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- [00:01]
Heidi Wong
Crime House has the perfect new show for spooky season Twisted Tales. Hosted by Heidi Wong, each episode of Twisted Tales is perfect for late night scares and daytime frights, revealing the disturbing real life events that inspired the world's most terrifying blockbusters and the ones too twisted to make it to screen. Twisted Tales is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes out every Monday.
- [00:41]
Vanessa Richardson
This is Crime House this week in crime history, we're looking at the cases of two serial killers whose crimes landed them on death row. On October 9, 2002, former sex worker Eileen Wuornos was executed after killing seven men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Although Eileen initially claimed she acted in self defense, she later said she killed them for their money, which she spent on gifts for her girlfriend. Then, just one day after Eileen Wuornos was executed on October 10, 2002, serial killer Gregory McKnight was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering two people at his trailer in rural Ohio in the 23 years since he spent his days in a cell on death row. Welcome to True Crime this week part of Crime House Daily. I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Sunday we'll be revis notorious crimes from the coming week in history. From serial killers to mysterious disappearances or murders, every episode will explore stories that share a common theme. Each week we'll cover two stories, one further in the past and one more rooted in the present here at Crime House. We know none of this would be possible without you, our community. Please support us by rating, reviewing and following Crime House Daily wherever you get your podcasts and for ad free and early access to Crime House Daily. Plus exciting bonus content subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts this week's theme is Death Row Serial Killers. First, we'll start on October 9, 2002 when Eileen Wuornos died by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Eileen had spent a decade on Florida's death row for murdering seven men with a.22 caliber pistol. Although she claimed claimed her murders were all self defense, investigators found that she'd likely killed for much more selfish reasons. Then we'll jump ahead one day to October 10, 2002 when Gregory McKnight was convicted of murdering two people. One of them was Kenyan college student Emily Murray, who worked with him at a local pizza restaurant. The other was Gregory Julius, one of his personal friends. To this day, we don't know much about what motivated McKnight's killings, but which makes his senseless murders all the more chilling. The subjects of Today's stories seem to have no problem handing out death sentences, but when they'd finally been caught and put on trial for their crimes, both of them were on the receiving end of a death sentence of their own.
- [03:48]
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- [04:22]
Vanessa Richardson
October 9, 2002 was set to be Aileen Wuornos last day on Earth. That morning, under Florida State prison policy, Eileen was allowed to have anything she wanted for her last meal as long as it cost $20 or less. Eileen skipped the meal and just asked for a cup of black coffee. Just after 9am Eileen was escorted into the death chamber, where she would become the second woman to ever be executed in a Florida prison. Once she'd been strapped into the chair to receive her lethal injection, Eileen was asked if she had last words and did she ever Eileen said, quote, I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the rock and I'll be back. Like Independence day with Jesus, June 6th. Like the movie Big Mothership and all, I'll be back. End quote. This nonsense statement was pretty typical for the hard drinking troublemaker, drifter, sex worker, and eventual serial killer. Her long, rambling journey along America's highways came to an end that day in the Florida death chamber. But it started 46 years earlier in an unhappy home in northern Michigan. Eileen Wuornos was born Eileen Carol Pittman on February 29, 1956 to a pair of teenagers in Rochester, Michigan. Eileen never met her father. By the time she was born, he was already in prison for rape and attempted murder. Murder and Eileen's mother, Diane Warnose, wasn't a model parent either. Diane often left Eileen and her brother Keith, who was just a year older, to fend for themselves for long stretches at a time. This neglect ended when Diane abandoned 4 year old Eileen and her brother with their grandparents in nearby Troy, Michigan, and never returned. Eileen's grandparents, Lowry and Brita Wuornos, adopted her and Keith, raising them along with their two other children. Up until Eileen was 12, she and Keith believed that their grandparents were their actual parents. Despite the secrecy, it was a more stable home, but still far from a happy one. Their grandfather Lowry was a heavy drinker and a strict disciplinarian. He would beat Eileen with a belt for even the slightest infractions. Eileen also claimed he sexually abused her, although that was never proven. Either way, it was a cruel household, physically and emotionally. Eileen's grandparents never allowed her to receive Christmas gifts, even though their biological children did. Growing up in this abusive environment took a major toll on Eileen's development. She fell behind in school and developed a fierce temper before she was even a teenager. She started trading sexual favors to local boys for cigarettes, earning her the unfortunate nickname Cigarette Pig. It all culminated with a family friend sexually assaulting Eileen when she was 14 years old in 1970, which resulted in pregnancy. Eileen's grandparents weren't supportive. They sent her away to a home for unwed mothers. For the duration of her pregnancy, she gave birth to a son, then gave him up for adoption. After that, she returned to her grandparents home in Michigan, where more bad news was awaiting her. Her grandparents were kicking her out of the house. At 15 years old, Aileen Wuornos was homeless. With a few brief exceptions, she'd remain that way for the rest of her life. Until she went to prison. After getting kicked out, Eileen dropped out of high school and started living in the woods near her grandparents house, sleeping in abandoned cars for shelter. Eventually she began hitchhiking around the US Engaging in sex work to pay for food, drugs and shelter. As she was crisscrossing the country. Both of her grandparents died. Her grandmother Britta from cirrhosis of the liver, and then her grandfather Lowry from suicide. But then In May of 1976, 20 year old Eileen finally had some good luck for a change. She became a wife. Her husband's name was Lewis Fell and He was the 69 year old President of a Florida yacht club. They'd met through her sex work, although they didn't mention that when they announced their marriage in the local society pages. For the first time in her life, Eileen had real stability. A roof over her head, a partner who cared about her, and access to a lot of money. For a second, it looked like her story might have a happy ending. But despite her glamorous new surroundings, Eileen hadn't dropped the habits she'd learned on the road. She liked to drink a lot. She liked to start trouble. And she didn't like being told no. Just weeks into her marriage, these qualities all boiled over into a fight that ended with Eileen giving Lewis a severe beating with his own cane. His lawyers got involved and they were divorced by July. And things kept getting worse from there. Within a week or two of her divorce, Eileen received tragic news from back in Michigan. Her 21 year old brother Keith was dying of throat cancer. She went to see him on his deathbed, but hospital staff kicked her out of his room after just a few minutes because she was blackout drunk. When he died a few days later, Eileen had almost no family left. No parents, no grandparents and no siblings. The one thing she did have was the payout from her brother's life insurance policy. $10,000. The equivalent of just over $55,000 in 2025. In the wake of her disastrous marriage to Louis Fell. This amount of money was a miraculous second chance for Eileen to get her life on track. It was an opportunity to find stable housing, go to school, get a job. There were so many ways for her to change her circumstances. Instead, she spent most of the money on a luxury car, which she totaled within months. Once the money was gone, she went back to what she knew knew best. Hitchhiking, sex work, and looking for a good time. The rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s were a blur of drunken misadventures and arrests for petty crimes. Eileen picked fights, forged checks and got busted driving drunk. She was briefly locked up for throwing a cue ball at a bartender's head. In 1981, she did more time for drunkenly attempting to rob a convenience store at gunpoint. And in 1986, 30 year old Eileen's aimless and chaotic wanderings brought her to a gay bar in Daytona Beach, Florida. There, she met someone who would change her life forever. Her name was Tyra Moore. She was a 24 year old hotel housekeeper who'd moved to Florida from Ohio after her family shunned her from being a lesbian. We don't know if Eileen had ever been with a woman before, but when she met Tyra, she never wanted to be with anyone else. That night was the beginning of an intense four and a half year romance that lasted until Eileen's arrest. Eileen and Tyra were inseparable. They lived together in cheap motels and seedy apartments all over the state, going wherever Tyra could find housekeeping work. In their spare time, they drank and shot Eileen's.22 caliber pistol in the woods. Eileen tried to help support them by doing sex work along Florida's highways. But in typical Eileen fashion, she did it in her own way. Instead of dressing provocatively, Eileen often walked along the side of the road in jean shorts and sleeveless T shirts. Many of the drivers who stopped to pick her up didn't even realize she was a sex worker. They assumed she was just down on her luck and needed a ride. She Once she was in the car, Eileen would chat with the driver and show them a picture of some kids she claimed were hers, talking about how she needed help making some money, and then she'd start offering sexual favors in exchange for cash. Eileen had made a decent living from this method of sex work since she was a teenager, but by the late 1980s, she'd spent more than half her life on the road. The hard drinking and drug use was catching up with her, and she was having a harder time finding men who were willing to pay her like they used to. Eileen could also tell that Tyra was getting tired of living hand to mouth. She was afraid that sooner or later Tyra would leave if their financial situation didn't change, and that what little stability and happiness she'd found would go with her. So in the summer of 1989, Aileen Wuornos found a new, new way to get money from lonely men in cars. Murder.
- [13:58]
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- [14:25]
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- [14:54]
Vanessa Richardson
When 30 year old Aileen Wuornos met Tyra Moore in 1986, she knew she'd found her soulmate. But that didn't mean life was easy. The two of them lived in a series of cheap apartments and and rented rooms as Tyra tried to find work as a hotel maid. Meanwhile, Eileen tried to help out by doing sex work, but she had trouble finding clients, so eventually she found a more violent way to pay the bills. All of Eileen's victims were killed alone in secluded areas. Their bodies were found long after the Florida heat had destroyed valuable forensic evidence. All this is to say the only source we have for how these murders played out is Eileen's various and contradictory confessions over the years. But there's still enough information to get a sense for how she did her dirty work. Eileen's murder spree started on November 30, 1989, and it may have been by accident. Around 10:30 that night, she was walking by the side of the road when a few 51 year old repair shop owner named Richard Mallory picked her up. According to Eileen, they drove to Daytona beach together, drinking beers and smoking a joint. Around midnight, they pulled into a secluded area at the edge of town where Eileen asked if he'd be willing to pay her for sex. At this point, she claims that Richard tried to rape her. Whether or not that's true, the encounter ended with Eileen grabbing the.22 caliber pistol from her purse and shooting him in the chest. Once Richard was dead, she went through his pockets for his cash and valuables. Then Eileen wrapped his body in a carpet she'd found in the brush and hid it nearby. After that, she drove off in Richard's car, which she abandoned several miles away. When Eileen got back to her and Tyra's motel a little later, she was excited to share the good news. She'd made enough money last night that they could finally afford to move into a new apartment they'd been looking at. Tyra was thrilled when she asked how she'd made so much in one night. Eileen casually told her that she killed a man. She could immediately tell that Tyra was freaked out by that, so she tried to play it off as a joke. Whether or not Tyra believed her, it didn't seem to matter. She and Eileen moved into their new apartment shortly after. As for Richard Mallory, his body wasn't discovered until a few weeks later in mid December. By then it had rotted so badly in the Florida humidity that police couldn't find any forensic clues to who killed him. Following her first murder, Eileen waited six months to kill her next victim. But once she started again, the violence kept coming. Her second victim was David Spears, a 43 year old construction worker. On May 19, 1990, he was making the 30 minute drive to visit his ex wife and kids in Orlando. Presumably, he only picked Eileen up because he thought she needed a ride. But Eileen had other plans. Especially when she learned that David was carrying $500 in cash he planned to give his daughter as a birthday gift. When David Missed his family lunch date. His ex wife reported him missing. After a two week search on June 1st police finally discovered his naked body in the woods 80 miles away from Orlando. He'd been shot several times with 22 caliber bullets. As that investigation got underway, another body popped up just a few days later. 40 year old rodeo worker Charles Caradin had been reported missing on May 31 when he didn't show up to pick up his fiance for a trip to Missouri. On June 6, his badly decomposed remains were found a few miles away from Interstate 75 in Pasco County. A completely different location from Eileen's other victims. But he did share something in common with them. During the autopsy Police foundation nine.22 caliber rounds inside him. By this point, dead bodies were popping up all over the state. But because they were scattered across different counties, it was harder for detectives to connect the dots and realize they had a serial killer on their hands. However, Eileen Wuornos's next victim would change all that. Just a few days later, on June 7, 1990, 65 year old retiree and volunteer missionary Peter Seems disappeared while driving from Jupiter, Florida to Arkansas with a trunk full of Bibles. Peter's body was never found. But the gray Pontiac Sunbird he was driving did turn up a few weeks later and it gave police the first big break in the case that would eventually put Aileen Wuornos behind bars. About a month later, on the 4th of July, a woman in Orange Springs, Florida was sitting outside her house when she saw a gray Pontiac Sunbird veer off the road and crash into some bushes. Two women climbed out, swearing at each other and throwing beer cans into the woods. They spotted the woman watching and begged her not to call 91 1, then got into the badly damaged car and tried to keep driving. The witness didn't listen to their request. When a volunteer fireman arrived a few minutes later, the women had abandoned the broken down car a little ways up the road and were walking. When firefighters asked if they had been driving the Pontiac, one of the women, blond, clearly drunk and with a short temper, said no. She cursed him out and told him to leave. By the time sheriff's deputies arrived, the women were long gone. But when they impounded the wrecked car and checked its vehicle identification number, they found it belonged to Peter Seems who'd been missing for nearly a month. The Sheriff's department had the volunteer fireman talk to a sketch artist and fax the pictures to police departments all over the state. The net was tightening around Eileen Wuornos, but her deadly summer Wasn't over yet. On the morning of July 30, 1990, 50 year old trucker Troy Burress left on a delivery run near his home in Ocala, towing a trailer full of sausages. When Troy didn't make it to any of his stops, his manager called his wife and then the police. At 4am the next day, police found his truck abandoned on the side of the road. Troy was nowhere to be found. Five days later, a family out for a picnic in Ocala National Forest stumbled across his body in a clearing roughly eight miles from where his truck had been left. He'd been shot in the chest and back with a.22 caliber pistol. After that, Eileen took a month long break from killing. But she got back to work in September. On the 11th, Dick Humphries, a 56 year old former police chief and state child abuse investigator went missing one day after his 35th wedding anniversary. The following day, Dick's body was discovered in a deserted housing development in Suwannee County. His pockets were turned out and he'd been shot seven times with a.22 caliber pistol, including an execution style shot to the back of the head. After that, Eileen waited another month before she claimed her next and final victim. On November 19, 1990, 61 year old trucker and auxiliary police officer Walter Antonio was found dead and naked on a logging road in rural Dixie County. And like so many other victims, the bullets that killed him came from a.22 caliber pistol. By now, word about the surge of.22 caliber highway shootings had spread from different parts of the state. And police across Florida finally realized they were dealing with a serial killer. Detectives assembled an interagency task force to share information and try to figure out who they were looking for. Since all the victims cars had been stolen, investigators quickly settled on the theory that they'd been killed by a hitchhiker, which was unusual. By 1990, most drivers were afraid to pick up a hitchhiker. After many well publicized cases of hitchhiking serial killers during the previous decades, detectives realized that whoever was murdering these men was somebody unassuming, someone who didn't look threatening. Which meant the killer was probably female. And that's what led them to the sketch of the angry blonde woman who who'd crashed a missing man's car.
- [24:07]
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- [24:36]
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- [25:08]
Vanessa Richardson
By November of 1990, Florida police had finally realized that the same hitchhiker was responsible for killing seven different men with a.22 caliber pistol over the past year. They knew they were looking for a woman, and thanks to a sketch from earlier that year, they knew what she looked like. In late November, the statewide task force investigating the murders went public. They talked to the press about their investigation and gave reporters copies of the police sketches of Eileen and Tyra. Soon they were in papers or all over Florida. By mid December, tips were flooding in. Several landlords and motel managers contacted police to tell them they'd rented rooms to women matching the sketches in the paper. But tracking Eileen down would be difficult because she gave a different alias everywhere they lived. She rented a trailer using the name Lee Blachowicz at a motel in Tampa, she went by Susan in Clearwater. She told landlords her name was Cami Marsh Green, but Tyra had used her real name. Soon investigators identified her and learned that Tyra had no serious criminal record. Even so, police all over Florida kept an eye out for a woman with her name and description. But by this point, Tyra was long gone. As soon as she'd seen her sketch in the newspaper in connection with Sarah several murders, she'd abandoned Eileen and fled the state to live with her sister in Pennsylvania. When police were unable to find Tyra, they started looking into her mysterious partner, working their way through Eileen's aliases. Because the victim's bodies and cars had been stripped of valuable belongings, detectives started checking pawn shops near the murder scenes. At one of those shops, they discovered that a woman woman calling herself Cami Marsh Green, had pawned a camera and a radar detector. They'd belonged to the first victim, Richard Mallory, and per Florida law, Cami had left a thumbprint on the receipt. When police ran the thumbprint through Their system, It came back with a match. Eileen Warnos. Fortunately for investigators, she didn't keep a low profile, which made her easy to find. On January 5, 1991, 34 year old Eileen went to the Port Orange Pub outside of Daytona beach to grab a few drinks. Once she was settled in at the bar, a couple of friendly men sat down next to her and started buying her beers. They said that they were a couple of vacationing drug dealers from Georgia. One went by the nickname Bucket, the other called himself Drums. They talked for hours, and later the three of them went down the road to a biker bar called the Last Resort. Bucket and Drums left when the place closed. Meanwhile, Eileen passed out on an old car seat outside. When she woke up the following afternoon, she went back inside to start drinking again. Soon, Bucket and Drums showed up to continue the party. After some more day drinking together, the two dealers invited Eileen back to their motel to get cleaned up. As she followed them out of the bar, sheriff's deputies walked up to Eileen and placed her under arrest. Bucket and Drums were undercover police officers, part of a sting operation intended to lure a confession out of Eileen before making an arrest. That mission had been unsuccessful. Although Eileen had talked a lot over the two nights at the Last Resort, she didn't give up any incriminating information. And that posed a problem. While the police were certain that Eileen was the killer, they didn't have any hard evidence like witnesses or a murder weapon to make an airtight case. But they weren't giving up their shot at a confession just yet. When police arrested Eileen, they didn't mention the murders. They told her she was being brought in on a weapons charge from several years earlier. The plan was to lull her into a false sense of security so she'd say something incriminating. And investigators had a secret weapon for that. Tyra Moore. A few days after Eileen's arrest, detectives tracked Tyra down at her sister's house in Pennsylvania. They had a lot of tough questions about how much Tyra knew about her girlfriend's year long murder spree. In a sworn statement, Tyra told them that she hadn't been involved in the murders. And she didn't have much information on them either. After Eileen had told her about killing Richard Mallory, Tyra stuck her head in the proverbial sand. Whenever Eileen would come home with a bunch of cash or a mysterious new car, Tyra didn't ask questions. She didn't want to know anything that would put her in a position where she had to report Eileen to the police. Of Course, if Tyra had reported Eileen after she told her about the first murder, she could have saved six more lives. Staying quiet for all that time made her an accessory. But police offered her a deal. They'd give her immunity if she could get Eileen to conf Confess to the murders on tape. Tyra took the deal. The next day, she flew back to Florida with the police, where they set her up in a Daytona motel room with a tapped phone line. Over the next few days, Tyra repeatedly called Eileen at the county jail. She said she was worried that Eileen's murders would be pinned on her. At first, Eileen reminded Tyra that she was only in jail on a weapons charge and and the two of them were only connected to the murders due to mistaken identity. But Tyra kept at it, insisting that the police were closing in on her. Finally, Eileen cracked. On the morning of January 16, 1991, she volunteered to sit down with police and confess face to face. Over the course of a long conversation with two detectives, Eileen confessed to all of the murders. Her stories were rambling and often contradictory, but she stuck to two key points. Tyra had no involvement, and every killing had been done in self defense. After the victim tried to rape her, Eileen's public defender was present for her interview, and he repeatedly begged her to stop making incriminating statements. She didn't listen to him. She said she just wanted to get it over with. Eileen went on trial for murder in January 1992. Against the advice of her public defenders, she took the stand to testify on her own behalf, insisting that her victims had been killed in self defense. When prosecutors cross examined her about physical evidence and her own prior statements that contradicted her claims, she lashed out at them. The defense called no other witnesses. It took the jury two hours to find Eileen Wuornos guilty of murder. She'd go on to receive six death sentences for her crimes, but she was determined to have the last word. As the jury was led out of the courtroom after issuing their verdict, Eileen exploded at them in an angry tirade, calling them scumbags of America. During her decade on death row, Eileen's stories of how the murders played out continued to change, based on who she was talking to and her mood. But by the early 2000s, it seemed as though she'd gotten tired of life in a 6x9 foot cell. Like she said during her confession, she just wanted it to end. However, it seemed like she might not get her wish. A national controversy over capital punishment prompted Governor Jeb Bush to halt the state's executions. But Eileen didn't want to spend any more time in prison. In letters to Governor Bush and the Florida Supreme Court, she insisted that she'd chosen to kill her victims because she wanted to, not in self defense. She said, quote, I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again. This convinced the governor to make an exception and let Eileen die. Aileen Wuornos, rough and tumble life ended in the death chamber on October 9, 2002 at 46 years old. Although she promised in her final statement that she'd be back one day, so far there's been no sign of her, and Florida's highways are safer because of it. Up next, the story of another serial killer whose exploits landed him on death.
- [34:15]
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- [34:32]
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- [35:05]
Vanessa Richardson
Just one day after Aileen Wuornos was executed in Florida, another serial killer was sentenced to die in an Ohio courtroom. On October 10, 2002, 25 year old Gregory McKnight was convicted of murdering 20 year olds Gregory Julius and Emily Murray. We don't know what drove this small town family man to kill the people he knew, but the brutal slayings and their aftermath shocked his Ohio community to its core and illustrated just how little we know about the darkness that can lurk inside our neighbors. Gregory McKnight was born and spent his childhood in Queens, New York. As a teenager, his family relocated to central Ohio. But after the move, it seemed like Gregory fell in with a bad crowd. In 1992, at the age of 15, he shot and killed a man during a robbery in Columbus. He was arrested shortly after and put through juvenile court proceedings. Because he was a minor at the time, the judge gave him a five year sentence at the Circleville UN Youth Center, a correctional facility for teen offenders. The light sentence was intended to give Gregory a chance to atone for his mistake, learn some skills and get his life back on track. And at first, that's what seemed to be happening. He was released from the Circleville Youth center in 1997 at the age of 21. Gregory seems to have made a good impression on at least one person there. Not long after his release, he started dating a former employee at the youth center named Catherine. Over the next three years, the couple would go on to get married, have a child, and settle near the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe. But even as Gregory seemed to be turning over a new leaf, he was still harboring dark intentions. The first sign was In April of 1999, when the 22 year old bought three handguns from two two different gun shops in town. Eventually, he'd use one of these weapons on somebody very close to home. Early in the year 2000, Gregory met a man named Gregory Julius through one of his friends. Over the next few months, the two men would hang out from time to time. But everything changed in May. It's not clear if they had a falling out or if that was just when Gregory McKnight decided to execute a plan he'd been cooking up for some time. On May 12, Julius's girlfriend Dana came home from work and found him and Gregory McKnight out in their kitchen with her daughter. They talked for a minute, then she took her daughter and left to run an errand. When Dana got back to the house an hour later, both men were gone. It seemed like they'd left in a hurry. The front door was unlocked, candles had been left burning, and Julius's driver's license and personal belongings were all still there. Hours went by and Julius never came home. Dana called his pager repeatedly. Finally, later that night, she got a call from Gregory McKnight. He put Julius on the phone. He told Dana they were staying with one of McKnight's friends in Columbus and going to a college party at Ohio State University. Then, before she could ask him anything else, Julie Julius abruptly hung up. After that conversation, Dana never saw or heard from her boyfriend again. It's unclear whether she reported his disappearance to the police, but at the time, Gregory McKnight was never under any suspicion. The next few months were eventful for Gregory and his wife Catherine. In early June 2000, they bought a trailer on a plane plot of land in rural Vinton County, Ohio. Catherine was pregnant with their second child and they were looking to expand their home to fit their new family. They stashed some of their belongings in the trailer, but still had some time until it was move in ready until Then they stayed with Catherine's mother in the nearby town of Gambier. Then in October, 23 year old Gregory got a new job as the kitchen manager at a pizza restaurant and bar called Pirates Cove. It was a good fit for him. He got along well with the other employees and they sometimes gave him rides back to his mother in law's house. One of those fellow co workers was Emily Murray, a part time waitress and junior at nearby Kenyon College. Emily and Gregory had only been working together for a few weeks when she handed in her resignation. She worked her final shift on November 2nd. A bunch of her friends came in to help celebrate her last night on the job. They stuck around for a while, then left before her shift ended. Time card data shows that Emily finished work at 3:07am the restaurant's bartender remembered seeing her looking around the bar for her car keys at 3:30am he was the last person to see her alive. Emily Murray, never met made it back to her dorm the following night. Emily was supposed to meet her friends at a party. When she didn't show up, they started to worry. They checked her dorm and didn't find her. But they did find her wallet, credit cards and id. Her friends searched the campus and the surrounding town for the Subaru Outback Emily drove, but they couldn't find it anywhere. Shortly after they were reported her missing to the police. On November 5, 2000, two days after Emily went missing, one of her friends Talked to Gregory McKnight at Pirates Cove and asked if he remembered seeing her on her last night at work. Gregory was curt and unhelpful. He said his shift had ended long before hers, so he never saw her leave. However, police would later find that his time card showed he clocked out at 2:59am that night, just eight minutes before Emily did. A month went by with no sign of Emily Murray and her friends and family began to fear the worst. There was finally a break in the case on December 9, 2000, but it brought tragic news that day. A deputy from the Vinton County Sheriff's Department drove to Gregory McKnight's trailer to serve him a warrant on a minor charge, though it's not clear what. But Gregory wasn't there. He and his family were still just using the trailer for storage while they lived with his wife's mother. When the deputy looked around the property, he discovered Emily Murray's Subaru Outback parked behind the trailer. Police got a search warrant and entered the trailer. They found blood stains on all over the carpet right inside the front door. A trail of blood led investigators down the hallway to a spare room where Emily's fully clothed body was wrapped in a length of carpet. She died of a single gunshot wound to the head delivered at close range. Detectives would later find the bullet hole in the bloodstained carpet by the door. As police continued their search of the property, they found human bones and discarded clothing in the cistern and the root cellar. The bones were damaged, suggesting Gregory had dismembered the body, and there were also ashes in the root cellar. It seemed like he'd even tried to burn some of the bones. Investigators used dental records to identify the remains as belonging to Gregory Julius, who'd been missing for seven months. When they examined the the car McKnight had been driving on the night Julius disappeared, they found blood stains in the back seat that matched Julius's blood type. The evidence against Gregory McKnight couldn't get much more damning than that. On October 10, 2002, a jury found him guilty of the murders of Gregory Julius and Emily Murray. They later recommended that he he be sentenced to death. Today, Gregory McKnight is awaiting execution on Ohio's death row. He's never spoken publicly about how he chose his victims or what drove him to murder. All we know for sure is that his inexplicable choices ripped a hole in two families and forever shattered his own. Looking back at this week in Crime history, we get a chilling look at the types of crimes that can lead to a death sentence. For Eileen Wuornos, it was the calculated killings of whoever was unlucky enough to pick her up along the side of a Florida highway. For Gregory McKnight, it was mercilessly targeting people he was close to. These crimes were barbaric, senseless and tragic, and for that, these criminals received the ultimate punishment. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is True Crime this Week part of Crime House Daily. Crime House Daily is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. At Crime House, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing and following Crime House Daily. Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly matters. And for ad free and early access to Crime House Daily + exciting bonus content. Subscribe to Crime House + on Apple Podcasts with will be back tomorrow. True Crime this week is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original Powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the True Crime this Week team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Truman Capps, Sarah Tardiff and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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