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Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America, ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crime House plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of Murder True Crime Stories and the rest of the Crime House shows ad free and released early. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap. Try free at the top of this show's page. This is crime house. Every man Melissa Ann Sheppard ever went after thought she was an angel. White haired, soft spoken, and the kind of woman who shows up at your back door with a basket and a smile, asks if you're lonely and tells you God sent her. By the time any of them realized what she actually was, it was already too late. She ran over one husband and left him for dead. She cremated another before an autopsy could be conducted. She put a third in a wheelchair and then in her late 70s, she found a fourth and almost killed him before she got caught. She did all of it under five different names, all of it after she'd already done time. And up until the very end, every single one of her victims still thought she was an angel. They didn't know she was actually a devil in disguise. This is the case of Melissa Ann Sheppard, the Internet Black Widow. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, but you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Murder True Crime Stories and be sure to like and subscribe. Today's story is about a 90 year old Canadian woman who's still considered too dangerous to use the Internet. Her name is Melissa Ann Sheppard. And for most of her adult life, she used charm, religion, and a sweet little smile to find lonely men. And then she ruined them. But there's one question that hangs over her whole story. It's the one her own lawyer raised at her final sentencing. Was she actually trying to kill these men or was she just trying to keep them weak long enough to drain their bank accounts? I have been turning this case over for a while now, and honestly, I don't think there's a clear answer. After you listen. Let me know what you think. All that and more coming up.
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Melissa Ann Sheppard was born Melissa Ann Russell on May 16, 1935, in a small fishing and logging settlement called Burnt Church in northeastern New Brunswick. Burnt Church sits right next to a Mi' Kmaq First Nation reserve, and it's the kind of place where jobs have always been scarce, but especially during the Great Depression when Melissa was born. Public records of Melissa's childhood are thin. We don't know much about her parents or her siblings, if she had any. What we know is that she grew up poor and that when she was 20 years old, she met a man named Russell Shepherd. Russell was from Montague, a small town on Prince Edward island just across the water from where Melissa had grown up. They got married in 1955. Melissa took his last name, moved to Prince Edward island, and the two of them started a family there. By all accounts, the next couple of decades were normal, stable. Melissa was a wife and a mother. Nothing unusual. But somewhere in the 1970s, something changed. In 1977, when Melissa was in her early 40s, she was convicted of fraud. Her first sentence was 11 months. And when she got out, she just kept going. Bad checks, forged signatures, impersonating people to cash their money. Between 1977 and 1991, she racked up more than 30 separate fraud convictions across multiple Canadian provinces. Those convictions added up to roughly five years in prison total, spread out over those 14 years. So Melissa was in and out of the system. Russell stuck around through some of it. But eventually, their marriage fell apart. In 1988, Melissa was 52 years old. Her marriage to Russell was over. Her kids were grown and out of the house. She'd been drifting between Canadian provinces. Then one day, she answered a personal ad in a lonely hearts column. That's how she met Gordon Stewart. Gordon was 41 years old. He was a former member of the Canadian armed forces from Prince Edward island with two kids at home. His wife had recently died. He was working, paying bills, and trying to hold things together for his kids. But by every account, he was deeply lonely. He also had a steady armed forces pension and about $50,000 in savings. Not a fortune. But in 1988, that was enough money to make a serious difference in somebody's life. He and Melissa went on a blind date. Things moved fast. Within a year or so, Gordon and Melissa were planning a wedding. They flew to Las Vegas and got married in 1990, apparently while Melissa was still legally married to Russell Shepherd. That's a crime. It's called bigamy. But Melissa had been forging paperwork for over a decade by then. She probably wasn't worried about it. At some point after their Vegas honeymoon, she officially divorced Russell. And once Gordon's ring was on her finger and the paperwork was filed, she had access to everything he owned, including that $50,000. The money started to disappear pretty quickly. But that wasn't the only thing going wrong. Gordon started feeling sick. He'd get dizzy. He'd pass out. He'd come around with no memory of how he got there. Gordon had a history of drinking, so he figured the alcohol was finally catching up with him. But that's not what was actually happening. And maybe deep down, Gordon knew it, because at some point, he sat down and wrote a letter. In it, he laid out everything. How Melissa had been cheating on him, how she'd been lying to him over and over, how she'd been emptying his bank accounts. He left it somewhere in his belongings where someone would eventually find it. Clearly, he knew something was coming. He just didn't know what. In late April 1991, Gordon Stewart's body was found on a remote stretch of Road outside Halifax. He had tire marks across him. Hours after she'd left him there, Melissa walked into a Royal Canadian Mounted Police station. This is what she told them. According to Melissa, Gordon had been drinking that night. He'd attacked her in the car. He'd assaulted her, pulled her onto a logging road and sexually assaulted her. When he stepped out of the car for a moment, she scrambled into the driver's seat and threw it in reverse to escape. She heard a thump and thought she'd hit a log. So she backed up again. And that's when she realized it wasn't a log. It was Gordon. According to Melissa, she had run over her own husband twice by accident while fleeing for her life. The police listened. Then they started checking her story. And almost nothing she said held up. A toxicology report came back. Gordon had a near lethal amount of benzodiazepine in his bloodstream. Specifically Valium and restoral to sedatives. He also had a significant amount of alcohol in his system. A man with that much in his bloodstream would have been struggling just to stay upright. There's no way he was overpowering anyone. And that lined up with another detail. There was no physical evidence of a sexual assault. And then officers searching Gordon's things found the letter, the one he'd written before he died. Prosecutors believed they had a case for second degree murder. The motive was clear. Money. Gordon's armed forces pension would transfer to his widow after his death. So would the savings. So would anything else in his name. Melissa's trial was held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the spring of 1992. Melissa was 57 years old. The Crown laid out the evidence. The drugs, the alcohol, the letter, the missing money. But premeditated murder is hard to prove. The jury looked at the same evidence and saw a story they couldn't entirely rule out. Maybe Gordon really had been violent that night. Maybe Melissa really had panicked. They couldn't convince themselves beyond a reasonable doubt that she'd planned to kill him. So they found her guilty of the lesser charge, manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to six years in prison. She got out on parole after two. And when Melissa walked out of jail in 1994, she didn't disappear quietly. She did the opposite. She made herself famous. She started telling her story to anyone who would listen. She said she was a survivor of domestic violence. She said she'd been forced to defend herself against an abusive husband. She positioned herself as a voice for battered women, and people believed her. Canadian media picked up the story. She got interviewed by Peter Zoski, one of the most prominent broadcasters in Canada at the time. She appeared in a documentary called When Women Kill. She traveled around the country giving speeches. She even received a government grant to help other women who'd survived abuse for about six years. She was the face of a cause, and the cause itself was and is real. Domestic violence is real. The women who survive it deserve advocates. And nobody should have looked at Melissa Ann Sheppard and assumed she was lying just because she'd done time for manslaughter. But there was a wrinkle in the story she was telling. Remember that letter Gordon had written before he died? The one laying out how Melissa had been cheating on him, lying to him and draining his accounts? The Crown had read it in open court at her trial. So when Melissa walked out of prison and started telling audiences across Canada that her husband had been the abusive one, she was only telling them half the story. Some people noticed. A journalist named Barbara McKenna at the Charlottetown Guardian wrote an article publicly doubting Melissa's claims. Melissa sued her. Well, that's not the kind of move a real survivor of abuse usually makes. It's combative, it's expensive. It's designed to scare other reporters off the story. And it didn't work. McKenna stood by her reporting, and decades later, she'd still be one of the journalists. Editors called when they wanted to understand who Melissa Ann Sheppard really was. And the lawsuit had told people something. They started looking at Melissa differently. By the late 1990s, the media had moved on. The speaking grants had dried up. Melissa was in her mid-60s. The spotlight was gone, and she was running out of people in Canada who hadn't heard her story. So she left Canada. By the late 1990s, she'd resurfaced in Florida, a state full of retirees, widowers, and people who'd come there specifically to stop being asked questions about their past. She fit right in. And the man who would become her third husband had no idea what was coming.
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In the spring of 2000, Melissa Ann shepherd, now in her mid-60s, turned up at a Christian retreat in Florida. At this point, she was going by Melissa Stewart, taking the last name of the husband she'd killed. She'd been cycling through aliases for years. At the retreat, she crossed paths with an 83 year old widower named Robert Friedrich. Robert was from Bradenton, Florida, a retiree and a devout Christian. Friends and family said he was a kind, gentle man who was still grieving the death of his first wife. Robert also had a life savings of around $400,000, about $700,000 in today's money, sitting in his accounts. The day after they met, Melissa sent him a letter. In it, she told him, quote, God wants us to be married. Robert proposed three days later, they were married within a month. From the outside, the and the marriage looked like a fairy tale. Melissa whisked Robert away on a five month honeymoon. They traveled. They took a luxury cruise around the Caribbean. They lived like newlyweds. All of it came out of Robert's account. And by the time the honeymoon ended and they came back to Bradenton, he was a different man. He started getting sick. He'd be fine for a while and then he'd faint. He'd slur his words, he'd be confused. He was in and out of the hospital and doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with him. But his kids noticed something. When Robert was at home with Melissa, he was a mess. But when he visited them when he was away from her, he was the same guy he'd always been. Sharp, funny, active. The Robert they recognized. It didn't take his sons long to figure out something was off. And soon one of them called Florida's elder abuse hotline. An investigator did a welfare check at the house. He didn't find anything alarming enough to take action. But before he left, he recommended that Robert get 247 nursing care just to be safe. Melissa refused, and when the agency pushed, she threatened to sue them. So they backed off. Robert's sons were stuck in the worst kind of Family situation. Their dad was an adult. He was making his own choices. Legally, they couldn't overrule him unless he was declared incompetent. But every time they tried to intervene, Melissa was there to push back. She made them look like the bad guys. She told Robert his own children were trying to break up his marriage. Around this time, Robert's financial advisor noticed his accounts were being drained way faster than they should have been. He called Robert's son, Dennis. But by then, there was nothing Dennis could do. He got a voicemail from Melissa. According to Dennis, the message went something like this. I have something to share with you this morning. Your father is going to change his will. You guys are getting nothing. A big fat zero. So try that on for size and have a nice day. That told Robert's family everything they needed to know. They just didn't know what to do with it. By late 2002, two years into the marriage, Robert was a shadow of the man he'd been. He'd been sick for months, in and out of the hospital, slipping further with every visit. Then one morning, Melissa picked up the phone and called Robert's doctor. She told him she'd found her husband unresponsive at home. The doctor signed his death certificate over the phone. He listed the cause as cardiac arrest. He never went to the house. He never physically examined the body. Robert was 85 years old. Melissa had him cremated quickly before any autopsy was conducted. His sons filed a criminal complaint accusing her of overdosing their father on his prescription medication. Manatee county investigators looked into it. But without a body, without a tox screen, without an autopsy, there was nothing to test. Because of that, investigators couldn't substantiate foul play. No charges were ever filed against Melissa in connection with Robert's death. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Melissa had already drained roughly $400,000 from Robert's accounts during the marriage. Almost all of his liquid savings were gone before he died and what was left of his estate. Tens of thousands of dollars in remaining assets went to her, since she was now the sole beneficiary of his will. By 2004, Melissa was 69 years old and back in Prince Edward Island. She was also using a different set of names. Melissa Friedrich, Millie Friedrich, sometimes others. And she discovered something new. The Internet. Specifically, online dating. In late 2004, Melissa set up a profile on a website called americansinglesdating.com she started messaging older men in the United States. Eventually, she connected with a 73 year old retired accountant in Pinellas Park, Florida, named Alex Strategos. Alex was originally from Pittsburgh. He was divorced, not widowed. But the same loneliness was there. He was looking for a partner. They messaged back and forth for a while. Then Melissa made the long drive from Canada down to Florida to meet him in person. They went out for dinner. Alex would later describe Melissa as a classy lady, and in a phrase that would hit a lot harder in hindsight, a fine actress. At the end of the night, he asked where she was staying. She said she didn't have a place yet. Alex offered to put her up. She moved in that night. A few hours later, Alex got up to use the bathroom. He felt dizzy. He stumbled, hit his head, and passed out. Melissa called 911. This was a pattern. We know it was a pattern. But Alex didn't know that. The paramedics who took him to the hospital didn't know that. His son Dean didn't know that. What Dean did know was this. His dad had just brought home a woman he'd met on the Internet. Within hours, she'd moved in. And now his dad was unconscious on the way to the hospital. In Dean's own words, he thought it was a little bit too much too quickly. But his dad was a grown man. His dad liked Melissa. So Dean held back. That hesitation is something a lot of adult children of older parents will understand. You don't want to be the kid who makes the scene. You don't want to humiliate your father in front of new girlfriend. You tell yourself you're being paranoid. You tell yourself it'll be fine. In Alex's case, it wasn't. Over the next two months, Alex was hospitalized eight separate times. He kept falling. He kept passing out. He kept getting weaker. Doctors couldn't pin down what was causing it. Eventually, he was so debilitated that he ended up in a nursing home at Melissa's suggestion. And while he was in that nursing home, Melissa convinced him to sign over power of attorney. That gave her access to all of it. His bank accounts, his condo, his car, everything. Alex's friend Judy Frock got worried. She had friends in law enforcement, and. And when she told them what was happening, they spelled out exactly what Melissa could do with that document. She could sell his house out from under him while he was lying in a hospital bed. Judy got Dean in touch with the Pinellas park police Department. The case landed with Detective Sergeant Mike Lynch. Lynch started pulling on the thread. The first thing he found was male Melissa's bank activity. She had drained roughly $18,000 from Alex's accounts nearly everything he had. The second thing lynch found was Melissa's criminal record. 30 plus fraud convictions in Canada. A manslaughter conviction for running over her own husband. Multiple aliases. A trail of dead and dying men going back a a decade and a half. Lynch realized he wasn't just investigating some minor fraud case with a sweet old lady. By this point, Dean had gone to the hospital and asked to see his dad's medical records. Buried in those records was the toxicology screen. Alex had benzodiazepine in his system. The same class of drug that had killed Gordon Stewart. Now, lynch had a pattern. He brought Melissa in for questioning while other officers searched Alex's condo. They found bags of pills. They also figured out how Melissa had been dosing him. Every night she'd been serving Alex ice cream. And every night, she'd been crushing benzos into it. On her computer, they found something else, too. Messages to several other older men. She already had her next victims lined up. What gets me is the timing. While she was drugging Alex Strategos and putting him in the hospital eight times in two months, she was also chatting up backup options online. She wasn't winding down. She was already setting up the man after Alex. But she'd run out of time. On January 6, 2005, the Pinellas Park Police arrested 70 year old Melissa Ann Sheppard on charges of exploitation of the elderly, grand theft and forgery. She eventually pleaded guilty to seven of those charges. A Florida judge sentenced her to five years in prison. She served four. In April of 2009, she was deployed, deported back to Canada. She'd been convicted in two countries. She'd done time on both sides of the border. The RCMP knew her face. The Pinellas park police knew her face. She was almost 75 years old. Most people in her position would have admitted defeat by then. But Melissa Ann Sheppard wasn't most people. The press had a name for her. The Internet black widow. And she wasn't done spinning her web. Look, we all hit points in life where anxiety, depression or ADHD feel like a lot more than just a rough patch. I have been there. And honestly, sometimes standard self help tools or talk therapy aren't the total answer. We need a little more. If you need a deeper level of care, Talk Iatry connects you with real virtual psychiatry. This isn't a therapy app. It's a 100% online psychiatry practice providing comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety and more. 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Melissa came back to Canada in April of 2009. There was no special supervision. There was no Public warning. She moved into a retirement community in Nova Scotia. And in 2012, when Melissa was 77 years old, a new neighbor moved in down the hall from her. His name was Fred Weeks. Fred Weeks was 75 years old. He was from Stellarton, Nova Scotia, a small community in Pictou County. 20. His wife had just died the year before. They'd been married for 54 years. 54 years. I'll take that in for a second. His whole adult life from his early twenties on had been spent with the same woman. And then suddenly she was gone. He was, by his own admission, very lonely. Not long after he moved in, Fred heard a knock at his spec door. It was the apple cheeked white haired woman from down the way. She was standing there with a basket and a smile and she wanted to know if he was lonely too. Because she was. She'd heard he'd just lost his wife. That was how Fred met Melissa. He'd later tell a CBC reporter that she was very nice to talk to and was always talking like she was religious. Then he laughed and added, that was the first lie. But that was hindsight. At the time, all Fred saw was a kind, soft spoken woman who seemed genuinely interested in him. It was a whirlwind. Within a few months of meeting, they were planning a wedding. On September 28, 2012, they held a civil ceremony in his living room. The few people who attended said the couple looked happy. They had no idea who the bride really was. Neither did the groom. Three days after the wedding, the newlyweds drove down to North Sydney on Cape Breton to catch a ferry to Newfoundland. Newfoundland was supposed to be the honeymoon. On the ferry over, Fred started to feel off, forgetful, hazy. By the time they got to Newfoundland, he was having trouble driving. He couldn't remember how to start the car. He couldn't tie his own shoes. By the end of their stay, he needed a wheelchair just to move around. He didn't know what was wrong. He was an active 75 year old man, sharp as ever and over the span of a few days he was falling apart. They took the ferry back to Cape Breton and checked into a bed and breakfast in North Sydney. That night Fred vomited for hours. He was so loud that the owner of the B and B came up to ask if everything was okay. Melissa answered the door and told the owner they were both sick, but only Fred was sick. The next morning Fred fell out of bed and slammed against the hardwood floor. He needed an ambulance. The B&B's owner offered to call one immediately. Melissa told her, she'd take care of it. After she finished her breakfast, she eventually took him to the hospital herself. When she got there, she told the staff that she was Fred's only family. She didn't mention that he had adult children. She told them that he had a history of memory issues, which he didn't. Hospital staff started running tests. Fred. Fred's blood came back with near lethal levels of benzodiazepine. The same family of sedatives that were found in Gordon Stewart's system and the same ones that hospitalized Alex Strategos eight times. Only this time, instead of ice cream, it had been in Fred's coffee. Hospital staff called the police. The police ran Melissa's name through their system, and what they found ended any chance she had of slipping through the cracks. On October 2, 2012, 77 year old Melissa Ann Sheppard was arrested at her home in Pictou County. When officers searched the house, they found a stash of pills, mostly Lorazepam and temazepam, both benzodiazepines. They found prescriptions in her name from five different doctors. And they found several sets of fake ID made out to different names. She was charged with attempted murder. But the charge ran into the same problem prosecutors had hit in 1992 with Gordon Stewart. Proving Melissa actually meant to kill Fred was harder than proving she had drugged him. Because of that, the Crown ultimately accepted a guilty plea to a lesser charge. Administering a noxious substance with intent to endanger life, plus failing to provide the necessaries of life to her husband. At her sentencing in June 2013, Chief Justice Joseph Philip Kennedy looked at the courtroom and said, quote, people who have contact with this lady should be careful. He sentenced her to three and a half years in prison. That sentence was extraordinarily light. The maximum she could have received was 14 years. But because she was 77 and because she'd entered a guilty plea, the judge took mercy. Now, here's the thing. Melissa's own defense lawyer said something the prosecution had been wrestling with for over 20 years. He said that he genuinely didn't think his client was trying to murder. Murder anyone. He believed she was guilty of drugging her partners, absolutely. But he thought her goal was to keep them weak long enough to change wills, sign over assets, and drain accounts, not kill them. Pinellas Parks detective Mike lynch disagreed. In a 2016 interview, he said he thought it was one of two things. Either Melissa was trying to keep her victims weak enough to keep stealing from them, or she was trying to kill them outright. And with Alex Strategos lynch believed her plan had been to, quote, ultimately finish him off. What's strange is that Melissa herself, in a 2012 interview with CBC's the Fifth Estate, didn't deny the drugging. She said, quote, I can't say that, that I didn't personally give him benzodiazepines. If he had them in his system, we already knew he knew and I knew that our relationship was not going to continue. That's not a confession to murder, but it's not a denial either. Whatever her actual intent was, the result was the same. One man died on a roadside. Another died at home with no autopsy conducted. Two more ended up in wheelchairs. Melissa served her full sentence on the Fred Weeks case. She got out of the Nova Institution for women. On March 18, 2016, at the age of 80, Halifax Regional Police took the unusual step of issuing a public warning. They told the community that a high risk offender was being released back into the area. They also placed 22 conditions on her release. She had to report any new romantic relationships to the police so the men involved could be warned. She had to inform police of any change in her appearance or living situation. And she was banned from using the Internet point blank. Just over three weeks later, on April 11, 2016, a community response officer spotted Melissa at the Halifax Central Library. She was sitting at a public computer online. She was arrested and charged with breaching her release conditions. But on Dec. 22, 2016, the Nova Scotia Crown dropped the charges. They said they didn't think they had a reasonable prospect of conviction. Instead, Melissa agreed to sign a two year peace bond with 21 conditions, including a continued Internet ban and a requirement to report any new relationships. At the time, both of her surviving victims publicly disagreed with the decision. Fred Weeks told a reporter that some guys better watch out. Speaking to CBC in March of 2016, Alex Stratigo said, quote, I don't think she should be out at all. She did it before, she'll do it again. In another interview, years after the case, Alex told reporters he didn't regret meeting Melissa even briefly. She'd brought some happiness into his life. That was the part that got the detectives. Even the men who knew what she'd done couldn't stop missing the version of her they'd first met. As of this recording, Melissa Ann Sheppard is 90 years old. She still lives in Nova Scotia. She acknowledges running Gordon Stewart over, but says it was an accident. She insists Robert Friedrich died of natural causes and she has never offered a real explanation for what happened to Alex. Strategos Or. Or Fred Weeks. Both of those men have since died. Fred Weeks passed away in January of 2017, less than a year after speaking to that reporter. He was 80 years old. Alex Strategos passed away in September of 2020 at the age of 89. Melissa has outlived them both. When the Washington Post did a long piece on Melissa in 2016, the reporter landed on a line I keep coming back to. He said that out of all of Melissa's husbands, the only one who hadn't been a victim of a methodical practice ruse was Russell Shepard. The first one. He was the man Melissa married when she was 20 years old. Before any of this started. Before the fraud convictions, before Gordon, before Florida. The version of Melissa that Russell met was the only version that didn't have an angle. Everyone after him was a target. What makes this case so hard to shake isn't just the body count. It's that for 30 years, four police forces in two countries kept missing the same woman. Part of that was timing. Part of it was geography. She kept hoping. Stopping borders, switching names, slipping through cracks in jurisdictions that didn't talk to each other. But part of it was just her appearance. She looked like somebody's grandma. She looked like the sweet woman from down the hall. And every single one of her victims had something in common. They'd all lost someone. They'd all been alone. They were all in the part of life where the world stops paying you much attention. That's not an accident. That's who she chose. People talk about predators online, and they usually picture some shadowy figure on the other side of a screen. And they don't picture a 70 year old woman in a print blouse who shows up at your back door with a basket and asks if you'd like some company. But that's exactly what she was. And the saddest part is that what these men were looking for, what Fred Weeks was looking for when he opened that back door, was the thing she pretended to offer. Just someone to sit with. Just somebody to talk to. Just a little less quiet in the house. She found them because she knew what they needed. And then she made sure they paid for it. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. Murder. Murder. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media. Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode early and ad free. We'll be back on Tuesday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dylan and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.