Medicine Made Me Murder - St. George, Utah

Summary

Small Town Murder - "Medicine Made Me Murder: St. George, Utah" (June 4, 2026)

Episode Overview

This episode follows the bizarre case of the 1990 murder of Janice Fondren in St. George, Utah—one that became nationally famous for a unique "Prozac murder defense." Comedians James Pietragallo and Jimmie Whisman provide deeply researched background on the small town itself, the people involved, the medical-legal drama, and how a new psychiatric drug became central to a defense of murder. The hosts combine tragic true crime details with irreverent, brash humor, breaking down the murder, legal wrangling, community impacts, and ongoing controversies with signature banter.

---

Main Sections

1. St. George, Utah: The Setting

(06:01 – 24:52)

Town Facts & History

• Settled as a “cotton mission” in 1861—known as "Utah’s Dixie" ([07:07])
• Rapidly grew despite the failure of the cotton industry.
• Geographically, feels more like Arizona than classic "mountain" Utah—desert, red rocks, high heat.
• Historical quirks: major recipient of nuclear fallout from 1950s Nevada nuclear tests, causing elevated cancer rates ([09:30]).
• Town population more than tripled since the 1990s—from 28,500 to over 92,000 ([15:06]).

Culture & Demographics

• Mormon-dominant (over 70% LDS), family-focused,
• Reputed for repression, low nightlife, “keep up with the Joneses” mentality.
• “The earth doesn’t want you here,” jokes James ([11:59]).
• House prices and cost of living rising, making renting smarter than buying for many ([17:40]).

Town Color

• Reviews from locals: “It's a great in-between of small town and plenty to do” vs. “the air reeks of repression and low IQ points” ([13:09]).
• Activities: outdoor hiking, “boring” water lantern festivals and a dinosaur track museum that some idiots mistake for a live-dino exhibit ([21:56, 23:06]).
• Crime rate: Violent crime is half the national average, “They don’t know how guns work” ([24:24]).

---

2. The Murder: Janice Fondren Disappears

(25:04 – 42:04)

Introduction to the Victim & Circumstances

• Janice Fondren, 30, cheerful, private, a nurse from South Carolina who moved to Utah seeking safety, quiet, and opportunity ([40:12]).
• Described as “always smiling," beloved by coworkers and clients.

The Day of the Crime (July 22, 1990)

• Janice fails to show up for work—her friend and boss, Nancy Snow, discovers a blood-soaked, chaotic scene at Janice’s apartment, including an open kitchen window, blood trails, upended plants, and a bullet hole ([33:17]).
• Janice’s car is found with brush in the wheel well—a clue to where it was driven ([39:29]).
• No body at the scene, but major evidence of violence.

The Prime Suspect

• Nancy points investigators to her ex-husband, Joseph “JC” Gardner, who had recently harassed both women despite restraining orders ([33:08, 34:05]).
• Tension with JC included public confrontations at a local bar (where Janice defended Nancy), and reports of JC spying/building up anger ([51:47], [95:58]).
• JC is picked up, his shoes match prints by the window, and his behavior and connection become the center of the case ([99:13]).

---

3. People Involved: The Victim, The Killer, The Town

(42:04 – 72:01)

Janice Fondren

• Strong-willed, highly competent, moved for a better life, gave emotional support to Nancy ([94:23]).
• Had no romantic connection to JC, contrary to confusing early news reports ([105:25]).

Joseph "JC" Gardner

• Born 1957, raised Mormon in Nevada, Eagle Scout, mission to Switzerland, zoology degree, multi-role healthcare worker ([53:19], [67:44]).
• After his father’s death in 1988, spiraled into depression—prescribed Prozac, experienced side effects, attempted suicide twice ([72:39], [81:49]).
• Rapidly married (and divorced) Nancy Snow, with whom he had mounting, obsessive behavior.
• Developed a pattern of stalking and escalating harassment ([91:49]).

---

4. The Crime: What Actually Happened

(99:31 – 119:46)

Evidence & Theories

• Entry through kitchen window, with pre-planned rubber gloves, shovel, and 9mm gun ([103:01]).
• In the middle of the night: Confronts Janice, shoots her in the chest (possible second bullet through window), drags body outside ([116:39]).
• Poses body, undressed, possibly sexually assaults, dumps in remote desert spot tied to car’s brush debris and timeline ([111:04], [118:45]).
• JC confesses only hazily (“The next thing I know, she was lying on the floor” - [120:48]).

Investigation Success

• Crime scene science (botanical forensics, tire tracks), witness timelines, and ballistics lead directly to JC and the murder weapon ([102:59]).

Memorable Quote:
"He kept it all in his apartment like an idiot."
— James ([119:55])

---

5. Insanity & The Prozac Defense

(125:20 – 164:41)

The Defense Team

• Alan Boyak, bombastic, Vietnam Green Beret-vet, lawyer/public defender/coroner/pilot—“TV evangelist” in the courtroom ([125:20]).
• Boyak pursues an “involuntary intoxication by prescription” or “Prozac made him do it” defense, inspired by a similar Halcion-insanity acquittal in Utah's courts ([129:35], [145:09]).

Prozac Controversy

• At the time, SSRIs (like Prozac) were new; side effects, especially violent/suicidal ideation, were not fully mapped out.
• Hosts discuss the medical/legal context, media panic, and lawsuits (including the infamous Louisville printing-plant shooting) ([137:09]).
• Prosecutor: “If he asserts a defense that he was not in full possession of his faculties, we’ll try to prove otherwise” ([151:56]).

Memorable Quote:
"What you become on Prozac is a psychopath."
— Alan Boyak, defense attorney ([148:21])

Legal Outcome

• Precedents dissected: Utah’s laws had no explicit “involuntary intoxication” clause, but the court would only accept not guilty if JC could prove he didn’t know right from wrong at the time ([164:41]).
• JC takes a conditional guilty plea to felony murder in exchange for dropping death penalty; sentenced 5 years to life ([168:50]).

---

6. Aftermath: Prison, Parole, Recidivism

(171:07 – episode end)

Prison Life & Attempts at Redemption

• JC becomes a “model prisoner”: studies birds, earns a master’s by correspondence, and stays out of trouble ([171:19]).

Parole Proceedings & Community Safety

• At various parole hearings (2000, 2017), shows little memory or outright avoidance of responsibility:
  • “I do not remember making the decision to bring the gun with me...” ([175:45])
  • Family resists release: “He purposely, maliciously broke into her apartment to kill her. He should spend the rest of his life in prison...” ([173:56])
• Diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, but continues to blame Prozac ([177:14]).

Post-Release: Immediate Reoffending

• 2020: Paroled to St. George. Shortly after, implicated in illegal gun possession—caught with multiple firearms and ammunition, including a 9mm ([179:44]).
• Convicted federally for felon-in-possession; sentenced to another 8.5 years in prison at age 65 ([182:54]).

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• "The earth doesn’t want you here." — James, on St. George’s harsh environment ([11:59])
• "No dinosaurs. That's the dumbest review...we do a show about dumb reviews and that's the dumbest review I’ve ever seen for anything." — James ([24:52])
• "Nancy, you’re so good at this." — Jimmie, on Nancy solving the case for police ([33:08])
• "What you become on Prozac is a psychopath." — Alan Boyak, defense attorney ([148:21])
• "He kept it all in his apartment like an idiot." — James, on JC’s bungled cover-up ([119:55])
• "The next thing Gardner knew, she was lying on the floor." — JC's confession and the hosts' mockery ([120:39])
• "Janice Fongren was almost an incidental figure in this." — Boyak, minimizing the murder victim ([150:40])

---

Timeline of Key Events

| Timestamp | Event | |------------|-------------| | 25:04 | Discovery of the crime scene (blood, bullet, no body) | | 33:08 | Nancy points police to JC as prime suspect | | 41:13 | Janice’s biography—her move to Utah | | 53:19 | Joseph “JC” Gardner’s background | | 72:39 | JC’s depression, Prozac prescription, suicide attempts | | 103:01 | Evidence found: weapon, gloves, shovel, planning details | | 111:04 | Crime scene and body discovered—posed and assaulted | | 125:20 | Defense team details; Boyak’s colorful bio | | 148:21 | Prozac defense strategy outlined | | 151:56 | Prosecutor’s response: “We’ll try to prove otherwise…” | | 168:50 | JC’s guilty plea and sentencing | | 171:19 | JC’s prison behavior and later parole hearings | | 177:14 | Borderline personality disorder diagnosis | | 179:44 | Parole violation: illegal gun possession, federal conviction |

---

Overall Tone & Takeaways

• The hosts present harrowing details of violence, but keep the tone gallows-humorous, irreverent, and anti-killer throughout.
• They ridicule both the Prozac defense (“medicine didn’t make you a stalker”) and the town’s quirks, providing both a historical and legal education in their comedic, rambling style.
• The episode emerges not just as a true crime story, but as a critique of “magic bullet” defenses, small-town insularity, and tragic outcomes when obsessed (possibly untreated/undertreated) mental health meets access to violence.

---

For Further Listening

• For more on the Utah legal system’s history with drug-induced madness and violence, see previous episodes referenced here (e.g., “Master of Deceit” in Utah).
• The unique legal arguments here are set against a larger backdrop of 1990s psychiatric drugs in America—an ongoing debate about medication, crime, and culpability that still resonates.

---

This summary should provide a comprehensive, engaging overview for anyone interested in true crime, legal loopholes, psychiatric history, and the weirdness of small-town America—with all the wild character and comic edge of Small Town Murder.

Transcript

[James Petregallo]

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.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Hey there, it's Wayfair here where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock square scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it,

[James Petregallo]

a brand new patio set.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too.

[James Petregallo]

Alright, Wayfair's got you covered.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair Every Style, Every Home this week

[James Petregallo]

in St. George, Utah, a woman disappears from her home leaving behind only blood and a bullet hole in a window. Only to be found murdered in the worst possible way. The case unfolds into a national news story with the accused murderer using a very new, very unique defense. But will it work? Welcome to Small Town Murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to Small Town Murder.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yay.

[James Petregallo]

Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petregallo. I'm here with my co host.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I'm Jimmy Whisserman.

[James Petregallo]

Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another insane crazy wild edition of Small Town Murder. It's been crazy lately. It's only gonna get crazier. Everybody, here it goes. We have a wild story for you today. Before we get to that real quick, definitely head over to shut up and givemeimurder.com get your tickets for live shows. Also merchandise new stuff up as well over there. We're but definitely get your tickets. After the summer we have more live shows. On September 18th we're at the Pabst in Milwaukee. There's a few tickets left for that so get those pretty quick here, don't wait. Milwaukee. And then the next night in Minneapolis, September 19th at the State Theater. Get your tickets right now. Don't let Milwaukee punk you.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Minneapolis, it's one of the best places in the country.

[James Petregallo]

We love Minneapolis. It's fun so can't wait to get there. And then we're October 3rd in Dallas. October 16th 17th, San Jose, Sacramento. And then in November we are in Tarrytown and Boston. So get your asses in There, get some tickets. Shut up and givememurder.com also listen to our other shows, crime and sports and of course, your stupid opinions, which is just hilarious. I almost had, I think I broke a rib last week laughing during that show.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So fun.

[James Petregallo]

Just making the show. So I hope you guys maybe break a rib listening to it. So then get yourself Patreon, everybody you want. Patreon. Patreon.com crimeinsports by the way, P a T R E O N is Patreon.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Isn't that fun?

[James Petregallo]

Get in there. Anybody. $5 a month or above. You get everything we put out, including as soon as you subscribe, you're gonna get a huge catalog of back bonus episodes you've never heard before to binge on. It's like a whole new feed. It's almost 400 episodes, so it's a lot. Then you get new ones every other week. One crime and sports, one small town murder, and you get it all. Everybody. This week, Everything this week, what you're gonna get for crime and sports. We are gonna do them disasters again. Oh, we can't wait. Every few months you can hear there's posts about it. When are more theme park disasters coming? And people get the itch for them Every summer. Every summer it's coming. Then Small town murder. It's a user's choice, everybody. You pick. It's going to be a poll on Patreon. Either the crash, which is that Mackenzie Scurrilla killed her friends driving into a wall thing, or Corey Richens part three, because so much more stuff came out in sentencing her kids. Statements came in which contradicted everything she said. And you get to hear from the jurors a little bit and her wild statement that she made for an hour, her rambling allocution of horseshit. So either way, whichever one you don't pick will be the next one. And then it's prisoner dating game time. So do that. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all of that and you get everything we put out. Crime and sports, your stupid opinion. Small town murder. All ad free with your Patreon as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You bet.

[James Petregallo]

And you get a shout out at the end of the show here where Jimmy will try to pronounce your name properly, but no promises. Everybody. What do you want? Their names are hard. They really are. So that said here, disclaimer time. Hey, this is a comedy show, everybody. We're comedians. There's going to be murder, obviously. The show's called Small Town Murder. It'd be weird if there was no murder. And there's going to be jokes because we can't help it. We have to make jokes. Part of it, to me, to us, it makes us be kind of more comfortable with the whole thing. The serious talk about a murder seems kind of creepy. Let's lighten it up a little bit here. And you're not around the murder. There's plenty of stuff to make fun of. We make fun of the murderer. We make fun of if some police force doesn't know how to do their job and let some guy go free and murder more people. It's the type of thing we make fun of. But what we don't do, what we never do, is we don't make fun of the victims or the victim's families.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Why?

[James Petregallo]

Because we're assholes.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But.

[James Petregallo]

But we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's real easy. So if that sounds good to you, you're gonna hear a hell of a crazy story. If you think true crime and comedy should never, ever go together. I don't know. Maybe we're not for you, but this is what we're doing. So check it out, and if you like it, you like it. If not, no complaining later.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You're not gonna change it.

[James Petregallo]

That's it. That's what the show is. That said, I think it's time, everybody, what do you say here. To sit back, clear the lungs, and let's all shout shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

Let's go on a trip, shall we?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

All right.

[James Petregallo]

We're going to Utah this week.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Which. We were in Utah a few weeks ago.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Not bad.

[James Petregallo]

Well, it's pretty anyway.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a beautiful place.

[James Petregallo]

Beautiful place. Not for me, but I mean, beautiful for anybody. But the place isn't quite for me, but that's fine. That's all right. People seem to enjoy it there. This is St. George, Utah. Yeah, it's in southwestern Utah. Like all the way in the corner there. You know where it is from the electric company.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. This is northwest of Page.

[James Petregallo]

Yep. There you go. It's about an hour and 45 minutes to Las Vegas. About 4 hours and 5 minutes to South Salt Lake City, which is.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a ways up there.

[James Petregallo]

It's a way up there. Which was our last Salt Lake or our last Utah episode. Episode 662, the Master of Deceit. That was the one where they had to basically piece somebody's body together. Like Hangman finding body parts here. And over there. That was a Crazy episode Utah. When you guys decide to kill over there, you're pretty repressed. But when you just decide to go nuts, you really go all out. I'll give you that extreme. It's pent up from decades. You just explode on people. This is in Washington, I think so swear words, drinking regular beer, not even 2.5% or whatever they used to have there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Running across the border to get real alcohol over there.

[James Petregallo]

This is in Washington county. Area code is 435. It's got a nickname and a motto, so you get both. The nickname is Utah's Dixie. And we'll explain why that is very quickly in the history here. There's a reason for that and the motto is quote. It's the brighter side of what we don't know of Utah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The other side is fucking.

[James Petregallo]

Maybe it's.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I mean, it's pretty bright too. Mostly just white people, but.

[James Petregallo]

Well, yeah, and I'll tell you what, you go outside, anywhere around there, it's bright.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, it's bright.

[James Petregallo]

The southwest in this desert area and all, it's like nuclear flash bright. Speaking of nuclear stuff, there's some nuclear

[Jimmy Whisserman]

stuff involved in the south in the summertime. People are like, oh, the sky's so blue here. It's fucking white.

[James Petregallo]

It's white. It's just a glare.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

White hot.

[James Petregallo]

It's a weird, odd glare. You don't even get a blue sky, but yet there's no clouds. It's so weird. It's white history here. The town was settled in 1861, meant to be a cotton mission, which is why it became Utah's Dixie. Because it was supposed they were wanting to grow cotton here. Never became a successful commodity around the area. It just didn't quite work out. No. But for some reason the area kept growing in population anyway. Even though the thing that people came here for failed. Doesn't make sense. But basically compared to Utah, St. George is more Arizona than it is Utah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, it's.

[James Petregallo]

It's that there's no mountain.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

When you. When you think of Utah and you think of like all the rock formations and the red dirt and shit like

[James Petregallo]

that big mountains and the snow covered shit.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No shit is down here.

[James Petregallo]

Red shit's down here. Yeah, this is not.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's not anywhere near. None of that shit's near Salt Lake.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, not this. I said no mountains, but I meant no snow covered mountains. None of that. That's in Salt Lake. No. There's no skiing around this area whatsoever.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's 100 mostly hiking trails and very hot.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. If you like to hike when it's 115, this place is for you. Basically right up your alley. So the settlement is named after George A. Smith, who was an LDS Church apostle. Of course, in 1877, the LDS completed the St. George Utah Temple and it was the church's third temple and it's the oldest still in active use in Utah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No shit.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it is. Now. In the early 50s, this area, St. George, received most of the bad shit from the fallout of the above ground nuclear testing that went on. Whoops. Yucca Flats, the Nevada testing site, that's northwest of Vegas, where they would have parties where people would remember, they have the rooftop viewing parties where people would eat dinner and you'd watch the nuclear explosions and just get shitloads of radiation. Cause if you can see it, it's getting you.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That shit rode the jet stream right into fucking ut.

[James Petregallo]

That's the problem. The winds go right through there and basically carried the fallout directly to St. George. It was like, whoops, might as well have brought it in like a package with a bow on it and said, candy Graham and handed it over. And then fallout comes out.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What's in here? Another eyeball?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. So there's. Oh, a tail. That's not normal. So there was huge increases in the frequency of cancer in the population, including leukemia, lymphoma, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, melanoma, bone cancer, brain tumors, gastrointestinal tract cancers. I think they could just say all the cancers. Holy. This was reported from the mid-50s until the early 80s, basically, until all those people kind of died off and cycled out.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Thirty years of that shit.

[James Petregallo]

Yep. In 1980, People magazine reported that from about 220 cast and crew members who filmed the 1956 movie the Conqueror on location near St. George, 91 of those people out of 220 had come down with cancer. 91 out of 220. That is a lot. That's a lot. Among the cancer deaths were John Wayne, obviously and Susan Hayward as well, the film stars. So even they died of cancer. But John Wayne was old and I think he smoked like three packs a day too, so that doesn't help.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He lived into his 80s, didn't he?

[James Petregallo]

I think so, but I guess the lifetime odds of developing cancer for men in the US population are 43%. And this place is a lot higher than that, apparently. In 1992, the St. George earthquake destroyed three houses as well as a bunch of utility shit, which you probably had to deal with at that point, not 92. You're a little young for that. 2005 they had a hundred year flood come through and just destroy shit and killed a person and 28 homes were destroyed.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This is extreme desert weather.

[James Petregallo]

The earth doesn't want you here.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No, no, no, no.

[James Petregallo]

That's what it is.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Lizards survive here. That's it.

[James Petregallo]

This and that. They try to. Tries to shake you off. You don't leave, it tries to wash you out. You don't leave. I mean, for a bunch of people that believe in God, they sure don't take signs very much. You know what I'm saying? Jesus.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, they aren't taking the fucking hint.

[James Petregallo]

They're not taking the hint. Reviews of this town. I've never been here, so let's find out what people think of this place. They might Love it. Here's five stars. St. George is where I was born and raised while still currently living here. Okay, the weird way to put that, but sure. While still currently living here. I still live here. Matter of fact, I still live here.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Born and raised. Ain't left.

[James Petregallo]

Nope. It's a great in between of small town and plenty to do with a variety of residents. Also known as Dixie. There's a great variety of public schools, sports teams, job opportunities, etc. I enjoy living here. Hence the five stars. It's an exclamation at the end too. Here's three stars. St. George is a very friendly town for those who are wanting a good place to settle. On the other hand, if you want any nightlife or just fun activities to do, it's really not the place to do it. Right.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Because you've settled.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, you've settled. If you like church or walking around in the heat, up a rock, this is for you. Otherwise find somewhere else.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I think there's a lake there too, maybe.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, I'm sure. Here's three stars. Very family friendly. But everyone is caught up in keeping up with the Joneses. That's a big Mormon thing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

There's a fucking TV show about it for Christ's sake.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely. Everyone seems to be copy and paste and then finally here, one star. This is just. This person is unhinged and it's wild. St. George wins the award of being the most hated city for domesticated animals. Okay, good luck. We'll find out in the review here. Good luck finding a place to rent when you own an animal. They especially hate dogs here. No one wants to rent. There are people on trails pointing guns at hikers, dogs telling them they have the right to kill their dogs. Kill me? What? What are you talking about? I'm gonna shoot your dog. Cause I can. What are you talking about? Which they don't. In parentheses. Police doesn't care. They doesn't care, man.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is it one police or there are several? Because you may be using that wrong.

[James Petregallo]

Chuck doesn't care. Police doesn't care and won't do a thing. Because they're all related to each other somehow. If he means in whatever way, or if he means, you know, cosmically. I'm not sure.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't know how that happened.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. So everything gets put on a shelf. All right. Speaking of feelings. Come to any place and you can feel the heavy feeling of repression. The air reeks of repression, depression, and low IQ points. It's noticeable, which makes me laugh at first. Then it makes me cry because I live here. Wow, that is depressing. All right. Population in this town right now, it's shot up like crazy. 92,875.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

God damn.

[James Petregallo]

When the murder happened that we're gonna talk about in 1990, there was 28,502.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

90,000 people have moved here.

[James Petregallo]

It's crazy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

80,000 in a decade. Two decades.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. It only had 49,000 people in 2000. So it's almost 50,000 people have moved here in the last 25 years. So that's pretty impressive. More women than men, 51% women, but not a lot there. Median age is right about the national average, 37.9. It's a lot of LDs, so it's a lot of families, a lot of kids and things like that. Matter of fact, it's 60% married, basically. 59.7% married people. Very low. Single with children. People. It's very much families here. Race in this town. 80.7% white, 0.8% black, 0.8% Asian. Is there like a quota here or something? That's it. No more. They close the gate. That's enough now. Sorry. Families reaching for each other through fences. That's 0.8%. That's all we can handle.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

How do you feel the migration pattern of this town?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.9% Native American, 13% Hispanic. 78% of the people here are religious, which is about as high as it gets. It's 53%.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's about as high as we've ever heard normally.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it's in the ballpark of other Utah cities, basically. And a whopping. I mean, this is not even close. Far and away. 70.4% of the people here, so 78% are religious. And 70.4% of those not of those people of everybody. So 70.4% are Mormon here. It is a Mormon town. Nobody's even close. As we know, the LDS are the Baptists of the western mountain regions here, whatever it is. Unemployment low here. Median household income $63,604, which is below the national average, which is odd for Utah. Usually they make decent money in Utah at a lot of these places. So you would think the housing would be cheap also. But cost of living here, 100 is average. Here it's 110. And the housing is the highest thing of everything.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, it feels like when the population rises like that in a rapid succession, houses gain value fast because supply and

[James Petregallo]

demand, baby, that's what I mean. They can't build them fast enough to have that many people come in here. Median home cost $485,000.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Holy shit.

[James Petregallo]

Which is well above the national average by $150,000. So if we've convinced you, dammit, you like the heat, you got plenty of sunscreen and you got your hiking shoes on and you don't want to bring your dog. We have for you the St. George Utah Real estate report. The average two bedroom rental here is $1,270, which is like right at the national average. So renting seems like the better option here. But if you need to buy. Here they are. Here we have number one, two bedroom, one bath, 1050 square foot trailer. Oh, it's a trailer around other trailers. I mean it's got like wood around the bottom. They made.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, that's nice.

[James Petregallo]

They made it look like it's not going anywhere. There's like a metal carport outside. Inside it's got some carpet that has been there a while. Let's just say that it's like gray and it looks like it is. I don't know if it was gray to begin with, but it's gray now. It's old. It's a bit dingy in there. Just had a price cut by the way, of $19,000. This house is $81,000.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That is 20% off.

[James Petregallo]

That's 20% off. That's a smoking deal. They couldn't sell that thing. Next up, three bedroom, two bath, 1,039 square feet. So it's a pretty small. It's smaller than the trailer by 11 square feet. It's not a huge house, but it's a house and it looks nice from the outside. It's not a big lot either. It's a small lot, kind of crammed in. Houses are like right next to each other. It almost looks like those patio homes in Phoenix. How they are like the retirement communities.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Almost. Condominium, but single level.

[James Petregallo]

But yeah, single level, single family. $293,000 for that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a bit much.

[James Petregallo]

That seems pricey. Just had a $5,000 price cut. So they agree it was a little much then. Next up, four bedroom, four bath, tea bowl for each and every B hole. Over here, 4,340 square feet. 34 acre lot. So not huge, not small. It looks like one of the nice west Phoenix kind of houses. Basically. It's a lot of beige style, you say? Yeah, a lot of beige. It's got the tile roof and some stonework around that goes three quarters of the way up. You know what I mean? That Phoenix house they built around 2007, 2008, those. It just had a $50,000 price cut as well. Apparently the real estate's not doing great in Utah or in this portion of it anyway. 1,169,000 bucks for that, which it just doesn't.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Three quarters of an acre.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. I'd like some more land if I'm going to pay that much money.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's only 4,000 square feet. That's stupid.

[James Petregallo]

4,300. I mean, it's not like it's enormous. You couldn't have eight kids and live there. You know what I mean? It'd be tough. So be impossible things to do in this town. All right. Not a whole lot. I got to be honest with you. It is mainly hiking outdoors and shit. Yeah. Even these things are still outdoors type of things. There's the St. George water lantern festival, which looks real boring.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Water lantern is like opposites. Oh, lily pad things.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And then with the things around them and you float them on a lake. One of those. Experience the enchantment of a magical. The enchantment of a floating candle. Can you handle it, Jimmy? Can you handle that kind of enchantment? Yep. A magical evening at our water lantern festival. Join us as we gather by the water's edge to celebrate love, hope and dreams. All illuminated by the gentle glow of floating lanterns.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is that what we're celebrating?

[James Petregallo]

Hope, love and dreams, babe. That's it. When that's happening, I don't even know what it is. Doesn't matter. That's how we're celebrating.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

If it's February, then fucking stupid.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. What are we doing? As the sun begins to set, you'll be captivated by the serene beauty of the scene. It's a lot of words that mean boring. Serene gentleman. All these Words mean boring.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

A lot of silence.

[James Petregallo]

A lot of silence. Not a lot for the kids, I wouldn't think here. Then there is the St. George dinosaur discovery site.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I believe that.

[James Petregallo]

Tons of dinosaur shit around here. Big dinosaur footprints in the dirt and shit like that. Cool stuff if you're into that. This is an indoor museum built directly over thousands of actual dinosaur tracks and fossils. They built it over it so you can just go in and look on the floor.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And so they probably destroyed some for making the foundation for this.

[James Petregallo]

Probably or possibly. Either that or they were real careful. Now I found a couple of reviews and I think this is the best way to find out about this place. Here's a five star review. This was an incredible discovery on a recent trip to St. George. It's so educational and fun. It's good for kids and adults. Adults with intellectual curiosity. It was so enjoyable to see actual dinosaur footprints and impressions of skin left in the ancient waterways. Planned to spot spend more than an hour here. They have an excellent selection of books to learn more. Okay.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Skin left.

[James Petregallo]

Skin left impressions of where the skin was.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Where it like fell down and died in the rock bed.

[James Petregallo]

And probably. Yeah, I don't know. Then there's a one star review. Very disappointing. Mud tracks only. No dinosaurs.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, holy shit.

[James Petregallo]

Sorry. It wasn't Jurassic Park. You fucking. This is America, everybody. Or not even America, the world. This is who we're living with.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What the fuck?

[James Petregallo]

When people go, society's all fucked up. You can't have a society. When people go, there's no dinosaurs. You can't have a society like that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This person is a dinosaur on the sign. That's not fair.

[James Petregallo]

When this person's driving on the road, you are counting on them to not just drive any of your children like because they're so this fucking stupid. It says 10 to 15 minutes to go through the entire place.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And McDonald's thinks we're capable of bringing up our own food.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. No. Can't do it. You can't even. No, no.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This fucking moron thinks there's dinosaurs.

[James Petregallo]

Yes. And there's fucking insane. There's a response here. Hi. I'm sorry to hear you were disappointed during your visit. I'm not sure what you mean by quote, no dinosaurs. As we have hundreds of dinosaur footprints on display and several real life restorations of what these animals looked like when alive. So just making sure. You mean you thought dinosaurs would be here? Like walking around? You could pet them. It's a fist.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Are you okay? But they know.

[James Petregallo]

They know. Crime rate in this Town. What we're interested in here, Property, crime, a little bit below average, but not too much.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

They can't figure it out.

[James Petregallo]

But no violent crime. Murder, rape, robbery, and, of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is about half the national average.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, they can't figure it out.

[James Petregallo]

No. They don't know how guns work, probably. They're like, what happened? They click it back. They're like, I'm pressing a lot of suicide, just looking down the barrel. Oh, no. Damn it. That is incredible. No dinosaurs. That's the dumbest review. We do a show about dumb reviews. And that's the dumbest review I've ever seen for anything.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a fucking idiot.

[James Petregallo]

That's an idiot. He doesn't know dinosaurs are extinct, okay? He's like, I saw Jurassic Park. There are dinosaurs you could have used. They used them. Why couldn't you use them?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So sad.

[James Petregallo]

Borrow some dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Okay, let's talk about this murder now. Okay, let's start out. 1990, as a matter of fact. July 22, 1990. It is hot, hot, hot around in these parts right now. Buck 10 every day. I mean, dry cooking. Oh, cooking. Let's talk about a lady named Nancy Snow. Now, Nancy is in her late 30s at this point, and she is, at this very moment, thrice divorced. Oh, okay.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Three times.

[James Petregallo]

Three times. Very recently is the third time. So I'll give you that. You get married especially. It's, you know, Utah. Maybe she got married when she was 18.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She was forced.

[James Petregallo]

That's not going to work. Or you even just thought it was a good idea to do. And if it's encouraged by everyone around you, you do it. And then you go, jesus, why didn't you tell me not to do this?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Or you get married to run away from whatever the fuck was that.

[James Petregallo]

Or that. Nine kids in the house or some shit. Or just whatever. Just found someone she thought she was in love with. Either way, that didn't work out. Maybe you think, oh, now you found the one. And now, who knows? Maybe he's not who he thought.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Maybe he's like, the pattern that you got away from.

[James Petregallo]

And then things are starting to get ugly for her here. Now she's a receptionist at a nursing home, and she has a friend here that works at the nursing home with her. Technically, it's kind of her boss, I guess. She's a receptionist. This woman's kind of like the head of the nursing staff, but I don't know if it's her direct supervisor, but whatever. But they hang out all the time. They're like best friends. They've gotten pretty close to each other. Now her friend doesn't show up for somewhere she's supposed to be, I believe work. On the morning of July 22, she doesn't show up. And so Nancy Snow calls her house and she doesn't answer either. So she's like, God damn it. She drives over to Nancy's house. Now, she had dropped Nancy off at her house the night before. So she's like, I know. She came home the night before I dropped her off because they had gone out to a bar the night before to hang out. Hey everybody, just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you about a very cool app, Whatnot.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, that app, Whatnot is terrific.

[James Petregallo]

It is very cool. Whatnot is a live shopping platform where you can buy items. I mean that's across everything. They have really nice like beauty stuff and apparel and bags. They're big into bags and jewelry and you know, a lot of stuff for ladies. And then a lot of stuff like sneakers. And I found the sports card section actually and that's what I was really concentrating on. And it's great deals. You get on there. It's awesome. And also I found a, like a vintage watch that I dig. Sure. Because I'm into watches. It's really cool. And you should get on there. And check this out though. I was looking at, I was looking at cards, older cards is what I was looking at. Kind of older baseball cards and then I got into the older football cards and you get into it. You know what I mean? It's just, it's a fun thing to do. It's really interesting. You could have interactions with the seller and the deals are great. They really. This is a place you can get your favorite stuff, discover new things and you're not going to pay full price. You're going to get smoke and deals. Whatnot is the largest live shopping marketplace in the country, allowing users to enjoy a trusted shopping experience in a real time format. With over 10,000 fashion, beauty and bag sellers on Whatnot, there's always something for every buyer and everybody to discover live. Right now you almost never pay full price shop name brands but without those retail prices you never want to pay. Live shopping is community driven experience with real time engagement among like minded shoppers looking for great deals buyers. And as a buyer, you're a buyer, you can connect with passionate sellers to discover the unbeatable deals. It's good stuff. I had a great time looking at this app. I was on it just having a ball checking it out and saw some cards for I could get really inexpensively. I got a cool watch for way less than I thought it was going to be. So it's great. You should do it. We like it. Download the whatnot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search wh a t n o t whatnot in the app store and start scoring amazing deals.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

Hey, everybody, Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you the best thing you can feed your dog. It's Ollie.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Ollie.com O L L I E.com Absolutely.

[James Petregallo]

There's a reason why 91% of dog parents say their pup is an important member of the family. It's because they are. That's why. I don't know who are those other 9% of those people. We should take their dogs and bring them to my house where they can run around free and have a good time and I'll feed them Ollie, and they'll be very happy. It's excellent stuff. I love my dogs. You know that I have three dogs. You have two dogs and you love them. You have a puppy growing up. Right now we want our dogs to be healthy and happy and wagging tails and all that good stuff. And you know, we love it. And if anyone gets being dog obsessed, it's Ollie. They're relentless about delivering the best food and experience for you and your dog. And they give you a way to check in on their health over and over and over again as well. And that's what's really cool here, the food. First of all, these recipes are amazing that Ollie does. They're real chefs. They're backed by vet nutritionists. They're really obsessed with making the best of meals from the highest quality ingredients. And you can see real food in there. It's food you want to sit down and eat with the dog. You're jealous. You're like, hey, why do you get that that's better than my dinner? That's real food. It's really good. And from the moment you start your subscription, everything's tailored right to your dog, your pup. The meals are perfectly portioned. You get a puptainer and a scoop for easy storing and serving. No messes, anything like that. And the health check ins are super cool with all Ollie. It's not just food that you use their app and you can actually check in on your dog's health with real vets. You just upload a picture and then their team can check on your dog's weight, digestion, teeth and coat. Because they're obsessed with making sure that your pup is as healthy as can be. And so are we. So you know it works out. My dogs love the Ollie. They love it. Their poops are smaller, they're looking shiny, they're real happy. They're running around. And the healthy screenings too. It's just awesome. Great idea. So get ready for both you and your pup to be obsessed. Head to ollie.com stm and tell them about your dog. And use the code STM to get 70% off your welcome kit when you subscribe today. Plus they offer an obsession guarantee. If you're not completely obsessed, you'll get your money back. That's O l l I e.com STM and enter code STM to get 70% off your first box.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

The friend here that she's looking at is not Mormon, by the way, as we'll find out. Just as she went to a bar and all that she wasn't doing it in secret. She's not from here. Sometimes they do, they do in secret. This wasn't a secret is what I meant. Yeah, she's not hiding it. She's just living her life. Now the friend who here goes over to her house, Nancy Snow goes over to her friend's house to say, where the hell are you? Basically, it's a two story residence and she finds it in complete disarray. From the outside you can see there's complete disarray. There's like the back screen is messed up on her kitchen window. There's blood that she can see in the house. Things don't look right, they're disheveled. So she, Nancy heads to the St. George Police Department right from the house to say, my best friend Janice is missing. I didn't see her in blood all over her house. I didn't see her in there. But she might be in there, but I don't know and I can't find her and she's not answering her phone and she didn't show up and she's very dependable and yada, yada, yada. Even more than that, she says, by the way, if something happened to her, I think I know who did it as a matter of fact, which if you're the police, that's very helpful.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Nancy, you're so good at this.

[James Petregallo]

Someone comes in not only to report a missing person, but then to solve the case for you as well. It's pretty impressive. That's a lot of information.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Don't even Put your coffee down, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Wow. Yeah, let's do this. So she said, I bet it's my example husband that did this. The last one. Yes. My ex husband. Not Janice's ex husband. Nancy Snow's ex husband. She said, a few days ago, three days ago, we had gone out to a bar, and there was a confrontation between me and my friend Janice and my ex husband, where he came up to me and wasn't supposed to be bothering me because I have a restraining order against him. But we were all in the bar at the same time. And so when we saw he was there, Nancy says, me and Janice got up to leave and he bothered us. So Janice was yelling at him and telling him to leave me alone and to go, you know, let us leave and don't bother us and things like that. And he got really mad at Janice.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He's my ex husband, but we had a confrontation with him together three days ago.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. And there's restraining orders, and we're talking multiple restraining orders are going on.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, he's a bad guy.

[James Petregallo]

Then Janice had went and got a restraining order because of the bar incident, because they had gotten into it at the bar. She went the next day and got a restraining order. So within the last three days, now there's. Nancy's got restraining orders on him, and now Janice does as well. So when the police, they take her seriously, I mean, they go, oh, Jesus. So she just. And they look it up, and Janice had filed a complaint a couple of days ago. So they go, okay, this makes a lot of sense. Let's look into it. So they go over to Janice's apartment. They find the kitchen window is open. The screen from the window is on the ground.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's not good.

[James Petregallo]

That's not good. Really good track covering by whoever did this. Speaking of track covering, there's also a footprint in the dirt outside because there was a hanging plant there that is now taken down and put onto the kitchen counter as well. And some of the dirt from that spilled when it was being taken down. Yeah, it was in the way. So that's how they can tell. It definitely came in through the window. And then there's dirt, a footprint in the dirt, you know, shoe print. So that's all of that. They think that has to be the point of entry is the kitchen window. So the police detectives here say they found a large amount of blood on the carpet of the townhome of Janice's apartment here. Blood was also found on the front door, which now there's another entry, exit point. Here. So they found it on the front door. On the tile inside the front door. A little tile foyer there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Landing.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, little landing. And on the porch. Concrete outside the front door. Okay, so blood. Big pile of it in the living room. And then looks like whatever happened. Cause there's no body here, by the way.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, they don't find her.

[James Petregallo]

She's not here. There's no people in this house, dead or alive.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

So they see, obviously whoever they don't know, did they leave on their own? Were they carried, were they dragged?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Nancy started leaking, and then there's a trail of leaking all the way through the house. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Jansen, Nancy, they're reporting one. Yeah. In addition to that, which, I mean, that looks bad enough as it is, they also found a bullet hole in the front window of the ground floor, which is right by the. Where they find the blood stain. And near the door there. So they find a bullet hole in the window.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't know if it went through out or in.

[James Petregallo]

It looks like out. Okay, it's an out because the glass would be on the outside. And there's a 9 millimeter. Even more proof of it is there's a 9 millimeter shell casing in the kitchen from the inside. So, yeah, definitely shot from the inside. They also find, like I said, the kitchen window open and all that kind of shit. And there's one plant on the counter, and then there's a couple more plants that were just taken down and thrown somewhere. So all Together they have a 9 millimeter shell casing, which is good evidence. They have blood on the carpet, blood on the door, blood on the porch, which they can test and see if it's Januses 1990. That's not DNA, but they can at least kind of blood typer. Anyway, a bullet hole through the front window and no victim.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And plants moved all over the place.

[James Petregallo]

And plants all over the place. And a footprint in the dirt outside. So basically they're going, we have to investigate this as a homicide because there's a lot of blood. I mean, there's carpet soaked in blood. There's enough blood where it doesn't look like whoever bled this much is probably medically, okay, they didn't bleed this much. And then go out to dinner and come home later, like there's an issue. And then certainly. So, yeah, they're looking. And the fact that they're not there and this person didn't like check into a hospital or anything like that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. We don't have anywhere close by of them getting help.

[James Petregallo]

No. So they're investigating this as this is a crime scene, obviously. And we have a murder investigation with no victim, which is strange to have. You don't even know if the person's dead. You don't have any idea where their body is. But you already have a suspect, which is in because you've already been given a suspect by somebody. Now, obviously, they say it all sounds right, but at the same time, they're like, you have to look into Nancy because she's the one who reported it and she came to the apartment first and she's the one saying, I bet it's my ex husband. So who knows?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Last one to see her.

[James Petregallo]

Exactly.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She's already steering the investigation for Kirsten.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. So they have to look at her, but they don't. She seemed pretty genuine, they think when she came in, she seemed genuinely freaked out and, like, really scared that her friend was missing, essentially. So the other thing they find at the house is Janice's car is parked in front of the house. So they look at the car, which is smart police work. They could just say, well, her car has nothing to do with it if this happened inside the house. And, you know, has nothing to do with it. But instead they really look over the car. Well. And they find that the car has scuff marks suggesting that it may have been driven through brush. And also they find a very specific type of vegetation up in the wheel wells as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This has been a great, great find.

[James Petregallo]

It's a real good fight. Yeah. This where they. Yeah, where they. They are very specific. Where this particular brush grows is not

[Jimmy Whisserman]

inside the city limits, scientifically. Forensics has become botanists as well.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We've seen cases where they do all sorts of crazy grass samples to see how long it would die under a car in these conditions. I mean, you really gotta be. Yeah. You wanna be a forensic scientist, you better take some botany classes. Cause.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Fuck. Yeah. Better get yourself a ranger wreck. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

You're gonna need to know where this particular type of shit grows and why it's there and everything.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Pay attention at your doctor's office at

[James Petregallo]

those National Geographics, definitely. So the friend that they're looking for, the missing woman, is Janice Elaine Fondren. F O N D R E N. Janice. She is born April 20, 1960. April 20. Same birthday as Cory Richards and Hitler. Yeah. She's a few years younger than Nancy. Now, Janice, she's born 1960. She just turned 30 a couple of months ago. Now, she's an interesting story. She's from South Carolina. From Monks Corner, South Carolina. M O, N C K S. Moncks.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Where the fuck is that?

[James Petregallo]

It's in Berkeley county, just north of Charleston. Okay, so. And if you've ever seen, like live PD or whatever they call it now on patrol, Berkeley county is one of their counties and there's some rural shit going on and it's a lot of, like, chasing people through the woods and then they have tons of guns on them and drugs. That seems to be Berkeley County.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Never an id.

[James Petregallo]

No ID or driver's license ever. Of course, it's probably not their car, but they're driving. That's the craziest. I love that you have a license. No, people are acting like, why would I have a license? A license for what?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Can you just hand me the weed? It's legal in the States.

[James Petregallo]

Just please.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't have any. Okay, all right. We'll get out of running. Frisk you. Where's all this weed coming from?

[James Petregallo]

They never say the weed's legal in this state. In South Carolina.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. It's not fun. Which is why you don't see us playing in South Carolina. Because I'm not going to fucking some southern prison because I want to have a good time before a show.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

When they do it in Arizona, it's always that, though. They always. Yeah, they don't tell them that they have weed on them.

[James Petregallo]

And they're like, yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Do you have any drugs on you?

[James Petregallo]

No.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And they're like, it's legal in this state. You could have just told me.

[James Petregallo]

Well, then it's not drugs.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I get it. But if you're.

[James Petregallo]

You have to tell them if you

[Jimmy Whisserman]

can still give you a DUI for it is my point.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, well, you don't have to tell them if you have a six pack in the trunk, so why would you have to tell them if you have one?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But they know that. They know. If they see it, then they're going to assume that they just smoked it now.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, okay. Yeah, I guess.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And they're getting arrested for DUI because Arizona loves it.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, they just love. That's how they make money in Arizona, as DUIs. Yeah. Let's be realistic here. In other states, they aren't like they are in Arizona. And people aren't smashing into everything drunk all the time. It's. They're making money. They know how to drive drunk. Are you kidding me? In Milwaukee, anything less than an 18 pack, they. They're fine. Those people, they're a different breed up there. So Janice, back to her. Her parents are John and Betty Jo, and she has a sister Beth, and a brother, John iii. Oh, nice family. Working class family. Her mom, Betty, worked for county supervisors, and when she retired, she was the Berkeley county finance director. So they do well. Nice middle class family, basically. Janice is a real happy person. Sings in the choir in high school and all that kind of thing. She's a cheerleader, everything like that. She's very outgoing, very up in South Carolina. Absolutely. Very into stuff. Now she goes to college at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She goes for nursing, so she gets a bachelor's in nursing. And the whole way she was. The whole time she was in school, she was paying her own way through school. And she did that by working with the elderly as an aide in a nursing home, which is what she was trying to do in her career. So she's just getting her feet wet. She's described by her teachers as an excellent student. She earned two scholarships from the state and local chapters of the business and professional women's organization of the thing. So she's somebody you want to put your chips on. She looks like she's not going to waste your money. She graduates from the university at that point, and her father John said, I tried to get her to stay home in South Carolina where she belonged, but I lost that battle. He said, she. She loved the west so much. She just wanted to go out west, wanted some open horizons here. Now, there's differing information here. There is information that she moved to Las Vegas first for a minute and was there for a few months and then ended up in Utah. And then there's other.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Was like, this place sucks.

[James Petregallo]

Well, it was that she wanted to go somewhere that was not so. She's from, like, a small town, and Vegas is a little much for anybody. It's much for anybody. I don't care where you're from, it's too stimulating. Even if you're from Manhattan, it's too stimulating.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Do you like fun? We're gonna shine a bright light on it and show you it. Even when you're trying to sleep.

[James Petregallo]

Vegas is the equivalent of somebody sitting you down, tying you to a chair, and having a machine that just feeds you ice cream continuously until the machine is tired.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Which is never. That first couple bites, you're like, hey, ice cream. I like that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

A half hour into it, enough ice cream, and that's what Vegas is. It's too much ice cream.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And when this machine breaks down, we're gonna have Criss angel come in and do it.

[James Petregallo]

He'll make ice cream Appear in your mouth.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wayne Newton's gonna come do it. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

It's just too much.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And then we're gonna feed you a tiger.

[James Petregallo]

And then Celine Dion's gonna sing at you for some reason or whoever the fuck is there. So she is known as a pretty private person here. She never talks about herself ever. It's like one of, like, kind of like, seems like a rule of hers to not talk about herself. And a lot of people. It's not polite to talk about yourself.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Some people think, yeah, that's a thing.

[James Petregallo]

Some people also say that she's also pretty private anyway. She's not a me, me, me person, and she's just kind of private anyway. So one of her bosses at the nursing home later on said Janice was, quote, a very private lady, not a person who talked about me, me, me. She was cute, had an infectious smile and was always, always, always smiling.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Great.

[James Petregallo]

Very happy young lady here. So she gets herself a cat that she names Rambo. Because it is the late 80s. It is 90 in the late 80s. You might name your cat Rambo. It's just. That's what you did.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It was Gizmo or Rambo. Those were the two animal names that you were allowed to have.

[James Petregallo]

Gizmo, if it was cute, Rambo if it was tough. If you got one of those, like, bounder cats that's got, like, you know, fucking one eye and a weird limp because you found it in that. That's a Rambo cat. You get a fluffy little white thing. That's Gizmo. You know, none of this shit.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Gizmo can't make it outside, dress up as Rambo.

[James Petregallo]

That's true. Gizmo can't make it outside. Gizmo's gonna get eaten by an owl in, like, you know, two nights. Whereas Rambo, Rambo will get by.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Gizmo's got a weak bladder.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, Rambo's like the cat. And Always Sunny, the junkyard cat. Always Sunny in Philadelphia. So she still talks to her mom, too. Despite moving out there and being, you know, almost in her late 20s. She still talks to her mom four or five times a week in the late 80s, which, by the way, that's long distance. Bills.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's expensive.

[James Petregallo]

That is fucking. We discussed this recently on a show. Long distance now. You just call wherever. You don't even think about it. Because your phone, it's all the same. Whether you call in your own house or you call to California, it's the same thing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And they don't even care how long you talk for.

[James Petregallo]

Now forever. No, no. Back in the day, if you called the next area code, which could be 15 miles away, it costs money, period. It was expensive. You were outside your area code, you were in deep shit. So she did that. She would pick up the phone four or five times a week to call her mom. A lot of it would be just to ask her, what do you put in that recipe that you have?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, wow.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Just trying to keep close. Her mom said she'd be in the middle of cooking something and she'd pick up the phone and ask me how to do it. So walk her through it. So, yeah, by 89 is when she ends up going to Utah. Basically. She wanted to be able to moved to a safe place where you could sleep with your windows open if you wanted to. Stuff like that. So she picked St. George, Utah, which has about zero murders a year in general. Yeah. In 1990, there hadn't been a murder in St. George in four years. My God, it's very small. So she moves to Newtown St. George and she ends up at the St. George Care center, which is a nursing home in town because she's a licensed registered nurse. Her boss describes Janice. She says you'd watch her come into work. She said, I'd see her through the office window because it's by the parking lot. I'd see her coming in every morning and she said, I'd sit here in the morning and watch. She'd get out of the car and it was almost like she'd skip into the building.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

God damn.

[James Petregallo]

That's a different level of happy that I'm impressed with. Because if you're going to work at a nursing home, first of all, if you're going to work at an ice cream factory where you're the tester, let's go back to ice cream. Because it's wonderful. If you're an ice cream tester, it's eight in the morning. I'm never skipping into that anywhere. Anywhere your job could be to get blow jobs. And I wouldn't skip into it every morning. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I would walk into an ice cream testing job like I was lactose intolerant every day.

[James Petregallo]

Every day. Because I had to go there. I don't want to go here. So that's impressive. To be able. I'm going to go watch old people deteriorate and get yelled at by someone with Alzheimer's, then clean shit off of

[Jimmy Whisserman]

somebody and she's like, yeah, my son does it now, where he goes and feeds at one of these people. He like, makes the food for these guys. And Jesus, it's already. It's already wearing on him.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, but to be honest, I mean,

[Jimmy Whisserman]

everything wears on him.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, you're always complaining about him. He doesn't want to do anything.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So he's not the most active boy. I mean, he'll feed him.

[James Petregallo]

The way you said it, not the most active boy. Oh, man, that's funny.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He'll feed him one day and come back and their room's cleared out. There's a new person in there, they're dead.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's a bummer.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's tough. He's starting to get a real taste for what life is.

[James Petregallo]

That is a serious life lesson, though. You want a serious life lesson? There it is. This is what's gonna happen eventually. And it won't last long, so fucking enjoy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The guy who made you your pudding yesterday will be like, oh, he's gone. That's it.

[James Petregallo]

That's that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

All right, well, that's our first footprint, babe.

[James Petregallo]

That's all there is, man. So she loved Utah, loved her work. She loved working with the elderly. Her mom summed it up perfectly, I think, describing giving an umbrella quote here, quote, she was a sweet girl. I think that's the best way to put it. She's a sweet girl. So Nancy Snow is telling the police as they look for this sweet girl, it's gotta be my ex husband. I know it's my ex husband that did something with her because nobody else in this town kills anybody. So it's gotta be him.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So he's got the restraining order. So.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. Cause she said, I went over there. It's the color view, Townhomes is where she lived, Janice. And she said the night or July 21, which is the night before I had dropped her off and we were hanging out over there and I saw my ex husband through the back fence looking at the apartment. So he's like looking through the back fence spying on them while they were hanging out in the apartment.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I mean, she's making all the sense in the world of why to look at this guy.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that seems awful. She notified Janice, who went to check, but he ran away. When they started going toward the door, he took off. He was watching him. So they're like, all right, who is this guy? Okay, it is Joseph Charles Gardner Jr. JC. He goes by, you know, they call me JC one of those already, like the other one, but, you know, not quite. He's born November of 1957 here. He grew up in Nevada. He grew up with two Sisters. So just him and two sisters? His mother, her name is Connie, and we'll talk about her a whole lot. Connie's got a lot to say. So they're kind of an outdoorsy family. They hunt, they fish, Dad's around and JC, Being the only boy, is real close to his dad. Dad likes to take him to do boy shit. Yeah. So he's the youngest of the three kids and the only boy. Nevada.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

We're at Nevada on the west side, probably.

[James Petregallo]

No clue. No idea. If I knew, I would have said he grew up in this part of

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Nevada, probably near Tahoe somewhere over there. That's where all the outdoorsy street.

[James Petregallo]

It would seem like that. Yeah. Vegas would be a real lame place to hunt and fish. I think I'm gonna hike the strip. I'm gonna go fish the reservoir for a while and see how I threw

[Jimmy Whisserman]

my line in that Bellagio fountain. Didn't catch shit.

[James Petregallo]

Not really. Anything I did, actually, I caught like a tourist from Iowa. But that's cause I used. I was using a dollar.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I was 30ft of air.

[James Petregallo]

I was using a dollar as bait. So that's why. So, yeah, he's close to his dad. He's the youngest and the only boy. So, you know, his dad wanted a boy and he finally got one and he's trying to take advantage of it now. He is a real. He's a swinging wild kid. Boy. I mean, when you hear like the phrase, like a wild and crazy guy, it's him. He's on the edge. You can't control him. His favorite thing to do, his mother said when he was growing up, his favorite thing to do was read the Webster's Dictionary.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is that right?

[James Petregallo]

He's out of control. He's wild. I'll tell you. Wild. How are you gonna stop this kid? Hey, listen, that's your dictionary curfew. It's 10:30. Put it down, bud. Come on. Jesus.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I had one of those. It was laid with gold leaf on the COVID and shit. That thing was incredible.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, the dictionary.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, it was a very impressive book.

[James Petregallo]

Very impressive book. So not the Bible you thought everyone thinking I was reading him, like, oh, he's going to be a big Bible guy. Nope, dictionary. So his mom said, quote, JC has a kind heart. As a child, he didn't like to see his playmate's feelings hurt. Oh, he's just a big softie. When he got older, a lot of people brought their problems to him because he's just. He absorbs it, you know, he's just

[Jimmy Whisserman]

such a Sum up all your problems in one amazing word.

[James Petregallo]

Well, yeah, he's gonna have words for actually. He's like, did you mean this word? He just constantly corrects your word usage. I don't think you used pervasive correctly. Let me help you with that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is that the word you want?

[James Petregallo]

That's not the word you want right there. Let's find a better one. Come on. He starts opening the book now. Here. Okay, the other thing. His mother said he could see things. Things that weren't obvious to everybody else. He could see how things fit together.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

So I guess she's saying he's very smart and sensitive is what I'm getting.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Observant, I guess.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she sounds like a mom who's real enamored with her son, you know, loves this kid and an only son, too, in a family that from, like, early 60s, too. He's born in 57, so, you know, they wanted a boy. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Bedroom painted, baby blue.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, someone to carry on the name. Imagine how much cowboy he had from the ladies. Oh, he had the little gun belts and the hat and the whole. The Lone Ranger. He rode around a thing, a horse on a stick. Totally. He's also an Eagle Scout.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, that's impressive.

[James Petregallo]

Because if you don't know. By the way, the Mormons have completely taken over the Boy Scouts.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Have they?

[James Petregallo]

Oh, this was 25, 30, 40 years ago. They took over the Boy Scouts. They have taken over the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts are a Mormon organization, give or take. Now, what? Absolutely. Girl Scouts.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Foul news to me.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, The Girl Scouts aren't. The Mormons are like that. And they had. They. They kind of have taken over Scouting, basically. So being an Eagle Scout, if you're a Mormon, is like one of the things you do. Yeah, not everybody, but it's a very common thing. Like, you go to church, you do your mission. Later on, become an Eagle Scout.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a very structured lifestyle which kind of falls in line with the. With the religion itself, and it kind of guides you how to go ahead and just continue that shit in our building once you're done being outside in your fucking tent.

[James Petregallo]

Here's how you don't think for yourself ever. Here, you start here, and then you do this, and then you do that. Here's how we control.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Distract him.

[James Petregallo]

All facets of your life. This is how we do it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Distract him with making him go out in the woods and find a fucking spruce.

[James Petregallo]

Well, now he can tie a knot. Great. That's terrific. Now, hey, maybe he can Be a forensic scientist. Now he knows what pieces of brush are from what places.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Now he knows what a cottonwood park looks like.

[James Petregallo]

Perfect. He went on a mission as well. His mission. Not too bad. It is a crapshoot with these missions, by the way. You could end up in the jungle or you could end up in, oh, you're going to South Central, door to door.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Philadelphia or El Salvador.

[James Petregallo]

Or they might send you to Pago Pago. Literally. They might send you to some tropical island. They might send you to paradise. They might send you to, like, you know, Paris or something or whatever. Some place you'd want to visit.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Would it even matter? You can't even partake in the good shit there.

[James Petregallo]

No. I don't know what they consider the good shit. Sugar, sugar, we got sugar everybody. So he goes to Switzerland. So he gets a pretty decent one. Honestly, that's not bad. It's a chocolate two year mission. I don't even. I don't think they're allowed to have chocolate yet.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No.

[James Petregallo]

Now they can. They can have sugar now. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And caffeine.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. The Mormons are a fun one because

[Jimmy Whisserman]

they adapt based on what's fun.

[James Petregallo]

They're a business and they don't hide it. They just adapt to what they think would help them get more business. Up until 1980, they said if you were black, it's because the Lord was punishing you, because you're cursed. You're cursed and you're being punished by the Lord. Then in about 1980, they were like, Jesus, the Jeffers. And like, this is a little harsh. Good times has just ended. What's happening's over. Like, this is pretty mainstream. Then all of a sudden, they can also tithing. Yeah, we looked. There was a smudge on that part of what, Joseph? Yeah, there was a smudge on that. Apparently black people are loved by the Lord is what it is. So, yeah, they're more than welcome now. And they do shit like that. It took forever for the Catholics to go, okay, fine, you can eat meat on Friday. That's. That took centuries of people fucking bitching about it. Whereas this was like they had a marketing meeting and they were like, hey, we're missing a market.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And so later a lot of tithing was given. It's almost like Mormonism is the mainstream country music of religion.

[James Petregallo]

It is, yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Pander to whatever group is popular, Whatever,

[James Petregallo]

whatever's gonna sell a few more downloads. And that's kind of what it is. Where they have. Also, like, they have. Now the big thing is those dirty sodas that you hear about. That's all from Mormons. Yeah, they made them because rather than going out and drinking, which isn't socially acceptable, they go out and have dirty sodas. A soda that has enough sugar for like three months of your life, basically. And that's like, oh, man. I did so isn't this. We had a wild one last night, boy. I had whipped up cream on it and everything else is crazy. I'm still, still going the shakes from

[Jimmy Whisserman]

it like booze, almost.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, a little bit close. We're trying to get it to be booze.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I got the shakes like booze. But I can still remember everything.

[James Petregallo]

But I can still remember I'm real sticky too, for some reason. Everything's sticky.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's the same.

[James Petregallo]

It's the same. Hey, everybody. Just going to take a quick break from the show to tell you you the best present you could possibly get your dad for Father's Day. An aura frame.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Auraframes.com Absolutely.

[James Petregallo]

Aura frames shows the moments. Dad tells the stories, and that's what this is all about. And I'm telling you, I have absolutely gotten my dad an aura frame. And you've been to my dad's house and you see where it is. Where is it? Right next to the kitchen table on its own little thing. And throughout the entire meal that we're all sitting there talking about, picture will pop up and it'll be like, oh, oh, that's your great grandfather. And he played on that baseball team. And that picture's up on this bar. And it was like every story, it's so cool. And everything that pops up, these older things will have a story behind it. And he loves it. And I love going over there and doing. It's really, really cool. This will ensure how these won't just live in your dad's head. They'll live everywhere. And you'll know about everything. And it's awesome. I'm telling you. Also free on unlimited storage. On this, you can add as many photos and videos as you want. And you can even reload photos. You can preload the photos, I mean, before it even ships. And you can then keep adding them from anywhere, anytime. This is the best gift you can possibly get. I get every one of my relatives as aura frames. I've gotten them as gifts and every one of them prominently displayed. They're always watching it whenever you're at their house. You're gathered around it. It's better than tv. It's better than watching something streaming. It's excellent aura makes it easy to shop for dad. It's also named number one by Wirecutter, so you can save now by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Our listeners can get $35 off their best selling Carver mat frame with the code Small town murder. That's a U R A frames.com promo code small town murder. Support the show by mentioning us to check out. Terms and conditions apply.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

Hey everybody, Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you how to dress your best with quince.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Quince.comq U-I-N c e.com oh, you know,

[James Petregallo]

it's summer's coming up in summer. It's gonna change the way you dress. Changes the way I dress. You don't want to be hot and things like that. You want, you want pieces that feel lighter and more breezy, breathable things that are easy but you still want to look put together. Sure, you don't want to look like you're at the beach if you're not at the beach. That's why both of us, we keep going back to Quints. Quince is where you find everything. It is my first and last shop stop for clothes. Shopping for everything. They have what I need and I love it. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing. Like, you know, breathable linen, soft, organic cotton, well made basics, but without the luxury markup. That's the thing. It's luxury items without the luxury markup. It's a rare balance that everything feels elevated but effortless. It's good stuff. Quint's European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation. Starting at just $34. Jimmy loves his linen pants that he got in there. Their tees are soft and easy to wear and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80, 80% less than similar brands. It's incredible the way they do it. And it's so simple how they do it. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middleman. That's where all your money's going, to the middleman. Instead you're just paying for quality. That's all you're paying for. Not some brand markup or advertising campaign or whatever. Quint's goes way beyond clothing. Custom upholstered sofas, ceramic cookware, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you end up recommending, recommending to everyone for everything. And that's what we do and not just when we're doing an ad on our show, right? In real life I tell people you got to go to quints. It's amazing. See this shirt? It's really nice. Quints. Great price. It's awesome. You gotta go. Honestly, there's no reason to not. Check this out. You're gonna love it. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints.com smalltown murder for free shipping on your order and 365 day return. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I n c e.com Smalltown Murder for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Smalltown Murder now back to the show. Hey everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you about the best security you could possibly have. SimpliSafe.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

SimpliSafe.com S I M P L I Safe.com Absolutely.

[James Petregallo]

In the United States there's a break in every 26 seconds. That means over the course of this ad like 3, 4 break ins will happen. That's a lot of break ins. And if you've listened to this show that you're listening to right now, Small town murder. You know what can happen when a break in happens? Bad things. So the problem here is most security systems only alert you after the break ins already started. Which you know by this show is way too late.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Way too late.

[James Petregallo]

Wait to have your family could be murdered by then. That's why we chose Simply Safe to secure our homes and businesses and everything else. Simplisafe makes us feel good and secure and have peace of mind. Using safe. That's the thing. Using the outdoor camera series 2 and advanced AI alert, simply safes US based live agents identify threats on your property and help deter them. Stopping crime before it starts. That's peace of mind. Literally. They come up and they're like, get out of here, we're calling the cops. Cops will be there in two minutes. People run away. It's what it is. Telling you. It's so good. We use it for everything that we have. Homes, offices. If I had anything else to put it on, I would. It's so good. I bought it as gifts for people that want home security. It's so good. Simplisafe has been a real game changer for us and we love it, I'm telling you. And there's no long term contracts. That's a huge thing. It's so important that you're not locked in. You don't want to be locked in in case your life needs change. Maybe you, you know, whatever. Simplisafe gets it. It means Simplisafe has to earn your business every day, and they don't mind doing that. And also, you know, you think about this, and I see so many shows we do where I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so glad we have Simplisafe, because this is. This could happen to us. You know what I mean? And it's so inexpensive, too. The monitoring and deterrence plans start at around a dollar a day. A dollar a day to secure your family, your home, your things, your pets, everything. It's ridiculous. And setting it up is so easy. I can't put together IKEA furniture, and I can install a Simplisafe system. It's excellent. And we want you to do it, too. We want you to experience the same peace of mind we do, which is why we've partnered with Simplisafe to offer an exclusive discount to. To our listeners. Right now you can get 50% off your new system by visiting simplisafe.com small that's half [e-mail] small there's no safe like Simplisafe.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Now back to the show.

[James Petregallo]

So he gets sent to Switzerland for two years.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Comes home, enrolls in Southern Utah State College, which is now Southern Utah University. That is in Cedar City, which we've done an episode on. Cedar City. Now he gets a degree in. Want to guess his degree?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Botany.

[James Petregallo]

Close. Zoology. Zoology. He likes sciences and nature shit. That's what he's into.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You can tell you what stage this fucking insect is in.

[James Petregallo]

Probably. I don't know. Well, I think that would be. That's a different thing than zoology. Isn't that like there's a separate thing that's an insect person?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

All right.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, it's a totally separate. But I mean, maybe zoology covers that. Sure, I know. Like as an insect specialist, not a zoologist.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Vague universal coverage of that area, probably.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. You know everything about everything from zebras to mosquitoes. You can figure it out. And you're good. So then, 8384, he goes to Tuba City, Arizona. Oh, no. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Why?

[James Petregallo]

That's a bad move there. So he can teach junior high. I didn't even know they had schools in Tuba City, Arizona City.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I thought it was only natives. I didn't know that they even allowed.

[James Petregallo]

I thought once you sprouted. I thought once you sprouted your first pube, they just stuffed you in a mine. I thought that's how that worked over there. I didn't even know they put you in School in Tuba City. Is it a reservation?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

There's a large population of. That's where Lori Piestol is from.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. So anyway, it's six months he spends doing the school teaching, teaching junior high science. And I don't blame him for wanting to get out of Tuba City.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I could not get out of there fast enough if I was stuck working.

[James Petregallo]

He will later say that a recurring throat infection made him not be able to teach anymore.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, that feels like a cop out, right?

[James Petregallo]

It's just a. You know what I mean? You can't teach like this. It's just tough, it's tough to get it out.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Perhaps it's the dust man.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, or it's that. So in 1986 he spent two months as. This is so his whole life is mad lib. Like he's a junior high science teacher in Tuba City, Arizona. Then he's deputy police officer. He's a cop In Mojave County, Arizona. Northeast, northeast.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Over by like St. John and shit.

[James Petregallo]

I think it's up that direction. If I'm not mistaken. I think that's Mojave County.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Oh no, no, nevermind. Kingman and Bullhead City. So that's over there going over by Vegas. Big just open spaces of meth labs, that's all it is a nightmare up there. He works there for two months. Yeah, I don't blame him. That's depressing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is all you can take.

[James Petregallo]

It's all you can do. He's also a licensed EMT as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

My God.

[James Petregallo]

So yeah, he does a lot of shit. In 87 he moves to I guess his family, his parents had moved from Nevada to St. George. I guess his dad wasn't doing so great health wise.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

So he does decided he was going to move to St. George in 87 to be close to the family, be around his dad as he doesn't do so well. So when he moves there he starts working as a home health aide because he's an EMT basically about 10 hours a week he's doing this kind of part time. He works with elderly patients in their homes.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He's really running a full public service career in Washington.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah. And he's got a zoology degree and he's doing this in home healthcare too. Man, let me tell you, that is a wild job.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's not.

[James Petregallo]

That's a tough one. No, that's a tough job. Anybody who can do that and do it well, holy shit. Hats off because I traveling nurses that

[Jimmy Whisserman]

just go to different people, all that stuff is so nuts.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They go to places that don't have a lot of nurses and stuff when they need to. Yeah. It's interesting. Now her. So that's where he goes now. His boss at this job said his patients loved him. JC seemed very stable, very sure of himself, very capable of doing the job we had for him. He always had a smile on his face. I don't think he ever came into the office grumpy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's fascinating.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Guy's got restraining orders coming out of his asshole. He's nice to everybody else.

[James Petregallo]

For now, he's doing great. He worked for a time for the Medavisit Extended Home Care and for the St. George surgical and Medical Clinic as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

He's doing really well. Real normal, kind of boring, nice Mormon guy in southern Utah. That's just who he is. In his mid-20s, by the 80s here. Professional of the box, top 30. Yeah, that's it. Helps his sick dad, works with old people, comes to work happy. Seems like a great guy at the time. November 1988, his dad dies of a heart attack.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Fuck.

[James Petregallo]

Now this is hard on him. And apparently he's real close to his dad. They do all the outdoor shit together, and they're real close. And he moved to St. George to make sure he was close to him and all that kind of thing. And then he dies. Apparently he goes into a pretty pronounced depression after that, which is happens. You lose somebody close to you. Depression often follows from that. It's just the way it is. So he actually seeks help for his depression, which in the 80s is no small feat. In 1989, that is not a small feat for someone to go to their doctor and say, I am depressed. Can you help me? Because back then, that was not standard operating procedure. Yeah, it wasn't. People would. It was a much different era. People would be like, well, you know, you just got to get over it. That's what people would tell you. Yeah, get over it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, there's. I mean, there's a lot of tropes about it too. In the 80s and movies where somebody just fucking didn't. Didn't do anything about it and had a nervous breakdown. It was like a joke. It's like, I don't know, man. Life piles up.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, leave me with the fuck alone. And whenever you'd see, Too in the 80s, a huge movie and TV trope was the psychiatrist in the 80s, somebody's sitting on the shrink. You know, I'm going to see my shrink. And they're sitting on the couch. They're never Talking about depression.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Never. They're always talking about some fucking thing that happened in childhood.

[James Petregallo]

Work problem, or they're stressed out and they don't know who they are. They're trying to find themselves. It's always some, like, existential. Existential, philosophical. They're sitting, laying on the couch like this, and the shrink is smoking with his pad out. And they go, well, what do you think of that? And they go, huh, I never thought of it like that. And they haven't. In real life, the psychiatrist is people that are sad. And you're trying to figure out why you're sad, what happened to make you sad to begin with. And now let's work on that back from there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

In real life, it's just a lot of that guy's sake scribbling and then going, yeah, that's normal.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's how you feel.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And then going, you're not fucking unique.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, this isn't. You're not a. Yeah, but they actually have to treat it like you kind of are, because in your head, you are. That's the problem.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But they tell you a lot that your problems aren't as complex as you make them. That's kind of the point of therapy.

[James Petregallo]

That's a big as you're making them. But in the 80s, a lot of. Not psychiatry, but society was, I'm depressed. So is everybody. Get over. Yeah, my job sucks. I hate this. Blah, blah, blah. Who isn't depressed? Get over it. That's what being an adult is. That's what I would. You know what I mean? That's what I always heard growing up was. Yeah, being fucking miserable. That's what being an adult is. Oh, okay. Shit, that looks bad. It's just how it is.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The trope of it all was they were going real fucking deep into what makes you who you are. That's not what therapy is.

[James Petregallo]

Not at all.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Really. Breaking it down to simplified versions of yourself to build tools of dealing with this tomorrow. Because you're not gonna see me every day, motherfucker. So you might feel great for this hour.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. If you have plenty of money and you feel like sticking around and you got the time to do it, sure, yeah, maybe you could do some of that. But most of it is trying to fix an active problem that you have and get you the tools to do

[Jimmy Whisserman]

it, stretching you to your next appointment.

[James Petregallo]

They prescribe him Prozac. Now, Prozac is pretty fucking new at this point because this is November 88. Prozac was approved by the FDA in December 87. So it's less than. Than a year on the market. Yeah, we don't think now, because now there's all sorts of drugs for it and things like that. But back then, this was a new thing. These SSRIs were pretty fucking new.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Was this one of the first ones approved?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. So it basically. Prozac, it becomes kind of the standard that Everybody. In the 90s, if anybody was doing something, the common throwaway joke was, well, let's take get down on your Prozac. People would say that that was the common weird hacky fucking trope that comics and people would use. So it basically increases the serotonin in your brain. You're depressed, you increase it. Now you're not so depressed. It was the biggest psychiatric drug in America in the last year. I mean, it was a lifesaver for a lot of fucking people. I mean, people, if you are horribly depressed and suicidal and things like that, this is a lifesaver for some people. By 1990, there's three and a half million users worldwide.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Eli Lilly is the drug company that puts it out and they are making a fortune off this shit right now. The drug works, based on their research here, works in about 60 to 70% of patients. A lot of people when they go very depressed, to get something like this, they have to go through a few of them before they find the one that works correctly for them.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's the fucked up part about these things, is that it often takes several weeks for it to really start working. And that's fucking crazy because with depression and those kind of thoughts, the last thing you've got is three to six weeks.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Especially if you're at that low of a spot where you waited till you were at your lowest to go see the. Go see a doctor and.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, so at that point, it's like that's the last thing you've got, is all kinds of time.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, and there was a ton, too. There's Prozac and Paxil. And then there was like your Wellbutrins, I think, Sarazone and this one and that one. And now there's a bunch more of them that came out Zoloft. Yeah, those are all the kind of 90s ones. And there's a million of them. What'd you say? I think that's an antacid. The one, the last one. You said Zoloft. Oh, no, I thought you said Zomig. I was like, that's an antacid. Zoloft. I thought you said Zomig.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

After that, there's all kinds of them. I mean, I could keep going, but

[James Petregallo]

yeah, there's a ton of them.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

There's just so many.

[James Petregallo]

So basically, it's not like the other stuff they used to give you before. That was shit that would just kind of knock you out. It was like a horse tranquilizer. You'd be sleepy. A lot of them would. Would make you get fat and lazy, basically. So if you're depressed, fat and lazy isn't the best addition to that roster.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Your body changing and making you feel less happy is just going to make the depression worse.

[James Petregallo]

Well, that's also some of the SSRIs make you have zero sex drive whatsoever, which some people don't care about. Because if you're in such a fucking horrible, terrible place of depression that you're worried about killing yourself, sex drive probably isn't your first problem that you're really thinking about. So you're happy just to feel a little bit better, but after a while you're like, hey, I'd like to be normal. So then you have to deal with that. And so there's all sorts of different things, and they can give you a different drug that helps with this and all sorts of shit like that. So, anyway, the university. A psychiatrist quoted in a news piece here, Dr. Fred Reimer, the director of the University of Utah Medical Center's Mood Disorders Clinic, said Prozac is effective because it's biochemically different in its actions. So the demand gets very big. At one point here, that health expert said that the drug is so common here, it should be considered one of the four food groups.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh.

[James Petregallo]

Which I bet, because also you have a lot of housewives that have eight children also. So I bet you they're kind of depressed from time to time. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a general area. Everybody's on it, huh.

[James Petregallo]

In Utah. Yeah. Now, his mom, Connie, said after he started taking it, he just got to be very different. He's a different guy. She said he suffered insomnia, headaches, mood changes. He fidgeted. He just wasn't JC when he was on Prozac. Isn't it interesting? Wasn't my guy. Now they're not. And these are the documented and warned about side effects. Headaches, insomnia, mood changes, fidgeting, trembling, shit. There's a list of side effects that are possible that are that fucking long, basically. And every drug you take, that's what they are, no matter what it is. Every goddamn thing there is huge you know, that's the FDA approved package insert has all these on there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The only way for the FDA to ban a substance is for them to have approved it in the first place. And so all these things that have all these fucking side effects, they're okay with that? That's fucking wild to me.

[James Petregallo]

Well, what are you gonna do if the overwhelming. If it's, you know, more good and

[Jimmy Whisserman]

you're okay with these side effects, then whatever.

[James Petregallo]

And that doesn't mean it's not everybody. That's the other thing. You might not have any side effects, or you might have a few, or you might have. And then you have to weigh, is that worth it or not? That's all. I think that's how you do.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Just to take it.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. So 89, tough year for JC. He tries to kill himself twice in this year while he's on Prozac. While he's on Prozac with barbiturate overdoses. He goes for. So two different times. That's a lot here, I would say. So the first time he tried doing it, he wrote his mother a note first, before he took the pills, he was really planning on going out. Then before he took the pills, he called his LDS bishop, he called his church bishop and asked the bishop to come over because, quote, my mother's going to need you in a little while, so you should come over.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, to console her.

[James Petregallo]

Okay, to console her. So he writes his mother a note and calls the bishop to try to set his mother up beforehand. And so, yeah, the way he wanted it was he wanted his mother to come home, find the body, and have the bishop already be there so he could help her. Okay, so he survives both these attempts. They keep him on the Prozac at some point. The doctor increases the dose at some point and doesn't take him off Now. So his dad's dead, living with his mom, he's still working 10 hours a week. He's like 31 years old. His life isn't going exactly how he wanted it to at this point.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's not great.

[James Petregallo]

It's not great. And the other thing I would say is the depression of losing a parent should be a temporary depression.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, There should be a low, and then from there it's a build. But it's whatever. It's entire ebb and flow build. It's like a really good penny stock.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, whatever the. Which means it doesn't exist. So, yeah, it's a good ipo, I

[Jimmy Whisserman]

guess it's just at the beginning it goes up, then it Comes down a little bit and it's a roller coaster for Greece grief. It's brutal and it's not constant.

[James Petregallo]

No, no, no, no. But it's definitely something that unless you're eight as an adult, you should probably naturally get over in a little while. Yeah, it's the circle. It's literally the circle and cycle of life, certainly.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. You grow up, sometimes you just take grief with you for the rest of your life and you're just not. Just doesn't. It's dulled a bit.

[James Petregallo]

Yes, But I don't. I don't know about that. I mean, the grief. Yeah. And everyone will say, oh, I still grieve my mom and all that, but you're not actively thinking about your dead parents constantly. And you shouldn't be for 20 fucking years afterwards. If you're a depressive person kind of prone to that to begin with, it's one thing that could end up just kicking you down that path. But I feel like if you're a happy person, normally, you have no depressive features. Your dad dies, you're a little bit sad in about a year, you should feel better. Not 100% better, but, you know, to the point where you'd be like, okay, I can. You know, I've come to terms with it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

That sort of thing, I would think. I mean, everybody's different, but still so

[Jimmy Whisserman]

close to a parent. Yeah, I guess they are happy because that parent exists. You know what I mean?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's true.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Because that relationship with that parent exists. They're just. That's what carries them. And then when they lose that parent, it fucking decimates.

[James Petregallo]

And maybe if the dad wasn't too old and it was a surprise that he died too, that can be worse. If it's a surprise. Because when someone is sick for five years, you should know that there's an end to this. Well, then when someone's sick for five years, the death is drawn out, so it's not that big punch. And then you have all this depression. It's this depression that kind of gets watered down over time. And by the end, if people are honest, they actually are happy. The person went. Relieved. Yeah, relieved.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

If it's not happy, it's certainly relieved because this poor bastard is not doing all that bad shit that I've watched him do.

[James Petregallo]

It's not only that, in reality, when they're honest, they're actually happy because they've actually started to resent that person for being alive. Not on purpose, but. No, that's what they say. Any Psychiatrist will tell you that they are resenting that person for being alive. Alive. Not on purpose. And they need.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Putting all of us through this.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, they're just tired of it. And as a human being, you're like, fuck. But then they feel guilty for having those feelings, which compounds the whole thing and makes them feel terrible. So it's a horrible cycle. We're way off the subject. Anyway, Nancy. Back to Nancy. Remember Nancy Snow? In October 88, about a month before JC's dad dies, she goes to an LDS singles party and meets jc. Yeah, okay. By the way, Mormons have very big mixers and singles and events and all kinds of shit like that. Basically now at this party, that's when Nancy and JC meet and she's a few years older than him, been divorced twice. She's lds though. Born into an LDS family and all that kind of thing. So close enough. Twice divorced happens. But one thing, the Mormons do divorce quite a bit. But you are expected to get remarried

[Jimmy Whisserman]

real fast and wear a cream dress. You can't wear white.

[James Petregallo]

No, no, no. You can't wear a white dress, obviously, but that's a big deal. You gotta hook yourself right back up again. Otherwise, a single person is not with children is not respectable in their thing. In the 80s. Anyway, I don't know about now. So she's looking for a guy and like I said, she's working as a receptionist. The St. George Care Center. Janice works there as well. Now, JC pursued Nancy after this singles party. He sent her flowers, bouquets of roses. Very romantic. He's very much traditional. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Shows up to the nursing, sends the flowers, they show up to the nursing home. So at work she's got the big flowers on her desk, like some people like. And he also shows up a lot at her job because he only works 10 hours a week or so. And so he just kind of hangs around her desk.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Which is weird.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Jim from the office. But he's not getting a paycheck for being here.

[James Petregallo]

I don't know that reference. Like a guy. I don't know. I've never watched the office. It's horrible. I'm talking the. No, he's like guy who's like 15, 16, and his girlfriend works at Dairy Queen, so he always hangs out at Dairy Queen.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He's standing there.

[James Petregallo]

Cause he can. Yeah, but this is like an office and like a professional environment. You shouldn't be hanging out with your girlfriend. The administrator of the place said that Nancy, quote, became like a little rabbit. She was more like a possession he owned Little Rabbit's. A weird way to put it, but I get it with the possession thing. Nancy doesn't tell her co workers really what's going on. She also tells the coworkers that JC is smothering her. And he always shows up and I'm tired of these flowers. And she doesn't really act like she likes him that much. She's like, I don't know, he's too much. Then In April of 89, after knowing him about six months, she just shows up one day at work. Married. What? We got married over the weekend.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The courtship worked. Fuck.

[James Petregallo]

That didn't work. Yeah, I'm Nancy Snow Gardner now. We put it on my paperwork. That's it. Like got married over the weekend. So it's interesting, their marriage doesn't go very well. No, no. Now Connie, JC's mom said he wanted to make it work and off and on she did. It was like a continual yo, yo. She just didn't want to be married anymore. That's right. Connie also claims that Nancy used to call all the time, call Connie, her mother in law to say that she's the source of the marital problems. Very convenient for Connie to remember that she wouldn't blame myself.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I know you're doing this.

[James Petregallo]

No, no, no, I'm doing it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Nancy is.

[James Petregallo]

Nancy will call and go, I'm fucking everything up. I'm the source of all of our troubles. Let me tell you, I'm wrong just all the time.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

God, am I terrible at this. Connie.

[James Petregallo]

It doesn't seem like it probably happened, but that's what Connie says. Nancy moves out in three weeks.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

They get married and in three weeks she's not living with him anymore.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Out of the house in three weeks.

[James Petregallo]

Three weeks. I'd like to say that is a crazy thing, but I'll tell you after the show. When I was a kid, experienced an exact same thing. A three week marriage. Sort of. Well, no, because it's lasted about 40 years, but it started out lasting three weeks. And I'll tell you later. So In June of 89, she files for a divorce. Done with his bullshit. Apparently she also files for a restraining order against him when she files for the divorce. Same day, September 89th, the divorce is final. Now JC doesn't take divorce as final. No, it's pretty fucking final. I would say we can rekindle this. This is as final as it gets. Now there is the claims and apparently he does have some proof of this that Nancy's sending him love letters over this period though, like they're yeah. So there's mixed signals coming from both sides here during this time.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Love letters or explanations of why we're not together.

[James Petregallo]

Some low love letters. Wow. Yeah. Like, I do miss you. And that kind of thing with the restraining order, too. So this is bad. Now and then sometimes she's saying, I don't want you near me. And sometimes she's sending him letters. And so. Yeah, whatever. So he then went over the top with it and would show up at her job, show up at her house, send her letters, refused to leave her alone despite a restraining order.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

You know, if she actually is sending him letters, he needs to throw them right in the garbage and say, I'm not dancing with this fucking shit. I'm not doing it. But instead.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

I don't even know if the letters are real. But that's what he says.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. At that point, you'd gotta be thinking, she got a restraining order on me. She's sending me these. Are baiting me to come to her so that I go to jail. I'm not doing it. Not buying into this shit.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. I don't think Mormons have that dark of a turn of thought, though. No, I think they. Honestly, I don't think they think that. Maybe they do, but I feel like there's a.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's because he wouldn't or she wouldn't.

[James Petregallo]

We're from. I don't think he would think that way or neither would she. I think they would think that, like. Oh, you know, this is. On the surface. I just. I don't know. They don't seem quite as subversive and quite as, you know, quite as. I don't even know if cynical is the right word here. Yeah, they just. They don't seem to have as much street smarts as. I mean, they're raised to not really have street smarts. That's the point. They don't want them to have street smarts. So it's not an insult to Mormons to say you don't have street smarts. Literally, everyone knows what that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Breathe that out of you, for Christ's sake. People that know that aren't street smart.

[James Petregallo]

No. So Nancy Snow and Janice, during this time where they're broken up, Nancy Snow and Janice become best friends. Best friends here. Nancy's a receptionist. Janice is the nurse. Janice is going to get a promotion to be head of the nursing staff pretty soon. Here, too. They work in the same building, see each other every day, go out to lunch together, whatever. Best friends. And Janice really is necessary for Nancy Nancy's really happy to have her there because she becomes her sounding board. Janice becomes Nancy's sounding board. Janice will listen to her, support her, because Janice is a sweet woman, she's a nice girl. As her mom said. That's it. Janice is the one talking to Nancy about all of her problems and all the pressure she's under. And Janice gives Nancy some advice. This is from a co worker. She said Fondren nurtured Snow. So Janice nurtured Nancy after the divorce, urging her to stand up to her ex husband. Stand up to him. She said Janice is the friend who told her that, quote, you don't have to put up with this. Tell him to leave you alone. Don't let him be a creep. Don't go along with this. Don't just let it happen. If he violates that restraining order, you call the cops every time. Just fucking.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's therapy.

[James Petregallo]

It is. That's what she needs, a good friend. And Janice just has her head on really straight. That's just how she is as a person. So JC continues to harass Nancy. She experienced all sorts of harassment, including telephone calls, even some physical confrontations where he apparently roughed her up a little bit, pushed her, shoved her, pulled her up against a wall. Why are you doing this shit like that? She eventually obtained a restraining order again. But he continued to come to her residence and even would leave notes on her car. Proof that he was there, which is the dumbest shit ever. You're not supposed to be on my property.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I wasn't there.

[James Petregallo]

I wasn't there. Well, why is this note here under my windshield wiper then? Stupid.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Jc, give me a reference.

[James Petregallo]

Did you write this on the back of the Chinese food menu that was left on her doorknob? Because it's here. May of 1990 is when Janice gets the promotion to Director of nursing. Her boss said that Janice was terrific. One in a million. She was one of the new young nurses who had such a deep, deep energy and love for long term care patients. That is such a rare quality. Wow, that's a great person to have around there. So July of 90 at a bar, that's when some shit goes down. Now St. George does not have a lot of bars. No, we've heard it really doesn't. Really doesn't even Salt Lake City not really overflowing with bars.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And the ones they have are real fucking weird.

[James Petregallo]

They're real weird. We found a good place. Yeah, that seemed like a lot of other people found because there was a whole lot of people drinking in there. After that volleyball tournament let out, we found a way to get good and wine drunk in Salt Lake City.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You're not allowed to buy a double in Salt Lake City. They can't serve you two drinks.

[James Petregallo]

No. That's weird as shit.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So silly.

[James Petregallo]

No, but we had no problem drinking a bottle of wine.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Look, if somebody wants to get more than a double, we'll figure out how to fucking get drunk. Stop passing laws to try to keep me from getting drunk.

[James Petregallo]

All it is is, okay, fine, you're gonna have to walk back and forth one more fucking time is what that means if I'm at a table. Because I'll take one. Then give me another one. What are we talking about here?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Go get me another when you drop this off. Cause it'll be gone by the time you get back.

[James Petregallo]

That's it. Go, start it going. So most of the bars are like, there's hotels and things like that for tourists. Because people who come from out of town, you know, they're normal and want to drink.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

We don't have to partake by your fucking rules.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, I don't want a dirty soda. I want something that'll make me forget my problems.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

At least don't feel them as much.

[James Petregallo]

Nope. So JC approaches Nancy at the bar. Janice is with Nancy. And Janice was basically. Janice is the one people said that was out for drinks that night. Nancy was just hanging out with her. She wasn't drinking or anything. JC shows up and approaches Janice, says, let's just go. And gets up. And there's witnesses around saying this. And Janice yelled right in his face, leave Nancy alone. Shouting at him, really getting in his face and saying, get the fuck out of here. And multiple witnesses heard her telling him to back off and leave her alone and go away so we can get out of here. And really at a quite a confrontation that Everybody saw. Then July 21, 1990, Janice filed a complaint on her own behalf. Because now he's harassing her. He pops up behind her back gate. She's scared of him. Essentially. July 21st was the day that Nancy saw him peeking through the back fence. Now July 22nd in the morning, that is when they show up at the house. There's blood, all of this. So you can see why Nancy said, look at my ex husband, because can't think of anybody else now. July 23, 1990, the day after they discover the apartment and she's missing. We still don't have any idea where she is, Janice. We just know a large amount of what's presumed to be her blood. Is deposited on her living room floor and entryway. So this day, JC Is arrested not for murder, not for kidnapping, not for any of the above. He's arrested on misdemeanor charges, including two counts of criminal trespass, one count each of lewdness and telephone harassment. Oh, now this isn't even stemming from the last couple days. This is stemming from incidents on July 6 and July 9 involving Janice and

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Nancy Snow that they've been investigating.

[James Petregallo]

That he's. Yeah. So they decided they were real and they arrest him for it, actually. And it's violation of a restraining order, lewdness, all that. He is released on July 25 after posting a $3,000 cash bail.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's high.

[James Petregallo]

So that's a lot for that. For harassment. For two days. He's in jail till the 25th. And they also know he is a suspect, obviously. Now, when they arrested him, he was wearing shoes that matched the track pattern found outside the kitchen window.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yep.

[James Petregallo]

So that's not good. That's how they got Richard Ramirez, by the way, the Night Stalker. Those are fucking avias. So that's a.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Were they not great?

[James Petregallo]

They were. No. Super. Yeah. Do they even have Uggs in 1990?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't know. I don't know. They may have only been in Australia because that's where they came from.

[James Petregallo]

Who knows? Yeah. Maybe that's where you need boots. Australia.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. Good, hot, warm boots.

[James Petregallo]

Some nice, furry hot, warm boots for me to sit in the fucking outback when it's 140 degrees. Wool lined, really good boots is what I need.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wool lined boots.

[James Petregallo]

Essentially, in our mind, in Australia, you should either wear sneakers, sandals, or something made of crocodile skin. We're not sure what one of the three.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Or you cut up an old tire and string some string through it to make a flip flop.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's fine. You can do that. Milk carton. Now, witnesses here, they also find out that between 2am and 2:30am on the night that she would have disappeared, this witness heard a vehicle outside Janice's apartment and observed a man doing something to the. To Janice's car. And the car was backed up to the front door of the apartment. Oh, so they saw her car backed up to the front door where all the blood drag marks were, where there's

[Jimmy Whisserman]

like a hood up or something. Because they're doing something to the car.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, doing something. They don't know what. Now, the vehicle was observed pulling away 10 minutes later. Okay, okay.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Runs.

[James Petregallo]

Now, a second witness also observed a male drive Janice's vehicle into Janice's parking spot. At about 3am, this witness was walking to a friend's apartment and saw this. So she drives, she had a Ford Thunderbird, an 80s Thunderbird? Hell yeah. And that's the car that they see backed up and then someone else sees it pull in. So we know about when it left and about when it came back. Between 2 and 2:30 the car took off. And then around 3 o' clock the car's back in the lot. So presumably the body went into the

[Jimmy Whisserman]

car, drove off and came back.

[James Petregallo]

So we know the body isn't in Oregon.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No, it's in a 15 minute halo around here.

[James Petregallo]

That's. It has to be. So that's something they figure out too, that it can't be that far. If those are the timelines and you never know, people, people's times are fucked up, but still, whether it's within an hour or an hour and a half, it still means it's not in, you know, really, really far. So all of this is enough to get a search warrant for JC's apartment house? Yeah, house. They get the search warrant, they go there, they find a folding shovel, like one of those shovels, two pairs of rubber gloves in the trash. In the trash, in the trash. A 9 millimeter handgun, which by the way, 9 millimeter is the caliber they think went through the window.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So we got a shell casing of

[James Petregallo]

it in the floor up there and we got the shell casing. So they found that. They also find nine millimeter ammunition as well that he has there. So they send all that off to the lab. That's gonna take a couple of days to get the ballistics back on that. So two days later, the police are informed by the crime lab that the pistol that was taken from JC's residence is the one that fired the shell found in the apartment.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, that was easy.

[James Petregallo]

That was pretty easy. So essentially what they believe is this is the theory that they have working. On July 21, after he knows he's got a restraining order and all that, he's sitting at home stewing because we knew he was home based on some calls that were made. And he's been thinking about Janice now for a few days because she put a restraining order on him and he's all pissed off. Somehow in this period, he bought a folding shovel and bought two pairs and bought gloves, rubber gloves. So he has two pairs of rubber gloves and he already had a 9 millimeter handgun. Okay, now he will tell his mother and his mother will tell everyone else later on that, that day he took A double dose of Prozac.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Double dose.

[James Petregallo]

Double dose. I don't know why you would do that. I don't know why. That's what he said. He told his mother that he was feeling, quote, extra depressed that day.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, look, man, that's gonna end about six weeks.

[James Petregallo]

I'm double depressed is what I got going on. So double the shit. So then they think, July 22, 9:30, he drove over to the apartment. The apartment has the back kitchen window that opens onto dirt popped off the screen. Male men's sneaker that's photographed and matched to his other shoe goes in the kitchen window, has everything. The gloves, the 9 millimeter, the shovel and did what he did. And we'll get into what that is exactly in a little bit here. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name youe 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. Now, Janice's parents say that she knew him. So they said, does he know. Does your daughter know this guy? Nancy said she knows her, but does she know him? And the parents said, yes, she does know him, but we wouldn't say they were friends. That's all she would say. There's some weirdly weird reporting in newspapers from the time that say that Janice had gone out with JC for a while in the inter. Did not happen.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The mistakes.

[James Petregallo]

I was like, you can't put that in the newspaper. Jesus Christ. Lucky we check more than one source when we're doing this to make sure to find it other places. I'm like, that's in nowhere else. As a matter of fact, she hated him and got restraining orders against him. That's just a mistaken.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And Nancy met him first.

[James Petregallo]

Some reporter heard that and mis put that onto Janice and wrote an article about it. Damn it, that's tough. I'm sure they did a retraction or at least a correction on that one. So Betty Jo and John, her parents arrive in St. George. That's Janice's parents. They arrive from South Carolina to go there and they're prepared for the worst because obviously it doesn't look like their daughter's alive. They told the Daily Spectrum newspaper that even though their daughter's case was being treated as a missing person. We have every indication that our daughter is dead. They said, right. Betty Jo said, the thing that has me so upset Is that I may not have a body to take home. That's what's killing me.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That is fucked up.

[James Petregallo]

That's fucked up. But there's definitely not no body, no crime here. This is. There's a crime and we're looking into it for sure. So at least there's not that. At least they're not going well. I mean, she could turn up any point. So we really can't look into her.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She may have left on her own.

[James Petregallo]

You never know. So they also said there's a lot of secrecy around the investigation. And the couple said that that is also very frustrating. They're not telling us everything.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, cops can't give you the information because if it gets out, they hold things close so they can get the real guy.

[James Petregallo]

You could accidentally let it slip in a press interview, and then we're fucked now. So they said at home, meaning South Carolina, if this had occurred, there would be people coming out of the woodwork to find her. That's not happening here for. But they are. They're not just out randomly looking through a field, but they're looking. They're trying to figure this out a little more scientifically, I believe. But I get, hey, you show up, your daughter's missing, they don't find her right that day, you're frustrated and understand

[Jimmy Whisserman]

it's also how we put people to death for false confessions in South Carolina. Maybe we take it a little easy down here.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, maybe we do that. So her car is the thing. They're really looking at her car. They note there's black brush. It's what it's called, black brush stuck to the undercarriage of the car. Now, it's a desert plant. It's, ooh, Caliogene ramesissima. That's the. If you were a botanist, you'd know it by that. Unfortunately, neither of us are botanists. Very common in the Mojave and Great Basin. Grows in clusters in the dirt and catches on shit all the time. It'll catch on the shit. So if you drive your car off road into the desert, basically, it's going to get up in your wheel wells and people will know you were in

[Jimmy Whisserman]

the desert and you'll move it somewhere else. And then it'll rain and it'll grow there, too.

[James Petregallo]

That's right. That's how it works. So July 26th. Now, this is a day after JC gets bailed out for the harassment and lewdness and all that kind of shit. This is in the Shivwitz Reservation now. So we're Outside the town. We're onto a reservation now. This is the fourth day that they're looking for her. Somebody and we don't know who. We believe it's a police department. It wasn't a random person. Someone finds a body out here. It's 150ft off Camp Spring Road. Camp Springs Road. One mile west of Motoqua. Is that how you say that? Motauqua. M O T O Q U A.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I've never heard that one.

[James Petregallo]

Maticoa? I don't know. Mataquoa Road. And a few miles north of us old US 90. Old US Highway 91. This is 15 miles west of St. George.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Hey.

[James Petregallo]

Which is the perfect amount of time.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's 15 minutes away.

[James Petregallo]

Bang bang. Do what you need to do. Get back in the car within an

[Jimmy Whisserman]

hour, you're back 60 miles an hour. Right back the other way.

[James Petregallo]

That's it. And it's on a highway. Now by examining the type of brush and tree limbs and road dust found on the Thunderbird belonging to Janice, they figured that the car was used to bring her out here. Obviously this is evidence they're putting together now based on the foliage at first. That's why they were looking in this area. Oh, they were looking for basically because they had two parameters. They basically had, okay, place where black brush grows that is within this halo of us. So anything around there is fine and that's what they're looking for. So that's why they're doing this. Which is very smart way to do it. Now they said that where the body was discovered, they found it in the middle of the night. So they basically had to just secure the scene. Yeah. Can't do much in daylight. So the Utah Medical Examiner's office is out there. The searchers had combed from Castle Cliffs on the south to Tenoco mine site on the north and from Central to Snow Canyon and roads branching off of it is what they said. So they had basically a big circle they were searching. Now the problem here is it's 110 fucking degrees outside and it's been 110

[Jimmy Whisserman]

disappear in a minute every day.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Yeah. For a body to sit outside for four days in 110 degree heat is absolutely forensically a nightmare. Nothing is there. It's destroyed, decomposed.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He was there for 48 hours and they had to go identify him. And that wasn't him.

[James Petregallo]

They were like, imagine four days. And also there's animals out there too. They're scavengers is what they are in the desert. And That's. It's not good, it's bad. So decomposition, what they think is. And we'll tell you why, but they're pretty sure they believe this is fucking horrifying. That she was sexually assaulted after she was killed.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

That's the thought here. Yeah. It's post, which is.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I mean, I guess if she's shot at the house, that means they waited till out there.

[James Petregallo]

Yes.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Which is really just fucking horrifying in every aspect for the corpse, even for him. What are you doing? You know. You fucking monster. So it's disgusting. The position of the body is one thing. Also, she's posed.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, my God.

[James Petregallo]

So, I mean, this is not a dump under a bush. I don't want anyone to see this.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She's just humiliation and owning it. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

That's why if there's a sexual assault,

[Jimmy Whisserman]

that's why that's a dangerous person.

[James Petregallo]

I'll show you a scary person. Yeah. She's posed, feet apart, hands above her head. So very much in a posed way. Also, she's undressed as well, which no reason for that. Otherwise it's been there for three days. 110 degree heat. This is Paiute land out here, by the way, on the reservation. They find two blankets nearby from her house. They also find her pink pajamas there and her underwear in a pile nearby.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So she was going to bed.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, she was in her house. It was the middle of the night when this happened. She was in bed probably. She probably heard a noise, came out and this confrontation happened. As you can imagine. I'm sure she wasn't shy when she saw him. She probably said, I'm gonna call the cops. Fuck you. And this is what happened. And they also find a beer can nearby. This beer can would be so helpful now. Useless back then unless there's a fingerprint on it. Pretty much.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This is somebody's brand.

[James Petregallo]

This is somebody's beer can. They never can forensically match that beer can to JC because there's no DNA. You can't get DNA off a beer can back then, so. Or anybody. Yeah, no, that's just a random beer can. But it seems it's right in next to the pajamas and underwear. Looks like part of this. Yeah, looks like it goes together. Basically, this location is consistent with someone who wanted the body basically the fuck away from wherever they were, middle of nowhere. The body is identified as Janice by multiple things. Number one, her clothing and things like that. And then dental records eventually to make it 100% positive. So now they go and arrest J.C. all right. He's arrested outside the hall of justice building by law enforcement officers. I think they asked him to come in for something and then they. Just as he was walking up, they slapped the cuffs on him. And he's charged with first degree murder.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, yes. And four related misdemeanor charges as well. So. Yeah, Chris is a. Basically one of them. Is that also they're saying this first degree homicide was in the commission of an aggravated burglary as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What'd he take?

[James Petregallo]

He broke in.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, got it. Yeah, that's. Yeah. Breaking and entering.

[James Petregallo]

And also stole her car. He brought it back.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

There's a.

[James Petregallo]

So his bail is set at half a million dollars. Like I said, this is the first homicide case in this city in four years.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Half a million sounds low too. Doesn't.

[James Petregallo]

Does. But it's 1990. Yeah, I look at it that way. That's like 4 million now, basically, or $3.5 million now, which still. And also, I think that he just has no chance of raising half a million.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't think so either.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Yeah. Back then, especially. So at his arraignment, the judge denied his request for appointed legal counsel due to varied financial assets. If you have any money, they won't declare you indigent until you spend all that money on a lawyer. Then they can give you a lawyer. So during the indigency hearing, JC Said there was a large number of guns in his home that had belonged to a. His recently deceased father, which he had access to use and which the court viewed as collateral for hiring his own attorney.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh. So they said sell those.

[James Petregallo]

Sell you a bunch of. Sell all your guns. Do that. Yeah. Now, here is the theory that they've put everything together. He left his apartment at 1am with a 9 millimeter Ruger pistol. Entered the apartment, obviously taken off the kitchen screen when Janice heard it and came downstairs. Cause her bedroom's upstairs. When she came downstairs and confronted him, he shot her in the chest. Now, they believe, based on the wound and even with the decomposition, that she died pretty much in place. Like she was dead within a minute. I mean, she wasn't being dragged out there alive or anything like that. So they don't know. By the way, she shot once in the chest. And there's only one shell casing. So they don't know if the bullet wound was a through and through. That then went through the window, probably, or if that's a second shot that went through the window. If he shot twice on the first one, she went down the second One hit the window.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The casing has just gone somewhere.

[James Petregallo]

Either that or he might have picked that casing up but couldn't find the other one because you're frantic. And it's the middle of the night, too, so it's dark, so you might not have found him. Blood on the carpet, blood on the door, blood on the front porch. Obviously dragging. So they know the shot was from the inside of the apartment based on the shell casing. And Janice, they said, basically. So they're trying to figure out the number of rounds, but either way, they figure he shot one of them, so it doesn't matter. Or both of them if there was two. So he either shot twice or once, essentially. Then he carries her and drags her out of the apartment to her car. Obviously, there's blood all over the place. He wrapped her in a bedspread and then placed it in the trunk of her own car, which was backed up to the front door. So this is just. I mean, he wrapped the body up and put it in the trunk like it was a fucking. Just a package. Got into her car. He had rubber gloves on, and he wiped up some of the blood in the apartment. That's one of the things. Some of the blood, like, on the walls is, like, wiped up. There's evidence of that. Drove out to the Shivwitz Indian Reservation and turned onto a road leading to the Beaver Dam Wash, where he disposed of her body after he took her clothes off and God knows what else he did. They found the black brush, like we said. That's there. Then when he's done, 3 o' clock in the morning, he drives 22 miles, or that's. He drove out to 22 miles out to there. This spot is 22 miles from Janice's joint from her place. So he must have stripped her, removed her clothes and underwear, pajamas, leave them behind. Also left the blankets behind. A beer can. And they do say from the report, the evidence also suggests Gardner sexually assaulted the victim after he killed her.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Terrible.

[James Petregallo]

That's in the court documents. So that's horrifying. Then he drove back to St. George with the black brush and the wheel wells and gets in his car and goes home. Wow. Like it never happened. Puts his rubber gloves in the trash, which, by the way, they were still in the trash four days later at his home.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I'll have taken out the trash at this house.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Puts the folding shovel, which I don't even know why he had. I guess he got out there and was like, what, am I gonna dig a fucking hole out Here I'm not.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, those holes are awful to dig with one of those little ass shovels.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, that's.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Even if. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

The best equipment. Deserts are so fucking hard. It's so hard to dig. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

A shovel is. That's to build a small fire pit and then be exhausted and sit by the fire.

[James Petregallo]

Exactly. In like the woods and soil. Not in a fucking. Not in the desert. So anyway, that was there and he brought all that back and went to sleep. Got up the next day, went to work, acted like nothing happened.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

Acted real normal. So can they get a confession from him? Because they have a lot of evidence. I mean he kept it all in his apartment like an idiot.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. If he doesn't confess, he's real dangerous because this is fucking. This is insane.

[James Petregallo]

He claims to have a hazy recollection of what happened. Not really sure. I didn't really know what happened here. Apparently here he said he entered the front door, which we know isn't true. You know, he came in the back door, he says in the back window. Yeah, he climbed in a window. It's not even a door. A back door. So he claims he went over there. He believes in his very hazy recollection, he went over there to talk to Janice about reconciling with Nancy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

Because your ex wife's friend really wants you to come over to talk at 3:00 in the morning. That's really when they're up for relationship counseling.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The one that yells at you in bar.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, so he said. Then she turned the lights on and threatened to call the police and mace him as well. Oh, she said, I have mace and I'll spray you. Because she came down with mace. And she came down and said, I'm going to mace you and call the cops. And so he shot her instead. Basically. Quote. This is from the report. The next thing Gardner knew, she was lying on the floor. Gardner reported he became frightened, disposed of the body and brought the car back. Okay. Okay. Now by the way, here are some reactions to this whole thing here. Remember her boss said she would skip into work?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

She said last day she saw her, quote, she just bounced across that parking lot and that was the end of her. Which is really disturbing. You know, the exact same reaction I had at three in the morning. I was like, what the fuck?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

God damn, lady.

[James Petregallo]

That's the question. That was the end. The of that is depressing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's like a terrible nursery rhyme.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. That was the end of her. No more. Nope. That's it. Kids enjoy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's the lesson, don't skip.

[James Petregallo]

Don't be too damn happy about everything. That's the lesson. Hold a little bit back. That's the lesson. Close to the best.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Save them for later.

[James Petregallo]

One of her bosses says she was a friend to everyone. She was one of those people. One of those exceptional people. One that won't be easily forgotten. I can honestly say I didn't know anyone who didn't like her. And they also said this is an enormous loss, not just to us, but to the entire nursing field. Okay.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The world over.

[James Petregallo]

The world over which. She's a good nurse. Yeah. She could have gone anywhere and applied that trade and done well and helped.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's fascinating. His confession leaves out the part where he shot her. Next thing I know, she's on the.

[James Petregallo]

That's how they always say.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Next thing I know, she's lying on the ground. What do you do then? Who knows? So the problem now is jurisdiction. The murder happened in St. George, in the city limits. The body was dumped on the Paiute Reservation. Yeah, which. That, by the way, is an interesting thing because they're talking about in some scenarios that would trigger a federal jurisdiction under the Major Crimes act, which gives the feds jurisdiction over major crimes committed by or against Indians in Indian country. The problem is Janice is not Indian and neither is JC but it's hard

[Jimmy Whisserman]

to determine where she died, where she shot. We know, but when did she die?

[James Petregallo]

The autopsy says she died in less than a minute. So she died in St. George.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So then she died right there.

[James Petregallo]

That large pool of blood is unsurvivable. They said that was enough blood to die on the floor. She was dead before she left the apartment. They know that much. So the killing happened off the reservation. The disposal happened on the reservation. Under the case law, particularly section 6A, by the way, defines that where a killing legally occurs, the killing is where the death act occurs, which is St. George. So the jurisdiction is the state. But if either one of them had been Native American, it would have been a whole different thing. Then it would have triggered something. Then you would have had a fight over. It was on the reservation, but it happened in the city. But there were actually Indians and it was on the reservation. It would have been a mess. So. Yeah. Anyway, the prosecutor here is W. Brett Langston. I like when people have an initial

[Jimmy Whisserman]

first in the 90s.

[James Petregallo]

W. Brett. Hanging on to it. Brent, not Brett. Brent. Yeah. So that's what they do. Now, the defense, he has a court appointed attorney and he is a character of the highest order. Wow. The Court appointed attorney is Alan D. Boyak. B O W A C K. And you can go to a newspaper archive and just Google his name and oh, boy, there's some wild shit that comes up. He is a character. A character and a very famous lawyer in this area here. Now, he is a real colorful guy. I gotta kinda give you a little on his background. He's 50 years old in 1990. He calls himself a big man and a big talker. That's what he says of himself. He says he's a big man with a big talker. And he tells stories with the flare. This is the Deseret News newspaper said he tells stories with the flair of a TV evangelist.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, boy.

[James Petregallo]

He's very bombastic in the courtroom. And he's a big guy too. Big guy, he's very loud, all this type of shit here. He also here was a Green Beret in Vietnam, Special Forces guy in Vietnam, retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Those guys rarely talk.

[James Petregallo]

That's what I mean. He's a big talker. He does all that kind of shit they said about him. The Deseret News did a profile about him and he said that he keeps the Green Beret in his office there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, he still has it.

[James Petregallo]

Still has it and keeps it there because he wants people to notice it. He said, in his words, the Green Beret is evidence that I like a good fight. I don't back down. So it's an intimidation thing. He passed the bar in 1976. And this is hilarious because it piggybacks a conversation we had a few days ago. He passed the bar in what he describes as, quote, four and a half tries. My last attempt, four and a half. I don't know what that. Yeah, I don't know what half a try is. But he said, first try. He said, I'm so stubborn that even now he just did half of it and left. I don't know any of this shit. He said I'm so stubborn that even after four failed attempts at the bar, I kept going. Which normally we were talking the other day, and that was our number too. We said if you fail your road tests for driving or the bar four times, you just don't get to do it. That's it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I think we landed on 3.

[James Petregallo]

3 for a road test.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

I don't know if we came to a conclusion on the bar.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I think the bar should be three also. If you can't pass it after I think you're done, three on a road

[James Petregallo]

test is good news, bad news. Yeah. Good news or bad news first, you didn't pass. Good news is here's a lifetime bus pass on us. You're never allowed to drive again. Sorry.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Be real kind to the Uber drivers.

[James Petregallo]

You're going to need them. So that's what he's been doing. He gets that. He also. He pilots his own plane.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh boy.

[James Petregallo]

He flies back and forth. He has a satellite office in century city in LA. In LA, yes. Where he commutes by his own plane between LA and St. George. And he does a bunch of celebrity type cases, including he worked on the estate of Howard Hughes.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Really?

[James Petregallo]

Howard Hughes? Howard Hughes, billionaire, eccentric lunatic. After he died, yeah, he worked on the estate for that, which was a big giant case. He was a public money. He was a public defender in Utah for years. He's on the list of public defenders in the area, people that can be called to do this. He's handled multiple murder cases. And the other weird thing is at the same time that he's a high powered multi jurisdictional defense attorney, he's also the Mojave County, Arizona coroner.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

I don't know. That's what he also does. He's also.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I guess you'd have to live there, right?

[James Petregallo]

I guess not. I don't know. It's across the border there. Who the fuck is.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But I imagine Bullhead City, Kingman, there is death there all the time.

[James Petregallo]

All the goddamn time.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Those people are so fucking old.

[James Petregallo]

Plus they're killing each other over meth constantly. Yeah, and the heat. Between the heat, the meth and the

[Jimmy Whisserman]

old and the aids, it's all day.

[James Petregallo]

So he's got a radio mounted in his car that connects to the whole sheriff's office. So he does that, which is really weird. So technically he could drive, declare a body dead and then go back and defend the guy who killed the body.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Technically, that's unbelievable.

[James Petregallo]

Which is crazy. I don't know if that would be allowed. But it's interesting. He was also, and this is another thing, before he was an attorney, he was a police officer in Bountiful City as well.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Where the fuck is that? That's in California.

[James Petregallo]

That's in Utah. So he's been Special Forces, Green Beret, a Hollywood attorney, a pilot, a coroner, a cop, a public defender.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This is the guy that he needs as his lawyer because he's done all that shit too.

[James Petregallo]

He knows everything. Yeah, he's like, listen, you think that's a lot? So the first thing he wants to do is pursue an insanity defense. We're going straight into.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, we're gonna go. I admit it and I'm crazy.

[James Petregallo]

That's right. He says, about Prozac, quote, I let it go right over my head and was pursuing an insanity case. I'd never heard of Prozac. I didn't know what it was really. Which is interesting for a coroner. You think that would be a.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And a guy in la.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, well, you think that would be a substance that would come up in dead bodies once in a while? Would be that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So you'd think Howard Hughes was mainline in that shit?

[James Petregallo]

I would hope so. Well, maybe not. That's why he was so weak.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. May have been dead before that anyway.

[James Petregallo]

Well, before he was dead before 80.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Was he dead in the 80s?

[James Petregallo]

88. Yeah. I thought he died the 70s.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Did he?

[James Petregallo]

Doesn't matter.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He died on a plane, James.

[James Petregallo]

That's right. He loved planes. So he learned about Prozac? Only because during talking to a buddy of his about this case, a pharmaceutical salesman who was a fraternity buddy of his mentioned it casually, offhand. And this pharmaceutical sales rep he knew mentions at some point that, hey, this drug Prozac, I hear people do weird shit when they're on it. You should look into that. So then he said, oh boy. So he interviewed mom Connie Gardner. And when he's doing this, he's just building his insanity case, but he gets JC's biographical material, says he reads the dictionary, Eagle Scout, LDS mission, the whole deal. Then he hears about the Prozac and he called it his, quote, light bulb over the head moment. He said that he heard from Connie that JC was extra depressed on the day of the murder. And she said he took a double dose of Prozac. So then that was after he had heard from his fraternity buddy who told him about that shit. And he says, hold on, wait, tell me about that pill again. He says to his buddy of the pharmaceutical salesman, I want to know more about that. And he said that that's when he started thinking about building a defense on involuntary intoxication. Oh, involuntary. Now here are some Prozac issues. And this, by the way, they've been talking about this for almost 40 years and it continues to this day. And there are people who say they're. They should ban all the SSRIs. That would be a disaster. A fucking. Oh, you think there's a lot of unmitigated disaster?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You think there's a lot of death and carnage out there today?

[James Petregallo]

Oh, forget about it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Unmitigated?

[James Petregallo]

Yes, unmitigated, exactly. People do weird shit on everything. Whatever you do. Some people take Benadryl and freak out. So you gotta find the right thing. And every once in a while something happens. But if you ban this, then you also have to. To ban other shit that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, you gotta understand that any drug that you're taking, that's a drug, that's to balance chemicals in your body can have an issue. And that thing in there, that little noodle, is so fucking fragile. Everyone is different.

[James Petregallo]

Everyone is different, for the most part, at least when it comes to how their brain chemistry reacts to medication. Very different and very much. It can go multiple different ways.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Delicate balance.

[James Petregallo]

But to ban those things because some people have a problem with them would be akin to banning fucking peanuts because people are allergic to them. Sometimes you can't do that. If you do that, and we still sell fucking AR15s. I don't want to hear your. If we do that and we're still

[Jimmy Whisserman]

allowing people to throw all their money away on fucking FanDuel, then fuck you.

[James Petregallo]

That's what I mean. You don't care about.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

People react to things differently.

[James Petregallo]

Exactly. So now in February of 89, a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Teaker, publishes a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry. So this is very legitimate now. The paper documents six depressed patients, four of whom were also taking other drugs at the time, which is important. And by the way, it's also important for our guy that we'll talk about. And they developed some of these, developed intense, violent, suicidal preoccupations after two to seven weeks on the Prozac. This paper estimates that 3.5% of users may be at risk for this particular syndrome, which is minuscule.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's also about the amount of events based on how. Compared to how many people are on.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, no, But I mean, 3.5% of millions of people is a shitload of people, but it's still a small percentage compared to the people who get helped by this shit as well. So who knows? And we're not doctors and fucking. We're not members of Congress or the fda. So we're just going off of what this research says and we'll discuss dozens

[Jimmy Whisserman]

and dozens of people that medicate and are doing fantastic because of it.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, absolutely. That were a mess before. And it does. It will change your. I had a girlfriend in high school that her mom got sick and she went on Prozac and she was within a week a completely different person. We never liked each other again. She was just a totally different personality, was completely different. But she wasn't suicidally depressed. So that's good.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Drawing kids in a bathtub. That's nice.

[James Petregallo]

That's nice. Yeah. So I mean, there was that. I mean, you know, so I mean, it will change who you are a little bit because anything will.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, you know, you just got finding. Finding what works for you is fucking enormous.

[James Petregallo]

So it's big.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Good luck on your journey.

[James Petregallo]

Now the. This paper, even though it sounds kind of pro Prozac, saying that the people who had the problems were people who were on other drugs for the most part. And either way it's only 3.5%. The people who don't like this type of thing at all jump all over that as like. See, that's why you shouldn't. Number one, Church of Scientology. Number one, two and three are them because they don't believe in drugs and they don't believe in psychiatry. They don't believe in any of that shit.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

The two are L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

[James Petregallo]

John Travolta. They believe that if you give them all your money, you'll be fine. And you will, and you'll be fine. So they run an anti psychiatry advocacy group called Citizens Commission on Human Rights. They got a lot of balls calling it that. Meanwhile, it's horseshit to force people to do our dumb shit that we want them to do, even though we are a crazy cult.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Danny Masterson rapes people.

[James Petregallo]

That's right. And we help cover it. So by 1990, they're putting out press releases about Prozac. The Scientology people are. They talk about September 1989. A 47 year old printing pressman named Joseph Wesbecker in Louisville, Kentucky walked into his former workplace, the Standard Grevure printing plant attached to the Louisville Courier journal with an AK47 and shoots 20 co workers, killing eight of them before shooting himself.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Dang.

[James Petregallo]

He'd been on Prozac for about five weeks.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

When was that?

[James Petregallo]

1989. September. He had a long history of severe mental illness, had been institutionalized, and was not only on Prozac, but a cocktail of psychiatric medications. And the Prozac was the new one. But the families of his victims, advised by personal injury lawyers, sued Eli Lilly. Like saying the Prozac is what did it, not the complete cocktail of other shit he was on. So they had a trial. This is all, by the way. We're not just trying to give like this is how we feel about. We don't know shit. We're not doctors. We're just giving you the legal background on it because it's important for the actual case. Later. So There was an 11 week trial in 1994. Well after this murder thing here, the jury finds in Eli Lilly's favorite. But five years later, it comes out that Eli Lilly had reached a secret out of court settlement with the victim's family before the verdict came in and never told the judge. Basically they wanted it to look like they'd won a jury trial, but they realized that they needed to pay out, so they paid out. So it's a settlement out of court, essentially. Now the judge went back and changed the official designation of the case from verdict in favor of defendant to settle. So that way they couldn't say that they won the case essentially. But that was in 1995, so that's way later. Now. They also conducted studies on Prozac for Eli Lilly as well as the clinic's internal use. And as a therapist and researcher, this one guy, the Reimer guy, said he had seen it work on about 1,000 patients and plans more studies. The American Journal of Psychology is the one that talked about the Harvard guy. They said the patients who developed the violent suicidal preoccupations all had self destructive thoughts before. And they said that they suspected that the drug may have contributed to a new intensity in it. And that's by the way, one of the side effects they say is suicidal thoughts.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

But I think. But when you have those, you have to go to your doctor and say you're having those and then they try to fix the medication that's not working with you.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Seems like what it does is makes you okay with things. Do you know what I mean?

[James Petregallo]

That's what it's supposed to do. Yeah, yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Some people's chemistry going forward with some

[James Petregallo]

of those bad things maybe makes you not so sad about it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You know what?

[James Petregallo]

Fine. Other studies have shown on thousands, thousands of subjects have shown opposite results. And doctors acknowledge that the depression itself can result in suicide and violence. They're like, these are people who are suicidal to begin with. So this might not have worked enough on them, actually. Rather than intensifying those feelings, it might just not have worked enough, which then would make them even more depressed. That I went and I got medication and I'm still depressed and they kill themselves. I tried to get help, it didn't work. Fucking. And my ass is fat and I got a fat ass. But this doesn't cause that. So that's good. Now then there is the Grunberg precedent. This is very important for Utah. The Boyac, the lawyer, the Green Beret coroner lawyer thought the Prozac defense might have a shot in front of this judge in St. George, Phillip Eaves, because a couple years earlier, in a different drug case, there's the Elo Grunberg case, or Ilo Grunberg. This was in 1988. June 19, 1988, in Hurricane, Utah. There's a town called Hurricane that's never seen one. It's about 20 miles northeast of St. George. Still in the county, though. Now this ILO Marie Grunberg was 57 years old, lived in a mobile home in hurricane with her 82 year old mother, Mildred. Mildred has Alzheimer's. She's hard to deal with. ILO is the caregiver. Okay. Now it's tough. The two women have a hard time as anybody does, dealing with an Alzheimer's person in A1. You need help with that. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

They get very irritable because they don't understand everything that's happening. And they're adults and they fuck.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. They want to be told what to do. Yeah, yeah. And they're violent, they're nasty. They get really mean sometimes. So Mildred, according to later filings, is a burden to Ilo. She's tired of it. Ilo had recently lost her job and can't find any more work. And money's tight and stress is going. Her mom's getting worse and worse and worse. Mildred is on, you know, she's an Alzheimer's patient and ILO is on three different medications. Valium, Codeine, and a brand new at the time, not brand new, but reasonably new sleeping pill called Halcyon.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What?

[James Petregallo]

Which is a strong one. That's a strong. By the way, Halcyon is the shit all the wrestlers in the 80s used to put in women's drinks and knock them out and fucking do weird shit to them. They all say, just drop a Halcyon in their drink and that's the end of that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She's taken painkiller,

[James Petregallo]

two painkillers, Valium and then this. Halcyon's to sleep. That's manufactured by Upjohn, by the way, which we'll get into now. Halcyon at this point in 88, was the most prescribed pill in the world. Sleeping pill, really. Prescribed sleeping pill in the world. It's in the benzodiazepine area there. Same family as Valium, Xanax, Ativan, that kind of shit. But it has a. Basically it's got a short activating window where you take it. You sleep, you wake up and you feel fine. You don't feel like, oh, boy, oh man, I need Another two hours of sleep. Yeah. So the dose she was prescribed, Ilo Grunberg is 0.5 milligrams a day. A night. Take it at night. Now, March 88th, three months before the killing here, Upjohn stopped manufacturing the 0.5 milligram tablets because they've been getting reports that 0.25 was too high for some patients and causing a lot of side effects. Yeah, so Upjohn didn't. They stopped manufacturing it, but they didn't recall the 0.5 pills. Okay, so whatever was out there, well,

[Jimmy Whisserman]

let them get rid of them.

[James Petregallo]

Even if they're in pharmacies or whatever, don't pull them off the shelves. And they didn't tell the Doctors that the 0.5 milligram had been discontinued. They sent letters to pharmacies about a suspension of the dosage, and the letters didn't go out until eight days after Mildred was already shot. It didn't help there. So Isla Grunberg was prescribed a dose that the manufacturer didn't really want to make anymore. Here. And June 19, 1988, Isla Grundberg gives her mother a birthday card because she turned 83 that day. Then shoots eight bullets into her while she's sleeping. Her mom's sleeping and her head and neck. Just shoots her eight times with a handgun. Then sits down and writes a detailed confession. Then calls the cops.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, my.

[James Petregallo]

She snapped. So a deputy with the Washington County Sheriff's Department arrived, and he, by the way, is Ilo Grunberg's former son in law. Because it's a small town, that's what happened, which is crazy. So the responding deputy is the dead woman's grandson in law, and it's crazy. So anyway, they charge her with second degree murder. In that case, the defense attorney here, it's in front of the same judge that JC Has. Now, Grunberg's defense team brings in two psychiatrists who testify that ILO Grunberg was involuntarily intoxicated by the halcyon and the at the time of the killing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Too high.

[James Petregallo]

Too high. Now, the judge, on February 8, 1989, dismisses all charges against Ilo Grunberg rules that the killing was a result of halcyon intoxication that rendered her temporarily insane at the time. And they let her go. They didn't even get her on, like, a secondary charge.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's the most strange thing I've ever heard.

[James Petregallo]

It's crazy. Yeah. She's like the one person who that shit worked for. Wow. So this was the first Successful involuntary intoxication by prescription drug defense in a murder case in Utah history. And it worked. So first move after being freed is filing a $21 million civil lawsuit against the Upjohn company. The suit alleges that Halcyon is a defective drug and that Upjohn failed to warn regulators and the public of its severe and sometimes fatally adverse reactions. This goes on for two years, which is a lot. Now, in 1991, on the eve of the trial for Upjohn and Ilo Grunberg here, which during that trial, Upjohn would have been made to produce 8,200 pages of internal documents about how Halcyon side effects work and all that to the public. That shit would have been open. Instead, they settle as part of the settlement. That shit never gets released. There's confidentiality.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And we don't know how much she got.

[James Petregallo]

Nope. The 8,200 pages were sealed by a federal judge as part of the settlement. And Grunberg's attorney, who argued the documents need to be public, agrees to the seal in exchange for a shitload of money. It's multiple millions of dollars.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

We gotta stop that.

[James Petregallo]

That's insanity.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

We gotta know why that happened. Right.

[James Petregallo]

I think we should probably.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's crazy.

[James Petregallo]

I mean, I get that it's. I understand it's a company legally and it's a company and we're talking about. Trade secrets are buried. They can always say there's trade secrets buried in there and all that. So I understand that we're fucking. We're fighting with public, with public need and public safety against privacy of a human, of a person or company. That's always just gonna be litigation in this country like crazy. Those two things really butt against each other. Every day, all day in this country. All day, every day. Now, JC has a strategy here.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. Well, we should say his lawyer Beyock has a strategy. He calls Joseph Charles Gardner Mr. Wonderful. He's Mr. Wonderful. This guy. Don't worry about it. Paul Orndorff over here. He's the type of guy who'd look after elderly home healthcare patients. Even on his days off, he'd go, go do it. He's just a nice guy. His lawyer said all that changed when a general practitioner prescribed the antidepressant Prozac. A year and a half later, this wonderful. Mr. Wonderful, this nurse and this lovely man and this. He knows all about zoology. Mormon, missionary. Now he's a first degree murder charge hanging over his head. No way. He said J.C. gardner is not in the classically sense A murderer. This is what he says. What you become on Prozac is a psychopath.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, sir.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, he said that he started taking Prozac. He was melancholy over his father's death. He met Snow around that time. In the meantime there, he exhibited marked personality changes, became irritable, obsessive, and suicidal. He tried suicide. Suicide twice, they say also Gardner, who suffers from recurring throat infections, was taking 13 other medications.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, my God.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. You have no idea what the Prozac did to his brain, because he's on 13 other things that could fuck with that, too.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. 13 other things that are working in concert.

[James Petregallo]

That's exactly.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I mean, you stripped down Dave Matthews Band's performance. Performance. The song changes every time you take an instrument away.

[James Petregallo]

If you add 13 more instruments, it's a fucking mess. It just sounds like. It sounds like.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

If you gave.

[James Petregallo]

It sounds like an Orchestra comprised of 5 year olds at that point.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's basically what Game Matters is in a. In a nutshell. Five year olds just sliming together.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. There's worse out there.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is there? I don't know.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Anything country.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Everything he does, though, has a million fucking sounds. It's just too many sounds. It's an assault.

[James Petregallo]

You know what, too? I haven't. I haven't listened to lyrics. I know somebody that played live stuff of Dave Matthews and was like, that's not bad. That's why I think it's not bad live, I think. I don't really like the songs, though. I'm really into it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I just don't.

[James Petregallo]

Never a Dave Matthews guy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

There's just too much shit happening. And he doesn't even put words to it. I don't know what those words are.

[James Petregallo]

He's got a very good drummer, so 13 other medications.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But that's absurd.

[James Petregallo]

His lawyer, quote, won't say what they were, but is having a forensic pharmacologist research their interactions, and then he never comes back with some. Oh, here it is. This made it happen. So we don't know what the fuck happened in there. And we don't know. Which one of these medications do we know?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Are they prescription or over the counter or anything?

[James Petregallo]

We don't know. He won't say. He just said he's on 13 other medications. Which makes me go. And you blame that one.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's that particular one. Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And not the reaction between. Whatever. When you take. When they prescribe you Prozac, they say make sure you take 13 other things with it. I don't.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, I don't think they doubt that. I Think there's a pharmacist will tell you, don't take many other things with this.

[James Petregallo]

As little as possible.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Take this only with food.

[James Petregallo]

Don't take alcohol, although it's not great. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

All kinds of things not to take with him.

[James Petregallo]

So now, the lawyer said that Gardner remembers being at Janice's house, but that he blacked out and can't recall pulling the trigger. He said, this is an amazing quote. An amazing. Janice Fongren was almost an incidental figure in this. The murder victim is almost an incidental figure. Not a big deal. Wow. But he'd focused on her. If you put it in rational terms, there was no motive. It was spontaneous as hell. No, there was a motive. She was filing restraining orders against him. And she's the one saying, get the fuck away from your ex wife. She doesn't wanna talk to you. And also putting that in the ex wife's head. So he has lots of motives to kill her. Tons.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And even if that's not the case, if I'm sitting on the jury and a lawyer says that to me, I go, wait a minute. He didn't have a motive. This was spontaneous. He's much more dangerous than I thought.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, well, that's his way of saying the Prozac just put the thought in his head all the way.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Kicked him over the edge. Right.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Meanwhile, this is something that he's clearly been pissed off about for a while. So. Yeah. The deputy county attorney here, the prosecutor, said the prosecution does not believe that he is a victim of involuntary intoxication. Although, if he wants to raise the issue, go for it. He said that's the ultimate issue the courts will have to decide. Put it this way. If he asserts a defense that he was not in full possession of his faculties, we'll try to prove otherwise. Okay. This explodes into national news.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh, God damn it.

[James Petregallo]

Prozac is the hottest word going. Prozac becomes the Viagra of the early 90s. Remember in the late 90s, every joke's punchline had the word Viagra in it somewhere. This is Prozac is the early 90s version of that. But yeah, four hour boner. Yeah, that happened later. Four hour. Four hour erection. That was what people used to say all the time. Yeah. So March 1991. It comes out huge. There's a 3,000 word profile by a reporter in the Deseret News with the headline, prozac on Trial. Involuntary Intoxication. Defense Attorney and Murder Case Intends to Prove One Wonder Drug is Guilty. Wow. Okay. In the same issue, by the lawyer's accounts. He said that there are about a dozen active Prozac defense criminal cases pending in Utah, in California, Florida and New York. Judges in California and Illinois have already agreed to allow Prozac evidence in criminal trials. And some have started letting juries hear side effects, testimonies.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This is wild. I never even knew that this was a thing, a defense or a label for that drug until after Columbine, because one of those boys was on it too, and they claimed it for that.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is. It's a bit late again. How much planning. What are we talking about here? You know?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, you've got letters.

[James Petregallo]

Come on, dude, they made bombs. It took a long time to do that. Yeah, they had tons of time to figure that out.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

They drug them into the school. Like there's so much.

[James Petregallo]

So much.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You got dressed, bitch.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, that's it. Eli Lilly had been named in over 50 civil lawsuits by spring of 91, alleging Prozac caused a, quote, out of character, suicidal or violent actions. So now this is mainly. There's a personal injury lawyer named Leonard Fines or Finns that has 60 individual plaintiffs lined up. He, he's. Mister, I got a hammer and I'm looking for some nails here. You know, he's going around looking for people to add to this case. Someone famous jumps in here. The widow of the former, or not really former, I guess he was still doing it. The musician Del Shannon. You know who he is?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

No.

[James Petregallo]

My little runaway. Run, Run, run, run, run away. That 60s song.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

60s?

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, early 60s or whatever. That's him.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

And his widow is.

[James Petregallo]

He apparently died at 55. Apparently committed suicide at 55 in February of 90 with Prozac in his system. Okay, now back to the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which is a euphemism for Scientology horseshit, which is really what it should be called. They start pushing the story everywhere. Cause that's their agenda. You don't need this. You just come to Scientology. So Eli Lilly has a full on PR problem at this point. Yeah. Their subsidiary Dista Products quietly puts out a brochure to doctors stating that it is adding, quote, suicidal ideation to the adverse events to your side effects list. And that's a known side effect now is suicidal ideation. But they just put that in the package as an insert. So they say that this is one doctor Here, this is Dr. Fred Reimer, who says he's seen 1,000 patients on Prozac and hasn't witnessed the horror stories and thinks the drug is an important drug that helps people it's fascinating that

[Jimmy Whisserman]

people that are unwell, mentally, that are on mental mood stabilizer.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Unstable.

[James Petregallo]

And then they blame the drug. Like they weren't fucking whack before, that

[Jimmy Whisserman]

they were trying so hard to get okay. Perhaps they're too far. Not okay.

[James Petregallo]

It makes no sense. So they also said, and this I think, is that this is what it's all about. Quote, Prozac may be over prescribed. That's the problem.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Certainly a little bit over.

[James Petregallo]

Everything's over prescribed because people want to give people what they want, to shut them up and get them out of their office. It's just human nature.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, there's a. But it works for some people. So when it works, you're gonna prescribe it because fucking this might work.

[James Petregallo]

Because it worked. Yeah, absolutely. So Prozac may be over prescribed and doctors may need to monitor users more carefully. The standard 20 milligram dose may be too high for some people. And also says it shouldn't be combined with other drugs or alcohol. And it says it right on there. And when you do that, all bets are off, which is, duh. So smoke weed and then drink. Do them separately, then do them together. They feel much different. It's way different. You know what I mean? It's just that you combine the two, now you got a different thing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But when you're taking something that's a suppressant and you're taking another thing that's a suppressant, you're going to suppress so much.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. And then also maybe two negatives equal a positive sometimes, and that's a problem too. Maybe that'll make you more aggressive. Rather than two suppressives, two suppressions equal one aggression. Who knows? We don't know. This shit isn't meant to be done together. So September 1990, JC is admitted to the forensic unit of the hospital here so the doctors can evaluate his competency to stand trial. In February 1991, the state's forensic psychiatrist concludes that Gardner is incompetent to stand trial.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Is that right?

[James Petregallo]

Incompetent. The doctors are then ordered to continue evaluating him to determine when he will be competent. And as a part of this, they're specifically tasked with evaluating the effects of Prozac on his brain, because that's what the defense is going after. While they're monitoring him, they monitor him both on and off the drug.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Isn't that curious?

[James Petregallo]

So they run a clinical comparison with a medicated JC versus a non medicated jc. They keep him under observation, they take notes. His lawyer visits him at the hospital and he says, wow. And he says that this is one of the better. Wow. He says, quote, they found my client funny at the funny farm. That means he's incompetent to stand trial. He is a quote, machine, this guy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Well, that would take so long because the drug takes a while to get out of your system, to get back to the balance. And then to re. Drug takes as long or longer to

[James Petregallo]

get to that balance they have until whenever he's competent.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

That's just pushing trial two years down the fucking road.

[James Petregallo]

They don't really care about when it happens. They need it to be medically. Yeah. So he also says, quote, I can tell the difference from the legibility of his writing and the trembling of his right arm. He says he can personally tell the difference whether he's on Prozac or not. Not on Prozac, they said. Trembling, by the way, is a documented Prozac side effect. Psychomotor agitation. So little tremble in the hand or whatever. He also says that. The lawyer says that his strategic position here is that, quote, truth is, the longer his client stays at the state hospital, the better it buys him some time to build a case against Prozac, basically. He also says, quote, in my opinion, anybody facing the death penalty for murder earns the right to depression. Oh, weird, weird thing. So he remains in the hospital. He says that the lawyer said, doctors believe Gardner is so totally depressed that he cannot assist in his own defense. And he says, I agree. He said, if Gardner's depressed, it's because he's facing a possible death penalty. And, yeah, that's terrible. Janice's family, the problem of all this. There's people waiting for results here. Like you were saying. He said that they're frustrated with the wheels of justice cranking so slowly, and they're afraid that Janice's murder is going to be forgotten. It's going to get pushed under the rug somehow. So in Utah now, okay, There's a statute here that defines mental illness, the defense of using mental illness. The statute says if you. If you can prove that at the time of the crime, you suffered from a mental illness that prevented you from forming the required mental state for the crime, you have a defense. Yeah. Either insanity or diminished mental capacity. The statute also has a clause that says if you're under the influence of voluntarily consumed alcohol, controlled substances, or volatile substances, you're not excused on the basis of mental illness. That's voluntary intoxication. You can't say it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah. Is it controlled?

[James Petregallo]

I got you something.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Prescription.

[James Petregallo]

That's not prescription to you. That you're not supposed to be taking. That would be voluntarily took a leisure drug or whatever the fuck. Yeah, you're recreational and having fun. I didn't mean to strangle my wife. I was real drunk because there'd be about half the murders in this country wouldn't be crossing.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I didn't mean to strangle her. I was on PCP and I thought she was a squirrel boy.

[James Petregallo]

I mean, I hate squirrels, by the way. Hate them.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It was rabid.

[James Petregallo]

Trying to steal my nuts. I don't take them out and shit. You gotta tackle those. I keep a large collection of nuts in my house now, and I don't need them taken now. The statute, though, does not say what to do with involuntary intoxication. So he's trying to find a loophole here. The legislature, when they wrote it, didn't address it. They don't address. The doctor told me to take a pill that's not involuntary. Now, to make it worse, the statute used to be different. Prior to 1983, Utah's mental illness defense statute used what's called the irresistible impulse test. In pre 83, the statute said, if you suffered from a mental disease or defect that caused you to lack substantial capacity to either appreciate the wrongfulness of your conduct or conform your conduct to the requirements of the law, you have a defense. Okay, basically, in 83, the Utah legislature took that apart. They repealed the irresistible impulse prong, leaving only the cognitive prong. Did you know what you're doing is wrong? If yes, you're guilty, doesn't matter how crazy you are, essentially. And a lot of states did this in the 70s. They went too far with people getting off on. Getting, quote, getting off on mental illness things. So in the 80s, everybody made laws that said basically, if your head is attached to your body, you did it and fuck you. Doesn't matter how crazy you are. Doesn't matter if you have nine personalities, if you thought you were on another planet, doesn't matter if you ball the

[Jimmy Whisserman]

body up in a bed sheet and take it out into the woods. Does that you knew the wrongness. You know what I mean?

[James Petregallo]

I would say so, absolutely. But like that this is mainly like in Georgia, that Chloe Driver case, the young lady who killed her baby and then tried to kill herself and she was literally fucking insane, had no idea she was on another planet. Crazy. And everybody knew it, including the judge, including everybody but the prosecution. The only way in Georgia for this to be okay is if she's so crazy she thought the baby was trying to kill her. So that was what it was, it's such a narrow thing. You have to be so crazy that you think they're trying to kill her. And there's no way to prove she thought a six month old was trying to kill her, so she was automatically guilty, even though everyone in that courtroom knows she's crazy as a fucking loon and doesn't belong in prison. At least not yet. So anyway, that's what they're doing. So the pretrial theory from Beyock, the lawyer, is, my client took Prozac, doctor prescribed it. That means it's involuntary. The code, the Utah code doesn't address involuntary intoxication. Therefore, the court should fall back to the pre1983 standard, which is the same as Colorado's current standard at the time, which includes irresistible impulse. Under that standard, JC Lacked the capacity to conform his conduct to the law because of Prozac side effect. There we go.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

This guy's good. This is why he's got a plane.

[James Petregallo]

This is what I mean. You have a plane for a fucking reason. This is clever shit. I mean, as far as legality goes,

[Jimmy Whisserman]

not guilty, your honor. No.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. If you're the Fondren family, you want to fucking murder this guy with a fireplace poker. But if you're everybody else, just in the legal system, it's gamesmanship. So the judge says, I'm holding that involuntary intoxication, even if at least leads to temporary mental illness, still falls under the current Utah code. Meaning the defense would have to show that J.C. gardner lacked the mental state to commit the crime under the later statute, not the pre83 one. So they're fucked, essentially, is what that does. So this is in a separate stat. There's no separate statute for involuntary intoxication. And the judge is like, I ain't gonna make one, so. Isn't happening. So essentially, by the way, this judge also was the same judge in the Halcyon defense case. So I think he doesn't like the publicity he got for that. So he's trying to make sure it would be my guess anyway.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, leave me the fuck out of it. I'm involved. Fuck.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. Shit. So under this, basically, under Utah Statute 76 2, 305, the question isn't could he conform his behavior? It's did he know what he was doing and did he know it was wrong? This is not good, because bought a folding shovel, bought rubber gloves, took two pairs, drove to the apartment, came through the window, shot her in the chest, carried her body out, stripped her, probably raped her, took fucking her stuff Dumped it out, went back to the house, drove. He didn't sit in the front lawn covered in blood and go, I feel terrible about what I did.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Or pace around going, what have I done? What have I done? You had a beer, man.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah, you had a beer to chill yourself out here, basically. Did he know what he was doing? It's obvious he knew what he was doing. So you can't go on that. By the way, 1991, there's a big garden placed in memory of Janus, by the way. The former director of nursing there was killed. And they said the memory of Janice will rest peacefully here. She is dearly missed. So it's a nice garden, I believe, at the center there. And they said that a $500 nursing scholarship will be given locally in her memory to a student who specializes in gerontology as well. So now what can J.C. do here? Well, he can do what's called a conditional plea. Conditional plea is when you plead guilty but reserve the right to appeal a specific pretrial ruling. So if the appellate court reverses the pretrial ruling and the Supreme Court of Utah says the judge was wrong, then the standard for involuntary intoxication is different. Then the conditional plea can be withdrawn and the case can proceed that way. All right, so it's not a final. Final end. It's interesting. So, January of 1992, J.C. gardner enters a conditional plea of guilty to first degree felony murder. In exchange, the state drops the aggravated burglary charge, which. That's the death penalty aggravator. Death penalty's off the table. So the plea is conditioned on Gardner's right to appeal the judge's pretrial ruling on the involuntary intoxication standard. Okay, sentencing comes around, you, sir, may fuck off. Five years to life in Utah State prison, which is standard Utah sentencing. Indeterminate sentence. You go in front of the Pardons and Parole Board every so often, and they decide when you get out, but it could be up to life, whatever. Now, right away, he wants to appeal. The lawyer says, quote, that he contends it was wrong for Utah legislature to eliminate an irresistible impulse clause from the state's murder statute in 83. And he'll make that argument with the higher court. Now, this sucks, because the Fondrens were very happy that he was going to prison. They didn't give a shit about the death penalty. They just didn't want to go through the trial. They did not want to see all these pictures of their daughter. And, you know, it's horrible. A trial for the victims of the trouble.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You're gonna hear the whole thing.

[James Petregallo]

It's fucking terrible. You know, it's the worst. So he's sentenced, he's pled great. Fuck him, is essentially what they're saying now. So that's what he's trying to do here. He says, I won't rest until I get the involuntary intoxication defense, based on the belief that. It's our belief that Mr. Gardner was under the influence of Prozac, which caused those things. 1994. Remember Ilo Grunberg?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Our Halcyon induced eight shots in our eight shot shooter there. She moved to Las Vegas and on the anniversary of her mother's death, she hung herself, or hang himself, wherever you want to put it. Yep. Committed suicide. Yep.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

One year or like several years later,

[James Petregallo]

it's five years later, I think.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

But on the day or six years later, on the anniversary of it, the former son in law, who was also the cop who found the dead mother, said, money isn't everything because she had millions of dollars. He said, money isn't everything. They could take care of her financially, but the guilt, even though it was not her fault, I think finally just got to her.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Holy.

[James Petregallo]

Yeah. She obviously had some mental problems, and that results in that. So Utah Supreme Court. Now, the defense is arguing that since involuntary intoxication doesn't appear in the statute, the statute doesn't contemplate the defense, and therefore the court should adopt the standard which is more lenient. Like we said, the Utah legislature has not adopted a separate statute, statutory provision dealing with involuntary intoxication. Okay, so they also go through all of the. On his appeal, all of the different cases from Michigan, Indiana and others addressing these questions cites People vs. Cawley, a Michigan Court of Appeals decision involving a defendant who killed someone after taking excessive amounts of Halcyon. Again, different case out there. The Michigan court held the defense of intelligence, involuntary intoxication is part of the defense of insanity when the chemical effects of the drugs or alcohol render the defendant temporarily insane. So that's kind of what this judge said before. Did he know temporarily insane would mean he didn't know the wrongfulness of his actions? So they still say he knew the wrongfulness of his actions. The judgment is affirmed.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

Okay. He's in prison. What do you think he's gonna do in prison?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Hang himself?

[James Petregallo]

Read the dictionary. Yeah. He does graduate level work in ornithology.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What's ornithology?

[James Petregallo]

Birds. Fucking birds.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He loves animals.

[James Petregallo]

I believe that's birds. Through a correspondence course with Cornell University, too. Good. College birds. Now, he had a bachelor's degree in zoology, so that makes sense that he would do that. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has famous correspondence online course called Bird Biology Course, which dates back to the 90s. He does that and he's an expert on birds now.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Fuck.

[James Petregallo]

He earns a master's degree in Business Information Systems from Utah State University, which is interesting. Participates in naturopathic studies through an academy program, gets in zero trouble, has zero disciplinary things, nothing. He just. He's the model prisoner. When he gets in there, okay, August of 2000, he goes before the Utah State Board of Pardons.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

He's the least dangerous person on earth right now.

[James Petregallo]

Right now, it seems like that, right? But fuck, I wouldn't.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

For Christ's sake.

[James Petregallo]

Wouldn't trust his ass still. Fuck him. Nope. That was a. What he did was calculated as fuck.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

So bad.

[James Petregallo]

So he goes to the Utah Board of Pardons here, and they said that he's been a model prisoner, all this type of shit. He's serving five years to life and he's been doing great. He claimed he's under the influence and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, at the parole hearing, he said that he did not go through the front door like he had originally said. He actually tells the truth about that because he knows he has to. I came to the back door and as I leaned, leaned against it to knock on it, it simply came open, which we know isn't true. That's not true. Nope. As far as the rest is concerned about my recollection, that is true. I went through a chemically induced hell at the Utah State Hospital for a year trying to recover memory and treatment which did not do so. He says he's been on. Has not been on any psychiatric medication since he left the hospital in Provo, and he's much better now. Gardner said the basic things about what happened at that time are true. There's a lot of other information in there. In the report that this is the first time I've ever heard many of those allegations. So the board member of the parole board said it was interesting that Gardner remembered a detail about going into the apartment, but doesn't remember much after that. Regarding that, he said, that's the thing that bothers me every day. He's like, me too. I know, right?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You think he's stumped? I'm the one. You get to have coffee at home every day.

[James Petregallo]

I really got egg on my face here. I mean, I'm really. I don't know what happened. He's Laughing about swallows. That's the thing that bothers me every day, because this is one of the actions. What I did is something for which there's no way to recompense anybody. I can't bring her life back. If I could, I certainly would. He said there's nothing he can do to lessen the pain. He said, the fact is, it affects them, the Fondren's family, actually, far more harshly than it does me. And I realize that. And that is something that is continuing. That's a continuing sorrow for me every day and will be, regardless of my situation, for the rest of my life. Janice's family, shockingly, they don't want him out. Not surprising. Yeah, I wonder why I wouldn't either. So they said that Beth, the sister, told the hearing officer, during the past five years, much has happened to the Fondren family, none of which we could share with our sister Janice. Why? Because she's no longer with us on this earth. And why is that? Because J.C. gardner senselessly took her life in cold blood for no reason. He decided to snuff out her young life. He purposely maliciously broke into her apartment to kill her. He should spend the rest of his life and in prison because my sister having to live with the sentence. My sister is having to live with the sentence J.C. gardner gave her death. Okay, Mom. Betty Jo and the younger brother also testified. They talked about the memorial garden and all that kind of shit. 2017 here. So that goes. He's denied parole there. 2017 comes up. They did say during that that you will be paroled in 2020. That's what we decided from 2000, is we'll probably parole you in 2020.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Okay.

[James Petregallo]

But you still have to have your meetings every once in a while. 2017, he says in his parole hearing that his memory of that evening is, quote, really sketchy. So they press him and say, why did you go to the house that day with a gun and gloves? And he said, I do not remember making the decision to bring the gun with me into the house. And they said, what about the gloves? And he said, I can only think that the rubber gloves were a deliberate attempt to obscure my presence while I was there. No shit. Why else would you wear rubber gloves unless you're gonna go up somebody's asshole? I don't see what you're wearing them for.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I just like to wear them because my hands sweat and it feels nice.

[James Petregallo]

I was gonna break in and do her dishes, and they just get. You know what I mean? They get chafey and dry.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

She's not palm Olive.

[James Petregallo]

That's not good. He can only. Wow. He says, I can only think. Then he says, What I did 27 years ago was a horrendous thing, a tragedy. No way to express his sorrow, the remorse that I feel toward any of those who have been so terribly affected by what happened here. Janice's sister again said, I prayed every day that you will not allow him to get out even earlier than originally planned. Now they also have mental health findings that since he's been in prison, they found out he has borderline personality disorder, which was just recently diagnosed, though in the last couple years. Yeah. Which could have came on later. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Sure.

[James Petregallo]

But they said it, maybe not. It's probably a long standing personality disorder if you don't know. Borderline. It's unstable relationships, impulsive behavior, fear of abandonment. Basically, if you're in a relationship with a borderline person and they're trying to start shit, and you won't start shit, they will make sure that you will start shit. They'll make sure. They'll fucking punch you in the face if they have to. To get a reaction out of you. They need to cheat on you and

[Jimmy Whisserman]

make sure that you find out about it.

[James Petregallo]

Because they want drama and chaos. They need it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's a not a good person.

[James Petregallo]

It's tough. It's nothing against the people, but it's not a good person to be in a relationship with. It's a hard person to be in a relationship with.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Behavior that's not conducive to relationships.

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely. They also said he's still blaming Prozac for much of what happened. And the board member says she doesn't like that. She's concerned about Gardner making excuses versus taking responsibility for what happens. She also says she's concerned that the report showed little change in his personality compared to his first evaluation 25 years ago. JC says, look, here's what I'd like you to do. Don't let me out now. Let me. I need. I need three more years. Let me out in 2020 like we planned. I don't even want to get out now. I'm good for a couple more years, you know, because I'm just concerned about what's right. Obviously, I got work to do in here. I got a lot to do in here. So. August of 2020, JC is released on parole.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Wow.

[James Petregallo]

He's let out. Within a month, Janice's mom dies. Coincidence, who knows? But she dies. Now he's paroled, gets a parole officer. He's living in St. George still. What? Yeah, he goes back there. He has nowhere else to go. So the conditions include report regularly, no firearms, obviously no contact with the victim's family. That should be obvious. Standard shit. Get a job, check in, whatever. He gets a job. In October of 2022, now this is two years later, a 54 year old woman is arrested by St. George Police on multiple felony counts of theft, specifically stealing guns and knives. Now, we don't know who she stole them from, but we're not. That's pretty. Regardless, it doesn't matter. It's academic at this point. It doesn't matter at all. But she had stolen guns that got recovered and she got arrested. When the police asked her, what did you do with the rest of the guns you stole that we didn't recover? She said, she, quote, sold the guns to J.C. gardner.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Oh my God.

[James Petregallo]

Guess who's not supposed to have guns. That's right. So that's interesting. She could have said anything. I sold him to some guy. I don't know who the hell he was. She said, J.C. gardner. So they're gonna go talk to him. Did you buy guns from this woman? He said, of course not. I didn't buy anything from her. That's crazy. And then he says that he. Then he goes, but she did ask me to store the guns at my residence for just a couple days. And then they got moved right out of my house. Though he said, I never purchased them, I was just holding them for. I mean, if someone said, hey, hold this for a second, you wouldn't make sure you were allowed to first. You just hold it. That's what people do. It's easy. Here, hold my sandwich. You go. Sure.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Does he still have them?

[James Petregallo]

Well, then they find phone records because now it's 2020 fucking two. So they find this, they go through his messages, and on his parole, they don't even need a warrant. They can just look at his phone if they feel like it. The messages on his phone show him sending the woman messages, inquiring about purchasing guns, making offers, negotiating prices.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Would he do this on fucking Facebook marketplace or something?

[James Petregallo]

Texting her back and forth or social media or whatever, Maybe Facebook marketplace. So yeah, he sent all these texts. So he gets charged in the same court that handled his murder with four counts of being a restricted person in possession of a weapon.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Idiot.

[James Petregallo]

Then they search his home and find a 9 millimeter handgun.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

His favorite.

[James Petregallo]

His favorite. Same caliber. Interesting. There. He has a. It's a cheap one. What is it? S C C Y scy. Is how you pronounce it? Apparently, I guess it's about a $200 subcompact 9 millimeter. Small, shitty, cheap street gun, basically. He has thousands of bullets. He's not allowed to have any bullets. He has thousands of bullets, thousands of different calibers, three different calibers. Then through more investigation and text messages and everything, they find that he previously possessed other firearms, including an AR15. Nice murder. Parole, you can't have none of this. So the thing is, the 9 millimeter is from Florida. It's manufactured and sold in Florida. Somebody had brought it into Utah from out of state, which means the federal government is. Is now involved in this investigation. So the law requires that the firearm have at some point moved in interstate commerce. The minimum nexus is nothing. Basically every firearm in America is made in one state and sold in another. So it's just basically if it's illegal. So the U.S. district Attorney's Office of Utah picks it up. 20, 23. He pleads guilty to one count of felon in possession of a firearm and ambulance. You, sir, may fuck off. 102 months in federal prison. Eight and a half years.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Petregallo]

Plus three years of supervised release after that.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

How old is he now?

[James Petregallo]

Well, when he gets out, he'll be. He's 65 when they sentence him there. So he's gonna be like 74 years old. 73 years old when he gets out, which is rough.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Damn.

[James Petregallo]

So we don't know now the Prozac question keeps going on too. Basically, in 2004 here, the FDA issued a warning on Prozac and all SSRIs for increased suicidal ideations in young adults and adolescents. In 2007, it expanded the warning, but we all know what it does. It's fine.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's the reason I don't take those things.

[James Petregallo]

It's tough. Janice is buried at the Berkeley Memorial Gardens in Moncks Corner, Berkeley County, South Carolina. So they did bring her home anyway. That's nice. The family at least was able to bring their daughter home to be buried at home and not have to go to fucking Utah to visit her corpse. So there you go, everybody. St. George, Utah. And this is just. This was a wild kind of famous precedent setting case. So we kind of had to do this case. It's a real weird case. And just a weird. This guy is just a. I mean, think about what he is. He's a stalker.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Yeah.

[James Petregallo]

And I think that's who he is. I mean, you know, Prozac doesn't make you a stalker, does it?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

But when you're 30. That's. There's a lot of different things that go into the psychology of a 30 year old man that feels inferior. You know what I mean?

[James Petregallo]

Absolutely.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You're not ready for the world if you haven't been through some things by then.

[James Petregallo]

If I could just hurt this lady who's in my way then everything will be fine. Because she was sending me love letters before and now this Janice is in her ear like give me a break, dude. Grow up. So anyway, there you go. There is Utah. Hope you enjoyed that. If you did, get on whatever app you're listening on, give us five stars. It helps a ton. Give us a thumbs up on Netflix. Also helps a ton. Sure helps drive the show up rankings and do all that fun shit. So keep doing that. Follow on social media. Smalltown murder on Instagram, Smalltown pot on Facebook. For sure do that. Definitely head over to shutupandgivememurder.com oh boy. Get there for tickets for live shows. September 18th, Pabst Theater, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Those are almost gone. So get those now. September 19th, State Theater, Minneapolis. Let's go. Minneapolis.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

It's going to be good.

[James Petregallo]

We can't wait. We love Minneapolis. So get in there. Especially in a nice time of year when it's not 4 degrees outside. It's going to be awesome. Do not let Milwaukee punk you. Get in there and get those tickets right now. So do that. Shut up and give me murder.com. then listen to Crime and Sports, one of our shows where we're doing a show about the Yahweh Ben Yahweh cult right now because there was a professional football player who murdered a bunch of people for him, Robert Rozier. So we're doing that. A multi parter. Check that out. Also your stupid opinions, which is just hilarious. Our faces hurt for making it because it's funny. So you should like it. Then get yourself patreon. Patreon.com Crime in sports is where you get all the bonus material. Anybody $5 a month or above. You get everything we put out. I'm talking as soon as you subscribe, you get hundreds of back bonus episodes you've never heard before. Then you get new ones every other week. One crime and sports. One small town murder. You get them all, everybody. This week, what you're going to get for crime and sports, we're going to do theme park disasters. It's back again because we keep getting popular. Demand on this. Hey, where's that? It's been a few months. What's up with theme park disasters?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

People Losing Legos still.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, they're all over the place then for small town murder. Listener's choice, everybody. Your choice. Either the crash and the story surrounding the crash documentary, the Mackenzie Shurilla car accident. Not accident. Murder with the car. Or Cory Richens Part 3, which is so much more information. She's a bigger liar than we thought. Her kids statements come in now which contradicts everything she said. And you get to see exactly what more calculated lunatic she is. It's insane stuff. And you get to hear about the sentencing. So one or the other, it's on Patreon. The poll vote now. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all of that. And you get. Not only that, all the shows we put out. Crime in sports, you, stupid opinion, small town murder ad free with your Patreon ad free. On top of that, you get a shout out, which happens right goddamn now. Jimmy hit me with the names of the best goddamn people in the world who would never, ever, ever murder us just for being nice people and then blame it on something innocuous. Jimmy hit me with him right fucking now.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Firstly, thanks to everybody that came out to Boston or Detroit and Buffalo, Especially Emily, who makes those. She refurbishes the.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, she's great with my little ponies. We had such a nice time talking to her and her wonderful dad outside.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Too sweet people, and wasn't bothering us at all. We were very curious about that pony.

[James Petregallo]

She can talk to us about those ponies all day long and we'll listen. She's a good kid. Thank you.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Executive producers this week are Penny Boyce, Tracy poets, maybe Pots, I don't know. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Elena Zammel. Elena Zammel, she's terrific. She was in Buffalo, I believe. Liz Vasquez, Lisa Machowski, Ashley Williams. Happy birthday, Ashley. Happy birthday. Lisa Wharton. Gary Howard is in Kenwood, Michigan. Missed that show, but he's up there. Too bad.

[James Petregallo]

Sorry. We missed you, buddy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Happy hours in Nagadoches, Texas.

[James Petregallo]

Oh, boy.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I don't think that's home. I think he's on the road.

[James Petregallo]

That's tough.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Other producers this week. Matt stewter, he found $5 at a taco stand. Didn't know who to give it to, so he gave it to us.

[James Petregallo]

Ah, well, thank you very much. We'll take your taco money. We appreciate it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Peyton Meadows Scott Richard, or maybe Richard. Dina Snyder, Life with an autistic Child. Janice Hill Dubrovsko. What is this? Oh, Dabrovskoe. And Stephanie, the real estate broker. Thank you so much. You Guys, you're the best.

[James Petregallo]

Thank you.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Parker Adelson. Hannah Hockenberry. Vanessa Bundel. Bundle. Probably. Bundle.

[James Petregallo]

Bundle.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Crystal Shamsi. Norma with no last name. James Barnhart. Crystal with no last name. Katherine Bollard or Bullard. Ballard.

[James Petregallo]

Ballard.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Ballard. Ari Nash. Ari. I think it's Ari. I don't know. P.J. hatmaker. Elena. Sergey Michael Elliott. What is this? Haley Grace Glace. What? Clache? Perhaps. Millie. Lemonade. Lemonade. Lemonade. Brandon with no last name. Brandon. Wendy Brown. Judith Voight. Eric Shalito. Scott Gamester. Gamester. Tammy Cunningham. Richie's sister. Tony Delia. Delia. Justin with no last name. Reagan Baumgartel.

[James Petregallo]

Wow.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Brett Carone. Jennifer Heights. Brian Winch. Michelle Hurd. Chris Butler. Jen o'. Ryan. Cheryl Lucas. Tyler Smith. Diet Punk. Cynthia Meinholt. Meinhold. Meinhold. Sarah Beth. Robin Norton. Chris Kaufman. Leo F. Jonathan Peterhands. Wow. He has been just demolished his whole childhood.

[James Petregallo]

Gym class was rough on him in seventh grade.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Peterhands.

[James Petregallo]

That's a tough one. That's a tough one.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Can't be that John.

[James Petregallo]

You'd have had to drop out of school if you went to New York. They would have been relentless. It would have been tough.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I'm sorry. He might have a ged. We don't know. I wouldn't.

[James Petregallo]

I would run. Run from school. It's worth it.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Jeremy Springer. Jerry's Kid. Heather Fitzpatrick. Ellen Hillbolt. Alexis Sarber. Kinsey with no last name. Sonya with no last name. Sonja. Perhaps. Paula. Don Stevens. Julie Strand. Valerie Harden. Stephen K. Sarah Leahy. Dave Seagraves. Brian Luright. Lorette Le Rot. Brian. It's never going to happen.

[James Petregallo]

We're trying our best here. Right?

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Maureen Donovan. Courtney Andrade. Jess Rice. Adriana Siskey. Alessandra. Alessandra. Alessandra Grant. Will with no last name. Melissa Taylor. Nick Arduini. Vanessa Evans. Lindsey Craig. Court. What is it? Courtney. It's Courtney, God damn it. Courtney Court. Tnee. Don't do this to me. Randy Miller. Dave and Armani. Amanda Yarlo. Yarlo. Jessica Dillon. Peggy Perkins. Allison with no last name. Me. Kim Ashdown. Riley B. The lead dispensary. Or the lead dispensary. Jody Showmaker. It's not Shoemaker. It's Showmaker. Maureen Madeiros. That's Espanol. Shamil. Camille. Maybe Lahote Loja. Camille with ch. That's not right. That's Shamil.

[James Petregallo]

Right? Like the shamil.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

What's the dress? Shit. Is that Shamil?

[James Petregallo]

Oh, chiffon. Oh, chiffon is Ch. Isn't It. I don't know.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

I'm making up now. Haley Mikula. Sammy Navarre. Nava. Perhaps Ava Mangiello. Manganiello.

[James Petregallo]

What is that? There you go. Close enough.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Rose Conklin. Clayton Lovelady. Chris with no last name. Dan Copps. Becca with no last name. Jerrika Perkins. Go 24 KKR. Nikos Lynch. Jennifer Smith. Jenna Plating. Paige Harmon. Chase Mazur. Ray Mazur. Probably Rich. Adam. Adam. Adam Mac. Adamic. Shane and Ibby. Glenn S. Kaith. Kaith Bassett. I don't know. That's not Kate. Is that Keith with an A?

[James Petregallo]

No, no.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Keith.

[James Petregallo]

Keith Kath.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

You can't put an A in Keith Tay with no last name. Kyle Fell. Tell. Maybe Jake Winkler. Crystal Brooks. Nick Belgiorno. R. With no last name. Just the letter R. Alex Schumacher. Ron Barnes. Michael Mowes. Courtney Hepner. Andrea Raifsnider. Belinda with an I. Elijah. Alicia Ludwig. That is Jeremy A. Laura Bennett. Heather Coston. Lana Dovin. Devon Dovin.

[James Petregallo]

Dive in.

[Jimmy Whisserman]

Cowboys. Fandow fan. Dow. Do you mean fandom? That's a W, not an M. I didn't mistype that. Bradley Burns. I made this for you. That's a person. Megan with no last name. Catherine Fia. Filafiliato. That's a tough last name to have. April Park. Maxwell Bernard J. Just the letter J. Zack. Chelsea. Katie Purnell. Tim Papp. Andrew Neuschafer. Mark Holmes. Mike Erickson. Matt Malign. Cherie Charisse. It's Cherie Denny, right? Kerry Kovech. I'll talk my name out of anything, talk myself. All right. Lee Kleinert, Amy B. Diggy McPits and all of our patrons. You guys are the best. Thank you.

[James Petregallo]

Thank you so much, everybody, from the bottom of our hearts for all that you do for us and for hanging out with us for just everything. Thanks for coming to live shows. Thanks for doing everything that you do for us and with us. We damn well appreciate it. So keep hanging out with us. Keep following, come to live shows. And if you want to follow us on social media or get any information about anything we're doing, shut upandgivemerder.com is where to do that. It's all redesigned, brand new, so check that out. Keep coming back and seeing us. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. 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.