Brilliant Brutality - Prairie Village, Kansas

Summary

Small Town Murder – “Brilliant Brutality - Prairie Village, Kansas”

Podcast: Small Town Murder
Hosts: James Pietragallo, Jimmie Whisman
Date: September 25, 2025

Overview

In this gripping episode, James and Jimmie delve into a horrific double homicide in Prairie Village, Kansas—a crime so brutal the town was compelled to change its street addresses. This deep-dive unpacks the story of Deborah Green, a woman whose life crumbles from professional brilliance to substance abuse and, finally, lethal violence. Combining in-depth research with the hosts’ signature irreverent wit, the episode explores the tragic downfall of a family that had “everything,” and the ripple effects that left a community shattered.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Prairie Village: Picture-Perfect… On the Surface (06:15–16:18)

• Prairie Village is presented as a model suburb: safe, affluent, with high educational standards and almost nonexistent crime.

  “Prairie Village is one of the safest cities ever… The only major crimes are police chases from Kansas City…” —James (08:33)

• Demographic breakdown: predominantly white, wealthy, highly educated, with high property values and low crime rates.
• Social and cultural snapshot: reviews, local festivals (bucket truck rides from the mayor, “Mr. Stinky Feet”), jazz festivals, and the unremarkable, almost sterile suburbs backdrop the shocking nature of the murder.

2. The Backstory: Deborah Green’s Path from Prodigy to Doctor (23:29–57:54)

• Deborah Green: A child prodigy with a 160 IQ. Taught herself to read at two-and-a-half, musically talented, and excelled academically and socially.
• Early life: Deb’s parents pressured her and her sister to succeed. Deb was especially driven, but also described as difficult and sometimes arrogant.
• She becomes an emergency physician, switching to oncology due to a perceived flooded job market—always academically ahead of peers, but signs of emotional volatility.
• Marriage history: First to Dwayne Green (an engineer, marriage described as a convenience); later, she meets and marries Michael Farrar, another young doctor with ambitions in cardiology.

3. A High-Achieving Family: The Appearance of Success (59:33–73:29)

• Deborah and Michael become Kansas City’s power-couple: heart doctor and cancer doctor, living in a Tudor mansion, three intelligent, high-achieving kids.
• Outwardly, the perfect family—private school, ballet, sports, wealth.

  “That’s a power couple. That’s pretty goddamn good.” —James (59:41)

4. Cracks Appear: Mental Illness, Substance Use, and Marital Turmoil (70:10–81:49)

• Deborah’s mental health deteriorates: weight gain, chronic pain, migraines, increasing alcohol/drug use.
• Her career falters; she fails medical board certifications—reported as detached, lacking empathy.
• Michael and Deborah’s marriage unravels: emotional neglect, mutual resentment, violent arguments, and concern over her ability to parent while heavily drinking.
• Deborah becomes alternately more erratic and obsessed with Michael, who begins an affair with a fellow parent, Margaret Hacker.

5. Escalation: Fire, Poison, and the Point of No Return (84:54–113:42)

• First house fire (1994): Family returns from a picnic to find their home ablaze. Ruled an accident due to faulty VCR wiring; they move into a new six-bedroom mansion.

• Poisoning attempts (1995): Michael suffers repeated, mysterious, nearly fatal illnesses (diarrhea, sepsis)—eventually determined to be consistent with ricin poisoning.

  “She fucking made literal terrorist warfare materials to murder me, like I’m a Japanese subway. This is fucking crazy.” —James (112:15)

• Police find castor beans (used to make ricin) and potassium chloride vials in Deborah’s possession.

• Michael moves out; Deborah undergoes psychiatric commitment for major depression and suicidal impulses.

6. The Night of Horror: The Triple Tragedy (116:33–132:24)

• After a heated phone fight in which Michael says, “I know you were poisoning me,” (116:33) the house is engulfed in flames (12:21am). Deborah and middle child Kate escape, but two children, Tim (13) and Kelly (6), perish.

  • Deborah’s story: Woke to a fire alarm, escaped through her bedroom; told Tim (over intercom) to stay and wait for help rather than to escape.
  • Fire investigators find multiple, disconnected points of origin—clear arson, multiple gallons of accelerant used particularly around the children’s wing.

• Witnesses:

  • Neighbors note Deborah’s disturbing calm and indifference as the house burns.

    “She was just real nonchalant. She never said her children were in the house.” —Neighbor (121:23)

  • Kate (10) is a hero, escapes by jumping off the garage roof, is let down by her own mother:

    “She said, ‘Jump,’…but mom missed me when I jumped… she sucked. She saw Deborah take her arms back and let [Kate] fall.” (146:07)

7. The Evidence: Irrefutable Proof & Chilling Motive (133:52–166:25)

• Arson analysis: Multiple pour patterns, heavy accelerants, deliberate blockage of children’s escape routes—clear intent to kill.
• Book evidence: Deborah had borrowed and was reading novels about mothers who kill their families (“Necessary Lies”) and checked out books on intrafamilial homicide.
• Ricin evidence: Receipts from out-of-season castor bean seed purchases; Michael’s blood tested positive for ricin exposure.

8. Prosecution, Plea, and Aftermath (186:04–189:24)

• Deborah initially maintains innocence, tries to blame her 13-year-old son for both the fire and the poisonings during legal defense.

• Ultimately accepts a plea deal:

  “I believe this is best to end this now so that we can begin to heal from our horrible loss.” —Deborah (proffer at sentencing, 185:40)

• Sentence: Two life terms (no parole for 40 years), plus arson and attempted murder charges. Eligible at 84 years old.

• Michael Farrar: Survived, suffered lifelong health consequences, eventually died in 2023.

• Kate: Maintained for years that her mother was innocent; her life irrevocably changed.

• Deborah is profiled in Ann Rule’s book Bitter Harvest, which became a bestseller and inspiration for true crime media adaptations.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the perceived safety of Prairie Village:

  “It is very safe, very sterilized type of joint here. That said, let’s talk about some horrible, terrible murder.” —James (21:51)

• Deborah’s horrifying detachment:

  “He used to be my 13-year-old.” —Deborah, referring to her son moments after his death (155:03)

• At her plea hearing:

  “My attorneys are ready and willing to present evidence that I was not in control of myself when Tim and Kelly died. However true that may be, defending myself at trial would only compound the suffering of my family…” —Deborah (185:05)

• Community reaction to Deborah after the fire:

  “[At the funeral,] she told her parents to ‘shut the fuck up.’” (178:58)

• Cops on initial investigation:

  “This is arson and intentional murder as well. Murder and two double homicide.” —James on arson findings (139:29)

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Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |--------------|-----------------------------------------------------| | 06:15–16:18 | Prairie Village profile, reviews, events, real estate| | 23:29–57:54 | Deborah Green’s upbringing, intellect, family life | | 70:10–81:49 | Marriage, substance abuse, relationship breakdown | | 84:54–87:49 | First house fire & family dynamic | |116:33–132:24 | The fatal night, fire, and deaths | |133:52–166:25 | Investigation, evidence, suspect interviews | |186:04–189:24 | Plea, sentencing, and aftermath |

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Tone & Style

• Darkly funny/irreverent: Hosts balance harrowing content with levity:

  “You try cleaning the house after half a bottle of tequila. It’s not easy.” —James (76:43)

• Empathetic for victims: The children’s fate is handled with seriousness and visible heartbreak.
• Critical & skeptical: Toward both the “perfect” facade of suburbia and Deborah’s ever-shifting stories.
• Comedic banter: Humorous asides about local festivals, property prices, and their own ignorance about chemical engineering lighten the mood throughout.

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Conclusion

The episode masterfully interweaves local color, character study, psychological depth, forensic detail, and the broader theme of how unaddressed mental illness and toxic family dynamics can devastate even the most “picture-perfect” families. This is more than a tale of murder—it’s an exploration of privilege, denial, control, and the slow, spectacular unraveling of a mind.

If you want details, insight, and a darkly funny journey through one of America’s most chilling crimes, this episode is essential listening.

Transcript

[James Petregallo]

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[James Petregallo]

Week in Prairie Village, Kansas, a wildly intelligent person hands in their medical license amid a failing marriage and begins to lose their mind while slipping into a world of alcohol, drugs, strange threats and eventually two murders that are so horrific the town has to change the street addresses. Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yay.

[James Petregallo]

Oh yay indeed Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petregallo. I'm here with my co host I'm Jimmy Wissman. Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another absolutely crazy edition of Small Town Murder. If you listen to the opening, any murder that's so bad that addresses need to be changed. That's a wild one. This is just a crazy, weird, just odd story we have for you this week. We will get to all of that and more. First of all, though, head over to shutupandgivememurder.com get your first of all, your merchandise, but more importantly, your tickets to live shows. Get those right now. Portland, I believe is sold out. Our next live show in October, but the night after in Seattle at the Moore. Still some tickets there. Let's sell out this more. I'm telling you, man, do it. We have been wanting to play this place since we first went to Seattle and we're very excited to do it. It's a beautiful theater. So come out and see us right then. And I believe the rest of them are. Is there a couple left in Philly? Maybe? Possibly.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Maybe a few.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, maybe a few left in Philly. So get in there for December. That's shut upandgivemerder.com definitely. Also get yourself some Patreon. That's what you need. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is the name of is the name of our other show, by the way, which you should be listening to. But that's the address you need to go to anybody. $5 a month or above. You get access to everything we do. Hundreds of back episodes you've never heard before immediately upon subscription of bonus stuff and then new ones every other week. One Crime in Sports episode and one Small Town Murder and you get it all.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yes, sir.

[James Petregallo]

Every single time this week, which you're going to get for Crime and Sports, we're going to talk about a crazy fight that happened in the NBA in the 70s where almost killed a guy and just changed both of their lives massively. And it's just a wild story. Then for small it's so crazy. Yeah, just butterfly effect going out. Then for Small Town Murder we're going to talk about the history of executions in the United States. A very fun topic, obviously, but just crazy going back to the 1600s. We'll get into all of that. Patreon.com crimeinsports and you should also listen to Crime in Sports, that show, the other one that we do. And you should listen to your stupid opinions as well because it's damn hilarious. So get in there and check that all out. Disclaimer time.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

This is a comedy show. We're comedians. We also try to tell real murder stories better than anybody else in the world. That's our goal here. So, yeah, that's the game. The most information. Everything is as real as it could possibly be. No details are made up for comedic effect or any garbage like that. You might go, well, how does that work? How do you make jokes around murders? Very simple. Here we don't make fun of the victims.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Or the victims families.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Why, James?

[James Petregallo]

Because we're assholes.

[Jimmy Wissman]

But.

[James Petregallo]

But we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's real simple. It's a real easy line to cross there and not to cross. So good time. Yeah. So if that sounds good to you, you're gonna hear one hell of an incredible wild story. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever, ever mix. I don't know, maybe this show isn't for you, but maybe it is. Either way, no complaining later.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There it is.

[James Petregallo]

I think it's time everybody to sit back. What do you say here? Let's all clear the lungs and let's all shout shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody.

[Jimmy Wissman]

All right.

[James Petregallo]

Let's go on a trip, shall we? All right. We are going to Kansas this week. And this is very close to Skidmore, Missouri, which was a few weeks back.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Petregallo]

In distance, it's not very far at all. It's all kind of Kansas City suburbs. Yeah. This is in Prairie Village, Kansas, which sounds like it's a tumbleweed is blowing through it, like there's nobody there. Prairie Village, it's in far eastern Kansas, kind of in the northeastern part there. It's a suburb of Kansas City. It's 20 minutes to Kansas City, Missouri. About 10 minutes to overland Park, Kansas as well, where a lot of crazy stuff has happened. And about 15 minutes to Lenexa, Kansas, which was our last Kansas episode. Episode 577. It's been a little while. Behind the serial killer's mask was that one that was like, yeah, crazy one. Kansas never lets us down. And this is all in one area. I mean, within 15 minutes. So that's interesting. This is in Johnson county, area code 913. Now, a little bit of history of this town. In 1858, a guy named Thomas Porter bought 160 acres of land.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

And that's how this started. And he did it as a farm.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Man with a dream.

[James Petregallo]

Man with a dream. He raised all his children on the farm and was involved in the agricultural development and everything like that. So during the 1940s, J.C. nichols, a developer, wanted to turn the farmland into suburban house suburbs, suburban housing for soldiers who were returning from World War II. That was his thing. So he bought the farmland from the Porters and a couple other families who had bought into the Porters farmland. And yeah, so he put it in and he tried to do this. Prairie Village started to expand. They built the Prairie Village shopping center in 1947 and then another shopping center and then a bunch of subdivisions with names like Corinth Hills and Corinth Meadows and Corinth Estates and Somerset Hills and Ridgeview High. A lot of hills, heights, meadows and estates going on.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Now we got a town.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, now it's a town. Yeah. Some reviews of this town. Here's five stars. Okay. And there's no bad reviews of this town too. There's like 50 reviews and none of them are below three stars.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I love it.

[James Petregallo]

Really like it here. Here's five stars. Prairie Village is one of the safest cities ever. We'll be the judge of that. We have statistics. The only major crimes are police chases from Kansas City. And the community is very supportive and there is hardly ever any racism. The only con to Prairie Village is the massive trees that fall down in the major storms that we get now. And then we get a storm and a tree falls down and you're. Why mention that? That happens. It's weather. Five stars. Prairie Village is an amazing town to live in. Has the best location on Kansas side where roads and streets are very well maintained and very safe. And yet within minutes to KC metro areas such as Club Country Club Plaza, KC Power and Light District and Brookside. Yeah, I don't know. Highly rated, award winning public schools. My goodness.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Wow. Here's three stars. It's a decent community.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Decent.

[James Petregallo]

Generally safe, with a police station close by. It's a bit boring, but if you're looking for a good middle class place to raise a family, this is it. So yeah, if you're looking for your soul to die, but your kids to get a good education, this is good and boring life.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You can pay your taxes and get on with it.

[James Petregallo]

Move on. Move on. Enjoy. Here's three stars. Prairie Village is perfectly fine. Perfectly. When someone says that, you know it's not perfectly fine.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There's a guy with a bag of moldy bread that pulled out three pieces like, these are okay. Make a sandwich.

[James Petregallo]

That's what I say when I get food at a restaurant that I don't want. It's perfectly fine. Just don't worry. Yeah, I like Your sandwich too. So the Prairie Village, perfectly fine. The yards have oak trees and we know because they fall down in the street all the time. The houses are reasonably sized. The people are generally nice. There are a few Starbucks.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay, few, that's good.

[James Petregallo]

And then sums it all up with it's the suburbs.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It is.

[James Petregallo]

That's all you need to know really. Right there. It's lots of houses, a couple of Starbucks and some strip malls. That's what we got people in this town. 22,812 people.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, it's good size.

[James Petregallo]

Decent sized town, I guess right outside Kansas City in a suburban area. Kind of upscale. More. And this is strange for such a town with so many people. It is 54 and a half percent women, which it's usually very close either way when it's this big of a town. So that's strange. It's fine, but it's strange. The median age here is about a year older than the national average. It's 39.7. Family here, 57% married, which is well above the national average. It's the burbs, man. Less than 10% of people are single with children here. People stay married and they have kids. Race of this town, 93.8% white, 0.6% black, 1.3% Asian and 3.2% Hispanic. We have religion in this town. 56% of the people here are religious, which is above the national average. But there's no clear cut real. There's a lot of other Christian faith. There's some Catholics, there's some Methodists. It's just kind of mixed all around really. If you think about has low unemployment here, actually it's about half the national average. Very low unemployment. There's a lot of places to work here because Kansas City's right there. There's a bunch of different cities. Median household income here is also way up above the national average. Median household income here is $92,753.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Doing great. It's perfectly fine.

[James Petregallo]

23,000 over the national average. And then cost of living here we go here. Prairie Village is 100 as regular in the United States average here it's 106. It's a little high cost of living wise. And the housing is the highest one out of all of them. Median home cost here, $399,700, $400,000. In the rest of the state of Kansas, it's $194,000.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What is going on?

[James Petregallo]

So it's. This is a very upscale area.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Very nice.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. This is now there's not a lot of trailer parks or any of that stuff.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's perfectly fine.

[James Petregallo]

Perfectly fine. You're going to like it, not love it. You're gonna like it and live here and deal with it. So if we've convinced you, dammit, the only place to be is Prairie Village, Kansas. We have for you the Prairie Village, Kansas real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here goes for $1,710 a month, which is high. That's about. It's almost 500 above the national average. So that's, that's cooking right there. Here is a house. It is a two bedroom, one bath, 975 square foot house. Little as you can see. It looks nice from the outside. It's got a one car garage. Kind of looks like BTK's house a little bit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's a.

[James Petregallo]

It's a kind of a plain, small little house.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It looks bigger than 900.

[James Petregallo]

It does.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's crazy.

[James Petregallo]

It does. The front looks, doesn't go very deep, I don't think. Here this is on God, not even. It's 8,000, 8,800 square feet of land. $260,000 for that? For a tiny house on no land, nothing. And they just farm, agriculture, worker, house. No shit. They just cut the price on that 20 grand. Every house that we've done in the last like two months in the real estate reports all has a huge price got in them. All of them Here is a three bedroom, two bath, 1440 square foot house. This one again just a raised ranch, single level. It's nice, newly painted and you can see like inside it's got nice floors. And it's definitely redone. Yeah, it's definitely redone, but it's only 1400 square feet here. It's on 0.34 acres. It is $469,900. How that is crazy. That does not seem like it's worth it in the slightest here. And that's with a price cut too.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And then finally three bedroom, four bath, T bowl for each and every b hole and one left over 3012 square feet. It's not a house, it's a condo.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What you get part of this 3,000 square foot condo.

[James Petregallo]

Condo, yes. So you get no acreage. It's literally a condo. I mean it's very nice on the inside, very fancily done and all that kind of shit. $2,450,000. There's no land. I wish everybody could have seen right there the look on Jimmy's face.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It looked like what do you do?

[James Petregallo]

It looked like I just told him, hey, your 14 year old daughter just made the Denver Broncos roster. The 53, man. She's on it. You'd be like, what? How? I don't get how that works. She doesn't even play football. She doesn't even like it. I don't get it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I don't understand. If you look on your $2 million, why would you want to live amongst other people?

[James Petregallo]

I have no idea why you wouldn't want some. Unless you're living in Manhattan or something. If you're living in Kansas, especially. Give me some room.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh shit.

[James Petregallo]

Don't fence me in, motherfucker. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Don't give me an elevator that other people use. No.

[James Petregallo]

God no. I don't want to ever touch anything anyone else.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Unless it's my kids and my wife.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Two million dollars.

[James Petregallo]

No, no strangers are touching anything I touch. For two and a half million. Not happening.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Right.

[James Petregallo]

Things to do in this town. Here we go. They have the village fest. Yeah, this is a fourth of July event here. This is what happened this year. They had. They started out with a patriotic ceremony and community spirit award. Yeah, I don't know what that's all about. Then the mayor's welcome from the CFD2 bucket truck on the skate park lawn. That sounds very official. Go and get the mayor up in the bucket truck, put him over near the half pot and let him tell us something patriotic Electric company, right? Yeah, I think so. Or maybe the fire department. It might be the.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh yeah. Doing bucket truck rides. God damn, that's a big day.

[James Petregallo]

The mayor's going to welcome you from atop the bucket truck. Then from 7:30 to 9am There is a pie baking contest, registration and a pie drop off.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, but no eating contest.

[James Petregallo]

No, no, no. That's what I was waiting for. Then at 11 o'. Clock. So in two hours they're going to parse the whole town's pie making skills. Because by 11 the pie results are in on the main stage.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Calculated.

[James Petregallo]

We got it. Then at 11am line up for children's parade. Decorate your bikes, trikes and wagons to parade down Mission Road. All are welcome to participate. No registration is necessary. Jump right in. Then the entertainment comes.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Here we go.

[James Petregallo]

At 10am this is awesome. On the main stage, right across from city hall, right by where the mayor will be addressing you from the bucket truck. The top of bucket truck, Mr. Stinky Feet and the Hiccups will be performing. Mr. Stinky Feet and the Hiccups.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's everybody's uncle.

[James Petregallo]

He's coming. He's going to be there. He's not going to be there for that long because at 11am Multiphonic will be there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

All right.

[James Petregallo]

I don't know what that's all about. Then Sterling Silver Sound DJ will be playing. Yeah, so there's that. Now if that's not your cup, that's it. That's the whole festival.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's one day, Stinky feet and some Sterling silver.

[James Petregallo]

Dj, this shit's over by one in the afternoon. It's a Fourth of July festival. That is done by one.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Fireworks.

[James Petregallo]

That's it. No fireworks. No. It's fucking bright. The middle of the day.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's time for a hot dog and we don't serve. Get the fuck out.

[James Petregallo]

Go fire up your grills, assholes. Enjoy. Fuck off. So the. There's also the Prairie Village Jazz Festival. Mm. So we got that. This is where I would expect all the best jazz to come from. Rural. Not rural, suburban Kansas. That's where it all comes from.

[Jimmy Wissman]

But it's close to Kansas City. That's what they're banking, right?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, I suppose so that's probably the theme of why they do it. This is actually an evening thing. Doesn't take place at 7 o' clock in the morning. At 3:05 to 3:35, which is not a long set, the Shawnee Mission East Blue Knights will be playing. They're a student jazz ensemble so you know that's going to be excellent. Then at 4 to 4:50, Henry Scamor Skamora's Urban Forum. The fuck I don't know. Henry Skamora apparently graduated from UMKC Conservatory.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And he formed this band, Urban Forum. Oh, it's a band with Spencer Reese, a vibraphone and then a vibraphonist.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I don't even know what that thing is.

[James Petregallo]

I threw my hands up on that one. Isaiah Petrie and some drummer. They released their self titled album in January 2025. You can find out more at henryscamora.com.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Figure out how to spell Skamora.

[James Petregallo]

Good luck everybody. Enjoy. 5:10-6pm Brad Gregory Sextet with Clint Ashlock. He's gonna have sextet with Clint Ashlock Sextet gonna be gross. This is a composed of local Kansas City trumpet players.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

Band leader Brad Gregory played for the Houston Jazz Orchestra and worked as a professional jazz musician in New York City before relocating with his family to Kansas City. After failure. After failure. I didn't. That's not in there. I put the comma after failure because that's why you'd move there if you're a musician.

[Jimmy Wissman]

New York City.

[James Petregallo]

New York City. So yeah, they're gonna play a mix of covers and originals.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, and their owns.

[James Petregallo]

Then the Vanessa Thomas trio will be there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, three Vanessa Thomases, all three of them.

[James Petregallo]

Vanessa Thomas has been wowing audiences across the country for years with her five octave range and versatility across genres. Oh my goodness, why wouldn't you? Of course, vanessatomasesings.com for more. Then finally 7:45, the headliners of the night. Glamour Profession is their name. Glamour profession. What do you think they do?

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'll tell you, Vanessa Thomas is pissed. She's got five fucking octaves. Doing this for years, traveling the country and she's being upstaged by fucking glamour puss. What are they?

[James Petregallo]

Wait till you hear what glamour profession does. They are a Steely Dan cover band.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh my God.

[James Petregallo]

You're reeling in the years over and over again because what other stuff? No Steely Dan cover band.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh my God.

[James Petregallo]

It's composed of 11 of Kansas City's finest rock and jazz musicians. It takes 11 of you to recreate Steely Dan.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. How many are in Steely Dan?

[James Petregallo]

Is it not 11, I hope? Yeah, five tops. I would say they play more than just the hits. They also play covers, fan favorites and deep cuts. Gotta get that deep cut off the Asia album. Fuck out of here. Oh my God. You can follow Glamour Profession. KC Also on social media, crime rate in this town, what we're concerned with here, the property crime is about one third below the national average. So not gonna steal too much of your shit then. Violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is about 2/3 below the national average. This is a safe ass place, man. Very, very safe. It is very safe, very sterilized type of joint here. That said, let's talk about some horrible, terrible murder. What do you say? All right, let's start out by talking about two people named Joanne and Bob Jones. Okay. The story is going to start out in Havana, Illinois, which I did not know existed at all. And I really want to murder there in Havana, Illinois. It's a little small farming town, basically kind of the place you kind of drive past.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Havana.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. If you're going to like Champaign, Illinois, you'll pass Havana type of joint here. So this place, there's a woman named Joan which everyone pronounces as Joanne for some reason.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh boy.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. Joan Purdy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Now she met a guy named Robert Jones and they got married and settled down in Havana.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What? She is Joan Jones.

[James Petregallo]

Joan Joanne Jones. Maybe that's why she goes by Joanne.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I would.

[James Petregallo]

She went by Joanne before that, though.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Maybe she knew.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Very clear. Yeah. Clairvoyant gal.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, ESP on it. She got her Ouija board out and figured this shit out. So they get married very young. Joan just turned 18 and Bob is 17 when they get married.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, really?

[James Petregallo]

So this is some old school, 1940s farm marriage type of shit here. They are going to have two daughters here that we'll talk about. And they're going to kind of basically grow up. Both parents came from large families. That's why. And they both came up really poor, which explains why they got married so early.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Early, yeah. If there's eight other kids in the house and you don't have any money, you're looking to get the hell out of there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I gotta save myself.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Now, Joan is a really, really smart young lady. She's blonde and pretty and really smart. She won a partial scholarship to Stevens College in Columbia, Missouri. She went as a freshman even though her new husband didn't want her to go.

[Jimmy Wissman]

No, no, she's not 18 yet. Who's gonna watch me?

[James Petregallo]

She's like, you have to stay home. I'm sorry. I'll get you a babys. So this is a prestigious women's college. And a lot of the other kids. There are very wealthy kids going there. And Joan is not a very wealthy kid. So she had to make up the difference between. Her scholarship didn't cover everything, so she had to actually work to make up the difference and everything like that. So that's way different than all the other girls at the school pretty much. And this is the late 40s, and she wants to get the new clothes because fashion didn't really change much for like 10 years because of the war. But then after the war, that's when like, fashion exploded. And, you know, people wanted new furniture and new stuff and they just, you know, you wanted to completely kind of clear out the Great Depression, you know, years of war thing and start over again, basically forget all about that. Yeah. So she didn't have that kind of money, though. She, you know, still dressed the way she did before she came to school and stuff like that. So she felt kind of out of place with everybody. She called them the snooty girls.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. So she dropped out of college eventually. Oh, and that's when she marries Bob. They were together before that. Now he's very handsome guy and he's only, you know, five, eight, but he's real muscular. Oh, real muscular guy. And a handsome face on him. Yeah. So they got married on Halloween, 1948. But Joan had a dream of becoming a math teacher.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Which is a. I don't think a lot of kids, if you ask them, what do you want to be when you grow up? They say, specifically, a math teacher. There's not a lot of that nowadays.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, it's not a lot of.

[James Petregallo]

But she did. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Very few people want to be teachers in the first place. That's usually what they teach.

[James Petregallo]

Back in the day, people used to want to be teachers all the time. That was a very common profession for people want to be. But nowadays, for the last 40 years, everybody knows teachers don't make any fucking money, so nobody wants to. It's not really a goal that much anymore. So you used to be able to make a living off being a teacher.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Now it's. It's difficult. I know that because every single year, I give fucking thousands of dollars to our listeners who put up their. Their lists.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Their children's lists.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, dude. We do that every year. And it's like, why? God damn it. You know? It sucks that we have to do that. Why?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Why do we have to.

[James Petregallo]

Why do I have to give you so much money? I know I do. It's not their fault. I'm just like, damn it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Why are we crowdsourcing Mrs. Bethel's fucking art project classes? What is happening?

[James Petregallo]

This isn't even for art projects. It's not even that. It's for, like, basic shit, like pencils and paper and things that she needs to, like, visual aids for, like, very.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What the fuck?

[James Petregallo]

And forget about the special ed classes. There's a million of those. Those. I dig deep. I dig deep in the pocket for those. So it's tough, man.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We don't support shit anymore.

[James Petregallo]

No. So Joan, she becomes pregnant pretty much immediately and gives birth to Pamela in the summer of 1949. And then two years later, 1951. Here, February 28, 1951, to be exact. They have a daughter named Deborah. Now it's going to end up being spelled D E B O R A. At first they had an H on it, Then they took it off. Change her mind. Didn't want that. Then they changed it to debrub. D E B R A. Thought that was easier. Then they called her Debbie, then Deb. And then they finally figured out after a while, how about D E B O, R A? That's perfect. That's the compromise. So the household is happy enough. Joan Is a homemaker. Dad goes out and works and does that sort of thing. That was just it. They stayed together. And it was a 1940s marriage, average house. Doesn't matter how miserable they are. Damn it. They're gonna stay together.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We're gonna figure it out.

[James Petregallo]

He'll have a couple more drinks, she'll do a couple more word searches, and we'll be fine. Everybody's gonna got to figure it out. So the girls are both little cute kids. Both of them are really smart, but Deborah is like an actual genius. She is really, really insanely smart. She taught herself to read by two and a half.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Whoa.

[James Petregallo]

No one taught her. She looked at the newspaper by herself and could read and started writing by that time as well.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Two and a half.

[James Petregallo]

Turns out she has a 160IQ, by the way. Brilliant kid, which is extremely fucking brilliant. Like that is really, really, really smart. 160, 140 is genius. So what does that say? She's killing it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's doing great.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she's doing amazing. Really. Hey, everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you a better way to shop with stitch fix.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Stitch fix.com.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely. Because I'm gonna be real honest with you. Shopping, it sounds great and all, but it's not that fun. It really isn't. It's actually a nightmare, especially if you don't know what you're trying to get. Here. I spent all this. I'll zoom in on things. I'm looking at them, I'm trying to find. I don't know what I'm buying out there. I have no idea. I end up with a cart full of things that don't feel right. I'll get 10 things and three of them will fit. The rest, I don't know what to do with. It's a mess. It's an absolute mess. That's why Stitch Fix is what you need. It makes everything so much easier.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I.

[James Petregallo]

A personal stylist sends pieces that match your size, style, and everything is in your budget. No guesswork, no stress. It's going to be excellent stuff here. All you have to do. This is how Stitch Fix works. It's super simple, and it's great. You take a quick style quiz, share your size, style and budget, and get matched with a real human stylist, not some AI person who gets your vibe and understands this thing. It's really great. The stylus is an awesome thing. You get personalized pieces that I actually like and that actually fits fit, and they actually know what's like in style and all that stuff because we can't follow that. Oh, boy. Yeah, you look and you feel great and it's super easy. It's no risk. All style. Get personalized fix box. Get that sent straight to your door and try it all on in the comfort of your home. Shipping and returns are always free, no subscription required. Plus you get a try on for your first fix for free. Get started [e-mail] STM to get $20 off your first order and they'll waive your styling fee. That's stitchfix.com STM now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you about our SafeSt sponsor, SimpliSafe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

SimpliSafe.com S I M P L I Safe.com that's right.

[James Petregallo]

We want to talk to you about your home security for just a minute here. Just. I used to think home security was an alarm that goes off after there's a break in and the guy would get scared and, God, people are going to hear this and they run away and maybe get your neighbor's attention. But that's pretty reactive. I mean, things are already happening by that time. An intruder is in your home, it's too late. You've heard Small Town murder. You're listening to it right now. It's way too late. If someone's in your home, you're already dead. So we can't have that. That's why real security should stop a crime before it even starts, right? That's why we trust Simplisafe. Their system is designed to be proactive, not reactive, and really could have made half of our episodes not happen if people had Simplisafe. It's amazing. I love it. My whole house, my studio, Jimmy's house, studio, everything is covered by Simplisafe because it's the best. It's simply the best. That's all there is to it. They use AI powered smart cameras to identify threats lurking outside your home. They immediately alert Simplisafe's professional monitoring agents. Boom. There you go. These agents intervene in real time before things even happen. They can talk. They have access to two way audio to confront the purse. Hey, stupid, get out of the yard. It's great. It's amazing. Trigger sirens, spotlights to scare them. They request rapid police dispatch when needed. All helping to stop this intruder while they're still outside your house. That's security. So join the the more than 4 million Americans who trust Simplisafe with their home Security every day, including Jimmy and myself here. And with a 60 day money back guarantee and no long term contracts, Simplisafe earns your business by keeping you safe and satisfied every single day. Visit simplisafe.comsmall to claim 50% off a new system. That's SimpliSafe S I M P L I safe.comsmall there's no safe like simply safe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

Joan really wants the girls to succeed because she never got anywhere, basically. I guess she. The only thing Joan would harp on them about was not studying hard enough. She said Joan was obsessed that the daughters had to succeed. Yeah, just had to. Deborah said later on, between my parents, I think I would say my mother was the strongest and the one who made the decisions. She was the serious parent. Bob was the fun parent, kind of mom and dad of the day. Although not really, because back then it would be, wait till your dad gets home, he's gonna. I'm beat you to death. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Mom being the disciplinarian is interesting, but yeah, I mean, somebody's got to play.

[James Petregallo]

Each role, I guess. So you could split them up a little bit there. He, you know, he would play games and make jokes with them. But Joan wanted food or wanted, you know, schoolwork, schoolwork, schoolwork. Now Bob, the dad drove a bakery truck, so that's nice. You're getting free snacks anyway. I've known a couple people that drove bakery trucks. Some shit falls off the truck every day. Yeah, you're getting some.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Was a chuck. Chuck wagon truck.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, hell yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Stealing bear claws like crazy.

[James Petregallo]

Awesome. Awesome. Now, Deborah, real different as we'll talk about here, like we said, teaches herself to read it to 160 IQ. The Deborah. The weird part is both girls are good students, but Deborah's a lazy student. Oh, but she doesn't. She still gets straight A's because she's so fucking smart. She just doesn't have to do. She doesn't have to work very hard to get good grades. And a kid will realize that very quickly. Exactly how much they can dick off and slack and still do what they need to do. Yeah. The shit that you kind of is your whole life when you get older, kids figure it out quick. My whole life is how much can I slack, Right?

[Jimmy Wissman]

How much can I not do this?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And that's what Deborah's all about is accomplishments, scholastic things. The fact that she's so smart, that's all anybody ever talks about. So that's all she kind of is, basically. She also Would. She would kind of be shitty if she didn't think people were as smart as her. She'd be kind of shitty to them also, which, I mean, you're telling her she's so brilliant from a young age. It's really kind of hard for a kid to not do that at that point. Also, she's athletic. She's a good musician.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Mm.

[James Petregallo]

It's wild. So dad's driving the butternut bread bakery truck. Butternut bread. And, you know, would move up in the company a little bit. But Deborah said we didn't have a lot of money, but we always had everything we needed. She nothing negative or unusual about her childhood. She was never beaten or dragged into some trees, you know, and felt up by a bunch of boys or anything weird like that. Nothing crazy happened to her. She said, you know, everything was fine. There was one incident, though, that other family members recall. Deborah was angry with her father when he came home drunk from a bowling tournament. Oh, okay. If I'm driving a fucking bread truck all day, every goddamn day. Bowling tournament, which it seems like a special event.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

It's not like he's bowling. Every night is a tournament and he.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Got a little tank every night. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And my child is telling me, giving me the what for.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We're gonna have a talk.

[James Petregallo]

You're gonna be writing something 100, 200 times to shut the. Just to keep you out of my hair. Go away.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I won't bother dad when he's pissed.

[James Petregallo]

Quit fucking up my buzz. Get out of here. God damn. I worked hard for this buzz.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Come home and get yelled at by you.

[Jimmy Wissman]

This is an expensive buzz. Leave me alone.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Jesus Christ. It was late at night. She stayed up, pissed off, waiting for dad to come home. What? Everyone else was asleep.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She sat on the couch.

[James Petregallo]

How dare he? Yeah, how dare he?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Where have you been?

[James Petregallo]

Wow, that is wild. You like, you're the daughter, right? All shit faced. What happened?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Is there homework done?

[James Petregallo]

She popped in the kitchen as he was counting several hundred dollars. He won in the tournament.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, I got drunk and won.

[James Petregallo]

I got drunk. Yeah, I won. So I got drunk, I think is really probably what it was. Getting drunk and then winning a bowling tournament. Probably, isn't it?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

[James Petregallo]

But yeah. So she's gonna come in breaking balls. She screamed at him and yelled at him. And later on she felt bad about it because she found out that the money he always got from stuff like that he put into her college fund. It was for her. He didn't spend it on himself. At all. He had like a coffee can that he put it in for her.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I drank a couple beers because I don't get to keep all this.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, this sucks. So. Yeah, she said. Ah, God damn it. So Deborah and Pam, her sister, shared a room. They got along pretty well. Pam is smart, too, but Deborah is like next level smart. So, Pam, if your little sister is so much smarter than you, it's got to kind of piss you off a little bit, I would think. But Deborah took piano and violin lessons and was very good at both. Continued to play piano into her college years. Yeah, she's incredibly smart. She was the National Merit scholar, the co valedictorian. And so you would think maybe, you know, she seems kind of prickly and awfully smart. She'd probably be that, like, nerdy girl that is nobody really wants to talk to because she's kind of snotty, too, at the same time. But not true at all. She was also on the student council. She was a cheerleader.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

Which that's not.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's rare that the smart girl's that pretty, too.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Yeah. Or has time to be a cheerleader. You know what I mean? So she's doing all that. One of her classmates said she was a hard worker, intelligent and pleasant. He said she was quiet, nice and smart. This is. Yeah, she said. He said it's just, you know, he sat next to her in chemistry, said she was. Did everything right. She was a cheerleader. She dated the varsity football quarterback.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Dang. What?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she's got to have all the success she can have in every aspect. She played violin and piano. She did everything one of her class or the principal said she fit right in. She was rather aggressive. She was a rather aggressive girl. You could tell she was going to be successful. Yeah, absolutely. And she ends up going off to college at the University of Illinois where she's from there. Where she will. Yeah. The aligner. Fighting aligner with the orange helmets. She majored in chemical engineering.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Dang. She's hot, driven and brilliant. That's amazing.

[James Petregallo]

That seems hard. Chemical engineering.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, I can understand, like, electrical or, like structural but chemical or further.

[James Petregallo]

No.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Biological. No. I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

I don't understand any of it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

By the way, how do you make. She knows all about gasoline, man.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. I don't know anything about engineering of anything.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She can make gasoline.

[James Petregallo]

I couldn't even drive a plane.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's incredible.

[James Petregallo]

Couldn't even drive a train. I wouldn't know what to do. No engineering of any guy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I mean, that one. I Think is just throttle and brake.

[James Petregallo]

I still don't know where they are. I don't know. How do you know where the throttle and brake are in a fucking train? I don't either.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Feels like there's probably a lever that goes forward.

[James Petregallo]

There's probably all kinds of levers and a thing to let out like steam and all sorts of shit. I don't know what I would do with that. It would be really hard. So, yeah, chemical engineering, which is, like I said, the word engineering scares me. Quick story. When I was in the 10th grade, the guidance counselor fucked up. Must have pressed the wrong button in the computer when making my schedule. And instead of putting me in one class, she put me in this advanced engineering class.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What did they make?

[James Petregallo]

Everyone else in the class was a senior who'd been taking engineering for three years. This was like the fourth class. I'm in 10th grade. I've never taken engineering before and had no fucking idea what I was doing. So I sat down and I was lost in three seconds. I felt like the dumbest person in the world for like three days. I really did. I felt so stupid. And then I went to the guidance counselor and I'm like, oh, yeah, those kids have been taking that for three years. You came in like in the fourth quarter. You should not know what anything about that. Because I was like, I'm dumb. I am too dumb for this class.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's like, no, I felt in remedial fucking engineering. Remedial English. I felt like the dumbest kid.

[James Petregallo]

Oh God, maybe you should have sat.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Down in that class and like, oh, I think I can handle the other one.

[James Petregallo]

I think I got this. Maybe you could have done chemical and maybe you could have done engineering and didn't know about it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Maybe that's what my brain was just geared for that one.

[James Petregallo]

They had drafting boards in front of us. I was like, what am I? I don't know how to do any of this. This is terrifying.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'm not doing any casting here, guys.

[James Petregallo]

No. So she ends up meeting a guy here. While in her undergraduate here, she dated a man named Dwayne MJ Green. Hell yeah, MJ but sure, yeah, Dwayne MJ Green, he's an engineer and they get married while she's studying at her at Kansas University of Kansas, which is next. They're gonna live together in independence and do all of that. And then things are gonna. Things are gonna have some problems. She later would say, we had absolutely no common interests, is what she said.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Fascinating.

[James Petregallo]

So she graduates a four year program in three years with the chemical engineering in 72. Then goes to University of Kansas Medical school, graduating in 75, which is, again, early. So everything she does is early. Early, always. She switched to medicine because she believed the market was flooded with engineers back then. So, yeah, imagine if you had to decide between. I mean, there's a lot of engineers. I guess I'll just be a doctor. Imagine if that was our decision. Wow, that is awesome. Rather than, I guess I'll go work at Peter Piper Pizza. Wherever you went. And I said, I'll go work it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I guess I write some dick jokes and hope people like it.

[James Petregallo]

In 15 years. What are you talking about? Not out of high school. Oh, God, then I'm talking about college.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There was certainly an influx of pizza makers.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Plenty of people working at Taco Bell for me. Or whatever the fuck I was doing back then. So she chooses emergency medicine as her initial specialty, which is, to me, the craziest form of medicine.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Emergency medicine. Things that people need right now.

[James Petregallo]

To go to work and not know what you're facing at all is crazy to me. To just go in there and be like, someone's gonna come in with a sore throat. And the next guy's gonna come in with a sprinkler key sticking out of his temple. And I gotta deal with both of them back to back and have the same.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Equally.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, equally. Have the nice demeanor for the kid and have the fucking. Holy shit, there's a sprinkler key in you for the guy. There's a lot going on there. So that's too much, I think. I couldn't handle that. About two days of that, I'd have a fucking breakdown. Wouldn't be able to handle it. So she undertook a residency at the Truman Medical center emergency room after her graduation. And she finished this program in three years instead of four again. So a lot of people take eight years to get through all this. She did it in six years.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Dang. A doctor after six years.

[James Petregallo]

Six years. Pretty goddamn impressive. I would say she's going to deal with other specialties as time goes on, but we'll talk about that. By 1978, she's making about 70 grand a year. 1978 money, which is 400 grand a year now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's amazing.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she's doing great as a pretty young person. She's 27, for Christ's sake. She's crushing it. That's when she divorces Dwayne.

[Jimmy Wissman]

See you around, Dwayne.

[James Petregallo]

Bye, Dwayne. Now, Dwayne's. Her version of why the marriage failed is they didn't have any common interests. His version was I put her through college, then she dumped me. That's his version of it. A little bit different. As soon as she got a job and got out of there, she dumped me.

[Jimmy Wissman]

So she didn't need me any longer. Goodbye.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And he's an engineer, so she's not real interested in that. That's what she was when she got with him. That's what she wanted to do, but now, you know, it's different.

[Jimmy Wissman]

So our common interest was getting me through school. Once that was done, it was over. She's not lying. She's just different.

[James Petregallo]

No, she said we had no common interest. Yeah, they did have one common interest, getting her through school.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And then it went away.

[James Petregallo]

Then it was no more. So the divorce, though, everybody says, was pretty amicable because, I don't know, it didn't seem like it was that much passion flowing around where anybody really gave a shit. So pretty much immediately she meets another man. Probably a little before, you know.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she probably bridged that relationship gap.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She could see the. Yeah, she could see it coming through the writing.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. She met a guy named Michael Farrar. F, A, R, R, A, R. Oh, it's a lot of Rs and A's in that name. Farrar. So Michael, he's born in 1955, so he's four years younger than her. He was a medical student at the time, and she was already a practicing physician. He's pretty handsome, and his goal in medicine is to go into cardiology. Okay, so this is. Yeah, this is the perfect matchup. It seems like it's going to be great for them. You know, she also. She's like. She's cool at this point. She's like a young. She's a young chick doctor with a red sports car and all this type of shit. Like, yeah, of course she'd be attractive. Who wouldn't be attractive to that?

[Jimmy Wissman]

And she's had a pretty great goddamn life.

[James Petregallo]

Not too bad so far.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She wins at everything.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And Michael said, quote, I think it was all those things about her that attracted me. Yeah. Her attractiveness in every aspect.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The money, the hot chick, the fact.

[James Petregallo]

That she was attractive. Yeah. Smart. As smart as I am, all that stuff.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It attracted me.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Her attractiveness attracted me. He said the couple of things weren't so great, though. She's very volatile. She'll go from zero to 60 in a heartbeat. Hot, cold, real fast.

[Jimmy Wissman]

A lot of Warm.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she's strung tight. And a lot of times very smart people are wound a little tighter. They're strung a little different than the rest of us here. He also said she, quote, felt threatened by my family's closeness, which is odd. And she described her own family at this point as very cold. So that's why she didn't understand the closeness of their family. She said, my family's just very cold. That was her kind of excuse.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We don't need all that comfort and shit, you guys supporting each other. Do it yourself.

[James Petregallo]

Who needs a hug when you walk in the door? Fuck off.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Hug yourself.

[James Petregallo]

Fuck. That's all. So she would lose her temper at minor things, though. That kind of made him a little bit leery, but he's real stable and dependable, so she. They're kind of a good match for each other when it comes to that. If she pushes, he'll lean back a little bit type of deal, you know?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

So they. Yeah, he'd went to high school in North Kansas City school district, graduated from medical school at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. And then the couple's gonna move to Ohio, where she's gonna finish up what she's doing, and he's gonna start his residency at the University of Cincinnati. So that's how that goes. May 26, 1979, they get married real quick. Yeah, that is real fast. They got married. Michael later will tell somebody that after the. This is during the first couple years of their marriage, that he'd kind of known during the ceremony that he was making a mistake. Oh, during the ceremony. Which is odd.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Hello, Reverend. I'm making a big mistake today. How are you?

[James Petregallo]

So you two have composed your own vows? Yes, I have, my darling. I'm making a huge mistake. I mean, shit. Hold on a minute. I got a. I wrote that note to myself. Sorry. Hold on.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Ever. Whoops a daisy.

[James Petregallo]

You're so beautiful. I love you. Yes. My bad. So he said she had anger management issues. And it wasn't just with him. It was with anybody that she came across. She wants a couple in a parking lot, parked in the parking spot that she'd wanted to go to.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Didn't like, you know, screech in front of her and slam into it, then give her the finger and fucking, you know, walk away with their pants down, showing their asses. Like. Nothing like that. They just pulled in a parking spot that she had wanted to go to.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

So she followed them through the parking lot to berate them for it, for the whole, like, just screaming for 10 minutes about this parking.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Just as we're walking into the store, we're just. She's bitching at him level.

[James Petregallo]

Just fucking going crazy. She'd also yell at restaurant servers.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, no.

[James Petregallo]

Airline staff, anybody. And as much as airline staff deserve to be yelled at, I'm not the guy to yell at them. You know what I mean? I don't yell at. I don't yell at people like that. I just don't. I yell at people who are above me. That could hurt me. That's what I do. Because I'm stupid. She's actually the smart one. I'm an idiot. And I only yell at people that can ruin me.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The man at the gas station that was working the gas station yesterday, I'm on the phone getting a drink, going to my daughter's volleyball game. And I said, fuck. The guy behind the counter said, sir, watch your mouth, please. And I said. And I just went, oh, yeah, sure. And then just went about my life. As I got out to the truck, I was like, why didn't I tell that guy to mind his fucking business? Yeah, fuck you, man. How's that?

[James Petregallo]

That kind of shit I have and.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I still won't do that.

[James Petregallo]

No, see, that kind of shit, it's like a ball bouncing. If you bounce it, I'm coming back at you twice as hard.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Go fuck yourself.

[James Petregallo]

I would have said, no problem, you fucking cunt face. How's that? Better. Better. Dick licker. I would have fucking Just cause I'm an asshole like that. But I would have kissed his ass till he was a dick, though. That's the thing.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

You've seen me with.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

What? You've seen me with servers that completely fuck my order up. And I feel like it's my fault. Like I don't even. I'm sure I did something wrong. Like I'm not a come down on you guy. But don't tell me what to call an adult.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I got. I just. I'm too busy for the fucking. I don't mind dealing with this. I'm not gonna. We're not fighting today. Fuck you.

[James Petregallo]

Not happening. Nope. Fucking unbelievable. So this is what I mean. You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat servers. Yeah, Number one. And anybody that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

Is at that time, quote unquote, beneath them has to serve them or kiss their ass.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Frontline employee. And we're berating their life.

[James Petregallo]

You can tell.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Great. I promise.

[James Petregallo]

You can tell a lot about character like that. But. So anybody who. But it wasn't just that. It Was anyone who crossed her, she would just. If she was in the mood, boy, it was happening. It was gonna be a battle. So that's a lot. It reminds me of my mother and it scares me. Okay. That's what my mom always did.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's just frontline employee. Just berated him.

[James Petregallo]

Not Frontline, Anybody.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Any employee.

[James Petregallo]

Anybody. No. Any a doctor, a fucking. It doesn't matter. It was just any person, right? From my grandmother to anybody. And it used to freak me out as a kid. Cause I'd be like, can we just. It's okay. It's all right. And she'd be like, no. I'd be like, oh, God. Jesus. God. Embarrassed the fuck out of me. But I'm telling you, it was wild. So that's a tough thing. Luckily, she doesn't have any kids at this point to take this in.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's got a real man.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. So now Michael's going to accept an internal medicine residency at the University of Cincinnati. Like I said, they moved to Ohio. And Deborah, who at this point is going by Deborah Green. And that's what. She's going to keep this name. Even though she married.

[Jimmy Wissman]

From Dwayne.

[James Petregallo]

She's keeping Dwayne's name because I think that was her professional name. She started medicine with that. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You got Dr. Green. That's real easy. And, yeah, you don't want people going, what happened to Dr. Green?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And you might make an appointment just based on the fact that she might be giving me weed.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

You don't know Dr. Green. Maybe it's a code. Maybe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Maybe it's just Dr. Green.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sounds like a doctor that's done this a long time and just fucking knows what to do.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely. So she goes into her own practice or goes into a practice at Cincinnati's Jewish Hospital as an emergency physician. But eventually, she didn't really like the emergency room thing. No. She switched specialties and joined a second residency in internal residence and internal medicine, joining Michael's program. So now they're doing that together.

[Jimmy Wissman]

This cardiology set.

[James Petregallo]

Well, yeah, it starts out with internal medicine, I guess. And they're going from there now. By the way, later on, there is an Ann Rule book about this whole thing. Now, if you're not like a big true crime aficionado, if Ann Rule writes a book that means shit has gone off the rails, it's gone crazy. Bad things have happened.

[Jimmy Wissman]

If Ann Rule's heard of this, you got issues.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Cause every one of her audiobooks is 18 hours long and extremely detailed. Shit. You have fucked up royally. If an Rule is sitting there taking notes at your trial. Bad stuff here. So the bad things are gonna happen. Now, Ann Rule describes it this way. She describes how Deborah kind of coasted through college and med school easily, really had no problems. She said, quote, her genetic gifts of talent and intelligence had always made her life so easy, and there were precious few things she wanted that she did not get. Perhaps that's why she behaved outrageously when anyone crossed her. She couldn't abide anyone who questioned her intelligence or any glitch in plans that inconvenienced her because she had everything so set out.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. So she didn't expect people to be as smart as her. They just. She just expect them to bow before because she's better than them.

[James Petregallo]

Bow before my altar of intelligence. Stupid. What the fuck is wrong with you?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Incredible. It's not her going, listen, what's so hard about trigonometry? She's going, listen, I do trigonometry, so.

[James Petregallo]

You'Re clearly inferior to me is what she's saying. Obviously, so you should kiss my ass. And also, when her plans are laid out and then they don't come to fruition like she wants, that makes her fucking crazy, too.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So now, in the early 80s, she starts to develop some medical issues. She had surgery on her wrist. Her wrist got infected somehow, so she had to have surgery to remove some abscess or some shit. Also, migraines and insomnia she gets as well, which I would think the stress of doing another medical residency and doing all that would give you migraines and insomnia.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Well, also, she's probably got an exhausted brain. That thing's probably working hard.

[James Petregallo]

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you're doing all that, I would fucking.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It probably hurts a little. You use your elbow too much. That motherfucker hurts.

[James Petregallo]

Tennis elbow. I'd be on the floor with a green fluid dripping out of my ear, probably, if I tried to get all out of my head. And I can't. I don't know it. So they're gonna start having kids here, these two. On January 20, 1982, they have their first child, a son named Timothy. Goes by Tim.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She wants children, huh?

[James Petregallo]

She wants children? Absolutely. She wants it all. I mean, she wants a family, she wants the career, she wants everything, and so does he. They both want it all. She did a six week maternity leave, then returned to her fellowship in hematology and oncology.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Whoa.

[James Petregallo]

At University of Sympathy. She's going into oncology. As her specialty.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Which is good for her.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's something I could never.

[James Petregallo]

No, it's too sad. But it would feel amazing to be able to help someone with that. So maybe that's why you do that. It has to be the drive to treat it better, I would think.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. So I have a medical issue, whatever. But they thought it was cancer. So they sent me to the cancer doctor and he's like, there's a couple ways you can treat it. You can do stuff at home or you can come here. He goes, do you want to come here? He asked me that.

[James Petregallo]

Obviously not.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He doesn't even want to go there. And he gets paid, I'm sure, incredibly well to be there. I don't know how oncologists show up every day. Not every day. I might work once every three days.

[James Petregallo]

It sounds horrifying.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Treat it like a fireman, because that's crazy.

[James Petregallo]

But for you, that was a good visit because you don't have kids.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, yeah, I don't have kids.

[James Petregallo]

And his main thing was, hey, stop eating that shit. That was his main.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Stop fucking around. Take life seriously.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's much better than. So that's the thing you go for is, hey, you don't have cancer. You're an idiot, but you don't have cancer. You don't take care of yourself like an adult.

[Jimmy Wissman]

But you can't operate a train, or this body very well, to be honest.

[James Petregallo]

I'm gonna be quite honest with you. So December 27, 1984, almost three years later, they have a daughter named Kate. Yeah. So here we go. 1985, she received a fellowship in hematology and oncology, and she completed that. I'm sorry, that was before she completed it in 85. So now she's got two kids, a completed fellowship, everything's going great. So she returned to her studies and completed it. And she went into private practice in hematology and oncology, while Michael finished up the last year of his cardiology fellowship. Wow. Heart and cancer doctor. That's what they are together.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The most important ones. Right.

[James Petregallo]

Wow. I would say. Christ. They do a lot, but I mean, that's. That's. That's an impressive. That's a power couple.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

That's pretty goddamn good. And they would. Later they joined kind of the established. A couple of well established medical practices in the Kansas City area after this here. After about a year, Deborah starts her own practice, which prospers pretty well here in the mid-80s until we'll talk about what happens in the late 80s. That kind of makes her have a maternity leave and take some time off and kind of messes it up a little bit. But by 1986, Michael was one doctor that knew him in Ohio said, quote, he's a real superstar. Killing it. He completed his fellowship in cardiology and agreed to stay at the hospital. Three months later, he quit out of nowhere. And he told his colleagues it had something to do with his wife. His wife wanted to leave Cincinnati is what the other doctor said. She didn't want to be there anymore. So that's when they move back to Kansas City and start their own practices. She starts her own. And that's how it goes. They move into a very nice Tudor style home in a very upscale, fashionable neighborhood. And then in 1988, they add a third child to this mix named Kelly. Now it's another daughter. Now, this was an unplanned one, which you would imagine two doctors who can both write prescriptions would not have unplanned pregnancy, shouldn't have pills to take.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And there's that, too.

[James Petregallo]

If you don't want a kid, one of you write a prescription for something.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Or one of you don't put the secret.

[James Petregallo]

Cover it up.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Don't put the special sauce on the burger.

[James Petregallo]

That's one of the two. You can figure it out, I'm saying out of that. I would think medically, two doctors could figure this out, how to not have unwanted children. But apparently Deborah didn't want the kid at first. She didn't want to have the baby because she was in too much of a flow. But then she said, okay, fine. So, yeah, it's very, very interesting. Now, during this period. Here is an interview. This is living in Kansas City.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Doing doctor stuff, both of them. This is an interview later on with a woman named Ann Slegman Eisenberg. And she knew Deborah during this whole time. And we'll go from there. She said, how did the interview said, how did you meet Deborah? She said, I started taking a three and a pro tennis class at a little club near my house. I played singles and wanted to learn doubles tennis. Deborah was no longer working as an oncologist and was also learning tennis. So we got to know each other. They said, was she likable? And this woman said she literally had a genius iq. So she was so quick and as funny as a person can be. Kind of the life of the party type of person. That sounds fun. She said, did you meet her husband Michael? And she says, my husband and I socialized with her and her husband once At a tennis get together. He was nothing to look at. Kind of a drip, but was well thought of in his field.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jesus.

[James Petregallo]

He's a dull little fucking ugly man, but he's well thought of in his field. Okay. Kind of a drip. They said, did you meet their kids? And she said they went to a private school and my kids went to public school. Some of Deborah's kids would come around the tennis club and I think I really. They really did have a good relationship with their mother at that time. And Kelly was darling with a poof of blonde hair. So they're both working really hard. They both end up on the staff at Trinity Lutheran Hospital.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

This is going to be from 86, kind of on they do this. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you about our safest sponsor, simply safe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

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[James Petregallo]

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[Jimmy Wissman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

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[Jimmy Wissman]

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[James Petregallo]

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[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, that was that. What she was doing was cancer doctoring at that time. God. Yeah. You can't be unfeeling to those people.

[James Petregallo]

You have cancer. Going to be dead pretty soon. All right, have a good one. Don't worry, it's almost over. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to be. You're going to get worse and worse and worse, as a matter of fact.

[Jimmy Wissman]

But the, the. The worst worst is almost here.

[James Petregallo]

There you go. So that's pretty good. Anyway, even that would be somewhat.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Somewhat likable.

[James Petregallo]

Somewhat. Yeah. It's not fair.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Depending on who you are. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

At least if you're trying to make a joke. She also said, this woman, that Deborah never talked about her husband or her children in a loving way. It was always as far as obligation. Mainly. Another medical doctor from this area said that she was obsessed about her husband Michael and kind of followed him around all the time. Oh, she's always trailing him and tracking him type of deal. Now she's gonna have some problems, though, because she starts after a while, she starts losing jobs due to her strange behavior. She failed a couple of board certifications, which was a strange thing from her. For her, she gained a ton of weight out of nowhere. Well, I think we know why she started gaining weight because she also started taking prescription drugs and drinking to the point of stumbling around the house and falling into shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What is that?

[James Petregallo]

When you do that, you'll put some weight on.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What is going on with Deborah?

[James Petregallo]

I don't know. One of the friends said it almost seemed as if she had given up at a point. Here now the school the kids go to, the Pembroke School. It's the Pembroke Hill School. It's a private school in Kansas City. And people from the school said Debbie was, or Deborah was a good mother who encouraged the kids to do activities and do well in school. After her last maternity leave, she wanted to resume her medical career, but her practice faltered because she had more chronic pain problems. Now, I don't know if there's actual chronic pain that she takes drugs for and gets more into that or if she Takes drugs because she. She says she has chronic pain and then says she has more chronic pain to have more drugs. I'm not sure. You never know what that. You know what I'm saying. You don't know if it's drug seeking or legitimate or what here also, there's a lot of fighting going on.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

Her friend said they described her temper as having a, quote, explosive velocity.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Velocity.

[James Petregallo]

Explosive velocity is how you would describe a bullet coming out of a gun.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Not a person's temper. That's crazy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Or. Or a running back if you're like trying to sell them to the fucking close to velocity.

[James Petregallo]

Look, watch the way he hits that hole between the. Watch the way he hits the three gap. Look at that. Oh, baby.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

The B gap. So she accused Michael a lot of emotional neglect and because he was at work a lot. And she wouldn't be now at this point. So now she'd come home, he'd come home, and she'd be drunk and pissed and stoned probably. And yeah, also pills mixed with that too. But this all happened. She ends up deciding to kind of quit her practice at this point. And apparently it was a mutual decision between Michael and Deborah. They decided that one of them should probably watch the kids at some point. Two doctors. There's no time for the kids if they're both doctors. Let's be honest.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We don't need that much money.

[James Petregallo]

Yes. So it's.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We're fine.

[James Petregallo]

This is also some. Somebody should spend time with the kids. They got now they're getting older, they have like sports and activities they're doing. And neither of us are going to them. And, you know, one of us should do that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And you're drunk all the time, so.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, you know, I like to day drink, so, you know, it's perfect, actually. So she quit her practice and friends said, quote, she attended soccer clinics to become a coach to help her friend. Her kids play better because they played soccer. And her friend said, I just don't know a lot of mothers who would do that clinic. No, no, my parents would have never.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Done that to be coaches.

[James Petregallo]

No, my parents would have went, I don't know much about soccer and then went in the house. That would have been it. Oh, okay. I guess I'm figuring out because the.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Coach didn't give a fuck. So he was like, I'll do it.

[James Petregallo]

That's possible too. So she just kind of becomes a homemaker. She works part time from the family's house on medical peer reviews and Medicaid processing. That's all she's doing now. So she's taking a 160 IQ and working from home and just kind of hanging out, doing that. So 1994 comes around and this is when problems really start in the relationship. There's been problems before, but this is when the cracks start to become chasms here. Now they're kids at this point. They have Timothy, who's about 12 at this point. Tim, he's doing great, happy, confident, popular kid. Plays soccer and hockey.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

Doing all that really good. He goes to like special or early morning practices and weekend tournaments and he's really, really into it, you know. And then they have, you know, their other kids, they have a cute little six year old and this six year old, by the way, Kelly, people think she has intellectual gifts like her mother and grandmother. This is running in the. It's running in this. In the family's going to the second daughters, apparently.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, yeah. And that's the accident one.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's the accident. It's not like the second daughter was stupid either. Kate's not stupid.

[Jimmy Wissman]

This one just happens to be brilliant.

[James Petregallo]

Brilliant's a different story. And everybody would dote on her. She's a little blonde kid who's brilliant and she doesn't have activities and shit yet. She's just a little kid at this point.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's still teaching herself to play Beethoven.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And Kate is a ballerina, the middle daughter. Oh, she's a ballerina, actually dancing with the State Ballet of Missouri by the age of 10.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jesus.

[James Petregallo]

So they're accomplished, successful, the opposite of our families, essentially.

[Jimmy Wissman]

They've done wonderful.

[James Petregallo]

That's who they are. As a kid, you look at people like this and go, wow, that must be awesome.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Likely no depression in that house.

[James Petregallo]

Doesn't seem like it. Anyway, they're too busy to be depressed, these people. And also the two of them, Deborah and Michael, are hanging out with like the real influential families who are the parents of the other kids at the school. This is a private school that costs a lot of money. So this is a kind of a. It's its own little society. These people will be helping each other out for years and years. When you apply for a job in years and years and don't know why you didn't get it. It's because these people did. You didn't go to. Yeah. You're not like the dad of somebody who went to school with a guy whose kid was here and it's crazy. A friend said that Deborah was loving with her children. She did everything with her kids. Is what she said. Now Michael starts to tell his friends that, you know what, our marriage wasn't ideal. It was more of a partnership than a marriage. He said that neither of them ever expressed their love to each other. Even when they first, even they were newlyweds. They weren't like I love you so much and all that. It was more like a business arrangement. You know, we'd be good together type of thing. So we should be together. Not a lot of emotional anything. And maybe they're, they're both so smart. Maybe emotions don't come into it too as much for them. I'm not sure. I've never dealt with this kind of. No. So he said and he told other people that Debbie, Deborah seemed to not have the coping skills that a lot of people have. She would go into a rage and sometimes would even break things and end up like harming herself over it by accident. Breaking shit. And she. Yeah, and they said it didn't matter if it was a private or public setting either. You could be at the grocery store, she could be in the living room. It doesn't matter. She'll have equal reckless abandon with this type of shit. Michael would work long hours and he would stay. And this is a self perpetuating thing here. She'd be mad at him for working a lot so he would work more so he didn't have to argue with her. So he'd have to go home and argue with her.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He'd just come home and go right to sleep and then get up and leave again.

[James Petregallo]

He'd be like at 7 o' clock he'd be like, well I work till 7, she's gonna get pissed so I better work till 11. So maybe she'll be sleeping by the time I get there. Yeah, it's not good. So there. It's definitely just kind of plugging along here. It's like a big snowball going down a hill. And also he didn't. He thought that she was a shitty homemaker as well, which, I mean, you're never there, what do you care?

[Jimmy Wissman]

So anyway, she's drunk, man. What do you want?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, hey, what do you want? I'm tanked by 4:30. You try cleaning. You try cleaning the house after half a bottle of tequila. It's not easy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Tell you what, try putting that fucking fitted sheet on the bed when you're wobbly.

[James Petregallo]

Either that or she goes, I thought I was clean. Didn't I make this?

[Jimmy Wissman]

I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

I don't know. The kids are sleeping so they seem fine. I guess. I don't know. So she. He said when they fought, she would treat the children, especially Tim, as sounding boards, as little adults that could tell that she would tell them about what their father had done wrong and like, bad relationship shit, which as a kid who had to fucking deal with their parents, one of my parents relationship issues, that would tell me about them all the fucking time. That is not good for your psyche. It's just not good. You're not good to make your kid an adult that has to worry about your adult shit. You know what I mean? So they would tell. She'd tell them that, and the kids were. Oh, boy. After a while, the kids were a little upset about hearing it. But then after a while, they would just go along with it. And the kids thought, man, our father's a terrible guy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Mom keeps saying how awful he is. They would start to resent him to the point where Tim, at 12, 13 years old, would have physical confrontations with his father because he was pissed off and mom had told him all this shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my God.

[James Petregallo]

So that's not good. Now she's also apparently during this time, self medicating with sedatives and also narcotics to treat pain from certain injuries she's had periodically over the years here. Apparently several times he confronted her with issues regarding how she was acting. Even the fact that said, listen, you're acting like this. Your speech is like this. Even your handwriting, I can tell you're fucked up. I know you're fucked up. I'm a doctor, for Christ's sake. I didn't drive the bread truck home and then tell you, I think you're fucked up. I'm in medicine. Trust me, you're fucked up. And she finally said, yeah, you're right. I shouldn't be using all this stuff. And she agreed to stop using the medications. Every time he would confront her, okay? And then it would be like that for a week or two. And then, you know, he's still gone a long time at work, and she's still pissed off. And she would take it again and it would rinse and repeat the cycle over and over. So by January 94, things are getting real tense. Real tense. Over a very tense dinner. Real fucking tough day here, Michael just bursts out and says, quote, I can't do this anymore, okay? Can't do it. I want out of this marriage. I'm done.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Divorce.

[James Petregallo]

I want a divorce. She apparently lost her fucking mind when he said that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Was real pissed. You don't want to tell a drunk Person, you want a divorce, they usually leave me.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You don't leave me. I leave you.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. She started picking the plates off the table and hurling them at the walls as hard as she could and breaking them. Just started destroying everything in the dining room, basically breaking shit, screaming, collapsing on the floor, sobbing, cursing. The kids are home. They heard all of this, really, which is fun for them. So Michael moves out.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. He moves into a little apartment nearby. And imagine you're a cardiologist and you come home to a fucking. A small one bedroom. You'd be like, ew. Oh, fuck. So they would, like, do their kid handoffs at fucking neutral ground locations. Like, not at their houses. Like, shit. Is very, very tense now. Deborah wanted to get back together. She said she did. And during this time, by the way, she really steps up as a mom, too, and does even more than she was doing before. Absolutely. I mean, because now Michael's around even less, so she's got to pick up the slack. And she, too. I mean, she takes the kids to their soccer practices, ballet recitals, hockey games, everything. A neighbor said she was trying so hard to prove she could hold it together still.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, absolutely. She's trying to show that I still can do this and I'm gonna go on with my life, which is what you have to do. She had all of that kind of thing. She is working a little bit, doing medical consulting. She's still reviewing Medicaid claims from a home office, but they said the office is like a mess. She's kind of scat. You could tell by her desk that she's got issues going on right now. He is doing great. Michael's doing fantastic in her career. So it's at this point she tells him on the phone one night while very drunk, she said, I fucking gave up my practice to work, to do our family. So she said to him, quote, you owe me stability.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

You owe me stability. Which in this case is kind of true.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Even you had three kids with her. She quit her thing to do.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She certainly deserves a certain amount of stability. Yeah. Unless the alcohol and drugs were the reason she quit. You know what I mean? Well, that would certainly be a conversation. But, yeah, he definitely owes her help.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. If she's taking care of the kids all the time while he's never around, then, yeah, I would say stability is the basic minimum. Now, this goes on for a few months. Then in May of 1994, they decide they're gonna give it another shot. And they do this in a grand fashion. They decide that basically a local real estate agent told them they had this house that was a good deal. And it was a big, beautiful six bedroom, Tudor style, huge house at 7517 Canterbury Ct in Prairie Village, Kansas. Sounds so nice. It's just a beautiful neighborhood. It's excellent, excellent. It's got a big backyard for Tim to practice his soccer. There's a studio that's perfect for ballet. For a ballet studio in there for the kid, for Kate. It's a lot, man. So Michael said, you know what, let's try this. Because that was the other thing they said our house was kind of small and it was cluttered and it caused a lot of tension and maybe if we get into a big house, we're all a little more spread out and we'll give it another shot. So they decide to do it now. It's a big fucking nut, this house. Way expensive, real expensive. A lot of debt. So as the day comes up, Michael starts getting cold feet about the house. And he said later on I backed down, he said, fearing that if we moved in together again, it would just get worse, basically. So the deal ends up collapsing and they don't make the deal. They pull out of the deal for this house. Deborah said it felt like he was pulling the rug out from under us. That's what she told a friend of hers. So, yeah, Michael, that's not cool to say. You're going to.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's pretty fucked up.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it's kind of fucked up here. So May 21, 1994, they go on a family. This is just days after the house falls through. They go, look, we're not going to move into the house, but let's try to be a family anyway. So they all pile into the minivan and they're going out together. Family day. That's it. They're going for a picnic at the local park. Really, really attempting to do some family shit. Go to the park in a minivan to have a picnic is pretty Middle America. That's good stuff if you're a kid. They're all talked and did their things and whatever, basically. So when they drive home to their house that they've been living in, they pull up to smoke pouring out of the windows of the home.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, fuck.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely engulfed, basically. It's a two story colonial, little quiet cul de sac. And there is smoke and flames. Neighbors are in the street, fire trucks are pulling up. The house is on fucking fire. When they get home, they've been gone for hours. Something happened while they were gone. So the fire department it takes them a few hours to contain the blaze and the damage is awful. The living room is. They called the couch a charred skeleton. Fucking all the family photos are burned. Everything. The kitchen's destroyed. It's just destroyed. No one's hurt because nobody was home, luckily.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's great.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it was wild. So the insurance investigators go over the wreckage and they decide. They figure it out. What happened. It was an electrical short and afraid power cord to the VCR in the living room.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The VCR did this.

[James Petregallo]

Fucking VCR did this. Undoubtedly while it was flashing 12 o' clock also just to be a dick. So it was exacerbated by overloaded outlets. And the home had kind of an older wiring system as well. So when you added all that up together, you get a fire essentially. They found no foul play, no accelerants, nothing like that. Just a shitlock, basically. Shitlock vcr.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's it.

[James Petregallo]

Cheap VCR is what they got. So they get an insurance payout that covers repairs and replaces their stuff. Even Tim's, their son's hockey stick was burned. I mean everything, you know, ballet slippers gone, all that shit. But it's a lot, I guess. Deborah would go to the house and just wander around it, looking at it just burned and gutted and it hurts. Probably. It had to hurt. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

All your memories, everything's gone.

[James Petregallo]

She told a friend it was like our whole life went up in smoke when it happened. She said she was just that that's the worst thing that could happen to. Everything is gone. That's horrifying.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You've got.

[James Petregallo]

Not a little bit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Nothing like that's man on fire. It's not even like in a flood. Like you might find something and like dry it out and it might be okay. Something maybe or something gone.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Generally a hockey stick will float in the house.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah, it's gone.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You can still keep that. But if it's all burned, it's all gone.

[James Petregallo]

No shit. So Deborah and the kids move into Michael's apartment because they have nowhere else to go.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Luckily comfortable.

[James Petregallo]

Michael's got a two bedroom apartment.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

That you know, like a single guy's two bedroom apartment couch. And you know, he's got like apartment.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That'S not big enough.

[James Petregallo]

Some hot Pockets in the freezer. Like that's pretty much what he's got going on over here. So this ended up kind of bringing them closer together because they all have.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh yeah. On top of each other.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Same little table and you know, all that kind of thing. And Michael said, man, you Know the fire, it burned down our whole house. We could have been in there. Could have happened when we were sleeping. We could have been killed. And he said at that point, he said, no more long shifts.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'm going to stay home with the family.

[James Petregallo]

I got a life to lead. This is crazy. So he cut back hours. He volunteered as an assistant coach on Tim's soccer team.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

To do this, he went to all of Kate's recitals, the ballet recitals. He never had time to do that before. And Deborah actually said, you know what? I'm going to try my best. So she tried to keep everything nice, tried to make good meals for everybody, tried to keep the kids going. If he's going to try his best at doing that, I'll try my best on this one.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'll do mine too.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, and we'll do it. So that summer, they have a real nice summer. They go for. They have barbecues in the park and they go for family bike rides. And it's like this idyllic family at this point now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Hell yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Fall of 1994, they renegotiate that deal on that house that fell through because they need a house at this.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, we need a roof. God damn. We don't have one.

[James Petregallo]

So they move in in October of 1994 into that big, giant six bedroom beauty there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

They say they got the same house back.

[James Petregallo]

They got the same house back. Apparently it's very expensive and apparently didn't sell.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wouldn't sell.

[James Petregallo]

Nope. So they felt that this is the, the stage in which to mount their comeback, essentially.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So by winter though, as fall creeps into winter, Michael starts working longer shifts.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Again here, a little more there.

[James Petregallo]

He starts getting emergency calls and taking them and going in and conferences that go into long weekends and things like that where it gets a lot at the same time. Deborah's getting her migraines back again. And she also starts drinking a bunch of wine, which then rolls into drinking a bunch of boozes.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yep. Parlays into whiskey. Sure.

[James Petregallo]

And so just everything they were doing before just kind of everybody settles back into. Settles back into this shit. So they have fights over their finances. They also have fights because he's mad at her for telling the kids bad shit about him and then they're mad at him. It's a lot, all the baggage. The kids are all on her side big time. Well, except for the Kelly, the youngest really doesn't know what the hell's going on. She's six, but the older kids are on her side because they're Told constantly that their father's terrible. She'd yell at him and say, you're never here. And he'd fucking go in another room. And that was that. So they had used a lot of the insurance money from the earlier fire to purchase all new furniture. They had a formal dining room, a large oak dining room table and 12 chairs. One of those.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sure, sure.

[James Petregallo]

Big old, you know, Thanksgiving dinner tables there. They got a very expensive Oriental rug on the floor, a china, big gold, expensive china, china cabinet. They never had people over, by the.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Way, but they're prepared.

[James Petregallo]

They're ready for them, though. Yeah, they're ready for them. They invited a few people later on that they met out of town, and they stayed in the recreation room near the pool, those people. So she was trying to keep the house cleaner. But then, like I said, that kind of fell apart. By Spring of 1995, Deborah is drinking way more. Yeah, way more. And now she's got. When Michael's gone, she is positive he's having an affair.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

She starts spending all of her time going over his credit card statements, going over phone bills, doing all of that stuff that people do. Insecurity. Yeah, big time. July of 1995, they are going. They're all going on a trip to Peru.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Not Peru, Indiana. Yeah, Peru. The country down there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

This is ayahuasca. Together.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's what they're doing. No, this is what a rich school this is, that the two parents, Deborah and Michael and Tim, are all going with about 50 other students and parents from the Pembroke School. All of these kids have enough money to go to Peru.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Think about that. Remember when you were a kid if, like, you were going to, like, Six Flags?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, we were all going.

[James Petregallo]

The kid had to have enough money and not all the kids had enough money, you know what I mean? I've sat out several Action park trips for that very purpose. So, yeah, it's. It's interesting. A friend of hers down there said that Deborah was funny, bright, cheerful. She said when we were there, it's really hard 8,000ft above sea level. It was really hard on her, but she's a real trooper. So I don't know what the sea level was hard on or why that was hard on her. That's like Flagstaff, basically. It's not that bad.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, the thin air, which is because she's heavy. Heavy again.

[James Petregallo]

She's getting. Yes, she gained some weight, but I mean, unless you run up a hill, it's fine. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, I don't Yeah. I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

I don't know. So during this trip, by the way, Michael starts talking to a woman.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, now he's gonna have the affair.

[James Petregallo]

During a school trip?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So weird. A woman named Margaret Hacker. We'll talk about her in a second. So basically Mike was saying about his, about Deborah is that she was depressed and he would become more and more distant. And he also tells his friends that she's not the woman I married. No, she's not. Same. Doesn't have the same ambition, doesn't have the same drive, doesn't have the same. She's just not the same person. She's just this kind of. Kind of gone off into herself.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

So, yeah, he starts turning to other people. He tells his friend, a woman that he knows, that quote, within a matter of days, I guess, Mike had told a woman that he found another woman, the perfect woman, the woman he had been looking for.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, he's been looking for.

[James Petregallo]

Well, he's been married for a long time. You shouldn't be looking when you're married. So the woman he found is a woman named Margaret Hacker. H A K E R Hacker. She's a nurse. That seems like a perfect marriage there. Oh, did I mention she's also married to a doctor?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh boy.

[James Petregallo]

She's married to an anesthesiologist as well.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She doesn't work for him though, right?

[James Petregallo]

I don't think so. She's a fellow parent from the Pembroke School. So in Peru here, they started talking and they bonded over the fact that neither of them liked their marriages.

[Jimmy Wissman]

But both of them love sex.

[James Petregallo]

But they love sex and they love being on top of another person.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So this started out as just these, you know, conversations, and then it evolved into them sneaking off to the side to kiss, kiss every now and then during the trip.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's fun.

[James Petregallo]

Then by the time they come home from Peru, they're going to hotels and banging. So, yeah, this is interesting. He told a friend of his that she listened without judgment. And that's something my wife wouldn't do. Yeah, she's mad at you all the.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Time and she's got no interest in fucking you, whereas this woman does.

[James Petregallo]

So, yeah, that helps too. But still, that's kind of part of it. You got to figure that out. So Deborah is very suspicious. She calls her girlfriends up late at night, shit faced drunk to complain about Michael. She'd yell, she'd say, he's destroying us. He's destroying us. Yeah. He would talk about how the other school moms are whispering I know. They're whispering behind my back. She said, I found an earring in the car I didn't recognize. Physical evidence. That's not good, my friend.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jesus. What are you doing that for?

[James Petregallo]

What are you doing? Then the last week of July 95, he tells her, I'd like a divorce again, which at least that's only been a month. That's not bad. She freaked out and told the children that their father was leaving them. Your father's leaving you, she said. She was very upset also, and this is something she mentioned more than once to several people. A broken home could disqualify the girls from debutante events. Oh, not that she can't go to the debutante's ball.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Well, fuck it. We don't have a dad.

[James Petregallo]

You know what? I'll be miserable for the rest of my life. So the kid can go to a debutante's ball?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Is that what debutante means? Father? They have fathers?

[James Petregallo]

It means intact family is what that means.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I didn't go to one only.

[James Petregallo]

And events such as the Bells of the American Royal. God, I'm so happy I didn't grow up with a fucking pot to piss in. And don't know what any of this shit is stopping. Sucks. God damn it. So Deborah's all pissed off, man. She's upset. Her behavior at this point becomes unpredictable, erratic. Yeah, unpredictable and erratic. She drank all the time. She wasn't watching the kids very well anymore, really. She would just threaten people. She'd help. She'd say, she's gonna hurt herself. She would just act all sorts of wacky at this point.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Now, Michael initially declined to move out of the house. So this is all going on while he's at the house, while she knows he wants a divorce.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I want a divorce, and I'm not leaving.

[James Petregallo]

Well, no, he said that she was never a heavy drinker. So all of a sudden, her drinking large amounts of alcohol. He said, you can't supervise the kids. It's not even like you're a functional alcoholic. This is new to you?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. I'd divorce you and leave if I could, but my kids are fucked if I.

[James Petregallo]

They're gonna be drowning in vodka if I leave. She's like a kid who never drank and then starts going to frat parties every night. And you're like, you know, you don't know how to do this.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Why are you standing upside down on the keg? Stop it.

[James Petregallo]

Why are you sucking dick in a pond? What's happening right now? How'd you get in there? And why. Hey, everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you about our safest sponsor, SimpliSafe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

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[James Petregallo]

That's right. We want to talk to you about your home security for just a minute here. I used to think home security was an alarm that goes off after, you know, there's a break in and the guy would get scared and, oh God, there's people are gonna hear this and they run away and maybe they get your neighbor's attention, but that's pretty reactive. I mean, yeah, things are already happening. By that time an intruder's in your home, it's too late. You've heard Small Town murder. You're listening to it right now. It's way too late. If someone's in your home, you're already dead. So we can't have that. That's why real security should stop a crime before it even starts. Right? That's why we trust Simplisafe. Their system is designed to be proactive, not reactive. And really could have made half of our episodes not happen. People at Simplisafe, it's amazing. I love it. My whole house, my studio, Jimmy's house, studio, everything is covered by Simplisafe because it's the best. It's simply the best. That's all there is to it. They use AI powered smart cameras to identify threats lurking outside your home. They immediately alert Simplisafe's professional monitoring agents. Boom. There you go. These agents intervene in real time before things even happen. They can talk. They have access to two way audio to confront the person. Hey, stupid, get out of the yard. It's great. It's amazing. Trigger sirens, spotlights to scare them. They request rapid police dispatch when needed. All helping to stop this intruder while they're still outside your house. That's security. So join the more than 4 million Americans who trust Simplisafe with their home security every day, including Jimmy and myself here. And with a 60 day money back guarantee and no long term contracts, Simplisafe earns your business by keeping you safe and satisfied every single day. Visit simplisafe.comsmall to claim 50% off a new system. That's SimpliSafe. S I-m p l I safe.comsmall there's no safe like Simplisafe.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

It's just strange. So she would continue her routine of taking the children to all the activities and then she would spend her evenings at home drinking alone, sometimes to the Point of passing out and all of that. And she, while she shit faced, she has no filter with the kids in terms of why dad's an asshole and everything else. Some drama starts August 4, 1995. Deborah calls Michael saying that she left the residence and is currently walking the streets of Kansas City hoping someone would kill her. That's what she's doing right now. Hey, I'm just walking around the streets hoping someone will kill me. Okay. See you later. Bye. So the next day, that didn't bring him home right away. He waited till the next day to call it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Have fun.

[James Petregallo]

It's all right. Yeah, you'll be all right. The next day he came home.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The Hilly museum's down there. Go in, check it out.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Well, he couldn't find her in Kansas City, so the next day he came home and found her hiding under a bed in the basement.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

And he said, why the fuck did you do all this? And she said, to make you worry.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, boy. That's not manipulative or weird or anything.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Bizarre, that's for sure.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. August 7, 1995, Michael starts getting sick. And he assumes this is the residuals from Peru here basically is that there's like microbes and bacterias that can linger. Yeah. For weeks in your system for weeks and weeks. So August 11, he becomes even more ill, and by August 18, he's hospitalized with a condition the physician feels is life threatening.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

Now they just say it's a tropical disease of some kind. He was hospitalized with severe dehydration and high fever. He developed sepsis while in the hospital.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, shit.

[James Petregallo]

Yes. The doctor. Doctor identified streptococcus viridans, which had probably leaked through the damaged digestive tissue as a result of his extreme diarrhea.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Extreme. His diarrhea gave him strep.

[James Petregallo]

He has diarrhea to the point that it's like dissolving his insides and things are leaking into other things. And they said they couldn't pinpoint the source of the sepsis or the root cause of the illness itself, but he recovers and he's released from the hospital on August 25th. So he comes home, he's home for a few hours, and then he's sick again. So they bring him back, he's hospitalized again, and they go, yeah, I don't know if it's the stress of being at home. You can't handle it, or. We had you eating like rice and now you're eating normal food too. You can't really do that. He got home and had spaghetti so you can't put red sauce on a stomach that's been destroyed like that. It doesn't work. Marinara is going to be bad.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You had tapioca for three weeks.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, a little softer. From tapioca to marinara is a big jump. So he's hospitalized again. He stabilizes. He's released on August 30th that same week. Now, a couple days after he gets out of the hospital, Margaret Hacker, his girlfriend, files for divorce from her husband.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Okay, that's on right at that time, September 4th. Now the same week, Michael's sick again, back in the hospital, where he stays until September 11th. So a week in the hospital is a lot. And they're trying to figure this out. They based their conclusions on the fact that he was in Peru. They narrowed down the possible causes of his gastrointestinal issues to typhoid fever. Wow. Tropical sprue.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

Or the most. This is true. The craziest gluten sensitivity that's ever happened. Gluten sensitive enteropathy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You're either incredibly gluten intolerant or the craziest typhoon. What was it called?

[James Petregallo]

Typhoid fever.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Typhoid fever was the other one.

[James Petregallo]

Tropical sprue. S P R E man either got the typhoid or the sprue. We can't decide yet. Or you eat too much bread. We're not sure.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Or it's the noodles, man.

[James Petregallo]

It could be anyone. What kind are you eating? You're not eating those shit Renzoni, are you?

[Jimmy Wissman]

I either got Thai food, not those.

[James Petregallo]

American beauties, are you? I got Thai food fever, everybody. That's what Sally.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You're saying I got a typhoon in my belly or I can't have pizza.

[James Petregallo]

Crust anymore, or somebody sprued me up the ass pretty good. So they said they don't know why you're getting sick. Immediately they thought probably the stress of your dissolving marriage coupled with the fact that you're going to normal food when you go home. You can't do that. You guys keep doing that shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And you're having an affair, and a woman just got divorced, so that made it super real.

[James Petregallo]

Filed for divorce, yeah. Now, this is September 4th. Margaret Hacker, she comes, his girlfriend, and says, I think your wife's trying to poison you.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

And he's like, calm down. I was in fucking Peru. Like, relax. It's the pizza crust.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, it's Peru.

[James Petregallo]

I think I have typhoid sprue. At this point, I'm not sure. So maybe there's that September 5th. The day after he goes into the hospital, Margaret's husband dies.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

Margaret's husband is found dead in the garage of an empty house that they had rented.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Whoa.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. How weird is that?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Did he have typhoon fever?

[James Petregallo]

No, he. They are. They suspect a suicide. Oh, they suspect a suicide.

[Jimmy Wissman]

So couldn't take it.

[James Petregallo]

Deborah's still acting weird. Michael is released from the hospital on September 11, and he remained home because he was upset that she couldn't care for the children. September 25, 1995. Michael calls the cops to intervene in an argument they're having. He said that Deborah was acting bizarre and that's how this all started. So he had searched the house for his belongings, and in her purse he discovered seed packets labeled as castor beans.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What are castor beans?

[James Petregallo]

We'll talk all about castor beans, but they're poison, basically. Oh, they don't really. They have like some industrial uses to make some oils and some stuff like that. We'll talk about castor oil. I don't know if that's beats the shit out of me. I don't know, but I would assume so. But it's not something you'd mix into like a chili. Yeah, it's a three bean, it's a kidney, it's a fava. And the castor I think I used in the other.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We get rid of the cannellinis, we chop in the casters, you know.

[James Petregallo]

So there's also a copy of a supposedly anonymous letter that had been sent to Michael urging him not to divorce him. So he got an anonymous letter to him and he found a copy of it in his wife's purse. She wrote the anonymous letter. I bet you shouldn't divorce your wife. He also found empty bottles or empty vials of potassium chloride, which is poison, is what that is. There is no other use for that, I don't think, but poison. So he took all three items out of her purse and hid them because he figured she's going to try to kill herself. That's what's going on here.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, he doesn't connect that to his fucked up typhoon in his belly.

[James Petregallo]

No, because he went to the doctor and they told him it's typhoid fever because you've been in Peru for a month. So why would he think it was her poisoning her?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Maybe. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Well, yeah, when a doctor tells you.

[Jimmy Wissman]

A doctor tells you that.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, I suppose because she's acting very depressed. So he's. I mean, she's acting suicidal. So this all makes sense and all lines up and the Fact that they think that his girlfriend's husband just killed himself makes him extra wondering, you know, extra.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, he's got to feel like a piece of shit. Everybody around him is killing themselves because he's.

[James Petregallo]

Because he needs pussy. Yeah, real bad now. He said, listen, you know, I know what you're gonna do here with these fucking seeds. She said, I was gonna plant them. And he said, you're not gonna plant castor seeds. Why would you do that? And she said, okay, fine. I was gonna kill myself. You got me? I was gonna commit suicide. And this day, too, her drinking was especially heavy. And that's when her behavior got more crazy. And that's when he contacted the police and asked them to take her for some psychological care. She's psychiatric care. She's gonna kill herself and she's shit faced drunk. She's in a bad spot right now. The police who responded described Michael and the children as, quote, shaken and Deborah's behavior as bizarre. In the police report, though, she didn't seem to. It's weird. She didn't freak out when the cops got there, though she knew to be chill for that. She denied being suicidal and instead said, my husband's just a fucking piece of shit, and then went on with a string of obscenities about Michael. Michael showed the cops the seed packets and the other items that he found in her purse. So the police transport her to an emergency room where a doctor said that she smelled strongly of alcohol but was not visibly drunk. They said she appeared unkempt, but he also felt her demeanor wasn't unusual for someone going through a divorce, especially a bitter one, and noted that Greene said she had no desire to hurt herself or others to the doctor. All right, Now, Michael came into the hospital while this is going on, and her whole demeanor changed. According to the doctor, this is a woman who said, no, no, I'm very calm. I'm not gonna hurt anyone or myself. This is all blown out of proportion. Soon as Michael got there, the doctor said Deborah spat at him. Oh, spat at him and called him a fucking string of obscenities and names and said, you're going to get these kids over our dead bodies.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my.

[James Petregallo]

Not my dead body.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, our.

[James Petregallo]

Our dead bodies. All of us.

[Jimmy Wissman]

More murder suicide.

[James Petregallo]

Wow. So with some persuasion from the doctor, she initially agrees to a voluntary commitment. Listen, let's just put you somewhere for a couple days and you can.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You just said our dead bodies, man.

[James Petregallo]

That's a lot. So she said, okay. And she's sitting around the hospital and Then she just walks out of the ER without telling anybody and leaves. That's it. She was found hours later because she was walking home from the hospital. And they brought her back to the hospital.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

She then agreed again to a voluntary commitment in the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. So that's what was going on here. While she's in the hospital, she's diagnosed with major bipolar depression with suicidal impulses. Wow. She's placed on Prozac, Transine and Klonopin. Okay, those are pretty.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Klonopin's a. Klonopin's an antipsychotic. That's heavy.

[James Petregallo]

That's a heavy one, too. Yeah, that'll put you down. She returned home after four days in the hospital. Now, Michael, who, while she was in the hospital had been researching castor beans, really came to the conclusion that she fucking made ricin and poisoned me. That's what happened.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She made ricin. She's a chemical engineer.

[James Petregallo]

She's a chemical engineer. He said she fucking made. She made literal terrorist warfare materials to murder me like I'm a Japanese subway. This is fucking crazy. So as soon as she gets out of the hospital, whether it's true or not, he doesn't trust her. So as soon as she gets out of the hospital, he leaves. He moves out again. So. Jesus Christ. By the way, I love this. When Michael came into the hospital, after she spat at him, she called him a fuck hole, which is amazing.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What year was that? She invented that one?

[James Petregallo]

Maybe 95.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's pretty early for that one.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. As a teenager, I never heard the word fuck hole, especially in reference to a person, not a body part. Yeah. I could see one of my friends being an idiot and being like, I stuck it in a fuck hole or some dumb shit like that. But I never heard anyone go, you fuck hole.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's an early usage of fuckhole. Good for her.

[James Petregallo]

That's pretty good. Good for her. So that's what she had said to him, specifically here. Now, October 5, 1995, is, he's moving out. Like fucking Billy Joel here, moving out. He moved into another apartment nearby. Over the next few days, Deborah continues to act very strangely, drinking heavily, all of this type of shit. But she says she wants to get back together. She keeps saying that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

She then kind of puts everything aside, all her drinking and her craziness for a minute, and really doubles down on her mothering efforts. Taking the kids to soccer practice, ballet games, hockey practices, trying to keep it all together like, same as before. Yeah. This Is her thing that she does. She's still doing her medical shit and everything like that. October 23rd, 1995. Okay. Michael had taken the day off from work. It was supposed to be a week long vacation to recover some strength after restarting his job post hospital because he was sick and he got out of the. So, yeah, he spends the afternoon with his girlfriend Margaret, maybe picking out a coffin for her dead husband. And then picked up Tim and Kelly for Tim's hockey game.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So Kim and the youngest daughter. Yeah, I don't think so. I think they're all going, I guess Tim plays well and his team wins. They talk about the game, they talk about school, they do all that shit. He drops them off at the home with the mom at 8:45pm At 9:00pm they eat dinner. Michael. Or not Michael, Deborah and the kids eat Kentucky fried chicken at 9 o'. Clock. All right, now 10. Which is so funny because you were just talking about eating wingstop at 9 o' clock after your daughter's game.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, it's so bad.

[James Petregallo]

It's impossible to eat healthy if your kids play sports. You're eating shit at 9 o'. Clock. It's just happening. Yeah, you're eating deep fried shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Everything that you're putting in your face was cooked with grease.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely. This is a conversation before we started recording that we had never seen.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There was no grill in that place. I was shocked. I was like, what do you make here? Oh, everything in there.

[James Petregallo]

Fry it and microwave it. That's all we do. Zero. Those are your options. So at 10:35, someone pages Michael from the house, like on a beeper for young people who don't know that little thing you'd wear on your waist and go beep, beep, beep. And then you'd say what number it was and you called it back and.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You have to go find something to call it.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, some primitive shit. So at 11pm there's a second page to Michael. They talk for a while here and discuss lawyers that they're. I'm picking this lawyer, I'm picking that lawyer. They're kind of having a reasonable discussion about divorce at this point. 11:30pm she calls him back again and they have a fight. At this point, they have a big fight. Mike threatens a custody battle. Well, if you're gonna be a dick, then I'll fucking take the kids and you know, we can do all this shit. I don't trust you with the kids. Kids and blah, blah, blah. By 11:40, he's telling her that I know about the poisoning. Deborah, I know you tried to fucking poison me.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

So she said, no, I didn't. This is crazy bullshit. He said, I know you're drinking heavily while you're watching the fucking kids and I know you tried to poison me. And I might, I might even call social services to protect the kids if you don't get your shit together. Basically, he said that he was so angry. He said, I told her I thought she was crazy. I told her I thought she needed continued psychiatric care. I told her she was, I knew she was poisoning me and I told her I was going to try to take the kids away from her. That's what he tells Margaret, that he said. So then he went to Margaret's house, hung out with her for a minute, then he drove back to his apartment and all that. So that's what happened. That's where the phone call takes place from his apartment. October 24, 1995, 12:21am so less than an hour after this phone call where he says, you're a fucking waste and blah blah, blah, blah blah, police dispatch receives a Hang Up911 call from Deborah's house. Oh, a little bit of heavy breathing and a hang up. So the police are dispatched and by 12:27 there are police and fire units all over the street because the house is completely engulfed in flames.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, the house is on fire.

[James Petregallo]

Their new big giant house is on fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Same vcr. Why would you do that?

[James Petregallo]

Fucking get a new one, you cheat bastards. So they pull up, there's a woman standing outside, Deborah in a pink nightgown while her 10 year old daughter Kate, middle child, is clinging to her side and she's just watching the house burn. Kate, the 10 year old begs the firefighters, please save my brother and sister. They're still in the house. They're still in the house, but it's fucking ridiculous. They never get the two kids out of the house. Two kids are trapped in the house. Thirteen year old Tim and six year old Kelly are trapped in there. They never make it out of this fucking house. So yeah, at the scene, a corporal Steve Hunt was approached by the 10 year old Kate who said, please save my brother and sister. Deborah's neighbors are all gathering on yards immediately saying she set her fucking house on fire. That's her. She's nuts. I know she did it. The whole neighborhood is saying that. They said Deborah was casual and very nonchalant. She said she fell asleep in her room with the door closed. An alarm woke her up. She opened the bedroom door, saw smoke close the bedroom door and went outside through a sliding glass door in her bedroom.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Not grab the kids.

[James Petregallo]

Not grab all the kids and take them.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Holy shit. That's a bad answer.

[James Petregallo]

She never asked anything about the other two kids that are still in the house. She just said, yeah, that's what happened.

[Jimmy Wissman]

How did Kate get.

[James Petregallo]

She said as she was exiting the house, she heard Timothy, the 13 year old, calling her through the intercom system the house has. She told him, quote, stay in the house and let the professionals rescue you.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my God.

[James Petregallo]

Come on. As a parent. Honestly say that as a parent, you'd throw a fucking wet towel over yourself and you'd rush through the flames and you'd kick the goddamn door in and get your fucking kid out, Period. There's not. Or you'd burn in the fucking process. But you try. You know what I mean? You'd give it a fucking shot.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I wouldn't tell my kid, don't worry. There's guys with masks coming to get.

[James Petregallo]

They're coming. Strangers will be here. Wow, this is the fucked up part. She knew by the way that he had crawled out of his bedroom window and got outside a few times in the past. So he's very capable of crawling out the window and getting down and being fine. But she told him, stay in there. Holy shit. Now, inside the house, once they get it out, they go in there and they find that Deborah's bedroom door was open, not closed like she said. She said she closed it and then went out on the porch. It's wide open. Her hair was also singed. She had singed parts of her hair, which is inconsistent with not being around fire and only seeing smoke. So that's pretty fucking interesting by the way the children died. Both children died of smoke inhalation in their rooms. So a neighbor watching Deborah stand with her daughter watching the house burn, said, quote, she didn't say anything to her daughter. She was just real nonchalant. She never said her children were in the house. There was no indication from her, no hysteria. She said later she saw her and her daughter in the back of a police car sitting there. And she said there was. She wasn't even talking to her daughter. No conversation, no hugging. They were just sitting there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She's pissed. This one got out too, staring.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. How the fuck did you get out? So the investigation starts here. And this will be some technical fire investigation shit here. There's a bunch of experts here. One of the guys said, he's looking. You have to look for clues in a different way in this type of case. He said it's really so simple, the investigative work. He said we work from the least amount of damage back up to the most amount of damage and figure it out. They said through that doing that same thing every time. You can put everything back together and reconstruct the scene. So they sift through all of this shit. And this is immediately that night. And they said usually they begin by walking around the structure to assess the damage to see which areas are mostly affected. Then they move through the inside where, you know, they do the same thing. So they look, they all look at the burn patterns. Tell tale BLACK Vs that they see. That's what they see. They say a layperson could see that, not understand it. You know, see charred wood and a pile of ashes look like that. But to an arson expert, they can really see how it happened. This, this one investigator said we begin to remove the debris by layering down through the damage until we got down to the floor level. We photograph as we go along. We draw diagrams as we go along. We want to remove the top portion of the structure first. The uppermost portion that fell in, we will remove that layer. It might be part of the roof material that's on top of a pile of debris. Then we'll look at what's underneath that layer and we'll go down to the floor level. If we're on the second floor, we'll go next to the ceiling of the room below. Then we'll get down to the contents of the room and down to that floor level. So just kind of like circles getting smaller. Basically. They said they sift through the debris and they're looking for burn patterns on the walls or floors. They can tell whether it was a fast burning or a slow burning fire. They can tell whether it burned low or high in a room, whether it burned up or down. He said given certain conditions, they can even determine the direction the fire traveled. They said fire usually tends to burn up from its point of origin. It burns down only when it's consumed everything above it and it goes down looking for anything. They said an accidental fire has only one point of origin. Obviously your VCR doesn't light on fire and an outlet on the other side of the house burst into flames at the same time. Generally that'd be a wild coincidence. So they said that this fire, you know, fire set deliberately have many points of origin sometimes. So they said they had a big job because this is a big fucking house. It's close to 5,000 square feet and a bunch of different levels. So the Whole thing, and it's burned to shit to nothing. The first thing they said they noticed here was that the front of the house showed evidence of fire damage, and there was almost nothing left of the rear of the house. The railings around the main floors, rear decks were a good eight to ten feet from the wall of windows and sliding glass doors. But they had been charred black by flames blasting out of what had been the living room. The origin, cause and cause team, because they have a team that you guys figure out where it came from, Began their investigation on the ground floor because it was the least damaged. So they said this was significant to the investigator because many of the most common sources of accidental fires are in basement areas or kitchens.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Petregallo]

They said in the back part of this basement storage area, There appeared to be two water heaters and a gas furnace. To the right, there were two electrical panels. They were all ruled out as the cause of the fire. And those are the main ones they look at. First, there was a second gas furnace near the fitness room, and they said that furnace was fine, too. So, like, shit. So then they started checking the house. If it had underground utility lines, which could have been affected by a windstorm, maybe that fucked it up. So they came to the workout fitness room. The weight machine, treadmill, and other exercise equipment were all in good shape. However, the investigators could look up through the ceiling joists and see, you know, the other floor, basically, so they said. A section of the ceiling beams on the fit in the fitness room were gone. They were sawed through by the firemen they knew in order to remove the young boy Tim's body for autopsy. The medical examiner had asked members of the fire company to remove the joists that had fallen on him, which is horrifying. The fire had begun to burn down the fitness room, and the drywall was intact even to the paint on the walls. But there was soot and charring at the top of the walls, so it didn't completely eat through it yet. The heat had come from above. The living room come from above, and the living room was completely destroyed. The fitness room was excluded as a point of origin. However, the floor of the room was deep in fall down. They said some of which had come in come from two stories up from the bedrooms. Parts of Tim's bed and his furniture still hung from the floor joists of the living room.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, God damn.

[James Petregallo]

Holy shit. They said they entered the rec room where the ceiling had fallen in, and they said they were searching for survivors. They said there was a pool table in the center of the room there was a television set. The ceiling had fallen in not so much because of the fire, but because of the weight of the water from the firefighters hoses and all the debris. They said the fire did not start there either. So they went to the family room with a fireplace, a big screen TV and a large wet bar with a refrigerator, bookcases and a bunch of videotapes. That room was pretty intact too. Two bar stools were still pulled up to the bar. However, they noticed some carpet next to one of the stools had been burned. It melted in an irregular pattern and then the fire had gone out because the carpet had been pre treated with fire retardant chemicals. As you do so as you do, you don't want your carpet to be on fire. So they said there was no reason for the carpet to burn unless someone had tried to start a fire on it.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

They said the ceiling overhead was unscarred by smoke or flames and the walls were intact. They said that's weird. This is a fire that's not connected to the main fire. Red flag for arson, they said. So they said in the guest bedroom, where they had to crawl through the window in a desperate search to find the kids, they said things looked almost normal. There was a king size bed made. There was a bathroom there, untouched. The vertical blinds that they ripped out had burn marks on them. But they said they didn't know where those burn marks came from unless somebody tried to set them on fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Why? Because there's no fire around the blinds otherwise. So that's two unconnected fires. They said. They said the family's basement was not where it began. They said the 700 wine collection. They had a 700 bottle wine collection. Wow. That was stored in the unfinished north end. Was completely intact and fine.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There's a silver lining. That sounds wonderful.

[James Petregallo]

I'm going to need those tonight. So then they go to the main floor. They said this structure had been weakened by heat and flames and the floor was buckling all over the place. It's not good. So they said the foyer just inside the front door was two stories high. Big entryway, you know, flanked by stone. It faced the living room, which was straight ahead and one step down. The single stairway to the children's upstairs wing was to the left of the foyer. So are we getting a map here? Farther to the left, there'd been a formal dining room and beyond that a breakfast area, a huge kitchen and a laundry room. To the right of the foyer, the main hallway of the house led to the music room, guest bathroom, den, and a master suite to the left. They have it set up for good. Parental fucking is what they have it set up for. They found out that by shutting and locking three doors, it was possible to seal off the den and master suite on the south end of the main floor. That has the master bath and Jacuzzi. He said there was extensive damage on the main floor, but not so extensive that an appalling discovery could be hidden. They spotted pore patterns where someone had spread accelerants on the floors. Oh, the foyer's floor had been expensive. Tile giving way to the central hallway's solid oak. The stairs leading up to the children's wing had been carpeted. So they were working and going through this. And they said that they examined the amorphous picture patches they detected on the floors and stairs. Liquid, a flammable liquid had soaked into the carpeted stairs. The treads had burned away so vigorously that the flames had rolled underneath the treads to burn the risers, some of which had been burned through.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Got through the carpet into the bottom.

[James Petregallo]

And burned through the risers.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Burned through the patent wall, which are thick. Dang.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, they discovered as they climb up the stairs, the landing at the top had been drenched completely with some kind of accelerant. So drenched that it must have gone up the wall. Must have gone up in a wall of fire, basically. Yeah, they said they were standing there in all these sections and. Yeah, they said that it was just fucking. It was horrifying. Somebody somehow had blocked these kids from getting out of here like something. It's terrifying. They said the. The guy said he had never seen the dining room as it had been before, but he could tell where the china cabinet was originally. But the table had been reduced to rubble. He said it was possible to stand on the floor. It was much more stable than the music room floor. But that's about all that was left in the room was a floor.

[Jimmy Wissman]

They had a music room.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, yeah. They had six bedroom joint there. They said they removed the debris by layering down. And his team found pieces of furniture so small that they were identifiable only as wood. Even know where it came from. There was no way to say how big the dining room table had once been. No sign of that oriental rug that we talked about. And when they got down to the bottom, they found a tongue and groove wood floor. They said some intensely flammable liquid had pooled in the center of the room, charring the wood deeply in a flowing, irregular pattern. Yeah, the breakfast area had the Same pour patterns. And a closet in the kitchen had been destroyed, they said. Looking up, the investigators saw it was directly below Kelly's room. One by one they climbed up on a ladder which was the only way to reach Kelly's room now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And they saw where she had been. They said there was a quote. This is from Ann Rule's book. There was a pale child sized outline on the smoke stained bedclothes. In all likelihood, Kelly had gone to sleep and never woken up.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Didn't wake up through the fire. Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Never woke up. Never at all. They said she had and it doesn't matter because she had no way to escape.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So they needed better to get up there. She slept through it probably. Yeah. They said it was better that she slept through it. At least she didn't. Wasn't terrified in her last moments in the living room with the windows. Window with its window walls and sliding glass doors overlooking the back deck. In the pool had no floor at all. And every room leading back toward the master bedroom showed signs of isolated charring or low uneven burning where flammable liquid had been poured. So they have a dog too, a sniffer dog that looks for accelerants. And they found on the floor, they said just red flag after red flag as they go down the hallway. Dogs just alerting like mad of ass down all day. All fucking day. A couch against one wall was burned, but it was recognizable. While an oak roll top desk had burned so completely that it had collapsed onto itself. The accelerant had to have been splashed over it for it had to. For it to have crumbled to ashes mere feet from the couch. It's still not that fucked up. The carpeted floor had heat damage and was discolored. However, one section of the carpet was completely missing. And once again they saw pooling or puddling outlines. So that's where they started. So this is like what, six points of origin so far?

[Jimmy Wissman]

So many flyers. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

From the door of the study, they could see directly across to the master bedroom and see the end of the bed, they said fall down covered in the bottom of the door, holding it firmly in position. It had been during. During the fire. Open. So the door was open. That's when they found out, they said the origin of the origin and cause there they found was clearly arson. The proliferation of pour patterns and the heavy charring in certain areas were strong indicators for arson experiments. Starting at the north end and the main floor, someone had saturated the dining room and kitchen floors with accelerant. The heavy soaking of the Stairway carpet leading to the children's rooms could have been nothing less than a deliberate attempt to kill the children. To trap them there by a wall of fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Drenched the floor and walked it to the kids rooms. That's fucked up.

[James Petregallo]

A fucking wall of fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Remarkable. She said the. They said the flames had exploded, the children exploded and the children had no way out. So they said the fire starter had gone on to spread. Accelerant.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Wow.

[James Petregallo]

In the living room. And the music. God damn it. And then down the central hall all the way to the door of the bedroom where Deborah said she'd been sleeping. They said the bedroom was not burned. Although curiously, the investigators found evidence of another unconnected fire close by. In the bathroom off the master bedroom. A drawer in the double sink vanity was charred and the rest of the bathroom was perfect.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It went out.

[James Petregallo]

It went out. Yeah. Not a good bad fake wood or something. Didn't burn well. They said they didn't care what accelerant was used because it doesn't matter. The guy said, quote, I don't know what it was and I don't care because it doesn't matter. Okay. He said there are many, many substances that'll burn like that. And they were. Gasoline, lighter fluid, kerosene, charcoal, lighter. Even gin or vodka will make flames. It'll race through a house. He said, lots of things that'll do it. He said he also didn't know how much accelerant had been used in the house. He said this is only conjecture because I can't be precise. I'd venture to say that it was less than 10 gallons, but more than 3 gallons of accelerant.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Holy fuck.

[James Petregallo]

Think about that. Think about a gallon of milk, fill it with gasoline and pour three of those around your house.

[Jimmy Wissman]

A five gallon jerry can of gas is a lot.

[James Petregallo]

It's a shitload of gas. Yeah, that'll get you miles away at.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Less than 10, but more than three. So it could have been two jerry cans of gas. It could have been. That's so crazy.

[James Petregallo]

It could have been eight gallons of gas. We have no fucking idea. So they took all sorts of pictures. They did everything they said. The pour pattern stood out distinctly, outlining where the liquid accelerants had hit the tile and oak floors. In some photographs, the sniffer dogs stood poised like the hunting dog. They were. I think they probably had a German, probably a short haired pointer in there. They're good for doing this shit whenever there's anything they need to find. And they don't need the dog to like Bite the person when they find him. They use pointers. As you know, Oscar's not biting anybody. They're too fucking friendly to bite people, so you can't do that. You'd be like, chase him. They'd be like, no, no, no, he's fine. He's good. Maybe. Maybe he'll take me around the woods. Yeah, I'll go find him.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I doubt he even wants to bite. Didn't he. He got a turkey, but, like, didn't even want to. Didn't even want to hurt it.

[James Petregallo]

Well, no, that's not. That's what they do is they. They just grab them. They don't kill them themselves. So, yeah, he got a turkey in the woods. He just grabbed it by the back of the neck and looked at us.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Like, huh, I got it.

[James Petregallo]

And we said, no, no, no, let go. Let go. Which is. We tell him that with any toys or anything. So I said, drop it. Drop it. And he just opened his mouth like, okay. And then the turkey ran away. He was like, dude, what the fuck?

[Jimmy Wissman]

He's done with turkey for you, man.

[James Petregallo]

Damn it. He's gotten a couple turkeys and geese, too. He likes to go after in the water because he likes traipsing around in the creek a lot. So now. Wow, this is fucking horrifying. So two of the pictures that the photographer took of the fire were pretty crazy here. Detective Gary Baker found that the ladder. Found. Found the latter, meaning a later picture here. One showed two books, intact but singed around the edges. That's an iconic photo. And then one found he found on the living room floor of the wet bar in the basement recreation room. The words of the title were emblazoned on a red cover. He had been summoned by the firefighters to see the bodies of the two children. When he saw the book, he said, it gave me a chill. We'll talk about what book it is in a second here. They also. Don't worry, you probably won't know it now. It's a book, so I doubt it. I only know a couple. If it was made into a movie, then yes. And this is a novel, so I don't know it either. The arson investigation confirmed what police and firefighters had suspected. It's a goddamn arson and intentional murder as well. Murder and two double homicide. So the cops put together a task force and all this type of shit, multiple jurisdictions. This is a big. Two kids are dead. This is a big fucking deal. Yeah, big fucking deal. When the Prairie Village police requested help in this case, the Metro squad board placed calls to police departments in Kansas and Missouri asking for trained officers who are available. 21 investigators responded.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

So they work beside all these people. They put up a tips hotline so anybody could give information. It's a lot. There's rumors pouring in from the hotlines and everything else. They said. Usually, you know, these, the metro squad that was activated for a set number of days, but if leads keep coming in, then they keep asking for extensions to keep these people from their departments. And this turned into, like, a military operation because there's so many people involved. You got the chief of the prairie village police department, Got a couple other guys, a few experts, including Gary Baker, Greg Bernetta, and Rod Smith, the ex wide receiver for the Denver Broncos.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Obviously, the guy's amazing.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, he was great.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's a good walk on.

[James Petregallo]

He was phenomenal, man. He was great. Was he 81? I think he's a great, great player.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Is it 81 or is it 80?

[James Petregallo]

I can't remember. 80, 80. There you go. There you go. So, yeah, the burn patterns are a lot here. They released to the newspaper, arson not ruled out. In fatal fire. That's the next day that comes out. Not ruled out. They said, we haven't determined this is arson.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Which is interesting. So they said there's all the red flags of arson. They said the home was burned very, very heavily on two levels. The heavy burn patterns were on the main floor and the second floor as well. The children's bedrooms were all upstairs, and there were heavily burned areas found there. Okay. Now, Deborah's said woke up to a smoke alarm, open her bedroom door. Oh, no, there's smoke. Closed the bedroom door, walked out the sliding glass door to the deck, heard Tim on the intercom, told him to wait for firefighters. Now, evidence says her door was open during the fire. Burn patterns proved it, that it went right through an open door and didn't burn the door off. So guess what? Her hair was singed, meaning she was somewhere near an initial burst of flames at some point. Then a neighbor noticed her hair was wet when she came to the door to tell them to call 911-911. She had wet hair.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay. Like she was sweaty or.

[James Petregallo]

No, like she was splashing water on it because it got caught on fire. Wow. And they said Deborah knew that Tim had escaped out of his bedroom window multiple times before. It was like, a fun thing he liked to do to get downstairs. He would go out of the window and do all that, but she told him to stay in the room. So they collect hair samples from Deborah, and from Mike, because like, oh, you're in the middle of a divorce and you're. You just argued with your husband at 11:30 and then your house burned down.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's crazy.

[James Petregallo]

That doesn't sound good at all. His hair's not a singe on it. Nothing on it. Doesn't even smell like smoke.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wasn't in there.

[James Petregallo]

Deborah's hair has significant singeing. Not good. Then they found the books. One of the books they found is called Necessary Lies.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jesus.

[James Petregallo]

I will give you a book synopsis here. This was in Deborah's bedroom, by the way. The synopsis quote. North Carolina, 1960. Newlywed Jane Forrester, fresh out of university, is seeking what most other women have shunned. A career. But life as a social workers. Far from what she expected. Out amongst the rural tobacco fields of Grace County, Jane encounters a world of extreme poverty that's far removed from the middle class life she's grown up with. But worse is still to come, working with the Hart family and their 15 year old daughter Ivy. It's not long before Jane uncovers a shocking secret. And it's thrust into a moral dilemma that puts her career on the line, threatens to dissolve her marriage, and ultimately determines the fate of Ivy and her family forever. Soon, Jane is forced to take drastic action. And before long, there's no turning back. This is a book about. About a woman fresh out of university. Jesus Christ. That basically several children are burned to death in an intentionally set house fire. That's what the book's about.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Woman snaps.

[James Petregallo]

Exactly. Wow. And this is a book that Deborah got out. Got from the public library.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

She also they found, had checked out several other books recently, all dealing with intrafamilial homicide.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's way worse than I expected. In Cold Blood.

[James Petregallo]

Yes. No, no, no. Just books about killing your own children, not other people's.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Right. This is way worse.

[James Petregallo]

This is fucking crazy. So police talk to young Kate here who's 10 years old and this poor, fucking poor girl. I feel.

[Jimmy Wissman]

So this investigation is like arson's not been ruled out on by now is like saying terrorism hasn't been ruled out.

[James Petregallo]

On September 3, 9, 11. Yeah, don't know. Not sure. Terrorism, not ruled out. Which is exactly what they said actually. Which is funny. Pretty much exactly. Because they were like at first we.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Didn'T know for sure.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. Now this poor girl, I mean if you're a cop, you'd want to talk to this girl, but you'd want to. How do you not want to help her and want to. You Know, how do you make her feel better?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Basically, Lots of hugs, chocolate chip cookies, pizza. I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

Remember how being the middle child sucked? Outside of that, what else do you say to this poor kid?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Now you're the baby and the oldest.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, this poor child. That is horrifying, man. Isn't that the worst? Like, what else would you say?

[Jimmy Wissman]

I don't know how you.

[James Petregallo]

It's really funny.

[Jimmy Wissman]

No, but how do you comfort her?

[James Petregallo]

It's horrifying. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

You just saw your house burned down with your family in it and you begged and pleaded for them to save them.

[James Petregallo]

She said that on the night in question, she woke up to find the fire burning. She saw smoke seeping into her room and opened up her bedroom door and called her brother, then closed the door. And she's the one that placed the 911 hang up call.

[Jimmy Wissman]

The heavy breathing.

[James Petregallo]

It was Kate. Yeah. I don't think she knew what to say or what to do. She probably got scared. She crawled out of her bedroom window to escape the fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Atta girl.

[James Petregallo]

That was it. Got out of there. She said that when she called to her mother after escaping onto the garage roof, she said that Deborah mom had been terribly upset, as anyone would be while her house is burning, and called to Kate to jump off the garage into her arms. She said, but mom missed me when I jumped. She said, but I wasn't hurt. She's like, whoops, my bad, dude.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What the fuck?

[James Petregallo]

And a neighbor said she sucked. She saw Deborah like take her arms back when she jumped and let her fall, basically.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

She acted like she was gonna catch her and then didn't. But she wasn't hurt. Kate wasn't hurt. Yeah, she's a ballerina. She's agile, you know what I mean?

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's only a couple of stories, so that's long enough to hurt yourself, but 10, 15ft, if you jump down to mom and you're gonna kid.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah, you'll be fine. As a kid. Christ, we used to jump off walls and shit. Way higher than that all the time.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I jumped off a roof as a kid.

[James Petregallo]

You know how to fall?

[Jimmy Wissman]

It is weird the first time you do it though, because that is surprisingly far. That 10ft is a drop.

[James Petregallo]

And you realize if you don't. If you don't hit and roll, your ankles hurt, right?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Or your knees, your body just like collapse and your knees smack you in the fucking face.

[James Petregallo]

That too, yeah. So Kate was not hurt when they. I guess fucking Michael showed up at that point too. He showed up and they Said that Kate said that Michael had been accusatory toward Deborah. While Deborah was crying and worried about the missing children, he was blaming her for it. According to Kate, Michael had moved out of the family home and spurned the mother's desire for an amicable separation. My dad's been a real problem. She stressed that she loved and respected her mother and that of all the children, that all the children had good relationships with her, but that she was angry at her father for upsetting her mother by leaving. Kate acknowledged her mother had begun to drink a lot of alcohol, but she denied having ever seen matches in the house and expressed a surprise that Timothy had not escaped the same route she had, which was off the bedroom window because he used to do that all the time.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And she's a goddamn hero and doesn't even know it.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, she's absolutely a fucking hero. No doubt. So Deborah they bring in, okay, yeah, they said, I'll read this right for man rules book here. Deborah, still barefoot and wearing a dark rose cotton nightgown with a white collar and cuffs and a whimsical pattern of white sheep, was taken to which makes it is even more ridiculous of an outfit when you're in a police station with singed hair, was taken to a basement office in the police department. Here she would be interviewed by Detective Sargent and Detective Rod Smith. This interview and indeed all the interviews connected with the investigation would be videotaped obviously. Although the Prairie Police Village have since moved to a new headquarters, the department was housed in a rather outdated facility next to door. The best room for talking with Deborah had been a painted cement block wall with linoleum floor room the same bland pale celery color. Who the fuck makes a room celery color? There was a folding table, the kind that you know you get for like the kids table at Easter and some vinyl and metal folding chairs. It was not soundproof and occasionally phones would ring from the outside and you could hear people answering it, all that kind of shit. This is 4am now they start the tape and they knew nothing about the cause of the fire at this point because that was still being investigated. So they're sitting there while that's happening. They just got awakened at their houses and told to come to headquarters. Here we are. So they didn't know. They also didn't really know about the. Because they thought Timothy for a second they thought he had a chance of survival and that didn't end up being coming to fruition and they didn't even know. They didn't really know exactly what happened. They didn't have all the facts yet, so they said. They were somewhat startled to find Deborah talkative and even oddly cheerful.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Right.

[James Petregallo]

They said, slight odor of alcohol on her, but she didn't seem drunk. Ann Rule describes this quote. She was not an attractive woman. Stocky, with heavy, almost masculine shoulders. She appeared to have been in her mid-40s, yet she perched in her chair with one leg tucked under her in almost like a childlike posture. Lori Valo.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What happened?

[James Petregallo]

That's the Lori Valo?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

To watch somebody casually sit in an interrogation room to talk about a death is the creepiest fucking thing in the world. It is so creepy to watch her just pop her feet up on that couch and act like, let's just have a chit chat, like making s' mores over here. She shifted her position frequently. From time to time, she rubbed her feet and picked at her toes. That's an odd thing to do in a police interrogation. She was not crying, nor did she look as if she'd been crying. So they sat there and, yeah, they said, let's fucking do this shit. They said, we're gonna talk about is the fire. Is the house fire at your house? And Deborah interrupted him. Yeah, this is his introductory sentence. Yeah, what we're going to talk about is this. She said, which, by the way, is the fire out.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

The detective said, we haven't been there yet. We'd have no fucking idea if the fires out. We came here to talk to you. Weird thing to say. They said, you're not under arrest. You're free to leave any time you want. And she said, who are you guys? And they introduced themselves and explained their roles. And she nodded and said, I'm just curious. And then she laughed and said, I didn't know whether you were police or fire department. Okay? Your kids are dead, stupid.

[Jimmy Wissman]

We have questions. It doesn't matter who we are.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it doesn't matter. So they said. Her voice was very nasal, as if she had a cold, but her affect was that of a woman completely comfortable in her environment. She seemed anxious to talk. She gave long, convoluted answers to every question that they asked. Asked if she was under the influence of alcohol or any drugs, she said, no, I had a drink earlier tonight. One, maybe one and a half, maybe four. I might have had six, seven of them, I'm not sure. She said, barely. I'm fuzzy on time tonight because I can't remember what time I went to bed, you know, because I only had a drink and a half. But I'd say between 9:30 and 10:30, which we know isn't true because she was talking on the phone at 11:30. I had about a drink and a half at dinner time. They were not strong to begin with. I drank about half of the second one, then just turned the light off and went to sleep. Later, she said she had gone to her room, the master bedroom on the south end of the main floor, where she read and perhaps dozed off. She thought Tim had gone to bed at about 10, but some noises had awakened her at about 11 and she went out to the kitchen. He was there getting some food. They had a good night. They said good night and gone into their own rooms at opposite ends of the house. Okay, she said. And that's the last time I saw any of them. I turned my lamp, my lamp off somewhere around 11:30. I did have a conversation with my husband on the phone. Sometime during the evening. It must have been 10 or 10:30. He called me and asked me, what did you want? He said someone had paged him. I told him I did not page you and to the best of my knowledge, the kids are asleep. If you want, I'll go up and check. She said she found no one awake and you know, there's that. So the cops are noting all of her time fuck ups at this point. Deborah told Smith and Bernetta that she was taking Prozac, 20 milligrams a day and the last dose she had taken was at 10 on Monday morning, 14 hours before the fire. She recalled that she had been awakened or awakened from a sound sleep by a blaring noise. She assumed that her house had both a burglar and fire alarm. She said the alarm signal that woke me was nothing I recognized. And when I went to the panel in my room to try to shut it off, it didn't do anything. Shit's on fire, there's no shutting that off. Deborah said she was used to the burglar alarm going off. It had done so several times recently because she had two big dogs that set off the motion detector. Dogs didn't make it out either, by the way. Yeah, but this sound was entirely different. She said. I thought I'd heard every noise it knew how to make, but this was a new one. She tried three or four times to shut the alarm off at the control panel with no success. Quote. So I opened the door to the hall and it was just filled with smoke. It scared me. So I found the key that's always on my bookshelf. She explained that she had to unlock the deadbolt on her bedroom door from the inside in order to step out onto the deck along the back of the house. She said, I left that way. And as I went around the corner to inform the neighbors to call 911, that's when I heard Tim on the intercom by the pool deck. Quote, he used to be my 13 year old. Oh, lady, he used to be my. In case you're wondering who that is, he used to be my 13 year old till, you know, three hours ago.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

That is the coldest thing I've ever heard anybody say. Even if the kid was dead for five years, you'd say, that's my 13 year old.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What the fuck?

[James Petregallo]

And he'd just never be any other age but 13. Martin Short still speaks of his wife in the present tense. Do you understand that? She's been dead for a decade. Still speaks of her that way. This kid's been dead for three hours.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He used to be dead.

[James Petregallo]

Used to be.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Used to be. That's a strange word.

[James Petregallo]

She's talking about the kid like Dr. Dre talking about Eazy. E. Fucking ridiculous crazy string of words together. Yeah, you. Deborah spoke in a stream of consciousness style, and she was apparently unaware that she had just referred to Tim in the past tense. She hurriedly explained that Tim had lost so many keys that he was quite used to going in and out of his window by means of the second floor roof. She said, he must have done that 30 times. Deborah had heard his voice in the intercom, but she hadn't seen him. She didn't explain why she hadn't looked up toward his voice, but only listened on the intercom box attached to the wall of their house by the back deck. He said, mom, what shall I do? I said, tim, wait where you are and I'm gonna call 911 to come and save you. And he said, well, should I get one of the girls to try and try to come out? I said, no, which I'm sure was the kiss of death. She said that first of all, she should have been saying, no, I'll be doing that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'm on my way out the window.

[James Petregallo]

I'm going to rescue the girls. Whoa. Quote, her words were chilling, but her inflection was so matter of fact, even chatty. Deborah could not recall the last time she'd been talked that she had talked to Tim. She mentioned often that she was still fuzzy on time. She did remember running to the foreman's and asking, asking them to call 911. She said, but I Have a feeling someone else called. Because by the time they understood what I was saying, the trucks had started to arrive. Deborah did not say why she had not simply dialed 911 from the phone in her own bedroom or whether she had lifted the phone to see if there was a dial tone. Even after the people that she talked to there. Dr. Foreman had left her at his side door to call for help. Deborah remembered she turned around and quote, Saw my 10 year old on the garage roof. She said she's afraid of heights. She remarked, kate's afraid of heights. She's afraid of pretty much everything. She then goes on to say I said, jump. And she said, no, I can't do it. I said, you will jump to me now. And she jumped and I missed her totally. I'm sure she'll never trust anybody. Yeah, that's the ultimate trust fall there.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. And she finds out.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And well, you'll see. And she fell down right at my feet. But she was not hurt. I'm sure that's the only reason we have her alive. So they asked her to go over the afternoon and evening before the fire. And as much detail as she could. She recalled the day virtually minute by minute. Picked her children up from the schools about 3pm she said they all go to Pembroke Hill. She said it was. She was. They said she was speaking so hard it was hard to make out her words. She said they all go to Pembroke Hill. At least the living ones do.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, lady.

[James Petregallo]

Like they've been dead for five years.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Living one, by the way, you ask.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, you fucking idiot. So, wow. Again the cops noted that she was referring to her children in the past tense. But she continued her recitation without pause. She said that after she got them home from separate schools in the Pembroke Hill system she took Kate to buy two pairs of shoes. Then we got home and I gave everyone small assignments of chores to get done and they did them. And then we were watching Saved by the Bell or one of those shows until the point that Kate and I had to leave Saved by the Bell. We had one of those typical nights. I had a psychiatrist's appointment at 5:45 and Lisa, that's from the book. I'm sorry, Kate is the real name. They used a different name because she's a lie. But she's. It's all on every paper. The 10 year old had a ballet class from 6 to 7:30 and Tim had a hockey game at 7:15 which left Kelly at loose ends. The 6 year old, Deborah said she left him and Kelly home Alone, waited for Mike, who was to pick them up at 6:40. He brought them home around nine, give or take five or 10 minutes, she said. And then they had their typical meal of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The girls went to bed. Tim was up till about 11. I talked to him for a while in the kitchen. They discussed his hockey game, which had gone extremely well. They asked if he was a goalie and she shook her head, quote, he's not a goalie. He played goalie for two or three years, though. Asked about the status of her marriage, she said, I'm not even sure anything's been filed, but we are signing in the process of a divorce. She said the two older children were very angry with their father. In fact, later today at 1:30, I have an appointment with a counselor to talk about what to do with the kids before they go to see him. I think you can cancel that one probably. She said the counseling would be for her and her three children because her husband had never been a major part of their lives. She was concerned about. About Tim and Kate, while Kelly seemed to be taking the divorce fairly well. The younger girl. Yeah, she told the cops Mike's a cardiologist. Listed her own varied medical specialties. Staying, saying that she stopped practicing, quote, at the suggestion, really the coercion of my husband who wanted me to stay home and be a mom. I even retired my license. A big deal in my life. The last couple weeks have been what am I going to do? Because my life is changing whether I like it or not. So I've decided what I want to do is go for a psych residency, which would be a whole new deal for me to live the life I want to live. How could you even talk at this point in time?

[Jimmy Wissman]

The things she's saying are not. None of them are right.

[James Petregallo]

No, it's all wrong.

[Jimmy Wissman]

It's all figuring all the worst things to say.

[James Petregallo]

Oh. They said that her words came out so fast that they were really happy that the video camera was running because they couldn't write them down as fast as she was talking. They said there was scarcely a second's pause between one of her thoughts that the next. And she seemed entirely rational except for her references to both of her dead children in both the past and present tense. One thing was clear. Deborah harbored intense rage toward her estranged husband. She apparently found fault with almost everything she did. She recalled that the weekend just passed had been chaotic because she had to pick up Tim from his father's apartment when he called, wanting to come home.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And.

[James Petregallo]

And then return for Kate at midnight because she had heard her paternal grandmother and other relatives talking about her mother.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Deborah said she was very upset and very angry because she was hearing her father and grandmother talking about what a slob her mother was and how she couldn't keep the house clean and how Kate had no social skills because Deborah had no social skills.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, man. Deborah told the detectives she had promised her children she would always come home and get them if they found themselves at their father's apartment in a situation they just couldn't handle. She then elaborated on her appointment with the counselor. Said the therapy was intended only for her children and their feelings toward their father. She said, we always said it was just the three kids and me and they didn't really care if he was there, but they were tired of listening to his crap, so they're angry. Asked about her own feelings, she chuckled and said, I haven't been particularly upset or really even terribly emotionally involved. That's not quite the truth. I felt tremendous sense of relief when he moved out, which surprised him because he thought I'd be devastated. Yeah. They said with virtually no prompting, she continually would leap from one aspect of her life to the other. They noted her conversation pretty much exclusively revolved around her feelings and her plans. She told them again of her intention to become a psychiatrist and of her hope that she would be accepted into a fellowship or residency. She wondered aloud how she could get back and forth to Topeka and still be sure someone can pick up her children who would of course remain at the Pembroke School there. She returned again and again to her contention that all three of her children hated their father. He said, Tim has come to that incredible level of respect where he says fuck you to his dad and Kate's beginning to do it too. She said it laughing, 13 years old.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Saying fuck you to dad, who did.

[James Petregallo]

That, and then the 10 year old daughter too. Yeah, they said. The cop said he deliberately averted his face so that Deborah could not read his expression on that one because it was horrified. The other guy playing the good cop basically grinned at her, although he was taken aback by this insane amount of hatred she has for her husband. It's wild. So it was obvious too to Debra that the children were hers. I mean, she didn't describe them as both of them. She seemed to have forgotten also about that her house just burned down. She explained that Kate had been very excited Monday because she had won the role of Clara in the Nutcracker Suite. That had been her goal since she began taking Ballet lessons when she was only six. She said she already had ten and a half hours of ballet a week to begin with and last weekend got 30 extra hours, so she was pretty tired. They said one interrogation technique that they used over and over again was to ask the same question slightly different ways, which is what they always do. Any little things will pop up. So they. When they asked her again to recall the previous evening, she repeated herself in precise detail. When Mike brought Tim and Kelly. Kelly home from the hockey game, she said, quote, I was kind of surprised that he had just walked into the house because we reached a point a few weeks ago when I kind of demanded to have all my keys and garage door openers back and he refused to give them to me. She had not had her locks changed. She said, I just let it go. But I thought we worked it out and. And he was not going to be there unless he was invited. I was walking down the hall toward the kitchen, glanced over to my left to the entryway, and he had come in with Kelly. She said he had. She ignored him while he flipped through his mail. And then she said, I guess he got bored and left, saying, that was about 9pm from the Ann Rule book. Quote. Deborah's ceaseless monologue was bizarre, but Burnetta and Smith were not psychiatrists. They didn't know if she was talking so fast because she didn't want to think about the fire or. Or if she simply enjoyed having an audience. Nor did they know if she was trying to present herself as a good mother and show them what a rotten father Mike was. She was clearly not drunk, did not seem to be under the influence of medication. Her memory for minutiae was perfect. She was so sure of times and places that she might have been reading out of an appointment book. And the two investigators most certainly did not know the motivation behind her barrage of words. They just sat and listened.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Deborah described the layout of her entire house, ending with the children's wing on the upper floor. She's there four bedrooms, two bathrooms in that wing. She said they go up there and they stay up there. She said, laughing, because I don't want to see their mess. They share it with the dogs.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Well, that's a weird thing to say.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, yeah, she said, usually the two dogs slept with Deborah. But on Monday, the two dogs discovered a bag of coffee beans, dragged it out in the living room and ate shitloads of them.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Them. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Quote, so I said, these dogs are not going to go to sleep for 100 years, so they're not Sleeping with me tonight. So each of the girls took a dog. This. That's fucking insane. She then said, quote, she just jumped to talking about her husband. She said, he's been so odd lately. She said they had phone conversations that night. And, quote, I said, no, I'm not going to talk to you tonight. I'm just not interested. Then I hung up. And then I remembered something. She said that she knew he was on his way home to his apartment in his truck. So she called him. For a moment, she could not recall why. Oh, yeah, it was about the returnee. She said they'd been. She said that Mike had been really snotty because she'd taken so long deciding about an attorney to proceed with. So then they bring Mike in. Let's bring Mike in.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

6:20Am they bring him in. He's had a tough night, obviously. Clearly. So they let him into the same interrogation room he still had. He had on jeans and the same clothes he wore on to the hockey game that night. They could see immediately that his demeanor was completely different than Deborah's.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He's distraught, he said.

[James Petregallo]

His eyes were red from crying and he's hunched over. He's not looking great. So they said, mike, I'm Greg Berneta. It's a shame to have met you under these circumstances. Go ahead and have a seat. He explained that he'd been called to the home and, you know, he had already talked to Deborah. And they asked him, are you up to date on the most current information? And he said, I haven't heard anything. Then they had to tell him. They said, I wish I didn't have to tell you this, but your two kids are dead.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And they said his whole body sagged. And he said, I knew it. I knew it as soon as I got there when they told me they weren't out. Did you find them at least? They said his voice was trembling. And they said the firemen found the bodies. And some of our police officers are present at the house at this point. They stepped out of the room to let him have some time to be sad. Really, they're just watching him on the video to see what he does. See if he switches right up and he's fine. So they said they stepped out of the room and after they sensed he needed some time alone and. Yeah, they said that the weird part is they attempted to confront Debra. And they said they'd been completely rebuffed by him, by her. She didn't give a fuck. But they said that, you know, they didn't know how to react to him. They said Mike was watch being watched on the video camera. He sighed deeply, covered his eyes with his hand hands. And cried softly the whole time they were gone.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Like a man.

[James Petregallo]

Like a person whose kids just died?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, like a man. Like a man who's experiencing grief.

[James Petregallo]

Exactly. The cop said, I wish there was some way I could make you feel better. And Mike said, I know. I've told enough people their loved ones were dead to know how bad they feel. He's a cardiologist. He's done this. He's like, I've done your job. I've seen it all. So they gave him some coffee and they said, look, this is fucking horrible. They said, that was a pretty unpleasant task at your house when we had to take your children's mom away. Because this is the same cop who was there taking her away when he called. And Mike said, I know. He said, I know. They did a fine job when she was gone, too. So they hurried with some basic questions. Birth dates, pager numbers, all that and everything. They said Mike drew. He did well until the room grew silent. And then he would kind of break down a little bit here. So they talked about how. How long ago was the. When you called us out there? Was that about three weeks ago? He said, yeah, I bet. About. I think it's about three weeks, they said. They asked if Deborah might have started the fire and should. Should we consider her a suspect? He said. Mike said, I think it's a likely possibility she's been mentally unstable, drinking, severely depressed. I could never talk to her psychiatrist. I could only talk and deal with the social worker as an intermediary. When I saw Deborah had started to drink again, I confronted her. She denied it. Denied it, Denied it. I reported my concerns to the social worker. She said that he also said, she has a very characteristic pattern of speaking clearly. To my eyes, she was drinking last night. I suppose it's inconceivable that she was drunk enough and drugged enough that she left a burner on. I have to tell you, she's done some odd things. I suppose it's conceivable, he said, she might have done this by accident. He told them about their first house fire only 18 months ago. He said, but I then talked about getting back together. He said, but I realized that was just like having a baby when a couple's having a problem when they were going to buy that big house to begin with. He said, two days later, our house burned. The arson inspectors couldn't find a cause, but the insurance Company did. They said it was a wire wound around a pipe too tightly, and they also said vcr. So who knows? Anyway, we all moved into my apartment and resubmitted our bid to the house, the house that burned tonight. My God. He said. Some of my friends were convinced that Deborah burned down our first house to get me back. At the time, I thought it was absurd. I didn't think she could outsmart the investigators. But I will tell you this. This woman is brilliant. She's a brilliant woman. She's brilliant. She reads avidly. Who knows what she reads about? So they talk about the deteriorating marriage. And he said, in late July, I asked her for a divorce. And then things started getting weirder. Yeah, it was more than the bad behavior and swearing I was used to. All of her emotions were laid wide open with the kids. Kids, he said. And then I got sick. I was in the hospital for a total of three weeks. I was admitted three times, starting August 18th. There was no diagnosis. I had a number of specialists. It was a very serious illness. There was one point in time where I damn near died. So they were like, yeah, you look pale and fragile. And he's lost a bunch of weight. He's 5 10, but he's 130 pounds right now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

So he lost a ton of weight. He said, each time I went back to the hospital, I had eaten a meal at home that had kind of a bitter taste, but I thought, that's nuts. That's crazy. It's just nuts. And I went through her purse then, and I found packets of castor beans. He said, I saved one package and gave you all the rest. I started thinking about it. I found an old internal medical textbook, the seventh edition of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. And I looked up the symptoms, and they all fit. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure. Then I went to the North Kansas City Hospital library and had them do a literature search. And he had asked that any articles turned up by the search be mailed to an address because he didn't want Deborah to open them. So he said, honest to God, when I started reading the articles, I started shaking. I found out that even the KGB had used castor beans, ricin, to eliminate people. The problem is, unless you do the specific toxicology oncology screen at the time of the illness, you can't get a diagnosis. Wow. It's very hard. That's interesting. He also told them about mysterious letters that had been left on his porch and in the neighbor's yard. He knew Deborah's Turns of phrases and recognized everything she did. Also the beans. Obviously they had to deal with that. The Prairie Village detectives had to find which garden store in the Kansas City area had sold the beans and to whom. So the label had read, Earl May. The name of a chain of Midwestern garden stores with headquarters in Shenandoah, Iowa. They said at least a half a dozen branches in the Kansas City area area. They sell fertilizers, planters, hoses, all the gardening bullshit. So they believe she might have bought the castor beans there, perhaps in late July or early August. But they haven't been able to find proof. No one at the store remembered her. One woman worked there for five years and said that she, you know, again, didn't remember seen a lot of people in five years. Her store manager received a call from a detective around Halloween who asked whether anyone in the store recalled selling a dozen or so packets of castor beans. They said they didn't remember such a sale, but they did carry castor beans in season. And he promised to ask the clerk if they remembered such a sale. And at that moment. So that employee walked in the store and they asked her the question. And this employee said that she had sold a large number order of castor beans about a month before. So they got that. They said there's a good reason why Earl May had no castor beans in September. Smart merchandising, the castor beans, an ornamental annual that gardeners sow in the spring. It's fast growing, but short lived. I said they get anywhere from 6 to 10ft tall, depending about the site. They're used for quick cover and kind of have a tropical appearance to them, but they'll die off with the first freeze. So they said that planting time for castor beans would have been April 15 to May 1. So they said they'd never heard of anyone buying castor beans in the fall. So that's odd.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

So they said when she saw requests for 10 packets, she hadn't even bothered calling the other stores in the area because they wouldn't have any in stock. The only way to fill the order would be get the seeds directly from the warehouse in Shenandoah. So she had made this order and did all this. She said she would be up later to pick up the seeds. And she picked up 10 packets. Holy shit. When they first asked about the woman, she had trouble remembering what Deborah looked like since, you know, she waits on so many people. But she said this sale stood out. She didn't sell many castor beans anyway, but a Special order for out of season poisonous beans stands out to her. So she was able to say she was maybe mid-40s, medium build, leaning toward the heavy side, medium dark hair with a chin length. They said, we have register tapes. And the tape read September 21st, 1995. Um, should have been September 22nd or 20th, but the time was correct 3:27pm 10 packets of seeds for $1.29 apiece. She paid with a 20. They have all a receipt and everything. So the receipt that they have is a big deal that's gonna lock her in. Castor beans, by the way, used to produce a non toxic oil found in cosmetics, lubricants, paints, and also as a source for biodiesel and chemical feed supplies, stocks. The beans themselves are highly toxic, containing a potent poison called ricin, which is separate from the processed oil, but has been studied for anti cancer treatments. Historically, castor beans have been used in folk medicine for their laxative and other properties. And the seeds can be made into jewelry as well. That's a lot of things that they're ornamental for the most part. Now, suspects. They announced that they have some suspects, but they won't say who they are. Oh, make it sound like there's a team of people fucking burning a building down. They announced to the press. The police do that. Anytime you see small children killed in a fire that was intentionally set, words can't describe how horrible you feel. Nor can words describe what a treacherous act that would be for somebody to do this to these two small children. It's terrible. They have the funeral. Margaret Hacker comes to the funeral. Oh boy, that's fun. By the way, Deborah acts completely erratic at the funeral, yells at the funeral home staff about minor details of the funeral.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's par for the course for this woman.

[James Petregallo]

And told her parents in the middle of the memorial service to quote, shut the fuck up.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh my God.

[James Petregallo]

Grieving grandparents, shut the fuck up. They didn't sit together, by the way. Deborah and Michael, no, didn't sit together, which is odd for grieving parents. And Kate sobbed throughout the service because she's 10 and that's normal. Other weird Deborah behavior here, real fucking weird. She spent many hours watching Kate, who was living with the grandparents at that point, practice for the Nutcracker, like, you know, giving her instruction and shit. She visited the burned out house several times just to walk around. And one time when she attended a soccer game, she wept on the sidelines the whole time. Now the fire report is finally issued. Poor patterns and all that kind of shit. This is 11-10-95. So it's about two weeks. Poor patterns. Starting at dining room table, by the way, which was covered in divorce patterns, papers. That's the first place the fire started.

[Jimmy Wissman]

She lit the whole house on fire. Starting with divorce papers.

[James Petregallo]

Yep. Wound through the living room, focused on Mike's piano and his desk.

[Jimmy Wissman]

His shit. Yep.

[James Petregallo]

Up the stairs to the second floor. Soaked the hallway carpet outside the children's room. So they can't get out.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Created a trap barrier to escape. Stopped at Deborah's master bedroom door. Use three to ten gallons of accelerant. Multiple points of origin. This is arson. To kill those children, period.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Arson to.

[James Petregallo]

And Mike's belongings.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And inflict maximum damage on Mike.

[James Petregallo]

Yes.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's what.

[James Petregallo]

That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Exactly what it is. That's absolutely fucking crazy.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

They said that Deborah, at 5:4, carried and poured all this flammable liquid all over the house. She's very small at that point. November 17, 1995. After the fire, they do some blood testing at a naval research laboratory on Michael's blood. And experts conclude that his blood had been exposed to ricin. So that's not good. November 22, 1995. Deborah drops Kate off at ballet practice at the Midland Theater. And as she goes to get in her car, the cops are fucking waiting. And they arrest her in the parking lot. Charge her with two counts of capital murder, one count of attempted capital murder, aggravated arson, one count of attempted first degree premeditated murder. Should be some abused animals in there, too. Just saying.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Possibly some poisoning.

[James Petregallo]

Just throw them in there. Yeah, that's the attempted murder.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, okay. Got it. I thought the shit was on the baby. On the other baby. Oh, yeah, that survived.

[James Petregallo]

Oh. One count of attempted first degree premeditated. One count of capital.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There it is.

[James Petregallo]

All right, so that's two attempted. Both to. Both attempts there. $3 million her bail is set at. Which is the highest in the history of Johnson county and will stay that way for years and years. And the prosecutor announces the death penalty will be sought.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. She's a bad woman.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. By the way, remember her friend from tennis earlier?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

They said, how'd you first hear about the fire? She said, my sitter came over that morning and said there was a fire on Canterbury Circle. And I thought, please don't be Deborah. I called her phone and it was busy, so I thought she was chatting on the phone and everything was okay. But then when I took my son to the barber and saw on the news there was a fire at the house, I Thought, oh, no, they're going to think Deborah did that because of that other fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, because that other timer house went up.

[James Petregallo]

No shit. They said, did you. Were you surprised about the abuse? Substance abuse claims? And she said, deborah did call me. And it was obvious she was intoxicated, but she showed no signs of drug use before. As Ann Rule wrote, the night of the fire, she had taken a lot of Prozac and vodka. So maybe she might have been out of her mind.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah, maybe.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, man. So there's another. There's a lawyer who used to be a respected prosecutor that takes her case. And there's a whole article about how mad everyone is at him for that.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

He's a defense lawyer. That's what they do.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And they were mad that he had a job.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Well, you don't get mad at a doctor for pulling a bullet out of some gangbanger's chest, do you? No, that's their job. Like, let him die. No, don't let him die. You're a doctor. She maintains her innocence.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Oh, yeah. She's in profound grief. Her lawyer says that's all she talks about and worries about is Kate and what the pressure is doing to Kate. I think she's still somewhat dazed and confused. She's very surprised she would be charged with these kinds of crimes. She lost everything in this fire, including her children. Everything. And she's astounded. Okay. Interesting. The neighborhood said people in the neighborhood. The police chief said that environment has changed 180 degrees. They know they can't be insulated, but it's difficult sometimes in their minds to finally admit that things have changed and they may never be the same around there. 1996, they send her for a competency evaluation.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And she actually passes that. The defense strategy they announced for court because you have to basically get a judge to okay your strategy. They blame it on Tim.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Tim did it.

[James Petregallo]

The child did it. Tim.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

They said that Tim was angry at his father and had a fascination with fire. He'd been caught. She said to nobody else knew this, but that he'd been caught setting off Molotov cocktails once. He's obsessed with fire.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

She also said Tim poisoned his father's food because he likes to cook. So that's what he did.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Tim's a bad kid.

[James Petregallo]

Jesus. Evil, evil, evil.

[Jimmy Wissman]

13 years old, tells his dad to go fuck himself. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Then Ann Rule comes to town. You know, you are fucked and you've done something really bad when you're in jail and Ann Rule shows Up. You are fucked. She's gonna write like a 900 page book about you. You did some bad shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

How much of a piece of shit you are.

[James Petregallo]

April 17, 1996. She smartly agrees to a plea deal.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

In exchange, they agreed not to seek the death penalty. She pleads no contest to all charges. They submit a 17 page proffer of the evidence. At her hearing, she said that her defense would certainly challenge some of the state's evidence. But Deborah understood that the material above would be presented to the jury if the case proceeded to trial. She said, quote, I'm aware that the state can produce substantial evidence that I set the fire that caused the death of my children. My attorneys are ready and willing to and able to present evidence that I was not in control of myself when Tim and Kelly died. However true that may be, defending myself at trial on these charges would only compound the suffering of my family and my daughter, Kate. I love my family very much. I never meant to harm my children, but I accept the fact that I will be punished harshly. I believe that this is best to end this now so that we can begin to heal from our horrible loss.

[Jimmy Wissman]

What a convoluted, messy thing to say.

[James Petregallo]

Fucking asshole. The judge has something else to say to her, though. And that's you, ma', am, may fuck off. A hard 40 life sentence, that's 40 years to life, with 40 before possibility of parole on the Capitol murder counts we'll talk about in a second. And all of the other additional sentences run concurrently. She will be 84 the first time she's eligible for parole.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There's no way she gets out. No way.

[James Petregallo]

I would fucking hope not. No. By the way, Michael was there in court, fresh off of brain surgery he had to have because of all this shit.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my God. He had an aneurysm.

[James Petregallo]

Yep. He said, they said, why'd you show up? He said, despite what she did, this is still a human being. I was married to her for 11 years. Showed up for her to be. Yeah, to support her rather than to hate her. Wow. By the way, the friend, the tennis friend, they asked her, did you stay in touch when she was in custody? And she said, deborah reached out to me quite a bit. I visited her at the Olathe Jail when she went to prison in Topeka, I visited her there. She was always proclaiming her innocence. She wrote me letters and asked whether I would perjure myself and say that Tim said, quote, sometimes I get so upset with my dad, I want to burn down the house. Will you say that for Me, I think I sent it to our lawyer, who sent it to the defense. And pretty quickly afterwards, she pleaded no contest. Wow.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I didn't know you could plead no contest to murder.

[James Petregallo]

No shit. So March 2004, she tries to withdraw her plea, years later, saying that she didn't actually do it. There's new scientific evidence. She has a bunch of experts that argue with each other. It's pretty fucking stupid. There's a hearing to withdraw from that. That's 2005 tons. I have so much here on these experts, it's fucking ridiculous. But we don't have time to get into that shit. They said, get the fuck out of here. Affirmed, take a hike. They said her new evidence is insufficient. Even though there are advances in the science of fire investigation, it's still an overwhelming amount of evidence that you did this. Yeah. She said the factual basis was and remains sound. Absolutely. The court wrote, Deborah's focus on advances in science ignores the inescapable. The inescapable? Like a house fire that you're trapped in.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Well, you can't say that.

[James Petregallo]

No. 2007, her whole appeal is based on the fact that she was too medicated to remember setting the fire at all and probably was too fucked up to carry all that accelerant. So it couldn't have been her. They said, yeah, right. Federal appeal. They say, take a fucking hike, sweetheart. Get back to jail with you. Yeah. Petitions denied. Now, Michael never pursued a civil lawsuit against her.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I wonder what that is.

[James Petregallo]

Which is interesting. He's not a confrontational person, as it seems like.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He's a very calm man.

[James Petregallo]

He obtained a divorce and got full custody of Kate. Insurance claims from the fire were complicated by arson. There's medical bills from poisoning that the insurance didn't want to cover as well, so we had that. Kate was placed with Mike's parents initially because she was mad at her father.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, Kate.

[James Petregallo]

The court allowed supervised visits with. From Kate, with Deborah. Kate visiting Deborah in jail.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my word.

[James Petregallo]

For the next. I don't know if today, but at least for like, 15 years or whatever, Kate maintained her mother's innocence. She says, my mother's innocent. 2008, another hearing. No go. 2015, she's trying to get resentenced. And they said, get the fuck out of here. You're lucky we're not fucking beating you to death. You killed your kids. August 23, 2023. Michael dies at age 68.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, my God, this poor bastard.

[James Petregallo]

Fucking poor guy. Deborah is inmate number 007. That's the first really, yep. 0074319 at the Topeka Correctional Facility. Medium to high security, two concurrent life terms. Parole eligibility is November 21st, 2035. So she's only 10 years away, but still she'll be 84. She's had no major disciplinary infractions that would affect that, by the way.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Yep. Ann Rule's book, Bitter Harvest. A Woman's fury, A Mother's Sacrifice.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jesus.

[James Petregallo]

Jesus came. See, I couldn't give you the title in the beginning because you know exactly the whole story at that point. It's got 4.5 stars out of 2,500 reviews on.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's a damn good book.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's pretty goddamn good. Ann Rule began corresponding with Deborah Greene in 1996 and interviewed her in person in 1997. Rule's theory was that in destroying Michael, Greene would have been able to preserve her own ego and that Michael would not have been able to leave her for another woman. That makes a lot of sense to me. Also in Kansas, it influenced fire investigation training standards, led to changes in how accelerant evidence is presented and affected death penalty negotiations in domestic cases. Also cited fire science reliability challenges nationwide. And Prairie Village had to create a new address system after demolishing the Murder House because so many people are coming to stare at it. Wow, this has been covered in Red Book magazine. Yeah, it's been covered in.

[Jimmy Wissman]

My mom was a subscriber. I'll bet that shit was in my living room.

[James Petregallo]

Bitter Harvest and Rule. New York Times bestseller for that Forensic Files episode. An episode of Deadly Women. A 2021 Lifetime movie. House on Fire. There you go, everybody. So that is Prairie Village, Kansas. And that is a crazy ass story. We gotta bust through the end of it because we're running very, very late. But definitely, if you like that show, head over to whatever app you're on and give us five stars. It helps a ton. Shut upandgivemerder.com head to our show at the More in Seattle in mid October. Right? October. Get in there and it's just a couple weeks away. Get in there and see us. Definitely. Shut up and give me murder.com patreon.com crimeandsports all of your bonus materials, anybody. $5 a month or above. Hundreds of bonus episodes. New ones every other week. This week for crime and sports, Kermit Washington incident. Huge fight. Changed everybody's lives in the 70s. Small town murder, History of executions in the United States. That is for that. Patreon.com crimeandsports and you get all three shows ad free. With your Patreon crime and sports, your stupid opinions and small town murder. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, which is right now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the most wonderful fucking people on the face of this earth. Hit me with him right now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

This week's executive producer, Atlanta Zemel. My favorite Canadian, Jason Fuller. Gary Howard. Gary and Jason, thank you both.

[James Petregallo]

Thank you for coming.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Great to see both of you. It was amazing. And David Baer, both of them. Jennifer Widner. Thank you all so much for what you're doing. You're fantastic. Voltrobe. Other producers we got Voltrobe Electronics. They didn't give a name, just donated in a business name. So that's fine. Peyton Meadows Electronics at Voltro, wherever that is.

[James Petregallo]

What do we know?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Happy hour. Checking in and loving New Mexico. I don't. I did not very. Ooh, yikes. You poor bastard. Janice Hill, S.J. surridge. Martha Whiting, 508's phone. Dave Cohen, Jennifer Probst, Flossy May Tyler, Scarborough, Phantom Inc. Madeline Michaux, Rick Gallagher, Amy Clawson. Kate with no last name. Ashley Green. Kaylee with no last name. Keely Moore. Is. Is that Kelly? Keely? Is it Kelly? I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

Kg. Ellie.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah. Is that Keely or Kali?

[James Petregallo]

Usually. Actually, I knew a girl with that name. Yes, it's a Hawaiian Pele. Like Hawaiian Wild. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay. Joe, Kelly Moore. Kayla. Okay. Jim. Jim. Chichas Kachas. Austin Stevenson. Mike Stanton.

[James Petregallo]

Isn't that the pitcher?

[Jimmy Wissman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Or.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's funny. Victoria C. Melody Cadwell. Aaron. Aaron. Aaron Weingartner. Weingarten. Donna with no last name. Brittany Longmire. Angela Zimwaldi. Lisanne Bodhi. Bodhi. Bodhi Body.

[James Petregallo]

Perhaps.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Vanessa with a J. Guess where that's at. Vogan, Joseph Rimesey. Vanessa with a J. Timothy McMillan. Christina Van Sickle. Heard. Naomi Kramer. Libby Knight. Thomas mink. Dennis James McIntosh. Nikki Smith. Tiffany Freeman. Aaron Taylor. Adrian Zimmerman is shm. Ashley Berry. I don't know what that means. Patrick with no last name. Jason Heinrich. Dizzy Flame. Lucia with no last name. Brad Edwards. Brooke Tamboro. Jessica Davis. Vinnie Bag of Donuts. Who is that? That's. That's.

[James Petregallo]

It's a. It's a.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That other guy is that guy's joke, isn't it?

[James Petregallo]

It was a dice thing. It was. Joey Bag of Donuts.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Oh, okay. Got it. I think there was a. The guy with the weird last name. That's a comic. I think he calls his brother Bag of Donuts. It doesn't Matter.

[James Petregallo]

Definitely not his, then.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Okay. Sam Milbauer. He probably explains it better than me. Just saying. Bag of Donuts. Chloe Weiland. He's an amazing comic. Melissa and Resin. Reason Rising. Timothy Reagan. Velvet armadillo. Brooke Braun.

[James Petregallo]

D O D From someone else. He's amazing.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He certainly didn't steal it, is my point.

[James Petregallo]

If he's using it. No, no.

[Jimmy Wissman]

There's. I'm sure there's a reason he's telling it.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, okay. Okay.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I'm not quoting his joke very well.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. Okay.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Jamie Souza. Trisha York. Serena Lagore. The Easterlings. Debbie Anderson. Carol Pikeraz. Part R. Perkos. Shauna Issa. Man. Amanda P. Nancy Cantwell. I can't well read. Taya. Taya. Tayo. Elise. Ava. What is it? Is it Dom?

[James Petregallo]

Little Petey? Regular Petey. Regular Petey. Joe. Bag of Donuts. This one. That one. That was his kid's name.

[Jimmy Wissman]

He's been. He's an Italian guy, I think.

[James Petregallo]

There you go. Yeah.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Barbara. Yeah. Yeah. Where did I go? Damn it. Ava with no last name. Jen Tattershell. Nikki Nicole Coates. Karen Iowenthal. Joshua Gardner. Ms. N. Barb Farney. Farney Ho. Farney Off. Fernie Hoff. I'm asking so many questions with that last name. All right. Crazy and Krezian. With no last name. Terry Morris. J. Bob. ML. Sonia Nelson. Sarah Wolf Hill. Megan with no last name. Ricky Hutchinson. Aiden Rolfe. Aaron Bagley. Bagley. It's Bagley. Cindy McGee. Jackie with no last name. Brianna. Brenna Kosilski. Leah McClendon. Russell Mylot. Anthony O.G. miller. Adrian Lopez. Steph with no last name. Jackie Buddha. Mark Spark. Mary with no last name. Megan Dykeman. Cinnamon with no Last name. Sweet Care 74. Matt Lamas. Gracie Parrish. Christian Puckett. Drew with no last name. Bethany Alice. Patience Harper. Jenny Mae. Elise Christensen. Alice Perhaps Taylor Haas. Glorious Laurius. Rachel Guerrero. Ryan and Alyssa Dole. Jared Chappell. Chappelle. Maybe Zyra Holtom. Zyra. Zyra Holtam. Dina Dean. Dean Rashkow. L. Minnie Lauren B. Philippa Lee's. Kelsey Pringle. Tamara Hughes. Lorna Graydon. Jess with no last name. Vanessa Healy. Parrot Heads with no last name. Those are the people that are big fans of Jimmy Buffett. Diane Putsch. Steve King. Blair Osgood. Mick Mike. Mike with no last name. Jamie Kashirski. Amy Graves. Bill with no last name. Kate Sullivan. Super Flax on, whatever that is. Kelsey Unger. Bri. Bri. Bri Delvo. Delvo. Del Vox. Ross with no last name. Wendy Sue. Isabella Bascom. Bascombe, Sarah Johnson, Catherine Taylor, Liz Jones, ed Jones, Ryan McAfee, Alex Jarding, John West, Gene west, maybe Ryan Marshall. Kristen with no last name, Jennifer Finley, Wendy Katamoto, Jason Miller, Joanne Bacon, Melinda with no last name, Sarah Lee. Oh, nobody doesn't like her.

[James Petregallo]

Nobody doesn't like her. Nobody doesn't like her. I'll tell you that right now.

[Jimmy Wissman]

And all of our patrons, you're amazing. Thank you so much.

[James Petregallo]

Thank you everybody, so much. Fantastic bastards. Thank you. Thank you. Tell everybody. Keep tuning back in. You want to find us on social media, head over to shut upandgivemerder.com there's drop down menus to take you anywhere you want to go. Keep coming back and seeing us. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Bye.

[James Petregallo]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today. Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call you talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. Up.

[Jimmy Wissman]

That's all the rules.

[James Petregallo]

I never know what's going to happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings, crazy funny ones.

[Jimmy Wissman]

I talked to a guy with a goose laugh.

[James Petregallo]

Somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's going to happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today.

[Jimmy Wissman]

Beautiful Anonymous.