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It was before that craze.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So you go around. So you'd pick a game. I'd pick a game. We just go around the table. And I think there were, like, eight or 10 people at this table. Somebody came up with this game in between. So you deal two cards, and you bet yours will fall in between. You get two twos. You bet nothing happened. You get a two and a king. You're gonna bet the pot. Problem is, if you get a two or a king and there's still three of each in the deck, you have to double the pot.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So it got up to some. The number has grown over the years. It might have been, like, 10 bucks. I think it was $4,000.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, geez.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. And you're the only one there on a government salary.

[Kristen Bell]

I was on a government salary

[Christopher Whitcomb]

at that time. I had four kids.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I didn't want to be there to begin with. I didn't want to play poker. In fact, Pete spotted me the money. I probably still owe him that hundred bucks.

[Monica Padman]

He forced you into it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

He forced me into it. He spotted me 100 bucks. Now I'm having fun. Great group of guys. And at the time, this was just before Fight Club, but the trailer was out.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The bottom line is, it finally comes to me. I get a two and a king, and it was a new deck, and there's $4,000 on the table. Table. I didn't have 40 bucks.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And if I get it, great. If I don't, I owe $4,000 more. So I. It's going to be $8,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I go, oh, my God. What do I do? But all these other guys had the money, and they're all screaming at me, and they're calling me names.

[Kristen Bell]

Emasculating names.

[Monica Padman]

We don't really say anymore unless you

[Christopher Whitcomb]

say anymore, and I'm not going to do it was that moment where you go, I thought I was the tough guy. I thought I was the alpha male among alpha males. Yeah, y. I mean, he was an alpha male.

[Monica Padman]

You still were, by the way.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I don't know. He's pretty.

[Monica Padman]

Well, he is.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But yeah, the other guys were commensurate. I mean, there Was other celebrities in there. And Pete was a legitimate tough guy. So anyways, he goes around the table. So finally, they're making side bets. He stands up and he goes, you're such a blank. And he pulls out like, a hockey puck of $100 bills, you know, and they're making side bets, money everywhere. And I'm thinking, man, how did I end up here? This is horrible. So anyways, long story short, I finally said, screw you guys. I bet the pot. And I won.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, thank God.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So the next morning, morning, I get a call from Pete. I'm not even sure I went to bed. And at that meeting, I ended up selling my first book. So after trying to sell cold zero, that's how cold.

[Monica Padman]

What a weekend you had.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Crazy weekend.

[Dax Shepard]

You came home, your wife's like, I don't want you taking these trips. And you're like, girl, I got 10K. And she's like, take these trips.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I go, I just made 50 bucks, and I got a book.

[Kristen Bell]

You're not gonna believe it.

[Dax Shepard]

I won 50 bucks.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I won 50. You get that new jacket? I still have it, by the way. I went out and I bought this leather jacket. To this day, I've still got that jacket. But anyway, that led to the book. The book led to me leaving the FBI and my first book signing. Because all these stories are crazy. My first book signing was September 12th at the Borders at the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my gosh.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That night they did a press tour. And the first stop on the press tour was Larry King Live. You guys remember Larry King, Huge at the time, right? So all of a sudden, it wasn't going on. LARRY king. Just to talk about the. The book. All of a sudden, they needed somebody to talk about 9, 11. And I was the guy because I worked Al Qaeda. I was in Yemen and Africa and all these places chasing Al Qaeda. So that was those years.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now we're going to talk about Broken Plea. The book is called Broken Plea, the Explosive Search for Truth behind the Idaho Murders. I'm going to be honest with you. I acknowledge how enormous these were. But maybe because I don't watch the nightly news or anything, I personally wasn't terribly aware of this in. Until I read your book. So I guess let's just maybe start with what happened in 2022.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I wasn't either. I knew nothing about this case until just before Bryan Coburger pleaded guilty to this case. Bottom line, November of 2022, four students at the University of Idaho were murdered. You knew this One well, in a house. Probably the most sensationalized, high profile case in the last 10 years because it's so horrific.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. My mom could not stop talking about it. You can imagine.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sure this was a sweet sp.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, it was a huge story. It was daily story on all the people that you might imagine. All those shows that cover crime and true crime and things like that. Everything from mainstream legacy news feeds to tmz, everybody covered it.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Bottom line is these three young women and a man were killed in a three story house off cut. Well, it was campus housing, but not a dormitory. These four horrific murders and then the investigation that ensued to the point where the authorities. Authorities found a guy named Brian Kohberger. They arrested him in Pennsylvania, they brought him back. Grand jury indicted him for four counts of premeditated murder and one count of felony burglary. And assigned a public defender and got set up for trial. And the trial was supposed to happen in August of 2025. So a year ago, just prior to trial, after three years of going through the whole court process, he changed his plea from not guilty. Actually, that's not true. He never even actually entered a plea. We can talk about that. But he changed his plea time to guilty. And he stood in a change of plea hearing before a judge named Hippler. Judge Hipler. And he pled guilty to four counts of murder and one count of felony burglary. He was sentenced to four consecutive life terms, plus 20 years for something, I'm not sure what it was. And a fine of $270,000, which was $50,000 for each, and $20,000 for the burglary.

[Dax Shepard]

And this was all to avoid the death penalty, presumably.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes, because it was a death penalty prosecution at the time. Death penalty in Idaho is firing squad, which I think no matter who you are, that somehow adds a little bit more. Right.

[Monica Padman]

It's really hard.

[Dax Shepard]

I gotta be honest with. That would be my choice.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

What? Well, you. Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but you wouldn't.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right?

[Dax Shepard]

You wouldn't hear it. The bullet's traveling faster than the speed of sound.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Well said.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're standing there and then you're not.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

These lethal injections. There's some horror stories. God knows I don't want electrocution.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Just had one, like a few weeks ago.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really? Another one?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Couldn't kill a guy.

[Kristen Bell]

It can be terrible, terrible, terrible.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's my choice, I think.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So that's the end of the case. Right. And horrible, horrible, horrible story resolved to everyone's satisfaction with pleas of guilt and it goes away. Done. No trial, no evidence, no nothing. Except everybody in the world already knew about it. Everybody in the world had their own theory and all of a sudden it's gone. Then here I come. And here we are now.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You had a friend suggest to you that you should look at this.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Correct.

[Dax Shepard]

And initially you're like, no, I'm not interested.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I wasn't interested because I was doing another true crime book on a case from Springfield, Missouri called the Springfield Three, which if somebody googles the Springfield Three, it's a huge unsolved, 35 year old missing persons case. Three women disappeared, never found a trace. I was finishing that book and I was fully involved in all the edits that go along with that. And then I get this call from this guy and says, we gotta talk. I knew nothing about the case. I'd been buried in another case.

[Monica Padman]

And he was a student, right? A PhD student or something?

[Dax Shepard]

Well, yeah, let's go through in order. So your book. I like the way that your book is structured. So we start the book with the plea.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I think the first line is, most stories don't start at the end, but that's where we were. Right. So we start this book with a solution. And the solution is Brian Kohberger standing up. So it starts at that July 2, 2025 hearing where he stands up, Judge Hippler says, we're gonna change the plea. The prosecutor stands up and recites the evidence as it would have happened. He says, I did it five times. He says it again five times and it's sealed and it goes away. But that is the end until you look at what nobody saw. If there had been a trial, this information would have come out. It would have gone through public scrutiny. And no matter what happened, everyone would know why. But because there was no trial, no one knew any of the information in that book. I don't think I'm exaggerating. There's very little information in that book that people knew probably prior to it coming out.

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's almost all new information.

[Dax Shepard]

And let's just start by saying this book is not in any way attempting to say he didn't do it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Correct. It's not a wrongful conviction case.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, start there. It's not a wrongful conviction book, but there's a lot of stuff.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, no. This is.

[Dax Shepard]

So that does beg some questions that probably deserve to be scrutinized in a trial. And it would have probably been more satisfying for all of us to maybe learn some. So then we go from the plea to 4:20am Sunday morning in Moscow, Idaho.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So tell us what happened that night.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Let me just back up. I think this book is 16 chapters or something like that. The spine of this book, it is different than other books I've written. It will be my seventh published book. The one I'm doing with Dylan's not coming out till the fall. And I've written novels, I've written memoirs, I've written different kinds of things. This is different because it's a book built on somebody else's writing for the most part.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Each one of those chapters has a spine, which is a police document, an interview transcript. It is some primary source document. And I build the chapter around what they said.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, interesting.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And I don't formulate theories. I say this is what you don't know and it plugs it into the larger story. And in many of those instances in those chapters, some of them are outrageous. Would you agree with that?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, absolutely. So, but we start with, with what we all would think happened. Right. What we knew, which is four in the morning.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah. Let's start with this. What the prosecution has said at the hearing and all along is that sometime at approximately 4:15 on a Sunday morning, so Saturday night parties on a college campus, going into Sunday morning at 4:15, various things happen that lead investigators, then prosecutors to believe this is when the crimes occurred, when that happened, two young women were killed in a bedroom on the third floor and a woman and her boyfriend were killed on the second floor floor of the three story house. And the killer left. What really starts to stand out is the prosecution's timeline suggests that was between three and a half and five minutes. And now everybody listening to this thing is going to have their own opinions and attitudes. Some would argue that initially they said 15, 20 minutes. When it comes right down to it, the timeline established with all of the evidence as presented by the prosecution was three and a half to five minutes to kill four human beings in a,

[Dax Shepard]

a house you would maybe not know or know.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so, well, there's the next question. Three story house, two bedrooms, third floor, two bedrooms and a bathroom. Two bedrooms and a bathroom. Living room and a kitchen. Two bedrooms and a bathroom on the first floor.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. Other people were there. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Two other people were living in the

[Christopher Whitcomb]

house and they were not killed, which is another issue. And they didn't call police for eight hours. Yeah, they did not call 911 for eight hours.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So the 911 call, the initial 911 call is a full eight hours later.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Let's accept the prosecution timeline and say that the murders occurred approximately 4:15, 4:17, 4:18, 4:19 within that 10 minute window. That's the accepted timeline. The two surviving females in the house, residents of the house, went downstairs to the first floor bedroom and stayed there till they called 911 at approximately 11:50, 11:55 later that morning. Yeah, noon. So you know, 15, 20 minutes here and there. Eight hours after calling their friends who came over and went into the. Before the police got there and they called it in as a medical emergency. A passed out roommate. A roommate had passed out and would not wake up.

[Monica Padman]

That's what they called, that's what they

[Christopher Whitcomb]

called and said, which soon becomes a real issue.

[Dax Shepard]

There's blood everywhere.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, I mean this crazy stabbing, monstrous.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean I've been involved in a very, very large number of very violent, awful scenarios and this was bad. This was just absolutely horrible. It's such a complex case and it's so difficult to put the whole thing in perspective.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The bottom line is this. It started with a 911 call. A relatively new police officer in Moscow, Idaho is a town of roughly 25,000 people, 26, 27,000 people. A university campus. So you have a police department that deals with cases like this. They didn't have murders, they didn't have the violent crime.

[Dax Shepard]

It's primarily bar fights.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, exactly. It's a college campus. So. So all professionals trained. He had been a medical first responder before he got this job. And let me start with three things. The prosecution built this case around a three tiered or three prong killers. One of them was DNA found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor. Supposedly one of them was a white car that was tied to the suspect, Bryan Coburger, now convicted or pled guilty. And some cell tower information. So a car, cell tower tower and DNA on the surface looks great. So now we say how do we get there? So what's very unusual about this case is nobody knew this at the time because there was a gag order on the case. Judge Hipler imposed a gag order. So even though people were talking about this nonstop, no one had any of the information, no one knew what the evidence was. And so it was what the prosecution was saying, not what anybody had seen. So one of the first things that happened is I think it was Dateline NBC. Somebody leaked some really critical information to them in violation of the gag order. And the judge was unhappy about that and made that known to everybody involved. And that was a big issue at the time. Everything that I did was after that. It was after he had been convicted. Everything I did was after the gag order had been lifted and they were starting to disclose some of the information under Freedom of Information act request. So that's just a timeline. The timeline of the crimes. And the response starts with something you don't see in a lot of true crime, which is a 56 or 60 body camera video. This officer named Mitch Nunez, relatively new to the department, was wearing a body cam. And it starts with him and his cruiser responding to the crime. The way those work, you don't always have audio. Immediately the audio comes on and you have who was it? Was it Jelly Roll? Who's the Enemy is Me?

[Monica Padman]

That song was playing.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, the song was playing on the radio because, I mean, every. Cops have a good tam radio because it's a boring job sometimes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And then so you're listening to My Enemy is Me, and then all of a sudden the call comes from dispatch. So you have the dispatch where they call into. Oddly enough, my last name is Whitcomb. It was called Whitcomb911. Oh, wow. No idea why. So they dispatch police and fire to the house. And that's where you see it. The entire response is filmed with audio, which is remarkable. And no one had seen it when I started looking into this case. So your question, what did I see first? I saw the video. So you have a report in this case. We saw the whole thing happen in real time on video. Indisputable. And what happened in the reports and what came out was very different than what everybody thought, including the fact that when this officer goes upstairs, he goes in the house, goes upstairs, goes down to the second floor bedroom and finds the first two victims, one lying on the floor, one in bed. His first words were to the other officer coming in behind him, well, it looks like he killed himself. So initially on camera, which is now, I believe, widely available, his initial reaction was that this was a murder suicide. A murder suicide, exactly. Right from the very beginning, things didn't make sense. So there was another friend of the two surviving women who called friends of theirs, a girlfriend of theirs through one of the sororities, and a guy named Hunter Johnson. Hunter Johnson, University of Idaho student, came to the house and he actually went in the house, house, went upstairs, down the hallway and discovered the bodies. He came back, he went to the kitchen and got a knife for protection.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Which is not unreasonable. He had the knife in his hand when police arrived.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, okay, that's not great.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's not Great. Because nobody knows what's going on.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not a great first impression.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And then he places it on a beer pong table in the middle of the living room. There's a big living room and a beer pong table right smack dab in the middle that you have to go around to get to the kitchen and around to get, get down there. So I started putting those various things together and saying what does not add up, because when you walk into any crime scene, there's a blueprint of what happened. You just have to interpret it. Some people are very good at it. Forensic psychologists, behavioralists, the profilers in the FBI. People who get paid to map blood spatter. It's a science. It's reasonably good.

[Dax Shepard]

Reasonably is about as much as we

[Kristen Bell]

could say, I think.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, so much of this stuff under scrutiny is not replicatable.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And that's what happened. That's what happened, happened here. And the thing is, people had been talking about this for three years based on never seeing anything at all. I wrote broken plea, but the publisher came up with the explosive search for truth behind it. And they were not kidding. I mean, this went off like a nuclear bomb because so many people had so many theories and they had never seen any of this information before.

[Dax Shepard]

Was there anything about the body cam footage that immediately was like inconsistent for what you had read?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Everything was inconsistent and then it went downhill. So we have so much to talk about in this case and the book in particular. But I think the two things that stand out immediately from the body cam footage, what I think most people believe about the crime scene and what to this day, many people don't know. And I've got to say this about a book. I spent 6 months of 12 hour days mired in the majority of the police file. And I think we got to explain that when somebody commits a crime, the police do an investigation. The investigation goes to a prosecutor, the prosecutor figures it out and they use certain evidence from that file file to prosecute and put somebody in jail. That's the model, basically.

[Dax Shepard]

Right, right. And then they're obligated to be turning over all the evidence that maybe they didn't want to incorporate in.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's exactly. And that's called the Brady disclosure. There was a case called Brady v. Maryland. I think it was 1976. It's an old, well established federal statute that says the prosecution has to hand their entire case, including, as you just said, Dax, inconvenient. Inconvenient or exculpatory in any way to the defense and they did. And that is the Brady disclosure. The Brady disclosure in this case was terabytes of information. It is staggering how much information they gathered.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it was a three year gap between the plea and the event. I mean, that's a lot of time to be accumulating documents.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Building this mountain.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

In some ways, I was shocked at how much information it was because it wasn't just the crime scene itself. It wasn't just the autopsy and toxicology reports of the victims. It wasn't just the analysis of blood spatter and DNA testing of blood found at the scene. It wasn't any one of those physical evidentiary things. It was also every online interaction anybody associated with this thing had ever done. Brian Kohberger, the victims, the survivors, friends, every email, every social media post, every text message, every photograph, everything that anybody had ever done. And it became hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of information that I had to look through and try to make sense of.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell us about Dylan's story statement.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so there were four victims, two survivors. One of the survivors who lived on the second floor, her name is Dylan Morson. She was the impetus behind the call to police. And she was the only witness to these crimes. And her testimony. She was interviewed four times. The first time at the scene, which is very vague. The second one at police headquarters. And then after that, in the presence of legal counsel and transcribed it. And she was, and to this day is, and I'm not disputing that in any way, a witness. And that's all she is. Right.

[Monica Padman]

So she's saying she saw this happen.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so here's what she saw.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So the police arrive and they say what happened. And she said that she woke up at about 4:15 in the morning and she heard one of the women victims in the house going up the stairs. Now, the wall to her bedroom with the door is in a slight hallway which goes into the kitchen. Directly adjacent to the wall of her bedroom is a staircase going up to the third where the two other women were found dead. It goes up and then it comes back. It's a double back staircase. And you go up that staircase. And she told police that she heard one of the victims turned out to be another one of the victims with a dog listening to loud music to the point where she said, I think they're wearing Doc Marten's boots because she could tell by how strong the footsteps were. So it was very detailed information and

[Dax Shepard]

she interpreted as one of the roommates. But you would definitely argue it was Brian's no, no.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Great question. But the reason I said that is because she originally said it was one of the victims, and she changed to one of the other victims. Cause two women died in bed on the third floor, probably were found and attacked and killed in that bed. Never got out of the bed. The other woman, Xander Kernodle, was probably attacked in or around the kitchen, chased across the living room, down a hallway into her room, where she died on the floor of her bedroom after an extraordinarily violent struggle. And her boyfriend was found in bed next to her, killed also. And her boyfriend was 6 foot 4, 230 pounds old.

[Monica Padman]

I know, I know.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I feel like big guy. Yeah, Big, big gu. So, basically, Dylan Morton said in all these police statements that she heard this activity and then she heard somebody in a bathroom. And the bathroom was all the way at the other end of the house, approximately 30ft away, depending on how you measure it. Two closed doors away heard a male voice saying, it's gonna be okay. I'm here to help you. Essentially. I'm paraphrasing, but that was essentially what she said. She didn't know what had happened, and she thought whatever closed her door, heard something else, opened her door, and she's face to face, face with a man at 4:15 in the morning, wearing all black clothing and a balaclava and holding something in his hands. And it had to be, based on the proximity that the house, the construct of everything, that reconstruction that I've done, no more than three feet away, probably less than three feet away. So came face to face with the killer. 4:15 in the morning, four homicides. He turns around and walks out through the kitchen, and you disappears. That's the story.

[Dax Shepard]

And why doesn't she call 911?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So here we go now with what happened and what didn't happen and where do we fall in between? Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Can I ask you, was she drunk that night?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The toxicology of the four victims, I could tell you the blood alcohol content of two of them. I'm not going to say who's who for respect for the families. Two of the victims in the house, their blood alcohol content was about 0.28, which is more than three times the driving limit. It's a good buzz. And two of them were 0.10. So two were mild, probably, right? I mean, 0.10 is not.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

0.3 is drunk. And two of them had methamphetamine levels. And based on investigation, it was most likely, almost certainly Adderall, that they had bought. Nothing terribly unusual. For college kids on a party weekend, pretty normal behavior. Right. But in terms of impaired activity, somebody being asleep at point one and waking up, it's not going to be a dramatic. You're not going to wake up totally disoriented. But at point, you might ignore a

[Dax Shepard]

lot of stuff you wouldn't otherwise, you know, you want to get back in bed.

[Kristen Bell]

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

But we're going to get back to your original question, which is hers. And the answer is, I don't know. No one really knows. She says in her statements that she had been drinking a lot and actually itemized. And I think I put it in the book, what she actually, actually consumed. And I should preface this by saying this, that you've read the book. It's extraordinary amount of detail.

[Dax Shepard]

400 plus pages.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's 430 pages. And I had to cut 30 pages of the book out because I couldn't mention people that were suspects for legal reasons. And that's a monster part of this thing. So I wanted to write this book, like a grand jury investigation presentation. Like if I were an FBI agent, I do an investigation, I gather the information, I give it to a prosecution prosecutor, and then the prosecutor would present it to a grand jury. And it has to be very methodical.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And it has to be well thought out. And that's what I wanted to do with this book. There's no narrative in this thing. It's really saying, this is what happened and you figure it out.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[Monica Padman]

What about the other person?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, before we move on beyond Dylan, you asked what she was drinking. I don't know because she said she drank a lot. Somebody else, after the fact, said she told them she didn't drink anything at all. There's no way to tell. Is it Germaine? I have no idea.

[Dax Shepard]

Apps in a time machine. We shan't ever know.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly. Right. But what we do know from phone records and from the interview is that she decided to run downstairs to the first floor and spend the rest of the night in a room with another young woman whose name is Bethany. I wrote in the audiobook, Bethany Funke. It's F u n K E because that's the way her name has always been pronounced in anything that I've ever seen during an interview. She corrects the interviewer and says, my name isn't Bethany Funk, it's Bethany Funke. My apologies to everyone. I don't know how she prefers to, because I didn't ask her, but F u n K e. So she had a room on the first floor. Dylan ran down and they spent the night, based on what they've told police, in that room.

[Monica Padman]

Because she was like, I saw a robber or whatever.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly. Okay, but what happened, what they said happened and what actually happened during those eight hours is wildly disputed, not the least of which is that they spent the night in that room because they were terrified, horrified, in one statement, and in another statement two sentences later said, well, we didn't really think it was unusual. People were in the house all the time. And I go in great depth in the interviews in the book about what they say, how they say it and when they say it. They were never interviewed as anything other than witnesses. Nobody ever asked them hard questions about what everybody asks as reasonable questions.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. Like if they were being treated as a suspect.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Correct. When you go through the house, and I've seen thousands and thousands of photographs of the house writ large inside the house, outside the house details, all the things that happened during the investigation of the house, let's just say for the purpose of this conversation, you have a murder scene in a bedroom on the third floor. One bedroom doorway, two young women killed in a bed. You go down to the second floor and there is a at the bottom of the staircase, Dylan's room just to the right. Then you go up a step about 6 inches into the living room. The living room is blocked. The doorway is blocked by a beer pong table. It's a white table from Costco or whatever. You go through that table, turn left and you go down a hallway really quick.

[Dax Shepard]

You are serious about beer pong when you have a purpose built table.

[Monica Padman]

College, you are committed to beer pong is what you do.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's what you do. They had a party Friday night and they were playing beer pong. Yeah, I mean, it was college housing. There's nothing unusual at any of this except the placement of the table, which becomes massively important.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, God.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, end of the second floor hallway is the second murder scene or crime scene where the murders occurred, which is a woman and a man killed in that bedroom. So I would start by saying this. If you as a non trained reader, viewer of a documentary, whatever the case may be, you would look at the third floor bedroom and you would say, oh my God, this is horrible. But it's a typical crime scene with an edged weapon. There's blood on the walls, you have spatter transfer. You can do the math. It's stabbing, stabbing, wild stabbing, wild stabbing on the ceiling, on the walls. It makes sense in many, many ways. And can be diced, dissected, analyzed and evaluated based on that. This is a science, for better or worse, well established. You go to the second floor bedroom and you see the exact same thing, perhaps more violent because of the nature of what happened inside that room, but the same thing. One body on the floor, another in the bed covered with a blanket. Okay? Then you go back and you start going through the file. And it primarily comes down to this. Everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution, the defense, everybody hires witnesses. The prosecution hired a witness named Paul Charlotte Sutton. She submitted a report, I think it was 60, roughly 65, 64, 67 pages, something like that. And in her report, she goes through the whole crime scene and she says, this is what happened. And that became the center of the prosecution narrative. It was done and written long after the fact, just prior to trial, not long before the trial. In that report, she said various things. We don't need to go through all of them except for this. And this comes back to the body camera. When you look at the Mitch Nunez body camera footage going through the second floor living area where the beer pong table is down the hallway into the bedroom, it looks normal. You don't see any blood spatter on the walls. You don't see anything. It just looks fairly normal. And it's fairly close up and it's fairly high resolution. So things stand out after the fact. You go back and you look and you find out there is blood everywhere. And I'm not saying everywhere, meaning it's painted green. I'm saying that there are blood trails. Trails in most open spaces. In that second floor, there's droplets everywhere, everywhere. But you can't see them unless you get up very, very close. They're dramatically different. The blood stains on the third floor and then the second floor bedrooms look like blood spatter, drips, trails.

[Dax Shepard]

Helter skelter.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Helter skelter. That's exactly right, Dax. The blood stains in the common areas of the second floor look dramatically different. So the first thing you'd say, well, what does that.

[Dax Shepard]

Her report.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Now, this is a report done by the prosecution says, quote, unquote, that they were diluted with an unknown substance. So the first question you might ask yourself is, why were the bloodstains on the third floor crime scene partially cleaned? Yeah, okay, well, that's what I'm saying. So the blood stains in the bedroom on the third floor and the blood stains on the second floor, they look identical. And they look identical to crime scenes that we're used to seeing in fiction or otherwise. Right?

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

All the space in between has blood stains. The staircase, the walls coming down the staircase, across the room, the beer pong table. There's a knee wall, there's a far wall, there's baseboards. There are blood stains. All of them. All of those blood stains have been, quote, diluted with an unknown substance. That begs the question, what is the unknown substance and how did it happen and why? So she offers the answer, and her answer, that Xander Kernodle was found on the floor of her bedroom on the second floor, at some point, had suffered an injury to her mouth. She suffered grotesque injuries. Right. So Paulette Sutton speculates that the blood was diluted with the saliva from her mouth.

[Monica Padman]

She's saying all that blood in the entire house was from the mouth.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I'll just say it's impossible, that first of all, she suffered those wounds on the floor of her bedroom. None of the blood spatter in her bedroom were diluted with an unknown substance.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Where she suffered the injuries.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So how do you go back out through the entire house and every single blood spatter is somehow diluted with the saliva that she suffered in her room

[Monica Padman]

except the one back in the other room? Those rooms both don't have it.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

They have zero dilution.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think often prosecutors are in a position where they recognize the defense is going to make a meal of all this other blood and they don't have an explanation? But you're not allowed to throw your hands up in the air and go, like, we have no explanation. So your best bet tactically is to have some explanation?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Like if you're trying to read between the lines of like, do they really feel convicted about this theory, or is it they need one to present to counter whatever one the defense is going to come up with? They can't go, yeah, we don't know about that. Well, we have no explanation.

[Monica Padman]

You should be able to say that they did.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The lead prosecutor and attorneys that are actually going to litigate the case, they are law professionals, and that's what they do. But they have to do it with information gathered by law enforcement. In this case, local, state, and federal. You have local, the Moscow Police Department. You have the Idaho State Police. You have the Pennsylvania State Police, where they actually found and arrested Brian Kohberger. And then you have the FBI, federal, state and local. Different rules, different jurisdictions, all working together. Massive complexity in terms of the case. And then you have the defense poking holes in it. And I've asked experts from both. Both sides, specifically the defense. I've asked about that question. And Their answer was they just were gonna ignore it. And the primary reason I wrote this book is because the questions are so overwhelming. In this case. I don't see how it's possible that somebody in good conscience with the ability to question those things doesn't. I know I've lived five lives. At this point in my life, the last thing in the world that I wanted to be is actually guy that. I have zero social media. I've had a very large life. Right now. It's very small. I live in a small Midwestern town. I write books. When I got involved in this thing, it was explosive. And all of a sudden, you have to endure what you guys do all the time, which is the insanity of society.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The only talent that everybody in the world can have very easily is hatred. It's so easy to voice in this day and age. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So go do your thing. Whatever. I got thick skin, but I felt compelled to because I felt if I didn't, I would have felt very badly about myself again.

[Monica Padman]

You're not saying that this all went the wrong way. It's just that things needed extra looking at that did not.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, it goes back to your commitment to the Constitution. There's a rule of engagement. I may or may not agree with it, but that's the principle I agreed to uphold. And it's like, for right or wrong, these rules of jurisprudence are there for a reason. You're presumed innocent. You get a trial by your peers. These were novel, for they are the

[Christopher Whitcomb]

foundation of our system as a society.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

They do go wrong. I say in the book that American justice system is the best in the world, but it's not perfect.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

In my opinion, if we as a society throw our hands up and say, oh, yeah, this is great, then I think we've lost the battle. If we don't say, we are the people and we are doing this among ourselves, for ourselves, by ourselves, then we deserve what we get. And that could be you, it could be me, it could be you. And I've been on all sides of this. I was the object of Ruby Ridge. Began a grand jury for murder.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I've been on that side of it. Murder's not typically a federal crime, but I've worked two murder investigations, One in a federal prison and one on an army base. So I've worked murder investigations, and I've worked as an investigative reporter for some of the biggest publications in the country. So I look and say, if I have that skill set and if I stand here and Talk to you guys, who I have enormous respect for because of what you talk about the human condition. And I say to you, oh, you know what? I'm just gonna go over here. I'm just gonna ignore it. I'd be ashamed of that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So I'll you tell take the hit. I believe in this. I believe in it strongly.

[Monica Padman]

I have such a weird question. Okay. So when the officer came in and on the body cam, he says he thinks murder, suicide, but the guy had a blanket over him. How could it have been a suicide if he had a blanket?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Let me just say this looking back and saying, I think that there are things that stand out. Like you just mentioned, things that stand out that are so compelling and they are so troublesome that you just can't look past them.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And one of those things is the difference between the two discrete crime scenes. Third and second floor bedrooms and the space in between. And we know that the killer had to go from the murder scene on the third floor, down the stairs, across the living room, down the hallway to the mer scene on the second floor. We know that. It's unequivocal.

[Dax Shepard]

It could have been a coincidental.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Two different double bombs.

[Kristen Bell]

There's a path, right?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Then he had to come back the same path. See Dylan Mortensen outside her bedroom door and then run out the kitchen door. That's the theory. There's blood everywhere in the second floor bedroom. There's blood everywhere in the third floor. There is no blood on the floor anywhere outside the threshold of the doorway on the second floor to the threshold of the floor on the third floor. There is zero blood and the dude's

[Dax Shepard]

carrying a very bloody weapon. He's got blood all over him.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I can hear people screaming at me right now saying that's not true. There is evidence in photographs and in the file of a luminol blood identification

[Dax Shepard]

fluid where it gets high lit.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly right. So blood gets wiped up, but you can illuminate it with a protein reactive chemical and says it's evidence that there was blood here. There is a spot on the second floor that shows evidence of blood on the floor. But there is no blood that's been tested, identified or recovered from the floors outside the two bedrooms. So the blood on the second floor, and I should say this very clearly, the blood found in the common areas of the second floor, the cast off blood that was diluted with an unknown substance, it was all cast off blood by somebody swinging in their arm. So the killer had to be soaked in Blood, because the blood on the second floor came from the third floor, came down the stairs, they bounced off the stairs in a few places. And that blood has been analyzed. The blood on the second floor, that's on the knee wall to the staircase, on the far wall, on the beer pong table, on the molding, on the sidewalls, all of that blood that was diluted in an unknown substance, all of that was cast off by somebody swinging their arm. And they had so much liquid blood on their person that it was cast off like a wet paintbrush. So it gives you a very, very clear and macabre sense of what was going on, the horrific violence and how did that get altered. And we'll come back again. And I'm talking again in very, very, very vague generalities right now because of what we have for time, but supposedly this all happened in three and a half minutes. They got into the house, they killed people on different floors, found them and interacted and killed them on second floors. Then they got out of the house, got back into. And that white car, Bryan Coburger's car, what they said was Brian Coburger's car, drove down past a video camera. So not just the crimes in three and a half to five minutes, but getting into the house, out of the house, into a car and driving away in that period of time and kind

[Monica Padman]

of doing some cleanup in there. Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And I'll just say diluting, I don't want to be too grotesque for this, but the bottom line is that the two victims on the second floor, Ethan Chapin and Xander Kernodle, they collectively suffered 75 and weapon injuries. Now, I don't mean to be too much here, but you just go like this.

[Kristen Bell]

How quickly could you get that?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So, and the next thing is, it's one guy pleaded guilty to this case. You've got a woman fighting for her life on the floor and a guy in bed three feet away. There's evidence that she actually made it to the bed and one person killed her, roughly 64 wounds on her in this horrific violent fight. Even the police said she fought like hell. And her 6 foot 4 inch, 230 pound boyfriend is lying in bed watching all this happen. How's that Explain that to me.

[Monica Padman]

I don't understand any of that.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Explain that to me. And then he was covered with a blanket. Let me rephrase this because there are things that I know and things that we could speculate. All of his wounds and his wounds were significant, were inflicted on a naked body. And the blood evidence was in the sheets and the matches, mattress itself. The blanket when police found him was on top of all of those wounds.

[Dax Shepard]

So it was done post.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Somebody covered his naked body after he'd been murdered.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

One person confessed to these crimes or pleaded guilty to these crimes. So it goes like this. There are 10 or 15 or 20 of those things in this book.

[Dax Shepard]

Can you tell me quickly about Brian?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Brian Kohberger, and I'm not speaking out of school, is a very odd guy. He was 27 or 28 at the time of the crime crimes. He had moved from Pennsylvania. He's lived at his parents house. He got a master's degree and an undergraduate degree in. People say he was getting a PhD in criminology. He was, but his undergraduate degrees were not in criminology, but he got into a doctoral program at Washington State University in Pelham, Washington, which is only eight miles away. So you've got University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. And you've got Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. And they're only eight miles apart.

[Dax Shepard]

So the border's just right there.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, right, exactly. So he goes to Washington in June from Pennsylvania in a white Hyundai Elantra. He moves up there. He gets a cell phone when he gets there, and he moves into an apartment. I think it was a two bedroom apartment. And he is a teaching assistant, as is often the case in PhD programs. So he teaches, he's a teaching assistant and he's a student at the same time. He's a very, very often awkward guy. I've been through all of his emails, all of his cell phone communications, his texts, his photographs and his messages. And he communicated with his family, his mother and his father and his two sisters. And he loved his dog and he loved baseball. He liked the Yankees.

[Dax Shepard]

How about friends?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Almost zero. Yeah, almost zero. Let's just say roughly 3,500 text messages from the time in July when he got the phone to the time the police seized his phone. I don't want to give an exact number, but I'd say fewer than 1/10 of 1% were to anybody other than his parents or his sisters.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Almost no one. But he's a very odd guy. So I am not a psychologist. My wife's a doctor of psychology and not a criminologist. But he was very spectrum.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, that's what it looks like.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

He was very, very awkward in terms of interaction. And the most obvious scene is when he showed up in court to enter his plea. He didn't say anything at all. He just stared at, at the Wall. And he never entered a plea of not guilty. The judge actually entered the plea of not guilty on his behalf. He didn't say a word.

[Dax Shepard]

Had he had any prior incidents with law?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

There was a published history of drug addiction, maybe opioids. When he was younger, he had a condition that he called visual snow, where he said that his vision would be obscured like an old television set. People don't even know what I'm talking about. But back in the day, televisions would just go to snow after a certain amount of time where he said that's the way he saw the world. So he had a visual affectation that was physiological. He had behavioral issues which would be spectrum related interaction, extremely awkward socially. And he also had a history of substance abuse. And he had lost a lot of weight. He'd been quite overweight and he had lost weight. So he had a history in his 27, 28 years of at least those three anomalies, socially interactive issues. He's a very unusual guy, but most people described him as very, very bright and focused in very awkward ways. And we've all had those conversations. You don't know social cues and things like that. So it's very easy to migrate from those things to, oh, he's a weirdo and he makes a murderer. And what you run into with a book like this, anytime you interact in a situation like this, invariably you have people and they say, oh, I don't care, I just know he did it.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Or, or I don't care. I, I just don't believe it. I just saw the, the Michael Jackson documentary and the O.J. simpson documentaries and all of these documentaries and you see in documentary form people in their own words saying, oh, he didn't do it. I just feel it, I just know it. And they just don't care about evidence.

[Monica Padman]

I know.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I don't think truth really comes into play. I have taken my own cases with a prosecutor to jury trials. So I've sat there in jury trials

[Dax Shepard]

and watched your theories to get tested.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly. And I've presented cases to grand juries. I've been through all elements of what we see playing out in this case, in this book. And I tried to bring that experience to the air.

[Dax Shepard]

I have had the experience of being convinced someone did something.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And finding out they didn't and being humbled by how wrong I was.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Well, look at the Innocence Foundation. And again, this is not a book about wrongful conviction.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I'm saying there are things that don't make sense. I'm going to come out and say I have no theories in the books. I'm going to say somebody cleaned up the crime scene and I'm going to say he did not do it alone. And I'll sit with any cop, I'll sit with the prosecutor, I'll sit with the defense, anybody and say you show me how this is consistent. There are things so wrong with what we know about this crime scene.

[Dax Shepard]

If they opened up the timeline enormously,

[Kristen Bell]

would that help you?

[Dax Shepard]

What if they go, you know, we totally fucked up this timeline.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Some people have, there are theories that it happened as early as 215. There are so many theories out there, I wouldn't even know where to start. Before I sat down with you guys, I went through the gauntlet of all the true crime podcasts. Some very bright people and some not very bright people. I've spent 14 hours trying to explain. It's like it never happened. I know they did it. I know he didn't do it. I know he did it. I know she's this, I know he's that. So I'm not trying to change anybody's mind because you can't. I do believe if somebody takes the time to read this book, they will vested themselves enough to have an opinion.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes, and I'll respect that opinion.

[Dax Shepard]

They never gave us a motive.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so we talk in a business say you have to have motive, means and mechanism, right? Why, how and what actually happened. First thing is a cop goes into a crime scene and they've got to say, all right, what happened? You look at the physical evidence, you look at the blood spatter, you might find a murder weapon, you might find whatever forensic evidence you're going to use, test it for DNA, blood, all of that. Right? But you have a behavioral aspect in every crime too. So that's why we have the national center for the Analysis of Violent Crime within a critical incident response group and a behavioral analysis unit. Now there's numerous of them and I worked there for a long time. The years after I was at the hostage rescue team, all they do is look at at the crime scene. From a behavioralist standpoint, what does the crime scene show? You have things like a killer will sometimes pose a body. It'll be a very disorganized crime scene. People like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer were serial killers, but very, very different in terms of the methodology of what they did. The Long island killers. You can have a serial killer, you can have a serial rapist, you can have a bank robber, you could have all These crimes. And they would show different psychologies behind those crimes. So the behavioral aspect of a crime scene investigation is critically important. That's why we have what society calls profilers, behavioral analysts. So you go into this crime scene and say, all right, look, let's gather all the evidence, look at where they found this, and let's look at what the blood spatter shows us, the patterns, all of that, and say, let's go back to motive, the foundation of every crime. Why did somebody sneak into a house at 4:15 in the morning on a Sunday in the middle of November and kill four humans? Human beings butcher for human beings. That's the first question you've got to answer. It's a critical one. So the first question that comes up after that is, was it directed at one person in particular? And then it unfolded from that.

[Dax Shepard]

Did it get out of hand?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right. So looking at what I've gleaned from other experts in this case, everybody's looking at it and saying, well, who killed these people? Is it a boyfriend? Is it somebody robbing the house? And it went wrong. Mostly people would say it was a sex crime. Everybody in, in this case, from the prosecutor Bill Thompson on down, has said there was no indication of any motive, of sexuality of any kind. None of these four. We can look at the behavioral aspects of these crimes. It'll tell you a lot about the person that committed them. Not me, but a trained professional in this case, what most people call profilers from the FBI. The FBI brought the BAU in. They never actually did a profile on a killer. I'm not sure why they were involved. So you go to the third floor and say those two homicides occurred before the two homicides on the second floor. Based on the blood pattern going through the common areas of the second floor and down, it would be impossible.

[Dax Shepard]

Direction the person's trapped.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It had to be. It had to be liquid blood cast off and it goes in one direction, not the other direction. And it's blood from the third floor.

[Dax Shepard]

Like if you're blowing blood out of a fan.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You would know which direction. Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You're not going to get blood from there to go over there if the fan's blowing that. And there are some things that would be extraordinarily difficult for an expert to refute. To the best of my knowledge, nobody's tried to. The murders almost certainly started on the third floor. So then you say, okay, why would somebody come in to the house, ostensibly through the kitchen, and go to the third floor and kill these two specific People first when there were two other people. That would have been easier if you

[Dax Shepard]

just wanted to kill people.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right. And the first door you would have come to in that house when you walk into the kitchen is Dylan Morton. She survived. Nobody killed her. So they went past her door, turned right, went upstairs to the third floor, went all the way down that hallway to the most remote bedroom from any entrance in that house. The most remote bedroom was the one where those two women were killed. Two women in the bed. The mechanism of injury, motive, means, mechanism. The mechanism of injury on those two women was dramatically different than the mechanism of injury on the two on the second floor. Two women lying in bed together. The woman on the left, Kayla Gancalves, she was asphyxiated. Where she was strangled or smothered. Something occluded the blood flow to her brain to the point where she suffered what's known as petechia. Petechia is burst blood vessels in the soft tissue of your lips and your eyelids.

[Dax Shepard]

They lost oxygen.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's a pressurization issue. They got choked.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Basically, for lack of better terminology, so that's one injury. Okay. The second was she suffered split, severe disfiguring blunt force trauma to her face and to her head. Oh, and she is the only one of the three that suffered those injuries. Oh my God. Then she was stabbed and cut to the actual cause of death. The other two, according to the autopsy reports, were contributing causes of death, but she suffered because of edged weapon injuries to her upper body. And we can talk about what happened in the bed and how it happened. The body's being staged or posed or moved and all, all of those things. But it is very clear that she suffered injuries that far exceeded anything necessary to kill her.

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And none of the others were choked or asphyxiated. None of the others suffered those disfiguring blunt force traumas. You couldn't tell who she was, skull fractures, things of that nature. So then you start thinking about it, and I'm talking about a layperson, not a professional. And you say, why would someone looking to murder in a non sexually oriented crime? It's not a robbery, guard gone wrong. 4:15 in the morning, somebody found them in that room. You have to have knowledge, you have to have all of the logistical aspects. But most important, you have to have a specific reason to act out that kind of a life altering event for yourself, the killer and for them on that one person. And it far exceeded what it would take to kill somebody.

[Dax Shepard]

Right. If it was a random.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right. So then the behavioralists come In. And it is a rage crime. Somebody hated her and not only wanted to kill her, but wanted to act out their rage upon her. Choke somebody, beat somebody, stab somebody, hurt

[Dax Shepard]

them in all the ways they were capable of hurting them.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Exactly right. And then disfigure them to the point where nobody could see them. But proximal to that is the woman who is in bed with her directly adjacent. Touching. She suffered the edged weapons, but not nearly to the sense of the mutilation. The mutilation.

[Monica Padman]

He had time to do all this and the other girl couldn't get out of bed, like, while that was happening.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so that's the next question. So how does one person use two hands to choke somebody, then beat them and then stab them dozens of times while another woman is.

[Monica Padman]

Is lying there?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Lying there.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And the one that was lying there is not one of the toxicology reports. She would have been conscious. She would have woken up.

[Dax Shepard]

This is a lot for one person

[Christopher Whitcomb]

to be managing, especially under those circumstances. The life of gonna fight or die.

[Kristen Bell]

Exactly.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Minimally you're getting up and running away.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Minimally, you're getting up and running away.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not saying suggesting everyone's going to try to fight.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You know, which of those things happened. None of those things happened. Never left the bed.

[Monica Padman]

I know that makes no sense.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It makes no sense. So let's just argue, and I think it's a very, very plausible argument that she was the victim behaviorally. Then you start looking and say, well, who wanted to go after her specifically? And then we come up with the next big issue in this. She did not live in the house at the time. She lived in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho. And she came back just for that weekend. And she was moving away. She didn't have to be in school to graduate, so she had moved home. And she was moving from home to Texas, where she was going to start a new job. And she just came down for that weekend. So not only would someone have to hate her to the point they would commit those crimes against her, they had to know that she was going to be there because she at the time did not live in the house.

[Monica Padman]

So.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So you start doing the math and you start checking down and say, there's something going on here. There is this individually focused rage based on some very strong emotive violence. And there is a familiarity that you knew this person was going to be in that place at that time in order to attack them. And then it starts narrowing your window of who might be plausible suspects. Then you go downstairs and say, how does the second floor crime scene difference? And the answer is profoundly different. The blood evidence shows, and the prosecution didn't dispute that the woman on the second floor, Zanna Kernodle, was attacked near the kitchen, more or less basically outside Dylan's door at the bottom of the stairs. Chased the beer pong table is a whole separate issue. Through the beer pong table, turned left down the hallway, casting blood all over the place as they ran. Then she was finally attacked on the floor of a room and died on the floor in this horrendous. Now imagine not just the violence of what occurred upstairs, but the sound of it.

[Monica Padman]

That's what I'm saying. This, all of these sounds, the woman running, she'd be screaming at the top of her lungs and no one's hearing anything.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, so second floor, the woman's running away. The house is 1122 King Road. There's a house adjacent that is 1112 King Road. They had basically a ring cam style camera device. It was kind of screwed into a light bulb. And it picked up at 4:17 in the morning. It picked up what everybody believes to be the sounds of her screaming and yelling and a loud bang at that time. So you could hear the violence inside

[Kristen Bell]

the house from the other house.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

From the other house. And nobody heard it in the house.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. What.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And when it gets to the bedroom, the boyfriend whose blood alcohol content was, I'll say it, he was one of the people who was. He was not drunk. Right. And he had been home at that point probably for two hours in bed. So he, 6 foot 4, 228 pound high school athlete, is lying in bed and doesn't get up when his girlfriend is fighting for her life on the floor. You start going down this checklist of

[Dax Shepard]

things, it's just hard to imagine how it all.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

We're talking generalities about a book that's very specific for 438, 30 pages. It's laid out well and the goal

[Dax Shepard]

of it, and these are going be, to me, my last couple questions for you, which is part of the reason for this book is to kind of examine the gap between public confidence and evidentiary certainty with these high profile investigations. So it's a little bit of a warning bell, right?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

It's a warning bell. And I'll say this. I worked a large part of my life, maybe not chronologically. I was in the FBI 16 years and my brother was a cop, was a local cop. I believe in law enforcement. I know law enforcement makes mistakes. I don't Always take law enforcement side. But I respect the process. We need it in order to society. Right. And I look at this thing and say if we don't question these things and ask questions, then shame on us. But I go back to it and say this. You're talking about a police department in a town of 25,000 people that are used to underage drinkers and loud noise complaints from frat parties.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean that's not demeaning, that's just a reality of what they did.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Experience.

[Dax Shepard]

How much experience do they have in this type of.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

In the training involved in it and within that. I made the mistake of saying they didn't. Great job. In a podcast. And somebody went nuts. I'm not saying they did a great job. I'm saying they did an extraordinarily extensive job. The extent of the case, they worked it hard. Staggering.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean it's unbelievable.

[Dax Shepard]

Whether they were great at it or not, they worked their asses off.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Right. There were so many suspects. I would say, conservatively speaking, there were 12 really hard people that were named in police files as suspects that I don't talk about in the book for various reasons I'd like to. But the cast of characters in this thing is staggering. It's unbelievable how many people could have been responsible for this. They had white cars that match Coburger's. They had relationships with the victims. So many different things.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Also cell phone tower pings in a town of that size. I don't know how much that.

[Monica Padman]

But I'm glad to know that. That there were other people that they ruled out. Cuz hearing this I'm like, how did they pick this random.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, let's, let's talk about the guys. That's so important.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

How did they pick this guy? And that's the question that nobody's really resolved to this day. The narrative says that police found this white car. Brian Coburger had a 2015 white Hyundai Elantra at that time. You know, these car manufacturers have a subconscious. They pick the same model and they all make a version of a small SUV or whatever. They're all very similar at that time. Many, many manufacturers. Mazda, Chevy made cars, four door sedans that had the same contours and they had a window behind the door in the back that was kind of like an eyelet that went up like that. And. And when the FBI came in and identified these cars, they basically went to surveillance cameras everywhere around Moscow and they found cars driving around at that time of night and they tried to make them look like they were all the same vehicle because they were white, they were four door and they had the window.

[Dax Shepard]

It was the only part I would have been useful in.

[Monica Padman]

Oh you would have because of the camera in the driveway?

[Kristen Bell]

Yes.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Okay, Wing cameras, surveillance cameras, outside, ATM, ATMs. Exactly right. So they came up with this white car. And the white car was seen on that same camera that I just mentioned, that 1112 King Road camera. So they put it all together and they said it's all the same car. Nowhere does it show Brian Coburger in that car. And many places in the police file I found cars that were almost identical. Elantras white four door sedans. Windows fit the profile. So that was how they said they found Brian Coburger. Because of the car, because of the video camera. The next thing is a cell cam. The FBI has a team called cast which is the cellular analysis support. So they came in and they did analysis. This is very common. If a crime occurred someplace down the street, CAST would come in. It's in television shows all the time. They call it dumping the towers. You dump the cell phone towers, you gather and I've seen them hundreds of thousands. It's just line after line. Phone number, phone number, phone number. So that's how they zoned in on Coburg. But here's what they found out. His phone was shut off at 2:54 in the morning and it didn't come back on until 4:48. Maybe I'm off by a minute. But not much more than a minute. So for those two hours around the time of the crimes, his phone was turned off and his phone pinged earlier and his phone pinged after. So many people speculate. I speculate in the book. I don't have theories, but I say this is what the evidence shows. Because I obtained all the FBI CAST data and I obtained the report that they prepared for trial. The CAST team had a thing to hand out as an exhibit at trial. I think it was 31 pages. It looked like an eighth grade science project. It looked like a PowerPoint that had been printed out on paper, standard colors. And it had a picture of a cell tower that looked like an evergreen tree and one that looked like a cactus. I'm reading this thing and I'm going, come on guys. I mean you're the FBI, right? Sorry, sorry. I was surprised at it. But it showed this. In order to dump a tower and to triangulate a cell phone call. I know this unequivocally because I've been involved in these before to be able to do the math, you have to triangulate. In order to do that, you've got to have three points of thank you, or you've got to have a proportion preponderance of towers that would allow you to narrow down. Because the cell phone tower will ping on a tower for various reasons. It might go to this tower, this tower, this tower. All that data gives you greater specificity in terms of narrowing it down. In Moscow at that time, Bryan Coburger's phone was at and T and the AT and T towers there were very, very small number of towers. So they could only narrow down those phones pings to within what I estimate to be a 10 mile distance. You could be 10 miles away. It would pick up that faux tower. If there had been two or three, then they could have found something more. They didn't have those things. So Bill Thompson goes out and says, we narrowed him down to within 200 meters or whatever else. And I look at this data and say, no, you can't.

[Dax Shepard]

How?

[Monica Padman]

How?

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I mean, I have the report. It would have come out at trial. So the next is cell tower pings. And a guy named Cy Ray was the defense expert hired by the defense to be the defense expert. He was a cell tower analyst and he just came out with a book, I think last week. I don't know what it's called, but he talked about this in general. But there's a section in the book about this case and he says the data was horribly flawed, it was terribly misrepresented, the thing was a debacle. And he was going to testify at trial to the insufficiency of the cast analysis. So that's the second pillar of the defense, the third, his DNA. So everybody that knows this case knows that Bryan Kohberger's DNA was found on a knife sheath in the bed on the third floor. The evidence shows that the knife sheath may have been found on the floor and moved to the bed by police. And I say that for this reason, the Moscow Police Department seal the crime scene. They go to a judge and get a search warrant. The search warrant was done by Nunez, who in the search warrant was looking for a gun and bullets because he thought he shot himself in bed. So they go and do the search, but the search was actually done by the Idaho State Police because they have greater resources. So they bring the crime law lab down. It's a guy named Detective Talbot, very seasoned professional. You fill out a report, might have body camera video, not in this particular instance, but you get A form. It's just a form. It says Idaho State Police. Date of investigation, address of investigation. It's like a spreadsheet and you just fill it in. So you say, number one, second floor, bedroom, coffee cup, whatever. Then you bag the item and you put it in, cataloging the whole payment. Page two, item number 14K Bar, Marine Corps style, knife sheath. Next box found on floor next to victim number three.

[Monica Padman]

Next to the girl.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

The girl. And it's not a typo. Where he said found on the third floor next to the victim. It says found on the floor next to victim number three. In the very next line, it identifies her again as victim number three. So there are some anomalies. And you would look at this and say, now wait a minute. Are we gonna take police at their word and say that we're gonna believe you? And the answer is yes. So should we believe him when he say he found the knife sheath on the floor? One might argue yes. Then why in all the photographs and why in the analysis is it found in the bed under her thigh? So there are so many anomalies like this, and then there are chain of custody issues. The biggest one is this. Ann Taylor, in trying to defend offender client would go to Judge Hippler and file motions. I'm not a lawyer, but it's pretty common knowledge. Some of them called motions in limine. And there is a thing called a Franks hearing. Franks is not frank apostrophe, it's a guy named Franks, like the Brady Disclosure, which is Supreme Court law that says that if a witness is deemed to be corrupted in some manner, they lie in a case, they're found to commit fraud in a case, whatever, they will always be identified as a Franks exclusion. They can still testify, but they have to announce that they somehow. Jaded, right?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So there was a Franks hearing asked for before Judge Hipler by Ann Taylor, the defense attorney. And she came in, lead investigator of the case, asked him if the FBI ever told him that Bryan Coburger's DNA was found on the knife sheath. And he said no. One word. No. Period. Everybody who knows anything about this case thinks that Brian Coburger's DNA was found on a knife sheath. Then the question is, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you mean the FBI never, never told you that? She said, what did the FBI tell you? And he said that we should treat this with no more credibility than a tip.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, great.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I can't remember if he said anonymous tip, but they said a tip. So then you go Back and you say, well, wait, wait, wait, wait. How is this conceivable that the evidence is a white car, whatever.

[Monica Padman]

Billions of those. Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Cell tower.

[Monica Padman]

Not great.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Not great.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And now you've got the DNA, and you have in a court hearing before the judge, the lead detective in the case saying the FBI never told him that Brian Coburger's DNA was on a knife sheath and that it was sufficient only to the point where it should be given the weight of a tip.

[Dax Shepard]

And they themselves didn't have their own DNA lab to send it to, so they were reliant on the FBI.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Great question. The Idaho State Police do have a crime lab. The knife sheath was sent to the crime lab. They sent a DNA sample to a crime lab in Texas, Woodlands, Texas, called Othram Labs. It was a private lab, so the state of Idaho didn't want to build a laboratory, so they contracted to a private laboratory. They took the evidence to that laboratory, and they gave the evidence to the laboratory in the Franks hearing. Now, this is not me. I'm just reciting what's in the Franks hearing. Ann Taylor, the defense attorney, asked them about the DNA and said, where are the reports? The whole point was, you say that his DNA was found on the crime scene. Where's the reports? And they said, there are no reports. And she said, what are you talking about? And they said that they identified the DNA sample from the knife sheath and tied it to one of four brothers. And she said, who are these brothers? And he said, I don't know. I don't have the name. Why not? Because there's no report. Where's the report? I don't know. And it goes through this whole thing. But the salient feature to come back to your question is, were any of those brothers named Coburger? And the answer was no. The Idaho State Police took the DNA sample back and they sent it to the FBI laboratory. And it brings up the next. Next question. There are two types of DNA. You take a cheek swab, you send it off, and they do a genetic genealogy research. And they say, you come from, you know, I'm quarter Cherokee and quarter Irish and quarter Lithuanian and quarter whatever. Then you have the DNA which is matching this. The DNA that I just put on this to a sample from my cheek, and it says, that's my DNA. That's a different type of DNA. This DNA, they never tied to Brian Coburger. They tied a genetic genealogy match of some kind.

[Dax Shepard]

Like someone who had submitted previously to like a 23andMe or something.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes. If all of these problems exist, why would Brian Coburger plead guilty?

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, just prima facie. We already know he has a lot of different issues. And then you get into to, you know, this amazing Frontline called the. What was it called? The Confessions, this terrible event at a naval base in Virginia.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And they got eight dudes. You know, you find the most pathetic, defenseless eight dudes, and you get them all to roll over, and none of them did it.

[Monica Padman]

Or like my favorite murder.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I mean, just.

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, making a murder.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Making a murder. Very, very similar. But you. John Grisham just did a great book where he talks about wrongful convictions and confessions. And the Innocence Project has freed somewhere around 200. I think it's pretty close to actually being 200. And those are all just DNA. They only take cases, or these cases are only things that they could prove because of DNA.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Wrongful convictions. Of those 200, I think it was 27%. Started out as confessions. Those were people that confessed to the

[Dax Shepard]

crimes that they didn't do. Yeah.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

So again, I'm stipulating that Brian Copeland pled guilty. I'm stipulating to that as a lawyer would, and I'm not a lawyer, but do I think this is over? No, I don't think this is over.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I don't think this is over.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Final words. What do you want readers to believe? Obviously not about Kohlberg, but how major criminal cases should be investigated.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Great question. Let me turn the call around just a second to say what I would most want people to do is read it first, because we've talked in circles around generalities, and I've not built a case that we have very specifically in the book. So that would be the first thing. Once they do that, then I would say look at these things and say that the criminal justice system is the best in the world. It's not perfect. It's not just the investigators. The investigators give the information to a prosecutor. The prosecutor determines what they could prove. And they always say, in the crime business, it's not what you can show, it's what you can prove. They felt they had enough to make a case. Bryan Coburger decided it was enough that he was going to get the death penalty, and he made that decision. So you'd have to ask Brian, you'd have to ask the prosecutor to ask them those questions. But we as citizens who pay their salaries, we're all inquiring minds and have special backgrounds in various ways. We, in my opinion, have an obligation As a society to say, when something stinks, we should look at it.

[Dax Shepard]

Especially when the context is a human being knew death was a possibility. As soon as. That's the premise.

[Monica Padman]

Correct.

[Dax Shepard]

That someone was, you know, you're gonna be tried. You know, we're gonna seek the death penalty. We're in a very peculiar game theory situation.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

And so everything's got to be bulletproof. If someone's in that position, I think,

[Christopher Whitcomb]

yeah, you're taking a chance with your life. So I don't know why anybody did anything in this case. All I'm saying is one person with the background that I have, for better or worse, I felt compelled to present the evidence as I saw it.

[Dax Shepard]

I think a lot of people's knee jerks is like, I would never admit to a crime I didn't commit. Well, I'll tell you if you can. Came to me and they said, your DNA is on this thing. I don't know how that's impossible to me. But then they say the penalty of this is 10 years versus. Do you want to go serve two days? I'll go serve two days in jail before I'll risk my life for 10 years.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You know, it's happening as we sit in this chair right now. Cases don't go to trial. Statistically, the number of cases that go to trial and the number of cases that get put out is astronomically disagreeable.

[Dax Shepard]

Single digit. Right. Having nothing to do with whether you're.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

That's right. All I'm saying is we don't know why those things happened to me. Looking at this case, I spent a year of my life more or less on this thing. If you can say at the end of reading this thing that there aren't major, major, major problems with what's gone down.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

If you feel great about the conclusion.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no, no, no. It doesn't feel good. Yeah. Beautifully written. You're a very skilled writer. It is incredible that you have had five lives. I'm delighted we got to hear about so much of your background before the book takes of care. This has been an absolute delight, Christopher. I hope everyone checks out. Broken plea, the explosive search for truth behind the Idaho murders. It is out now and it's on audiobook, which is lovely.

[Monica Padman]

That's nice.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

What a pleasure meeting you guys.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, this is great.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

I watched all your shows. I can't believe I'm sitting where all these people are. My first reaction is, what the hell am I doing here?

[Monica Padman]

No, this is fantastic.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

You're inquiring minds and you Are all about humanity. And I have enormous respect and gratitude. Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, thank you.

[Kristen Bell]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

This is great delight meeting you. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun

[Kristen Bell]

of one of our favorite fact checks.

[Monica Padman]

This is our first unedited fact check.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, my gosh. Down to the wire, no safety net. So scary. Well, what if people found out that we were only clever, like one minute out of every 40?

[Monica Padman]

It might happen.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's okay. If that happens, I will edit it.

[Kristen Bell]

Still, let's start by saying I've really missed doing fact checks because we haven't done one for a minute.

[Monica Padman]

I know we've been out of town

[Kristen Bell]

on the vacation of our life. Well, my. I'm gonna speak for me. Vacation of my life.

[Monica Padman]

We had so much fun.

[Kristen Bell]

There were so many variables. There were so many events. Generally, when we vacation, which is lovely, we go to a house and we sit there, which is great. We play cards, we go swimming. This one was action packed. This was soup to nuts. A barn burner of activity.

[Monica Padman]

We were in Austin, the F1 race.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, man.

[Monica Padman]

Very limited edition, very exclusive.

[Kristen Bell]

And there were events.

[Dax Shepard]

Boom, boom.

[Kristen Bell]

Gotta be here at this time. Gotta be there at that time. And just the notion that we bookended the trip with Salt Lick. Salt Lick out in Driftwood.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

We got off the airplane, we went to the rental houses, straight to Salt Lick.

[Monica Padman]

First meal in Austin, your favorite restaurant there.

[Kristen Bell]

And it's not. I'm not. Look, I'm not picking any barbecue fights. I'm not saying it's the best barbecue in Texas. But I'm saying when you add up the atmosphere. Atmosphere, the vibe, the smoke pit right in front of you, the. All that stuff together. It's my favorite restaurant.

[Monica Padman]

It's really fun. We had so much fun there.

[Kristen Bell]

And it's a great place to be with 23 people, nine of them kids. Because chaos is welcomed.

[Monica Padman]

That's true. They handled us really well. In fact, the whole city handled us really well. Except.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay, let's pin. Look, do you want to put a pin in our grievance?

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

We'll keep it positive at the beginning.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay. So first day. So first day we land, you know, we go to Salt Lake. Fantastic. Next day, let's go to Barton Springs. Favorite place to swim. Right in town. If you've not been. It's incredible. Big grassy slopes into like a, I don't know, half mile long pool. It's not even a pool. The sides are cement, but the bottom's a river. It's a creek. Yeah, go there. It's closed for cleaning.

[Monica Padman]

And we lots of big oops and

[Kristen Bell]

we got 23 people showing up. So think on your feet. Go and swim on the other side where the dogs are welcome. The riff raff, the misfits.

[Monica Padman]

Jess called it acid sprigs. And I think that was, that's a great, accurate.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, a lot of people were having experiences down there, which is great. The whole thing was great because my oldest daughter, when we walked to the car, she was like, I kind of feel like I was in fight or flight for that last two hours. And I said, well good that that's an appropriate response to that many people that are doing that many weird things that you've never seen before. It's like, that's not a wrong response. It's like who, who's. Who's legitimate crazy and who's just like eclectic and colorful.

[Monica Padman]

We were joking that because Charlie was there too and we were saying he was in fight or fight fight or fight mode.

[Kristen Bell]

And then there was so much pressure on Eric because listen, some guys were swimming in the their jeans. This one dude, God bless him, I hope he finds his way back to recovery. But he came up to us and he was saying he is a friend of Bill, meaning he's also sober. And then. But I could see immediately this guy is out of his mind. Yes, out of his mind. High. And so I'm nice and kind and blah blah, blah. And then he pulls Aaron to a side, he knows him and he says, you know, how do you feel about weed and pills in, in aa and he's got a tremendous amount of weed eating pills. Again, I'm the last person to be judgmental of this. I just don't really want to interact with someone who's pretending they're sober when they're to the gills and really won't

[Monica Padman]

stop talking to us.

[Kristen Bell]

Won't stop. This is kind of a funny story actually. So I was, I would say, very, very generous and nice to him about five interactions. But I could tell our whole day was going to be talking to this guy and it was so scatterbrained. He was, you know, he's got a five picture deal at Amazon. He inherited a katrillion dollar car collection. He, you know, just one thing after another. And finally I said to him really nicely, I'm like, brother, it was great meeting you, but I flew here to hang out with my family and my friends. So have a good one. You know, I was very, I was very nice. Then he came back yeah. So sorry. You know. You know, after that, then. And I said. Finally said, brother, I'm not hanging out with you. I'm hanging out with my friends. And then. Then it flipped. So then he went over to Aaron. He said, this guy's a. He thinks he's too famous. Well, I've been in front of the camera and behind the camera, and I got a podcast that's not the punchline. He then spent the rest of the two hours we were there going up to groups of people pointing over at us, explaining to them Dax Shepard was around and that he's a. He swam across the creek, went to the other bank of the river, and we just watched him. He was just going through every group of people. We'd see him point over at us for a minute, and we knew what was coming. So he. I think he was trying to, like, rally maybe, you know, some kind of a. A rabble against me. Yeah, sure, sure. Just. Yeah. Put together a troop and take us on.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And unfortunately, he was like, one of the least. God, what's the word? Because I can't cut anything out.

[Kristen Bell]

That's right. You don't want to offend anyone here.

[Monica Padman]

You know, hair raising.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Characters.

[Kristen Bell]

Sure, sure, sure. He was. Yeah. What would you give him out of 10 for fight or Flight?

[Monica Padman]

I would give him. I would give him a three because I wasn't. I wasn't actually scared of him.

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

There were. There were some people there that I was. I was nervous. What's gonna happen right now?

[Kristen Bell]

Swinging a golf club randomly? Is that one of your guys?

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And that he was particularly strange because he seemed kind of athletic. No. Well. Well, I don't want to take away his athleticism. I don't. Yeah, yeah, Maybe he was an ex golfer, but seemed at face value, normal.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Not on drugs.

[Kristen Bell]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

But then he clearly was on drugs, by the way he was swinging that golf club. And I was like, oh, okay. This is making me nervous because. What. Where's that aggression gonna go?

[Kristen Bell]

Well, it was going to that golf ball.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but what if he decided we were the golf ball?

[Kristen Bell]

Well, that's true.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true.

[Kristen Bell]

I will say, though, all in all, it had a similar vibe of many of the street corners I would be on in Detroit when I lived there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So you. You have some experience.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, but I will say it was. It was way more peaceful. So it was like. Yeah, people were blown out, man. Some people were having some like, 60s level acid trips where they were seeing huge insects and stuff.

[Monica Padman]

One guy was just like, Kind of touching his nose repeatedly, I think, to make sure it was, like, still there.

[Kristen Bell]

Of course. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, you can get nervous that it went away. Anyways, the long story short, it was actually a great time. All those little speed bumps taken into consideration. Like, the girls were going down the little. The little waterfall that was coming off the dam, and they were getting real adventurous, and it was really fun. We left. We go to Guerrero's. That's a party.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Best cheese dip. I love a cheese dip. As soon as we landed. Well, okay. I'm going to. I'm going to call it a cheese dip.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Because I don't know that it's fair. Dare to the people of Mexico.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

To call it queso. Because it's Tex Mex.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Sure.

[Kristen Bell]

Obviously, queso in Mexico.

[Monica Padman]

No, they do, but it's like a heart. It's like, almost this, like, hardish cheese. Like, the cheese on top gets hard

[Kristen Bell]

like a French onion soup.

[Monica Padman]

Delish. Yeah. Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

But Tex Mex, which is what I also grew up on.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I love the cheese dip.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

It's fantastic. So good time. There's. There. Go home. Blah, blah, blah. Next day. Now we're going to go to Barton Springs proper, and here's where the grievances start. So if you don't like to hear people complain, might want to skip ahead 30 seconds.

[Monica Padman]

No, you need to hear this, guys.

[Kristen Bell]

I want to preface this by saying it's literally my favorite place to swim on planet Earth, and I'm a big swimmer, and when I go places, I always search out local swim holes. I mean, this is my spot. It's my maca. I look forward to it so much.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

And I've been there 40, 50 times and had the best time always. Okay, we go.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Again, 23 people.

[Kristen Bell]

23 people. Let's own our. You know.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no, it's a huge, huge play. Like, this is the place to go with 23 people.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes, absolutely.

[Monica Padman]

It's a huge grassy knoll, but, you know, it's kind of hard to get in. Like, there's. You have to pay. But those machines weren't working all that well, so that was kind of hard. And we all figured. Figured that out finally.

[Kristen Bell]

Then they told us to put masks on as we walked in, which was really interesting because everyone else walking in didn't have a mask, and everyone walking out didn't have a mess, and not one human being there had a mess. But it was very important that all 23 of us find a mask. And they said, you can take it off when you cross into the grass, which was 6ft. So we're like, okay, that was a little unbarton springsy from my memory. Like, everyone's got to dig out. And it took a minute to get nine kids. Masts and shit. Yeah. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So then we go. We go. We get.

[Kristen Bell]

Shake that off. We're shaking that.

[Monica Padman]

Shaking it off. It's great. Putting out our towels, getting out our coolers. Get. And you guys. Some of the guys go down, they start getting wet.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Get wet.

[Kristen Bell]

Get it wet. Get it wet.

[Monica Padman]

And we're there for, I would say, six minutes.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, it happened that.

[Monica Padman]

Because I immediately.

[Kristen Bell]

Yep. News reached me probably 45 minutes later because I had swam to the far end.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay. So six minutes in.

[Monica Padman]

Six minutes in the. What I now know was the head guard.

[Kristen Bell]

Wait, you. How do you now know that?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, because she told. Okay. You don't know some of this?

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So this woman comes up. She's in charge.

[Kristen Bell]

She has an English accent.

[Monica Padman]

She does.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And she said, is that alcohol? And she looked out Erica, who had a beer, but she hadn't drank it yet. It was out.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And she was like, oh, yeah, it is being very forthcoming.

[Kristen Bell]

Sure. Nothing to hide.

[Monica Padman]

No. And she said, okay, we don't. We have very strict policy. We don't allow alcohol. We don't allow food. And if I see it, you gotta go. So I'll give you guys a few minutes to pack up.

[Kristen Bell]

And mind you, it's really important to say nothing was opened. Correct.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, are we fibing? Well, the beer was open.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know, because I don't really know that much about the beer. I think maybe the beer was open but wasn't drank. And then there was wine that was not open that she saw.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

In a friend's bag. She said, and I see your wine. I already saw it. You got to go.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Gotta go. And we were like, what?

[Kristen Bell]

Well, everyone's quickly like, oh, my God. So sorry. That makes sense. We'll just go put it in the car. We'll throw it away.

[Monica Padman]

We don't need this. What? And. And no. Already saw it. Already saw it.

[Kristen Bell]

If I saw it, you gotta go.

[Monica Padman]

Yep. And we were like, well, is there anything we can do? We just got here. We have all these kids, you know, we. We don't need this stuff. Nope, nope, nope. I could lose my job. And then. Oh, oh, okay. So then Erica was like, well, can I just go then?

[Dax Shepard]

I'm the one with the beer.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And then. And then that's when she saw Laura's, and she said, oh, I saw yours, too. And then they were like, well, we'll just go. And she said, okay, that's fine. And then I also had an open bag of Cheez it. So I was a culprit as well.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, Sure.

[Monica Padman]

A mouse with cheese.

[Kristen Bell]

I can't put too fond of point on that.

[Monica Padman]

This.

[Kristen Bell]

You're sitting on a grass football field.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay. Just.

[Monica Padman]

And there's no. You know, we were. We were really.

[Kristen Bell]

It's clearly a picnic area, but go ahead.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah. And we were really picking this apart because I. We were like, why. How. How can you not allow food at a place like this? Like, unless they had their own food service. That would make sense.

[Kristen Bell]

Absolutely. No outside food. Got to buy the food here.

[Monica Padman]

Got it.

[Kristen Bell]

Love to. But if you're taking children.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Kristen Bell]

To a public pool for the day.

[Monica Padman]

What you want.

[Kristen Bell]

Are you kidding?

[Monica Padman]

We have to have Jess come on at some point and do his impression of her because it was so amazing. He kept saying, yeah, kids starve here. Yeah. Anyway, so. So we thought, okay, you know, we'll let her cool off. We'll pack up, we'll go. I went with them. And. And we'll try to convince them. Her again. When. On our way out.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So we. We go up, we see another. Another woman Professor. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And we said, you know, hi. And she. She knew immediately what was going to happen. She kind of rolled her eyes. Not at us.

[Kristen Bell]

Right, okay.

[Monica Padman]

And she said. She said, yeah, you know, that's the head guard. She. She's really strict. And I said, well, you know, nothing was really open. Can we just throw it away or put it in the car? And she said, well, that should be fine. Just go talk to her.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

Y.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I go back up to her, you know, we're so sorry. We did not know. She said it was on all the signs, which. It was on the sign of the machine that was impossible to use. So obviously no one is reading that machine because everyone's too busy trying to make the machine work.

[Kristen Bell]

I also want to add, you know, it smells like weed everywhere. People are smoking weed. Yeah. People are new. People are drinking. Like, there's a lot going on. Which, by the way, awesome.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they shouldn't be drinking. They should have been. She should have saw it.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, that. That'll get into my. I have a chapter two of this.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So then. Yeah. So. And she was just not budging. She just kept saying, I'll lose my job. I already saw it. Yeah, already saw it. And then. And so we left. So we had to leave. We went into downtown Austin, walked around a bit, went to a jewelry store. I almost bought really expensive earrings, but I didn't.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, right, right. You shook it off. You shook it off, huh?

[Dax Shepard]

So.

[Kristen Bell]

So now I'm left there, I find this out. Oh, my God, they booted them. I'm like, oh, that's so weird. That's not the people I remember. I now get to our encampment and there are two people now, just stationed, staring at us.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

This is going on for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And finally I'm like, this is.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

I go up to them and I said, listen, you cannot stand here and stare at my group the entire time we're here. I love this place. It's my favorite. You're making this a very unfortunate experience for all of us. If you're going to patrol, at least go make it seem equal.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Kristen Bell]

I don't know what you're talking about. We're not posted up here. And I go, well, you've been standing here staring at us for 15 minutes.

[Monica Padman]

What.

[Kristen Bell]

What would you call that? I'm just doing my job, so. Oh, your job is to single out a group. And then it escalated.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, sure, sure.

[Kristen Bell]

And then. Yes. Bozo James was his name. So he. He bounces. They bounce. Finally. Like, it was. Thank God. It was like. Obviously it was uncomfortable for all three of us. They. They were like, we're not going anywhere. I go, all right. And I left. And then they did leave, and then they. They didn't come back. So I kind of thought, okay, good, we push back a bit. They know, like, stop with us.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, leave us alone.

[Kristen Bell]

And then.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, my God.

[Kristen Bell]

Cut to. Oh, plain clothes detective now.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, this 19 year old, she was in. She was a spy.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, she was undercover.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Kristen Bell]

All of a sudden, there's just this plainclothes gal, 19, I would come to find out, leaning next to my backpack, out of nowhere, I'm like, who's this person? And she goes, you have broken glass and blood all over this place. And I go, what are you talking about? You have broken glass and blood right here at your bag. I go, I. Broken glass and blood. I look, she's spying deep into my backpack where she sees a jar of jam that I have in my backpack because I have fucking kids and I have food in case we need to bang out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I go, that is jelly. Nothing's broken. She's like, you gotta. You gotta throw all that away. You gotta take that to the car. Then she starts repeating, this is a federally protected area. This is a federally protected area. On the ninth time she said it, I said, listen, I heard you. It is federally protected. You don't need to repeat that again.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

She goes, you're gonna give me a 19 year old a bunch of attitude.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Kristen Bell]

When I'm doing my, my job. And I was like, this is madness. I started wondering like, did they have some team meeting.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Prior to the weekend going like gang formula one's in town. You know, those people are crazy. We got to run a tight ship or we're going to lose complete control of this place. So she's now going, absolutely apply. She has lost her mind entirely. She can barely talk when she keeps repeating federally protected area fair. And I'm like, you know what? And now everyone in the group's like, we'll just leave. I'm like, no one's leaving. I'm taking this food out to, I'm going to take this jam out to my car, put it in there, and we're going to continue to swim because it's been a big hurdle to get in there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

So I'm taking it out and on the walk she says, federally protected like seven more times. I, I, I can't. I mean, wow, what an experience. Get to the. And then she decides on the walk she's throwing going me out. You got actually, you got to go.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

And when we get to the front of it, there's this taller dude that worked there that I had already interacted with on my swim. Like Good Time Charlie. Like I was chatting him up and he was friendly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

And she's like, I'm taking them. He's out of here. And he goes, oh, what happened? He has food. Okay. Was they, they were eating food.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

No.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, but he has it. And I go, I go, hey, brother. Yeah, I had some jam in my backpack, but I'm just gonna throw it in the car and then come back. He goes, yeah, totally. That's cool. Well, that made her.

[Monica Padman]

Uhoh.

[Kristen Bell]

Underminded in front of me.

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh.

[Kristen Bell]

Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare. I, I gotta tell you, I, I was like, I've never seen anything like this.

[Dax Shepard]

Is this the thing?

[Kristen Bell]

I know it's. That person's not even a millennial at this point. Point. But like, no, the level. We can't do any of that.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no, we can, but I don't think that can be because of her Age.

[Kristen Bell]

Like, I felt like she was saying you. Like, I felt like I was in one of those college campus things where she's like, you're triggering me. And in fact, when I stepped towards the tall dude to tell him I was going to take the food out, I stepped towards her, she jumped back, she said, sir, don't you come. Don't you come near me. And I was like, oh, my God, she's pretending I'm assaulting her.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, Jesus.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, is it maddening? I go through the food in the car, I come back, she's there, I walk back in, and now the whole group's leaving. I've lost it. But no one wants to deal with this anymore. So our whole group is packed up and I'm like, I'm still going to go for a swim, cuz I love it there.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so maintain down.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, well, now I'm in a for real power struggle, clearly. And I, you know, I regrettably and embarrassingly am the perfect person to get in one of those struggles with. I would have stayed there the entire day and talked to them if I could have, because I just couldn't surrender this insane policy. So anyways, we Swam for another 10 minutes and then we left. And then I did stop on the way out and I said to her, hey, I was curious.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Is.

[Kristen Bell]

Is this area federally protected?

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Kristen Bell]

And she goes, yes, it's federally protected. And I go, it's federally protected.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

And she goes, it's on the sign over there.

[Kristen Bell]

And I said that it's federally protected. And I said, then I must have said federally protected 20 times. I just wanted to experience what I had experienced. It reminded me a lot of these cell phone calls. I've told you about them on Stern, where they call people in the south, because their theory is people in the south will talk to you on the phone forever by just saying hello. So they're like, they just go, hey, hey. They call a stranger, hey. And this woman answers, hi. Hey, how you doing? Oh, good, good, good. So you're doing good? Yeah, good, good. That's great. So you're doing good. And this can go on forever. So at any rate, I was kind of doing that and then finally I said, well, that's, well, great. It's federally protected. Thank you. And then I split. But, yeah, what a. What a bummer of a trip to Barton Springs.

[Monica Padman]

It was rough. I will say when it was happening, the first iteration of that, that my. My part, I said out loud, I'm just, just don't go down There. Don't tell Dax what happened. I don't want this to become a thing. He's going to get really upset. It's going to become a thing. So just. Let's just not. I'm glad he wasn't up here then. Then part two.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I was meant to be.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. I let him. You know that one where they were denying staring at us for 15 minutes? That when I lost my goal. So, I mean, you think I'm fudgeing. Absolutely stupid. Is that what you think?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

That I don't recognize or the only people that you are posted up in front of. Okay, fuck that. So that we watch. We just said hell, that we're going to wipe that clean from our slime late. That was Friday.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Saturday was qualifying. Went to qualifying. It was so much fun. And then Sunday, big race day. Big race. And Moni had a great time.

[Monica Padman]

It was so fun. We got to stay in the Red Bull Lounge.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Which was so nice. I felt guilty.

[Dax Shepard]

Why?

[Monica Padman]

Because we were in the Red Bull lounge and I was wearing a McLaren. Oh. I was wearing a Danny shirt. I was very proud to wear a Danny shirt. But I also felt a little like, oh, they're being really nice and.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm obviously betraying them.

[Kristen Bell]

I. To be honest, I think it would have been more of an issue if you were in there wearing all Mercedes.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, God. It never would.

[Kristen Bell]

That's who they're battling in the Constructors Championship. So it does. You know, I don't think they're all that worried, you know, that you were. And I had worn a Daniel shirt the day before in there.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And also Danny, like, really early on, I think, like passed someone or something. And. And everyone in the Red Bull section cheer.

[Kristen Bell]

Oh, right. Yes. Yes. He paid. He passed signs.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And everyone was really happy. And then I was like, oh, everyone loves Danny here. This is great.

[Kristen Bell]

Everyone loves Danny.

[Monica Padman]

You. I know. So likable.

[Kristen Bell]

But I gotta. We gotta. Okay, so this is gonna be the first of many shout outs that we give. So Jeremy and Dan. Holy smokes. They made that experience incredible. 20 times better than it could have ever been on our own.

[Dax Shepard]

It was.

[Kristen Bell]

They were so helpful and wonderful and I am so in debt to them for that weekend they gave us.

[Monica Padman]

And you tell. You got to go down and the whole.

[Kristen Bell]

In the pit right now. That's shout out number two, Blake friend. Blakey, I love you. You are just the sweetest human being. And yes, he got us a few grid paths is for. From McLaren. So we got to go in the McLaren garage. We got to watch them pull out of the garage. And we had the headsets. And we were listening to what they were talking about.

[Monica Padman]

You and Aaron and Chris.

[Kristen Bell]

Aaron and Kristen and I. Yeah. And it was incredible. And we are on the grid row and they're with Shaquille o'. Neal. And I thought, poor Shaquille o'. Neal. That guy could wear a hat and a face mask and sunglasses. That's Shaquille o'. Neal. You don't even really need to see anything other than just the height.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, exactly.

[Kristen Bell]

It's so impressive.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

So anyways, he was getting a lot of heat, which I was grateful for because everyone was really focused on him. By the way, can't hide when you're him. You see him from a quarter mile away.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, of course.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. Anyways, that's neither here nor there. But that whole experience was incredible. Incredible. I was geeking out so much.

[Monica Padman]

It was so fun. I was having so much nostalgia for college football.

[Dax Shepard]

All right.

[Monica Padman]

Sports events like that where everyone's just so excited and everyone's rooting for the same thing and it's really lovely. And then Verstappen.

[Kristen Bell]

So we always want Danny to win, of course, but in the event, Danny can't win. For me, it has to be Verstappen.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

And it was an incredible race because right at the end, the two people that we were rooting for the most were experiencing major challenges. Verstappen with making an early second pit stop and his tires running out of grip and. And Hamilton catching him. So tons of anxiety there. And then Carlos signs catching Danny having a little more pace. And then they had a full on dog fight and Danny was victorious. Notice some contact. There was a broken arrow. And then Carlos started dropping down. He started slower laps. So Danny was. Was in the clear. Switch it over to Max. Got so intense at the end, but Max held on. So we got everything we wanted.

[Monica Padman]

So fun. And he. Since he won and he's on the Red Bull team, the champagne exploded everywhere. We're in a shower of champagne, which was really fun. It was great. It was great.

[Kristen Bell]

I can't even believe the whole trip. I just thought we are the most spoiled human beings on the planet. And I'm going to take it. Yeah, I'm going to take it. Then just to cap off a perfect purchase. Perfect weekend. Danny and Blake, like, what should we do on Monday? We have the day off after the race. I said, have you ever been tubing? I suggest tubing on the San Marcos river. So I don't know how many were of us. Were there 30 people? We had 12. Maybe he had 12. Maybe it was like 24 people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Something. Oh, yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Get on the river with 24 people and float down the river. Everyone's drinking and having a blast. I'm jumping off bridges. Everything's heavenly. It's so enjoyable. Even you are having a wonderful time.

[Monica Padman]

So much fun. Why even me? Definitely me.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, because it's kind of out of your. You're not like one that's gonna look up tubing somewhere.

[Monica Padman]

You're right.

[Kristen Bell]

Because you don't like to be in the water, per se.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Kristen Bell]

But I was. I'm setting up that you were actually having a really great time, which made me happy. I was checking in and you were loving floating around.

[Monica Padman]

It was great.

[Kristen Bell]

It was great. And then. And this is. This is my fault. I've been on the San Marcos River a couple times, and I thought we were on a section that has this very gentle little spillway. Cement smooth. You just coast over in your tube. Not a deal. That's what I believe we were coming up to. So I've got Delta on my lap and we're first to go through. And right as we crest this, this kind of drop off. Oh, this is. These are just big rocks. It all's funneling into this rapid. It's a chute. Yeah. Yeah. There's a natural. Natural shoot. So we go through first. We come off the tube. I'm holding her above my head so that she won't go underwater. But there's a point where I'm now getting sucked underwater. So if I don't let go of her, I'm gonna pull her underwater. So I let go of her and then shoot back up. It's like a river rafting movie. I see her paddling, I swim over and grab her, and then I get her to the shore. She's not super stoked at what just this happen.

[Monica Padman]

She's crying.

[Kristen Bell]

She's crying loudly. I'm bleeding excessively. Knee, whatever, doesn't matter. And then my. Of course, my very next thought when I've got her on the rock is, I, Monica, right?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

As we've talked about in here, we're not sure that you can swim anymore. We just don't know.

[Monica Padman]

We just don't know. We just don't know. Yeah. So when we're in these tubes and we're coming, we see, you know, from. From a distance still the little. The drop off, the easy drop off. Christian says, well, we should go that way. Because we can't go down those rapids. And. And our fearless leader says. Says, of course we can. And so we're like, all right. And then. But also, this whole time. Time, I'm. Molly and I. Our tubes. We're holding ourselves together by our legs, and it's really fun.

[Kristen Bell]

And.

[Monica Padman]

But I'm backwards then. So then I was like, she also

[Kristen Bell]

has Lily at that point. Or Dahlia.

[Monica Padman]

We have Dahlia and Lily.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. Right?

[Monica Padman]

And two kids with us and on their own tubes.

[Kristen Bell]

Four tubes. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

And I'm also holding on to Kristen as well. So we're all, like, in this thing.

[Kristen Bell]

Flotilla.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. And. And all of a sudden, we're getting closer to the area, and Kristen's like, delta's crying. Oh, Delta's crying. And then Molly's like, oh, Delta's crying. And then Kristen leaves and starts paddling very quickly to. To pass it.

[Kristen Bell]

Uhhuh. To go to the shore.

[Monica Padman]

To go to the shore. Exactly. So she. So she would miss the rapids. And I was like, wait, I want to do that. I want to do that. I do not want to do this. I do not want to want to do this. I was really panicking, and I was also backwards. I was like, wait, should I focus on now moving, or should I try to get out?

[Kristen Bell]

And then I can. I just got to add, I'm on the rock staring at you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Because I know there might be problems, and I see before you've gone over the rapids, all hell's already broken. You were off. As I recall, you were off your tube before you even went over.

[Monica Padman]

I was, yeah. Because one of the kids was like, no, I do want to go. And I was like, get out of the way. Everyone get out. I have to get be. I. Oh, my God. I can't. And then I was like, I'll just swim. I'll get out of the tube. So I got out of the tube, and I was already there.

[Kristen Bell]

Then you just went over the falls,

[Monica Padman]

pulled in immediately in. No tube. I. I thought I was like, but I don't know if I can swim.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

And I'm like, I'm. I'm just watching the whole thing, and I'm thinking, like, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna to need to jump in, like, for sure. And you make it pretty quickly to a. A station of rocks.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

And you go immediately. I didn't like that. And I was like, oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

I felt.

[Kristen Bell]

I mean, it was like you and your soulmate Delta, that you had both had the exact same experience. I just felt so heartbroken. I didn't like that.

[Monica Padman]

I don't even remember saying that. So I guess that was just a guttural reaction. Also, not to mention, my boob was out.

[Kristen Bell]

It. It came out.

[Monica Padman]

My boob came out. Everything was completely scatty. W. I hated it so much, and I really was like, I knew it. I know myself. I know it. Like, I. This is why I can't be peer pressure, because I know when I can do something and when I can't and when I can push the limit and when I can't.

[Kristen Bell]

Were you mad at me?

[Monica Padman]

No, not at all. But I. I should have been way more clear. I don't want to do that.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. You don't want any adventure on the water.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't. I barely want to float. Right. But then that was so fun. So I was like. Yeah. It just was. I was. It was so scary.

[Kristen Bell]

But here's where I want to applaud you. You turned it around.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

You got back. And I thought I. Based on what? You know, the situation when you got to the rocks. I thought, she's done, like. And understandably, so. She's. This is a wrap for her, and we're not really to the pickup point yet. I was starting to compute how I'm going to do that. Then Delta wouldn't go down the rest of them, which were gentler, so I had to figure out how to. I had to swim back up around that fence to walk her to the end. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was a whole thing. Then just randomly. They're doing some kind of civil works project, and they've kind of got these inflatable catchers that are crossing the whole river, which we then have to lift everyone's tube over that to continue on. Anyways, it was spectacular day.

[Monica Padman]

It was. I. I still look at it as a net positive.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay, good, good, good, good, good, good.

[Monica Padman]

I didn't die.

[Kristen Bell]

You didn't die.

[Monica Padman]

But I almost died. And then I.

[Kristen Bell]

And you didn't get any cuts?

[Monica Padman]

No, I did. Oh, you did some cuts and a lot of, like, a lot of soreness.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay. Okay. Like, you'd had a real rare.

[Monica Padman]

Perhaps. I don't know. But it. But then I felt. It was. Felt so embarrassed.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah. But no one had saw. No one saw except for Molly and I. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it was just really embarrassed. I just was like, why can't I just, like, do anything? And. But then when we met back up with Danny, I was like, did you. How was. Did. Were you fine on the Rapids. He said, no, I almost died. I said, oh, oh, okay. Yeah, all right. I felt a little better knowing I wasn't the only one. One. And he's very accomplished.

[Kristen Bell]

Yes, he's a daredevil. You know, I was thinking after the trip, you know, one of the other times he hung out with me, I took a motorcycle riding, and people were crashing off the side of this mountain. He was coming, and I thought, you know, McLaren would be smart to put it in his contract he's not allowed to hang out with me. Like, they should really consider that they've got quite an investment into him and, yeah, it might be time for them to explain, exclude me from his life.

[Monica Padman]

I, I, I don't disagree. Then went to Salt Lake again, again

[Kristen Bell]

at another incredible meal. In fact, this time the brisket was even better.

[Monica Padman]

So good.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Oh, what a trip.

[Kristen Bell]

It was. It was like I kept just getting overwhelmed with, like, the, the amount of, oh, one other shout out. There's really two other shout outs. Okay, one other shout out is Matt. Okay. Matt Collins. Matt Collins hair. Was that his Instagram?

[Monica Padman]

Instagram stylist?

[Kristen Bell]

Stylist Matt Collins. Stylist Matthew Collins Styles. So prior to this, my full extent of, of Matt's driving prowess was he had come to the sand dunes once, and I put him in a razor

[Dax Shepard]

and he did well.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

But I also knew from you that he drives kind of slow generally if he's just cruising around town. So before we left. No, he's not. This whole thing, I'm gonna blow his pants off right now. So right before we left the house, and it's, you know, going to the track on race day with 150,000 people also going to the track. I asked him before we pulled out because we were in two cars, what is your, what level of aggression are you comfortable with? 1 out of 10. And he said, whatever one's required. And I was like, wow. Okay. And it started slow with some lane changes, this and that, some dancing, some disco. And he, he was never got more than three feet behind the bumper. And then it just escalated from there. And he was over curbs and in residential neighborhoods, and he was an assassin. I would compare his performance to Steve McQueen and Bullet.

[Monica Padman]

He, it was amazing. I was very impressed. I was very scared for him. Uhhuh.

[Kristen Bell]

And he rose, he rose to the occasion and dominated. And it was mind blowing. Everyone was very, very happy and impressed.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, that's one shout out. Another shout out is from the beginning of the trip. So what we realized a little too late is that obviously it's F1 weekend in Austin. Obviously you can. Cannot get a car, cannot rent a car, can't rent a car, can't book a car, can't do anything.

[Kristen Bell]

No Ubers are available out by where we're staying.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. There's. So there's some panic of what are we going to do?

[Kristen Bell]

We have, we have one vehicle. Chrysler. God bless you, Chrysler. Another shout out, Vince. I love you, Vince.

[Monica Padman]

Yep.

[Kristen Bell]

Vince had some Pacificas down there for the race because of Alfa Romeo. He said, are you going to need one? I said, oh my God, if I could be black on black on black. Yes, please. So, so we had 22 people in a seven pass passenger vehicle.

[Monica Padman]

Yes. And then Laura, thank goodness, shout out

[Kristen Bell]

number 20, she

[Monica Padman]

talked to her friend who lives in Austin who knows someone who has a dealership or like a car rental car. I don't even know what he has. He used car garage. I don't know he had cars.

[Kristen Bell]

He did.

[Monica Padman]

And he. We don't know this guy. We don't know anything about this guy. This guy?

[Kristen Bell]

No.

[Monica Padman]

He's in Laura's phone as Danny. Car guy.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. And this beautiful person, he dropped off four cars, cars at the airport.

[Kristen Bell]

This is unreal.

[Monica Padman]

I know. So when we landed, we walked into the parking lot, there were four cars for us with the keys in the cars he wanted. He like, Rafe used money, right?

[Kristen Bell]

We're like, definitely we're paying. We want to pay three times what it would have costed a rented cars because he bailed us out and we're happy to pay.

[Monica Padman]

And his name is Danny Gomez.

[Kristen Bell]

Danny Gomez. Do you know the name of his business?

[Monica Padman]

Unfortunately not. But if anyone in Austin walks around and meets this Danny Gomez, please buy him a. A drink on us.

[Kristen Bell]

Yeah, but on us.

[Monica Padman]

We'll pay you back.

[Kristen Bell]

We'll vend if you can put a receipt on Instagram to prove it. But I gotta say, Danny Gomez. Danny Gomez single handedly saved our trip. It was going to be a fucking disaster. I don't even know how anyone was getting to these houses. They were 30 miles from the airport.

[Monica Padman]

We had two houses too that weren't next to each other.

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Kristen Bell]

They're out in the country. People would have been so miserable. Like, okay, well everyone pull a number. What six people get to go in the Pacifica out of this house. House it. The. What a short. I'm. I'm embarrassed too, cuz I rented those houses six months ago. Like I was, I was ahead of it.

[Monica Padman]

You were.

[Kristen Bell]

I had already secured tickets. I like I was so ready for this trip. I had the van and then it just occurred to me, like I should look into other rentals just for everyone else. Gone, gone, gone. What oversight.

[Monica Padman]

I hadn't. I wouldn't. I was not thinking about that at all. I never would have thought about it.

[Kristen Bell]

We just got there, but.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God. Anyway, so that is the major shout out of the trip. Danny Gomez, for real. Like, wow. And then I've one more shout out. Okay, so you and Kristin had to go to Waco. Waco from Austin to do press for hello Bello.

[Kristen Bell]

We opened a factory. Did you see pictures?

[Monica Padman]

They're gorgeous. So fun.

[Kristen Bell]

We're pulling up. It's like an industrial complex in Waco. There's a bunch of humongous buildings and we see a quarter mile long diaper virtually in the distance. And I'm like, could this, could they have possibly decorated a 300,000 square foot building? Which they did. It's all of our. Our patterns.

[Monica Padman]

It's amazing.

[Kristen Bell]

It's so cute. Oh, my God. I can't believe it's a factory.

[Monica Padman]

So, so cool.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay, so yeah, we went there.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so you guys did that. Jess and I traveled with the girls back, the kids, and they were great. Everything was fine. Except, you know, the airport was a little crazy again. I was like, Tuesday, that should be fine. But it was, it was hectic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then we get. So we get through. We get through security. Everything's great. They've done such a good job. And Lincoln says, there's Starbucks there. Lincoln says, can I get a cake pop? And I said, of course.

[Kristen Bell]

Of course.

[Monica Padman]

Well, they had just, you know, done a really good job. They deserved a reward. So I said, of course. And. And doctor was like, me too. I was like, yeah, so.

[Kristen Bell]

And you needed a mug. You already had a mug.

[Monica Padman]

I needed a mug. They didn't have them.

[Kristen Bell]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

So then we walk up, we see the Starbucks line is incredibly long. And I said, well, let's just look and see if they have them. So we walk up and we're like, you know, kind of talking about it like, o, oh, do they have them? Do they have the cake pops? Oh. And Lincoln's like, yeah, I see when I see a cake pop. So we get up and there's one.

[Christopher Whitcomb]

Oh, boy.

[Monica Padman]

And I was like, okay, well there's. If there's only one, we can see if they have any in the back. But if there's only one, like, we'll have to split it. And then Delta, of course, is like, she can have it. And I was like, okay, great.

[Kristen Bell]

So I almost died yesterday. I have a new gratitude for life.

[Monica Padman]

So we get in at the end of this really long line. It was gonna. But it was fine. Was like, we'll wait in it. We'll get the cake pop. But there was a little fear of, like, well, if that someone else in this line gets.

[Kristen Bell]

Has a hankering for a cake.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, yeah. We're standing there for, like, 10 seconds, and this incredibly nice man comes up, hands me a bag, and says, I was just really worried that somebody would get the cake pop before they got there. And I was like, oh, my. What?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

People are so nice.

[Kristen Bell]

Boston in particular, we keep getting these impossible miracles. Last time it was Houston street with a pontoon boat. This time it was Danny Gomez with these cars. Yeah. I don't know how many signs the universe has got to send us to tell us to get down there permanently.

[Monica Padman]

It was really sweet. I thought that was just the nicest thing ever.

[Kristen Bell]

That is. So that was the trip so nice, man. If you bought a little girl a cake pop.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. If you guys see that nice man, please buy him a drink on us. We'll venmo you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, cash app you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So that was the trip. Trip was great. And we're home now. And this was David Copperfield's episode, which was so fun because I love magic. I just love magic. And I do have some facts. So let's just blow through those. Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

Yep.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So you said his dad was a haberdasher, and he said his dad never said that. And it reminded me me that my first line in my fifth grade play ever was, here is the hat your worship ordered, and I was the haberdasher. And Taming of the Shrew.

[Kristen Bell]

I remember that.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Kristen Bell]

But we're still talking about that role, that performance.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's kind of legendary. It was small, but I made a big, like, big impact.

[Kristen Bell]

There's no small roles, only small actors.

[Monica Padman]

I was. I was both the small role and small act. Okay. Haberdasher. In British English, a haberdasher is a business or person who sells small articles for sewing, dressmaking, and knitting, such as buttons, ribbons, and zips. In the United States, the term reference refers instead to a retailer who sells men's clothing, including suits, shirts, and neckties. His father did do that.

[Kristen Bell]

Exactly that. His father was a habit, whether he wants to acknowledge that or not.

[Monica Padman]

Is Menilo park where Thomas Edison invented the light bulb? Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

Great.

[Monica Padman]

The Arthur C. Clark quote. He said, every new piece of technology is magic. He said he messed it up. What's the real quote? Real quote is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[Kristen Bell]

There we go.

[Monica Padman]

It's a long word, indistinguishable.

[Kristen Bell]

But a good one.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, really good.

[Kristen Bell]

Good, good, good.

[Monica Padman]

There's a game that we'll tell people about. But not today. Next time. Okay.

[Kristen Bell]

We would call that a verbal dump, like a photo dump on Instagram. That was our verbal dump of Austin.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you're right. One thing I just have to say. Our friend Anna, her dad got disappeared by David Copperfield.

[Kristen Bell]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Yes.

[Kristen Bell]

When did you find that out?

[Dax Shepard]

On the trip.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I forgot that she actually did tell me that a long time ago. But then she brought it up again, obviously, when I said. We interviewed him. And I said, well, what. What does he say? And he. He's. He'll never say. He never says.

[Kristen Bell]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

He says he disappeared.

[Kristen Bell]

That's right. Vanished.

[Monica Padman]

I couldn't find the Ray Ban knockoff Ray Ban story because obviously when I'm

[Kristen Bell]

googling it, it's just trying to send Sell you something.

[Monica Padman]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And that's all.

[Kristen Bell]

Well, I love you and I hope you enjoyed this live performance of a fact check without any editing.

[Monica Padman]

See you next time.

[Kristen Bell]

Bite Us in the Buns by

[Monica Padman]

Sam.