Suitcases Full Of Murder - Woodbridge Township, New Jersey

Summary

Small Town Murder Podcast Summary

Episode: "Suitcases Full Of Murder – Woodbridge Township, New Jersey"

Date: December 25, 2025
Hosts: James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman

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Overview

This Christmas episode of Small Town Murder takes listeners to Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, for the shocking and grisly case of William "Bill" McGuire, a man whose dismembered body parts were discovered in suitcases floating in Chesapeake Bay, hundreds of miles from home. The hosts dive deep into the peculiar backgrounds of Bill and his wife Melanie, the unraveling of their suburban marriage, calculated murder, and one of the most memorable "liar" suspects ever. As always, the comedians blend in-depth research, dark comedy, and astute (often irreverent) commentary on small-town life, community quirks, and human nature.

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Main Discussion Points & Key Insights

Woodbridge Township Deep Dive

• Location/Character: Oldest township in New Jersey. Called the "Crossroads of New Jersey"—hosts joke about the unremarkable “best town around” motto.
• Demographics and Quirks:
  • Population ~103,000.
  • Median household income: $98K, home values: $431K+.
  • Racially diverse, with a healthy blend of white, Asian, Hispanic, Black residents.
  • Significant Catholic population ("Catholics are the Baptists of the North." [13:12 J.P.]).
• Local Color: Mocking suburbia, mall culture, bizarre Yelp-style reviews:
  • "Most people keep to themselves. Mind your fucking business." [12:00 J.P.]
  • Complaints about neighborhood drama, barking dogs, and clamorous car alarms.
• Events: 50th Annual St. James Fair (complete with "gambling, wine, and beer tent," and the "Twirling Saints").
• Crime Stats: Both property and violent crime are below national averages—"People are doing well here… apparently they have money; they're buying million-dollar houses." [21:59 J.P.]

Discovery of the Crime [22:49 onward]

• May 5, 2004: The Suitcase Discovery
  • Boater Chris Henkel and friends (with children) find a suitcase floating near Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, Virginia. Initially thought to contain “pirate treasure,” but actually full of plastic-wrapped human legs.
  • Reaction: "Nope” to checking out floating suitcases—“This is why you mind your own business.” [24:50 J.P.]
  • Immediate 911 call, realization it was "foul play": “Did you think somebody killed themselves, exploded their legs off, placed them in a suitcase, wrapped them in black plastic and dumped them in the Atlantic?” [30:14 J.P.]

Victim & Suspect Backgrounds

William "Bill" McGuire [31:09 onward]

• Family Chaos: Constant family upheaval, abusive and unstable parents (multiple divorces/remarriages), oldest sister becomes caretaker after mom takes night shifts. Middle sister accuses father of molestation; both sisters leave young.
• Bill's Own Escapes:
  • Runs away at 15 to live with older sister Cindy, later with friend Lenny Polsky’s family, whose 12-year-old sister (Marcy) crushes on him.
• Military Life:
  • Joins Navy; charming, fun, but rebellious and impulsive (“one night, he decided, ‘tonight we don’t stop for red lights.’” [51:10 J.P.])
  • Marries Marcy (family friend’s much younger sister, originally his friend’s kid sister) for benefit boosts—“always looking for the angle.” [45:17 J.P.]
• Life After Navy:
  • Marries/divorces Marcy, starts dating Melanie Slate after breakup. Moves into Woodbridge; begins work in IT, adjunct professor.
  • Gambling at Atlantic City—described as strategic, net winner, not a desperate gambler as wife later alleges.

Melanie Slate McGuire [56:58 onward]

• Childhood/Family:
  • Father abandons family, then dies. Mom has high-drama affair with married boss (who moves in, causing extended family/multiple children to all live under one roof).
  • Early sexual experiences/maladaptations: At 13, sexually involved with 19-year-old during family vacation (statutory rape/grooming); serial affairs, including with married teachers, using wit/manipulation to get what she wants.
  • Academically gifted but described as “cold, gossipy, manipulative, quick to rage”—“stabby ass bitch... technical word” [69:40 J.P.]
• Young Adulthood:
  • Excels at Rutgers (double major stats/psych); instead becomes nurse. Starts dating Bill after meeting through a mutual friend’s roommate arrangement.
  • “Moves into the apartment and immediately wants to redecorate, replacing everything.” [78:36 J.P.]
• Marriage and Career:
  • Bill and Melanie marry (both file bankruptcy immediately pre-wedding to exploit now-closed legal loophole). Have two boys. Bill works night/second jobs, Melanie is respected nurse at fertility clinic—“medicine’s salty/sassy one, but patients love her.” [84:05 J.P.]

The Murder Plot & Evidence [93:14 onward; timeline reconstructed]

• April 28, 2004: House Closing (the couple’s “dream home”)

  • Bill is excited, tells friends; after 6:10pm nobody outside the house talks to him again.

• Melanie’s Claims & Investigation

  • Melanie later claims Bill left after a 2:30am fight, in which he slapped her and stuffed a dryer sheet in her mouth. [93:22 J.P.]
  • Days later, Bill’s car is found in Atlantic City. Video surveillance: a woman parks car, then disappears—later believed to be Melanie.
  • Suitcases found in Virginia between May 5–16, 2004, yielding legs, torso, then pelvic/lower body. Hospital blankets (with her clinic's supplier tag), weights, and trash bags all traced back to the couple.

• Digital and Physical Trail

  • Melanie purchased a .38 Taurus handgun two days before the killing (using fake Pennsylvania ID). Same caliber/type as murder weapon; claimed gun was ‘immediately put in storage and stolen.’
  • Google Searches from home computer:
    • “undetectable poisons,” “where to purchase guns without a permit,” “how to commit murder” [132:29 J.P.]
  • Obtains chloral hydrate (potent sedative) via forged prescription pad, supposedly drugs Bill before shooting/dismembering him.
  • Human ‘sawdust’ (forensic trace evidence of severed flesh) found in the car mixed with both their DNA.

• Dismemberment Details [146:55 onward]

  • Shower stall turned into makeshift mortuary, hospital blanket muffling, reciprocating saw and knife used to systematically cut up the body. Prosecutors believe she had help (not yet proven who).
  • “You don’t want to see severed legs when you’re 12.” [96:20 J.P.]

• Affair Motive

  • Melanie in ongoing, secretive long-term affair with her fertility clinic boss, Dr. Bradley Miller. Miller helps her move post-murder, gets immunity in exchange for testimony.

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

On New Jersey Rivalries:

• “It’s just a thing you grow up with in your blood. It’s part of your heritage…” [06:40 J.P.]

On the Discovery:

• “Suitcase floating in the water? The answer is ‘nope.’” [24:48 J.P.]
• “He thought it might be drugs… this is why you mind your own business.” [27:03 J.P.]
• “Still got that new leg smell...” [30:27 J.P]

Melanie’s Search History:

• “How to commit murder. You just… goddammit, don’t do it. Walk outside with your hands already cuffed!” [132:29 J.P.]

On Relationships:

• “Bankruptcy? For normal people, it means… your life is over. Rich people? It’s a strategy.” [80:32 J.P.]
• “Every husband’s an idiot and every wife’s a pain in the ass. That’s the basis of every sitcom.” [89:11 J.P.]
• “She was manipulative… perfect to be in the business world.” [72:06 J.P.]

On Small-Town Quirks:

• “Be careful, I heard malls collapse.” [11:58 J.W.]
• “There’s plenty to do… there’s a mall!” [11:53 J.P.]
• “If the word ‘scumbag’ had a pulse, it would be this man [Melanie's lawyer Tacopina].” [162:30 J.P.]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [22:49] – Discovery of the first suitcase by boaters
• [24:50] – Reaction to finding a floating suitcase: “Nope.”
• [28:16–28:35] – 12-year-old opens the suitcase: “Pair of legs… valuable lesson: mind your own business.”
• [93:14] – Timeline of home closing, Bill's disappearance
• [124:43] – Melanie’s subdued reaction after Bill’s body found
• [126:44] – Evidence against Melanie: gun purchase, fake ID
• [129:13–132:29] – Melanie's damning Google search history
• [146:55] – Prosecutor’s theory: step-by-step dismemberment process
• [164:56] – Defense: “She didn’t do it.”
• [170:27] – Sentencing: “History is replete with evildoers…”
• [176:40] – Melanie’s ongoing protestations of innocence; appeals; media coverage

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Case Resolution & Aftermath

• Trial & Verdict:

  • Overwhelming physical, digital, and circumstantial evidence. Despite defense arguments, jury found Melanie guilty on all murder and related felony counts (after three days’ deliberation).
  • Sentenced to life plus 15 years, ineligible for parole for 63 years, making her 101 at earliest possible release.
  • Dr. Bradley Miller (affair partner) granted immunity in exchange for testimony; accomplice (if any) never charged.
  • Melanie’s appeals (including podcast/media efforts) hinge mostly on nitpicks of forensic evidence, but are widely regarded as unconvincing.

• Memorable Judicial Quote [170:27]:

  • “History is replete with evildoers… The depravity of this murder simply shocks the conscience of the court. You, ma’am, may fuck off.” – Judge at sentencing

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Takeaways & Tone

• The episode is a classic example of the Small Town Murder blend: horrifying crime, dark humor, the idiocy and audacity of criminals, and the idiosyncrasies of American small towns.
• Pietragallo and Whisman use comedy to both soften and underscore the absurdities and tragedies of the case:
  • “How to commit murder. Google that, then come out with your hands behind your back.”
  • “This is why you mind your own business.”
  • “She calls in sick for her husband as he’s being dismembered in the shower.”
• Despite the comedic take, the show ensures victims are respected (“We make fun of murderers, not victims or their families.” [05:38 J.P.]).

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For further detail, reference the book To Have and To Kill: Nurse Melanie McGuire, an Illicit Affair, and the Gruesome Murder of Her Husband by John Glatt, and check out related Dateline/20-20 coverage.

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For More

Check out Small Town Murder’s other episodes, or join their Patreon for bonus material and ad-free listening.

Transcript

[James Pietragallo]

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[Jimmy Whisman]

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[James Pietragallo]

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[Jimmy Whisman]

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[James Pietragallo]

He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not. Of course he did.

[Jimmy Whisman]

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[James Pietragallo]

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[Jimmy Whisman]

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[James Pietragallo]

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[Jimmy Whisman]

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[James Pietragallo]

And the best part, you can make the switch to T mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber. The holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 717 on us with no trade in needed. And now T mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 device connection charge, credit and balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel Finance agreement. 256 gates, $830 eligible for in a new line, $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes, fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com this week we look at Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, where suitcases full of body parts washing up from the ocean leads to a local man, a lot of lies, and maybe the biggest liar of all time. Welcome to small Town murder. Hello everybody and welcome back to small town Murder. Yay. Oh, yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petregallo. I'm here with my co host Jimmy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm Jimmy Whisman.

[James Pietragallo]

Thank you folks so much for joining us today. We have a crazy story for you as usual here for small Town murder. This is our Christmas spectacular. Fantastic. It's really just a warm and fuzzy family special this week as it always is.

[Jimmy Whisman]

The newborn king.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, it's beautiful stuff. So you're gonna be sitting there with the fire gently, gently going. Yeah. You're gonna have the soft maybe oh, Holy night playing in the background. And then this it's gonna be perfect for you. So let's get right into it. Definitely. Before we do, though, we definitely want to say head over to shut upandgivemerder.com get your tickets for live shows. All of 2026 is for sale right now, starting off with February 21st in Nashville. Get those tickets. Nashville always sells fast, so get in there. Also, I'll just read the cities. Durham, Atlanta, Phoenix on March 20th. There's also the next night of your stupid opinions live show, so come to both. Salt Lake City, sold out. Sorry about that. You guys are awesome. Thank you. Denver, Buffalo, Royal Oak, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Dallas, San Jose, Sacramento, Tarrytown and Boston. Get your tickets right now.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Hurry up.

[James Pietragallo]

We can't wait. Get your merch, get all that good stuff and come see us. Shutupandgivemerder.com is where you get all of that stuff. You definitely want to listen to our other shows. Crime in sports. That's the name of our show we've been doing for 10 years. How do I mess that up? That's our foray into I say welcome to crime and sports every week and do all that. But crime and sports. Listen to that. We've done some crazy episodes lately, so you don't have to like sports at all. We just did an Australian kayaker, so you definitely don't have to like sports. We don't talk much about the kayaking. It's all about him getting arrested a lot. And your stupid opinions where we find the wildest, dumbest, craziest reviews on the Internet and make fun of the people who put them on there. So that's a lot of fun. And then definitely get yourself patreon. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all of the bonus material. Anybody $5 a month or above, you're gonna get everything immediately upon subscription. You're gonna get hundreds of 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 it all. And on top of that, you're also gonna get all the shows we put out. Crime and sports, Small town murder, both episodes and your stupid opinions, all ad free. Ad free. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, too. You can't beat it. This week for small town murder, we are gonna. I'm gonna give you guys a choice again. For the bonus episode, we'll do a poll and it's gonna be either old timey crimes, which people are always asking for more of. Either that or this Crazy mall collapse that killed a bunch of people, one or the other.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Where was that?

[James Pietragallo]

Doesn't matter. You just let me know what you think. We'll do that. We'll put up a poll and we'll. So that's patreon.com CrimeAndSports Quickly, the disclaimer. This is a comedy show, everybody. We're comedians. The stories are sadly, insanely real. We wish they weren't. Honestly, I wish we could just make up crazy stories like this every week. But I don't think Stephen King could write this much this every week. It'd be crazy. Nothing's embellished for comic effect or anything like that because the stories are crazy enough to where they're horrifying and they're insane and kind of are funny on their own. Yeah. Why? Because we make fun of murderers. That's why. It's always a dumb decision. Hey, I think I can get away with this. Yeah. No, no, I can kill her and just put her over here. No one will find her. That's a crazy thing to do and it's. We can't help but make fun of that. But what we, what we don't do though is we don't make fun of the victims or the victims families.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Why is that, James?

[James Pietragallo]

Because we're assholes. But. But we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's real easy to do that. If you think that true crime and comedy should never go together, I don't know, maybe we're not for you, but you should probably give it a shot. I think maybe you. You might be happily mistaken. And if you don't. Though, if you want to hear a crazy story, you're about to. I think it's time to sit back, everybody. What do you say here? Let's all clear the lungs and let's arms to the sky, let's all shout shut up and give me murder. Let's do this, everybody. Okay, let's go on a trip, shall we? We gotta New Jersey this week. Yes to New Jersey. That's hard to say too. Going to Woodbridge Township, New Jersey. And this is gonna be in like kind of north Central ish Jersey, kind of off on the East. It's about 35 minutes to New York City, about an hour 10 to Philly, about 40 minutes to Garfield, New Jersey. Our last New Jersey episode, episode 619. So exactly 50. Oh no, 40. Whatever. Brutal murder, Stupid murder. And that was, I remember that was a really, really wild episode. The guy tried to represent himself. So anytime you get A murderer representing themselves. That is a good episode. I know that for a fact. This is in Middlesex county. Area code 732. It has, I guess, mottos and nicknames. Two of them. One is the Crossroads of New Jersey. Yeah. Which I don't even. Yeah, great. It's all right there. By the way, I am from New York, so making fun of New Jersey is kind of a. It's just. It's just a thing you grow up with in your blood. It's part of your heritage and I'm sure they do the opposite. It's just. It's all in good fun. We don't care. I mean, Yankees and Red Sox fans.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I think everybody's got one that they do that with. Minnesota and Iowa, Tucson, Minnesota, Phoenix just.

[James Pietragallo]

Does it with owls and crows. It's all the same.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Another city. Because they're like, I don't know, we can't really compare this piece of shit to any other piece of shit.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, they try to have a rivalry with la, but it's like not really a rivalry.

[Jimmy Whisman]

There's no beach.

[James Pietragallo]

You can't compare being a five year old and punching your older brother in the mouth after when he gets home from the Marines. You know what I mean? It's like, come on, what are you doing? Not really the same thing. It's crossroads of New Jersey and the best town around. Yeah. At least it's not the best town in the world like that other place. The best town on earth. They're like, best town, you know, within a few miles of here. You know what I mean? Maybe in the county, but not the whole county. Like this part of the county. Yeah. Best town that touches this area. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Best town within a driving distance.

[James Pietragallo]

That's all you know. So not even. Because New York City.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

30 minutes, 20 minutes, anywhere within like six, seven miles of here, basically is what we're talking about. It's the best over there. So history. It's the oldest township in the state of New Jersey. Oh, so that's pretty cool. It was settled in the early autumn of 1664 and was granted a charter by King Charles of England in 1669.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So this is way, way old.

[Jimmy Whisman]

King Charles.

[James Pietragallo]

King Charles. Now Woodbridge is the site of the first grist mill in New Jersey as well.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Take all your grain there, grist it up. The mill was built by Jonathan Singletary Dunham, who's got a house there, which is hilarious because it's this house and it's a nice house and he's Buried, like right in front of the front door. Big tombstone. So it's like, yeah, I'll pass it down, but you're gonna whack your shin.

[Jimmy Whisman]

On me all the time.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. If the kids are playing Wiffle Ball, I'm third base. So you know what I'm saying? Like you're gonna remember me. No one's sticking me in the back corner of a cemetery. Coming once every five years. None of that bullshit. Every time you leave the house. Yep, every goddamn time you leave the house. So that's how that goes. Now, Woodbridge was also. It was named after Reverend John W. Woodbridge.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure. Oh, that was a name. Woodbridge.

[James Pietragallo]

Woodbridge was a guy before. Before, it was a cheap wine that got people to kill their boyfriends in suitcases. It was.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's right.

[James Pietragallo]

That's a man out of town.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Or you could buy it in a half gallon circle.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Where you could buy magnums of it. There it is. For fucking $14. Oh, man. So now famous people in this town. We have. Kelsey Grammer is from here. I don't know if this is where his brother was eaten by a shark or not. Off the waters. I'm not sure I want to know. Former governor Jim McGreevey, who's a governor of New Jersey and had a big sex scandal also, you may have heard from that. And then his life was over. A couple of Bon Jovi members, Richie Sambor and Tico Torres as well. Now, we've never been here, so let's find out with some reviews what other people think about this town. Because what do we know? So here's five stars. I have had a great time in Woodbridge Township and there was never a time when I have felt unsafe here.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Not once.

[James Pietragallo]

Not once. Wow.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Best town around.

[James Pietragallo]

I met the greatest people here and the bestest friends. Okay. This person's eight. That's why they've never. They don't know what danger is. That's why I wouldn't change it for the world. Yeah. That sounded like a Disney character wrote that in a letter to another Disney character. I found the town. I made the bestest friends for the world. For the world. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You could have the World or Woodbridge, New Jersey.

[James Pietragallo]

I wouldn't change it for the world. Okay. Four stars. Growing up in Woodbridge was great. They had almost anything a person would need to get by. Food, water, shelter. They had it all.

[Jimmy Whisman]

The basics.

[James Pietragallo]

The basics. We are close to most of the state.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know how that's even possible.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Most. There's some of it.

[James Pietragallo]

That's too far. Close to most of the state. So nothing is too far. It is a safe town with crime. Okay, this person is just. My head hurts now.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I love candy. It's sugary, but also dry.

[James Pietragallo]

We're close to most of the state. It's safe, but with crime. I don't know what's going on, but nothing you would expect with a town with a population of over 100,000, which is what they have now on top. There is plenty of things to do for families, like going to the mall.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Big day for.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, man. You know you're in the burbs when you're like, there's plenty to do. There's a mall.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Be careful. I heard those collapse.

[James Pietragallo]

You know that? Yeah. Two stars. Most people keep to themselves. Mind your fucking business.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Best town in the world. Crossroads in New Jersey. Mind your fucking business. Those are our mottos. They have annoying dogs who bark throughout the day and night. They also take their sweet time turning their car alarm off when it goes off. This guy has one neighbor that this review is about. He's like. I mean, they keep to themselves, but the dogs and the alarm. And then one star. Finally. Okay. A very political town. Oh. The same people work for Woodbridge Township for more of 40 years.

[Jimmy Whisman]

More of 40 years.

[James Pietragallo]

More of 40. If you go to the borough and ask for something, which is your legal right, like, and this is in quotes, Oprah. Your legal right, like Oprah. I have a right to Oprah. And I went down to the town hall and I demanded my Oprah, and they won't give it to me. Expect an attitude instead of the requested report. Someone let Oprah knows. Yeah, this is bad.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oprah's reports.

[James Pietragallo]

Oprah's reports. People in this town currently 103,000, 353, and it's gone up a significant amount. Yeah. It's 35 minutes from New York City, so it's very, very commutable. Yeah. And you could even commute to Philly if you wanted to. That's not a bad thing. If you're in a place and you're looking for a job and you can look in either of two major American cities and you're. You know what I mean? That's pretty. Most people don't have that advantage. That's pretty good stuff. It's a few more guys than women here, which is weird for a town with population like this. It's 51.3%. Guys. What the hell is going on here? Median age in this town 40.2, which is a couple years older than the national average, but nothing crazy. More married people than normal. It's about 55% married. This is a suburb. You used to have a place in the city, and then you had a couple of kids and it got too cramped, and so you moved here to have a yard. This is what you do here. And it's very low. Like single with children. Very low divorce rate. Divorce is only. There's only 7% of the people here are divorced. Is that right in the country? It's like 60%. This is like seven. It's wild. Well, I think 60% end in divorce. I don't know if 60% of people have been divorced, but race of this town. Here, they will be eventually. Race of this town. You wait for it. Set your watch. 43.6% white, 10.8% black, 24.5% Asian. A lot of Asian people in central New Jersey here. 18.9% Hispanic. Religion in this town. 57% religious here. That's higher than most. Normally it's 50, 50. But 42% of the people here are Catholic because as we know, Catholics are the Baptists of the North. Everybody, we all know that. That is a lot. 1.9% Jewish. Hey, hey, look at that. We can finally sing the damn song. It's been so long. Havana, Havana. I don't know the words. Hey, there we go. We got that out. Excellent. So, yeah, we're always shocked if there's 1% is the threshold. We're just like, wow. Most towns, we do. It's just not. There's no. There's just, you know, if it's down south, it's all Baptist. If it's up north, it's all Catholics, and that's that. If it's out west, it's all Mormons. So we. We like that. So Woodbridge Township's unemployment rates about average. Median household income here is above average. In the rest of the country, it's about 69,000. Here it is $98,086, which is damn good. But the. That's because you can work in either place. But the cost of living also is a little bit higher. Cost of living, 100 being average. Here, it's 124.7. So little high. Housing is about 109. Median home cost here, not bad. 431,500 bucks.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Why does this sound so fucking high?

[James Pietragallo]

It sounds high, but if you compare it to, like, if you work in Manhattan, compare it to what it costs to live there, they Go. Wow, that's cheap. That's nothing, you know. So if we've convinced you, damn it, you need to be in Woodbridge Township, New Jersey. You think there is a central New Jersey and you're gonna find it. We have for you the Woodbridge Township, New Jersey real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here goes for 2,020 bucks, which is, my Christ, almost 800 more than the national average. That is a steep, steep price there. So it might be better off to buy a place if you pay that much. Anyway, house number one is a two bedroom, two bathroom. So T bowl, technically, T bowl for every B hole there, but, you know, 832 square feet. So you're not fitting a lot of B holes in that place. It's a, it's basically a. It's a condo. It's a house that's split into two. A duplex, basically. So you have, you have two front doors and one's your neighbors and one's yours. You share a wall. It's okay. It's not bad. It's got like, you know, it's got some room in there. It's for 832 square feet. It looks bigger than that. It looks like it's done pretty nicely. 389,000 bucks for that. So that's a little steep for basic house. For an apartment, essentially, house number two, three bedroom, two bath, 1245 square feet. Kind of your standard, you know, family starter type home. Nice inside, Nothing wrong with it. You know, like it. The kitchen's been done in the last 10 years. It's fine. 479,000 bucks for that though. 1245 square feet. This isn't. Not on a bunch of land or anything like that. It's wild. Then house number three. Seven bedroom, seven bath, T ball for each and every B hole. 4,569 square feet. It's wild. It's got a big like yin yang thing in the driveway. Like whoever did this was a douchebag. Like, it's got like lions up front. Like when you, when you look at it, being an Italian guy, I look at this house and when you look at the gaudiness of it, you go, well, I still can't. Is it Persians or Italians that live here? I can't tell. But it's one of the fucking two, I'll tell you that much right now. A guy named Vinny owned that house at some point. I know it. And he probably, he's probably related to me. I just. It's one of those Things might even.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Be renting it out.

[James Pietragallo]

It's. He could be renting it out. It's. It's gaudy inside. It's nice. It's like the bones of the house are very pretty, but it's very gaudy. So it's hard to see past the gaudiness. 1,299,999 bucks, which. A million dollars, that's expensive. But for a half hour from New York City for 4,600 square foot house, that's not bad. That's a pretty decent price. I mean, if you're making big money, I guess. Now, things to do here. The 50th annual St. James Fair. Have a fair. It's a fair. They say they have new and exciting entertainment, games and rides as well as famous foods. Exciting, including a specialty booth, an American booth, an Italian booth, a Lebanese booth, and more. Now, musical acts that they have here. Oh, Thursday they'll have Johnny Spazzano streaming live music from the Border 106 with.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Their mobile station vehicle, the radio station DJ.

[James Pietragallo]

Yep, Johnny Spazzano will be there and he's going to be broadcasting live. This guy is an interesting looking guy, let me just put it that way. Friday they have the 10th Division Mountain or 10th Mountain Division rock band, which I believe is a group of soldiers who perform at events and do like a band.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Like, I don't know if they just play like Stars and Stripes Forever over and over again or if they play regular shit, but we don't know. I tried to find him and I could not find, like, I couldn't tell if it was that. There's a bunch of other bands with similar names, so it's hard to tell. Saturday though, DJ Joe Ablin will be there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Hell yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Who just looks like an Italian guy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

This guy spinning all the.

[James Pietragallo]

He looks like he's like hanging out at a. At a pool. Pool at a country club. Like that's the look of this guy. Like he's real tan and real. Like he looks like he works out too much.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Very Jersey. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Then the Twirling Saints will be there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Hell yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So that's exciting. Twirl it up. Then we have the Patty Stanford Band, which is an old lady and four old men, literally. And like the picture of their band is like in the middle of a field. There's a pickup truck and she's like sitting on the bed and all the guys are like leaning on the truck and they're all. They all look like. Like your grandpa who teaches wood shop. That's what they all look like. It's really weird. They all look like they whittle. Yeah, yeah, they all look like they whittle. It's a lot of fun there. So. Yeah, there's also rides and a dunking booth and gambling. Oh, gambling. Wine, beer and wine and beer tent. So in one tent you get gambling, wine and beer. That's the fun tent. And then there's a dunking booth and an ice cream booth and all that bullshit that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You know, James, a lot of people like to call those an underground casino.

[James Pietragallo]

That's what they. Although it's probably legal, I'm sure. Or someone's looking the other way, who knows, you know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Either way, we're just having a good time.

[James Pietragallo]

Either way. Listen, I didn't see nothing. That's all I'm saying. If we get a couple of chips there. Crime rate in this town, what we're interested in here, property crime is about one quarter beneath the national average. So under the average. And then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery and of course assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is also about a quarter under the average.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Great.

[James Pietragallo]

People are doing well here, living safe and apparently they have money. They're buying million dollar houses. Seems like a nice place. I guess so. That said, let's talk about some murder here. Okay, we are going to start this off on May 5, 2004. Now we're not going to start off in New Jersey either. We're going to start off near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel in Virginia, which is the worst invention in history. This is long ass thing where you go on a bridge for what seems like 50 miles but it's not that long. And then you go, the bridge disappears into the water. That's the crazy shit. It just. Dude, it's just gone. Like it looks like it collapsed, but it didn't. That's when you go in a tunnel for 80 to 90 miles or so and then you pop back up for another 400 miles of bridge. That's what it looks like. This is terrible.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And you were doing fine. You were almost done.

[James Pietragallo]

Matter of fact, I'd much rather just be in a boat through all this. It looks terrifying.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I guess they do that so you don't have to have a drawbridge. Is that the point?

[James Pietragallo]

I think it's too long to have a bridge. Bridge. So they do that so you can have some sort of bridge across it. I don't think a drawbridge or any other bridge would hold. I don't think you could build the. I don't think you could do it that far. I think the physics at some point says, okay, that's long enough probably, I would imagine. So. This day there's a guy named Chris Henkel, he's got a day off and he's got a fishing date with his buddy named D. Connors. They're gonna go out and do some fishing today. It's, you know, early May, the start of a of the trophy fishing season in Chesapeake Bay. So you're gonna get some good fish out there. And Henckel said, we dropped anchor because they said they. When they were getting on the boat, the weather was real nice. And then as they started going out there, it started to get shitty. The weather started to get a little choppy, some rain, some stuff like that, but they were still having a good time, so they dropped anchor. He said fishing wasn't real good that day, but we caught a couple of little mud sharks, some, some little spot and flounder. The kids were having a blast. The kids don't care what you're catching as long as they're reeling something in.

[Jimmy Whisman]

If it's wiggling on the other end.

[James Pietragallo]

Of the hook, that's a. I did it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, I did it.

[James Pietragallo]

It's like a magic trick, you know, for a kid. So by 10am the rain had stopped and it started warming up a little bit. So they said okay. They turned back toward the four artificial islands where the fishing was good because a lot of times fish like to hang around structures and islands and things like that. So they passed Island 4 and the two guys are bullshitting in the back of the boat. And there's a 12 year old kid named Sam that one of them has, and they have a little. He has a little sister and the kids are playing. That's what's going on. So suddenly this guy's buddy D says, hey, you just passed a suitcase floating in the water. Yeah, turn around, let's check it out. First of all, the answer is nope.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

Why? The answer is keep driving. And then when you're a half mile away, go. You say something? Suitcase. I don't know who knows about that anyway, so we're going up this way. Let's check it out. So he cut the.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Clearly, clearly a robbery. Just threw their shit over the bridge. We gotta get the money.

[James Pietragallo]

This fell out of a plane coming from Newark. We have no idea. So they turn around and they see a medium sized, dark green suitcase just floating, bobbing in the water. So they pull up alongside it and so Connors, that guy, the friend and his son grabbed the handle of the suitcase and pulled it on board just like you're taking it off the luggage thing at the airport. But it was heavy. They're trying to pull it on board but it's really heavy. They can't get it, so. And it's, you know, water in it too at this point, even heavier. So Henkel comes over and they have to pull it up together.

[Jimmy Whisman]

So two hands.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, it's either full of gold bullion or we're going to have a bad day. Now, one or the other, let's be realistic. Did you think it was gold bullion? Did you? Because I mean, even if it's like cocaine, that's not going to weigh very much, you know, a couple of, a few pounds, that's not that much. So anyway, they bring it on and the 12 year old boy thinks it's great. He said it's a pirate's treasure.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, sure. Pirates don't have suitcases.

[James Pietragallo]

Absolutely not. A pirate's treasure.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I don't think gold floats, buddy.

[James Pietragallo]

Holy shit. And he's all excited, unzipped and he starts unzipping the suitcase. That's a pirate's treasure. Yeah. What's going to be, it's just going to be full of gold coins and pearl necklaces and shit. It's gonna be amazing. So then the little boy opens it up and it's just a bunch of black plastic trash bags all in there. That's all. It's there. It's just a bunch of plastic around something. So Henkel, the guy with the boat, said I was nervous and looking around. Did we pick up something we shouldn't have? He thinks it might be drugs.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And someone's going to be pissed off at him for picking this up out of the water, which is a fine. Honestly, that is a really like sane reaction to it. Oh, shit. Someone might be mad we did this. This is why you mind your own business. Is it your suitcase? No. Keep on going.

[Jimmy Whisman]

So east coast dumps. There's a lot of things dumped in the ocean that you don't.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, there's tons of stuff. Medical waste, Gambino family members, deep things. Fucking garbage. You never know. So it's a pirate's treasure and he's opening it up. So the guy said, yeah. Did I pick up something we shouldn't have? Is whoever dropped it still here? Trying to make sure it sinks too?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Great question. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Is this a mob hit with a bunch of body parts? And they're trying, you know, they're watching it sink and they go, some asshole just picked it up and now they're gonna come over and talk to them.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He got a boat.

[James Pietragallo]

So, yeah. So this guy, as he's opening his mouth to tell the kid to zip the suitcase back up, the kid's ripping open the bags because he thinks there's a treasure in there. What there is though, is this kid opens up the bags and it's a pair of legs. Yeah, just legs. Yeah, just human legs.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's it. That's the only thing in the suitcase.

[James Pietragallo]

Severed from the knees down.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. There's something else somewhere else.

[James Pietragallo]

And below. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh boy. So that's you proud of yourself, junior?

[James Pietragallo]

What'd I tell you? This is why you mind your own fucking business. That kid will always mind his own business from now on. So this is a valuable lesson for this young boy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Still might be a pirate with two peg legs, James.

[James Pietragallo]

It's possible. Yeah, it's a treasure. All right. So he screams, the boy, obviously. So they all just stared at the legs for a minute just like, what do we do with this now? Yeah, everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments? When the killer's identity is about to be reveale during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping.

[James Pietragallo]

You in the moment.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes. So you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts, ad free included with Prime.

[James Pietragallo]

Then this guy Henkel says the most obvious thing that's ever been said in the world, quote, I knew it was foul play. Did you think somebody killed themselves? Exploded their legs off, placed them in a suitcase, wrapped them in black plastic and dumped them in the fucking Atlantic.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's a real accident.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, I knew it was foul play. Then I really started looking over my shoulder. Those legs looked very, very fresh. They're new. They didn't have an odor. Still got that new leg smell, you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Know, they're so new.

[James Pietragallo]

Still got that new leg smell. Jesus. After closing the bag, he dialed 911 on his cell phone. Smart.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So he said, quote, she thought I was kidding. I said, no, no, no, I need someone to come here and pick this thing up. We're holding legs, guys. I'm two seconds away from tossing this shit back in the ocean. Like, I'm not doing this. So that is what happens. So there are a group of people out on a nice day in a boat that are now staring at legs that said, let's go back in time and talk about some people. Okay? Okay, let's leave that right there and we'll pick that up later. Now let's talk about William Theodore Maguire.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ted.

[James Pietragallo]

Ted. Bill, actually.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Billy Ted. Bill and Ted. One guy.

[James Pietragallo]

He's one guy. He's got them both. So he's born September 21, 1964 in River Edge, New Jersey. He's the youngest of three kids. He's got two older sisters, Cindy and Nancy, and Bill and Ruth are his parents. I don't know if he's a junior, though. I know he's both Bill, but we don't know if the middle name's the same. His father worked for the New York Times as a pressman and his mother was stay at home, was a homemaker. Stay at home, mom type, A printing press.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's kind of cool.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, as a pressman, that's pretty neat. So they're a blue collar family. They live in the Bronx. That's where they live to begin with, which is where a lot of my family's from. And the New York Times doesn't pay that well, but they have their union and they have good benefits.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure.

[James Pietragallo]

So the kids all have very good health insurance and they have stuff like that. So they do have that. They just don't make a ton of money. So they have their first child, 1955, and that's Cindy. And then they have Nancy five years later. And then they have Bill Jr. I guess now. Soon after Nancy was born, though, they moved, the family moved to a larger apartment in River Edge. And, you know, so that's kind of how that went. So the kids are basically spaced out five years. It's like 55, you know, 60 50s, 64 type of thing. In 1968, Bill and Ruth get a divorce, which back then was a big deal. Yeah, in 55, 68, still a big deal. So the three children move out with mom with Ruth, and they move into a two story home in East Patterson, New Jersey. Now the fucked up part, this family is kind of just got a lot Going on over the next few years, Bill Sr. And Ruth would marry and divorce several times.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Each other.

[James Pietragallo]

Each other.

[Jimmy Whisman]

They're getting back together and breaking up.

[James Pietragallo]

Over and over again, over and over again. So that is a lot, man.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That ain't easy to deal with.

[James Pietragallo]

Imagine you're a kid, your parents break up, which. We've all been there, but I mean, not all of us, but most of us, we've been there. But then your dream is what? It would be great if they got back together. They get back together and then get divorced again. And then they get back together and then they do it again. It's gotta be like, really trying for a kid, taxing. Ruth was forced to get a night job to support them. And basically Cindy, the oldest daughter, was the. Began to be the caretaker from the kids from that moment on, from the time the first divorce happened, when mom had to work at night. By 1974. Ruth is very strict, by the way. Oh, really strict. So this is a tumultuous family. Anyway. There's obviously chaos. People who get married and divorce like four times, that's. That's chaos. They like chaos. So there's. That's not the only piece of chaos they have. There's chaos all through their fucking house, basically.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sounds like Ruth is a hard woman, but Bill probably isn't a picnic.

[James Pietragallo]

No, no, no, Bill is. Bill is a kind of a little pain in the ass. But he's the youngest and he's a boy, so he's. No, no, I mean the dad by his two sisters. Oh, Bill Senior.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

No, I'm sure they're both.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Two of them together are so fucking tough.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, yeah. No, it takes two to chaos. That's the thing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Absolutely.

[James Pietragallo]

One person can be chaotic, but then you break up with them and you move on. But to seek the chaos out over and over again, knowing what it is, they're both chaotic, period.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Tango and chaos are the same beat.

[James Pietragallo]

Same beat. That's exactly right. It's right where I was going. So by 1974, Nancy, who's only about 4:14 at this point, doesn't want to live there anymore. She later accused her father of molesting her also. So there is a lot going on here to the fact that both of these girls end up leaving home at a young age. Generally, kids who are 14 don't want to be taken from their homes unless something bad's going on. You know what I mean? She said. Nancy said, quote, I asked to go into a foster home. How many kids ask to go to Foster care.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Can I go be abused and called worthless?

[James Pietragallo]

Remember on the wire when Wallace was handing out juice boxes to all the kids and they're leaving and the one kid didn't want to go to school and he's like, you want to end up in foster care? That's worse than living in a fucking abandoned building with no electricity or bathrooms, where your brother gives you a juice box and tells you to split a bag of chips with your other brother. That foster care is worse than that. And she's like, I asked to go to foster care. Yeah. Because I didn't want to run away, she said, but she wanted to get the fuck out of the house. And she did. She got out of the house.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow. Make my transition stable is all she wants.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. That's brutal, man. So there's bad stuff going on there now. When Bill was 12, here, mid-70s, his sister Cindy left home and married a pharmacist named Bill Lagash. So she became Cindy Lagash and left. Now it's just little bill. 14 year old teenage Bill alone with his mother. Soon afterwards, Ruth moves to Clifton, New Jersey. Bill enrolls in Clifton High School. His sister Cindy said he was a B student, but he always had friends. Apparently he did not like living with his mother either. There didn't like living with Ruth. Cindy said it was hard for him. He was her entire focus and there was no buffer. So, yeah, if someone's a strict disciplinarian and there's three people to disperse some of that discipline, but if it's just you, you are the prime focus of all the attention, you're gonna not be able to move. So at age 15, Bill ran away from home.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is again, teenage kids don't run away and try to stay away usually unless there's very bad shit going on. They run away for a day and come back, but they don't. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And he stayed gone.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, he showed up at Cindy's house, at his sister's house in Vernon Township and said, can I live here? Yeah, I want to live with you guys. I got to get the fuck away from mom now. Cindy said, more sympathetic I could not be.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

But you know, no, she said, fine. That's how she said it sucks at home. I know it does. So move in with us. So after consulting their mother, Billy, you know, they make a deal where Billy's going to move in with his sister permanently.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

And so they make him a part of the family. Now Cindy and her husband have a baby daughter that he would Bill Would babysit. So, you know, he's helping out around the house. They tried to kind of be the parents that he never really had, basically, you know, loving and guiding and not chaotic, basically. And he loved the stability. He said, this is great. It's so stable, with dinners on the table every time, every night, you know, I know what's going to happen.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

You're not, like, going to get divorced and remarried again. It's pretty cool. Cindy said, I looked at Bill as a son, he said, for I more or less performed the functions of his mother. So he enrolls at Vernon Township High School in the middle of his junior year. And he makes friends with a guy named Lenny Polsky, who's going to be an important figure in his next few years of formative living here. Now, he's not a great student, though. Bill. No, he just doesn't really care about. School is not his, and it's not everyone. It's also. It's the mid-70s. It's just. It's just the time, the place, his upbringing, and some people just aren't that interested in it. I was one of them.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Just couldn't focus.

[Jimmy Whisman]

So we exist, man.

[James Pietragallo]

That's it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Tired of us always being so goddamn ignored.

[James Pietragallo]

Ignored as we speak to hundreds of thousands of people over a fucking microphone.

[Jimmy Whisman]

My plight is ignored.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, God. How do you know when your ego's out of control? When I complain that nobody hears me through a microphone to hundreds of thousands of people would be the answer to that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

My struggle is valid.

[James Pietragallo]

That's amazing, and it is. But people do hear us.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Nobody cares. Like, nobody cares about anybody's strife.

[Jimmy Whisman]

But in 1999, nobody gave up.

[James Pietragallo]

No. No. Then nobody cared. Yeah. I had no microphone then. So Bill showed no interest in extracurriculars. He would cut glass all the time. Lenny Polsky, his friend, said he had a rocky relationship with his mom. He was just a rebel. He was a hothead.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And that's the other thing, too. When you come from a troubled household, you tend to have troubles. Sure, sometimes. So that's kind of how it went. I mean, everybody had left the house young, and so that's kind of how it is. Now, Len Polsky, his friend, eventually, he ends up going to live with him for some reason, just with a pal.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Huh.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is. Yeah, weird. Now, Len's sister, Marcy, who we'll talk about plenty, Marcy with an I, she said that Bill had a lot of issues. My mom invited him to live with us.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

So now she said, marcy said she feared Bill's father. She said Bill's father was a scary guy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. So when a 12 year old girl is scared of a guy, it's a scary guy. You know what I mean?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Usually, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. And she. Cause Marcy was 12 when he moved in and he was, you know, 16, 17, so she got a big crush on him. Oh, Marcy. She was like, I like him. You know, a 12 year old would have a crush on a 17 year old. He's got a car. You know what I mean? It's like adult things. Yeah, yeah. Cause when you're that age, that's like an adult who's still a kid.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, right.

[James Pietragallo]

They have like adult stuff, but they're still a kid. Like they're still like in school and shit, so it seems, you know, normal. But Bill was lading dating a girl named Lisa and you know, obviously wasn't trying to date a 12 year old at the time, so. Which is a good sign. Yeah, you should, when you're 17, you shouldn't even notice a 12 year old exists.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He's not interested in that at all.

[James Pietragallo]

You should not even be looking at a 12 year old as even on this earth. To play with, to talk, to go away. Used to say, do you have an older sister? That should be the only time you talk to a 12 year old. Any sister with like tits that grew.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Out with anything that is interesting to me.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, you know, appetite for booze, anything, Anything. Lenny said my sister was mesmerized by him. He would sweet talk people that way. He's known as very charming Bill, just how he is now. 1982, he graduates from high school and joins the Navy, which it seems like for a kid like him would be like kind of a perfect fit. Yeah, he doesn't really have any direction he wants to go in. He's kind of, kind of a tear away. You might need a little bit of discipline. This might really help him a lot. So he did his boot camp at the US Naval base in Coronado in San Diego and then transferred to Vallejo for basic training. He's 5 10, 180 pounds, good shape, good looking guy. And he loved it. He loved the Navy, thought it was great.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. He wants some adventure. The Navy will give you that anyway. You'll go places and you know, you'll get tons of different STDs you didn't even know existed. It's all sorts of stuff to do in the Navy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Hey, right there by Tijuana. Forget it.

[James Pietragallo]

I mean, forget it. He began general training in a school which orients raw naval recruits. One morning, another recruit named John Rice, they were. They met each other, and they were. He came up to Bill, he found Bill, and Bill was cracking jokes for a bunch of guys. Like, he was making jokes. Everybody was laughing. And John Rhys said, I just wrote him off as some punk, a jerk. But I guess I was kind of envious of the attention he was getting. Yeah, look at this guy. Everybody's laughing at this scumbag. Yeah. He's a guy who, like, heckles at a comedy club. I don't like that he's getting all this attention, even though I paid to give him the attention, too. I bought two drinks to give him attention.

[Jimmy Whisman]

We all bought tickets and drinks for this.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. But that I. Thinking of him as a jerk does not last long because after, not too short of time, they're best friends, Bill and John, and will remain best friends after the Navy, kind of for life here. So now, John, this is amazing. The USS America, which is what they were on, got back to Norfolk in Virginia, and John Rice married his fiance named Sue. She'll come up later. Also now they settle down in different quarters now they get married quarters near the base, which are nicer quarters, basically. And one night, just in passing, he's talking to Bill. John is. And John Rhys mentioned how, man, you get so much more money now thanks to the marriage benefits. You get money, you get better housing. Everything's better if you're married. You know what I mean? It's so better. So much better. He said, I told Bill my paycheck basically doubled by getting married.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So he said, quote. He was like, okay, okay. And then he ran off. Okay. Now, soon after that conversation, he called Marcy, Len's little sister, who's 12 now. She's not 12 anymore. Now she's 17.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She's a big girl. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. He called her back in New Jersey and proposed to her.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

They weren't even going out.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Let's just get married.

[James Pietragallo]

This is like some weird 1800s shit where you're just like. You proposed to someone you talked to for five minutes because you thought they seemed nice. Cause that's what she had to do back then.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. My dad was a farm.

[James Pietragallo]

You had to propose to someone to get to know them. Otherwise you weren't allowed to get to know them. You had to fucking be ready to marry them. So he called her back. She had just graduated from Vernon Township High School, and he said, hey, why don't you move to New Jersey? And Marry me and you can go to college down here. The Navy will even fucking pay for it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure.

[James Pietragallo]

So she said she's been in love with him since she was 12. Yeah, she said, absolutely. Oh, I'm in. And the funny thing is, is this for love? What is he just for?

[Jimmy Whisman]

What am I doing this for?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, exactly. And John Rice, who John Rhys, like I said, is his best friend, said Bill was always trying to figure out the angle, and that's one of the main reasons he got married.

[Jimmy Whisman]

The angle?

[James Pietragallo]

The angle. So Marcy got to Norfolk and they got married in a civil ceremony, and they got a one bedroom apartment in Chesapeake. A friend of theirs said it was a paper wedding. She was just young and foolish. Their relationship reminded me more of a brother and a sister than a husband and a wife. Oh, because it's like an older brother. Yeah, you're. That's the other thing, too. Like, if you're friends with somebody and they have younger siblings, you're, like, protective of them also. So they're kind of like little sisters to you, too. Especially if it's a close friend where you lived there and shit like that. So John and Sue Rice, they meet Marcy at a Navy picnic here. And sue said Bill introduced her to us as his wife. We were very, very shocked. They didn't even know he got married. He just showed up. Hey, look at this. Here's my wife.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Here she is.

[James Pietragallo]

They remember Marcy as young and insecure and totally dependent on Bill.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Young and insecure.

[James Pietragallo]

She's like a child. Yeah, she's like a child. She has no life experience. She graduated high school and got married. You know what I mean? So John Rhys said she was like a deer in the headlights anytime she was around him. She was in awe. She's just in love with him because she has. It's literally childhood infatuation. Yeah, that's weird. So Marcy. Yeah, they're getting married. They do all of that now. Just before Christmas 1987, Bill called his sister Cindy out of the blue to wish her a happy holiday. And it was the first time they spoke in six years since she threw him out. Wow. She threw him out because he was being, you know, disrupting the house. He moved in with the Polskis. And then that's what. That's what happened here. They haven't talked in six years, so. But now they're getting together, and Cindy said, in my family, we hold grudges, but once you make up, you don't have to say anything. Oh, just make up. And it's fine. So Bill invited Cindy to come to Norfolk and meet his new wife. Come meet Marcy. So the next summer, she came for three days with her two children. She had a boy and a girl now. And she said it was the first time I got to see him in his uniform. He was adorable. He looked just like Tom Cruise.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Adorable even.

[James Pietragallo]

Which. Yeah, now the funny part too is the Tom Cruise reference is pretty funny.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Telling of the time.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, also in the book, yeah, this was that time period. But in the book they talk about how. There's a book that I'll bring up later on, I'll give you the title. And if I give you the title, it gives the whole story away. So, yeah, I'll give you to you at the end. So what ends up happening is he talks about how they would, like, you know, they do their Navy shit during the day and then they go out and like party. And then like before sunset they'd go play beach volleyball together. And I'm like. He's just describing Top Gun. He was. It's literally a whole paragraph of him describing how they are fucking Goose and Maverick, basically. It's fucking pathetic. It's so funny. So she said, the sister said when she first met Marcy, she couldn't understand why Bill married this girl, really. He said she had no personality, no intelligence, nothing. She was a shock to everyone. She's just a wet piece of paper, basically. Marcy, no intelligence. She's a young girl who's probably very intimidated by her older husband's older sister. You know what I mean? She's just probably intimidated. And at 18, a lot of people just don't have their voice yet. Yeah, they don't know their personality. They're meek. They haven't been out in the world and gotten kicked in the dick a bunch of times and gotten mad, you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Know, so feels like you know a lot, but you don't.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, you don't know a goddamn thing. So now Bill gets in trouble a lot. Bill, he's a cut up. I would call him a little bit of a fuck up when it comes to shit. He doesn't like rules very much. Now Bill had. He would a lot of the book, put it thusly. He played fast and loose with the rules during his six year service with the Navy. That says a lot. One time he was arrested by the Norfolk police for a minor felony involving checks. Just a minor felony, you know, felony. A light felony. Light felony. He was fingerprinted, allowed to go home without being charged. So they just said, we'll keep an eye on you. He likes sports cars. He had a Camaro, and then he got a Triumph TR7. One night he was out. Yeah, one night he was out driving with his buddy Jim when he got pulled over by a state trooper for not wearing a seatbelt. So he denied it, saying it would have been impossible to see whether he was wearing a belt or not. He said, you could not have seen whether I had a belt on or not. Yeah, you're full of shit, basically. No, yeah, my car, the Corvette, the old Vet. Yeah, Lap belt harness thing too. But it's super uncomfortable.

[Jimmy Whisman]

There's no harness at all. It's just fucking lap belts. Like airplanes.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, so they. He. They argue for a few minutes, and the trooper writes him a ticket for no seatbelt. Bill said, according to his friend, quote. Is that it? Is that the best you can do? He said, you must be a rookie. A real cop would have written me a lot more tickets than that. Oh, don't do that. So the policeman said, okay, and started writing tickets for other shit. All right, well, that's there. And you got a tail light out and your license.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You missed a tail light. You missed that. My registration's no good.

[James Pietragallo]

Why would you. Yeah, you messed everything up. This car isn't safe for the road. Give me a break. So on another occasion, according to his friend, Bill just decided tonight we don't stop for red lights.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is just very dangerous. That's fun. But also a way to get killed. That is not good. So he ended up being chased down by a state trooper and ended up getting a reckless driving charge off of that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ah, Jesus.

[James Pietragallo]

And his friend said this was kind of silly, but that's the kind of guy Bill was. He was so larger than life.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Is that what. Larger than life.

[James Pietragallo]

We're not stopping for red lights tonight.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ah, take a look at that. Every time I hear that they were larger than life. Oh, they didn't stop at red lights.

[James Pietragallo]

We're living la vida loca over here. We're fucking not stopping for red lights tonight. I'm a sultan, for Christ's sake. So 1990, he's discharged from the Navy, where he had worked as a computer specialist. In 1992, he and Marcy moved to Edison, New Jersey, where everything in this marriage fell apart.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, damn it.

[James Pietragallo]

Now, this is a weird thing, because this entire book never mentions this, and Court never mentions this. And really, nobody ever mentions this except for Marcy says this in an interview. Marcy hates Bill, by the way. Hates. Hates his guts.

[Jimmy Whisman]

After the Divorce, obviously.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. She said he was very abusive, physically and mentally, very violent. After eight years, he wore me down. So he's not violent in any other relationship that we can find also. So it's an odd thing, but we never know. He might have been controlling over her and done that. I mean, that's what she said. We have no idea. Nobody was there. So we don't know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Maybe they had a volatile relationship. We don't know.

[James Pietragallo]

We don't know. Maybe he. Like I said, maybe he was controlling and maybe. How dare you. You're some little kid. How dare you say anything. I don't know what the fuck it is. So either way, Nancy, Bill's brother or Bill's sister, the middle sister, she insisted that he was not violent, though, which. What the hell does she know? She's not married to him. No offense. But. Yeah, she said when we were growing up, he never even pinched me.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That is the.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, that's how you can tell.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Domestic abuse.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ladies, you meet. You meet a guy, he proposes to you talk to all the sisters, see if there's been pinching going on. If there's pinching, you run the other direction. She said he never hit a woman in his life, is what she said. Which again, she wouldn't know. Now, in early night, this is what the book. This is the book's version of events here, which is pretty good. Vetted version. Bill brought Marcy to his 10 year Vernon Township High School reunion in 1992. And then soon afterwards, he just. He walked out on her. He left her. Oh, and he told his friend Jim that basically he stayed in the marriage until Marcy could look after herself. Like she was immature. Too immature to do that in the beginning. Couldn't just leave her right away. But now she's grown up a lot. So now I can. Now I can free her. He's like a bird where you fixed up her little wing and now she can fly again. You're gonna release her from the back porch. So that's interesting. Her version is he beat me, and his version is just didn't deal with her anymore.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Back to health.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, yeah. So she. Marcy said. The book says Marcy was all broken up about this divorce and for the next two years tried to get him back all the time. Oh, yeah. Whereas Marcy was like, I couldn't take it anymore. I just left. So I don't know. Bill moved into a townhouse in Woodbridge at this point with Brian Gerber, a friend of his and another roommate. He started Dating again. But the roommates and everybody said Marcy was always around, she was always popping up. Basically, as Fred Jim said, she was still trying to mend that relationship, trying to bridge that gap. So for the next two years, Bill is in school for computers and working nights in restaurants around Edison. He also started going to Atlantic City to gamble a bit, too, because that's adrenaline. People like he is. If you say not stopping for red lights tonight, you like adrenaline. You like to almost get hit by cars, you like to be chased by state troopers, things like that. So gambling, Gambling provides you with that thing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Larger than life.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, larger than life, man. Now, during the separation of Marcy and Bill, Marcy went over to Bill's apartment and walked in and Bill's sitting there with a chick. Oh, Marcy's not thrilled about that at all. This is a young girl, a younger woman named Melanie Slate, and that's who's sitting on his lap. And Marcy said she was young and naive like I once was. That's what she said, which we'll talk about her. She is not naive at all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Naive, not a word I would use to describe Melanie whatsoever. So this is how they met, too. He's playing, he's hanging out at, going to the casinos, doing something like that. The Taj Mahal he was going to all the time. He became a rated player for the first time in 1994.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Rated.

[James Pietragallo]

He wins. That's the thing. He goes to Vegas and wins. I don't know, I guess maybe ranked in some. You.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, I don't know how you get ranked. That's fascinating.

[James Pietragallo]

So in the summer of 1994, his roommate Brian brings a girl home. Melanie Slate.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And introduces him to his roommate Bill. And Bill and Melanie hit it off.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, boy.

[James Pietragallo]

So that's how that goes. Now, this is Melanie Lynn slate. She's born October 18, 1972. So she's a few years younger than him also, but at this point she's in her 20s. She's not. Marcy was 12 when she met him and fell in love with him. She was young and naive like I was. No, she's 22.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She's a grownup.

[James Pietragallo]

Very much a grown up. Now, Melanie was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Her parents are Bob and Linda. Her father walked out on the family and moved to California when she was just a baby. Four years later, he died of cancer. So Melanie was very upset and obviously she has no dad. And then the dad's dead. So that really sucks for A young girl or a young boy or anybody now. So Linda, the mom, moved into a house in Oradel, New Jersey, with her parents and two sisters. So that's a lot of people in this house. She found a job working as a secretary in a Manhattan computer company and commuted from New Jersey. Linda then gets involved with a. Just a fucking rabid affair with her married boss.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Nice.

[James Pietragallo]

And it's a mess. It's a fucking mess. And, like, the kids have to hide it. It's just a mess, man. It's horrible. So the boss's name is Michael Caparo, who would often stay overnight at the home. This guy, he would come stay. Now, about a year into the affair, this guy started bringing his son over.

[Jimmy Whisman]

What?

[James Pietragallo]

He started bringing his son over as a cover, saying, I'm bringing the son to play with their daughter, to play with Melanie, when really they would just go fuck and leave the kids sitting out there alone. To play.

[Jimmy Whisman]

To Play.

[James Pietragallo]

Wow. Michael Jr. The son, said it was a very big secret. My father always told me that she was just a friend, but as I got older, I realized what was going on. But I was instructed to keep this a secret. That is. You don't want to keep those secrets from your mom. That's brutal. So Michael Jr. And Melanie Jr. Or Melanie Jr. Melanie. Melanie was four years younger than Michael Jr. Would be left to play together for hours while they would be in the room. Like, they're not even having, like, a quickie. They're having, like a whole session. Yeah, they're, you know, they're in there. Candles are lit. Al Green is playing. There's some massaging going on. It's wild. It's wild. The sheets need to be washed afterwards. Oh, man. Michael Jr. Said, I grew up with Melanie. She could always get you to do whatever she wanted. She always got her own way and could talk people into anything.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Manipulative.

[James Pietragallo]

Manipulative. Yeah. Which, you know, I mean, a lot of kids figure that out when they're young. So Melanie is in Woodbridge in public school. And as a student, she gets really good grades without really doing much work. She's a smart fucking kid. Just smart. Smarter than the other classmates, the teacher said was kind of just naturally adept at schoolwork and also had an amazing memory. Linda, her mom, said she was every mother's dream. A good girl, never got into trouble. Happy, wonderful student. Every mother's dream. Now, when his parents finally separated, this is Michael Jr. S parents there. Michael, the boss and the married boss and the wife. They put the family home up FOR sale. That's when Michael Jr. Finally told his mother about Linda. About Melanie's mom.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And he explained once his mom found out, his dad was blaming it all on her. Blaming it all on Linda. You went over there with your dick, did you not? I'd say it's pretty mutual, my friend.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She did this?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, she did. I don't know, I just. I was over there. Next thing you know, my dick was wet. I don't know how it happened. Don't look at me. Don't look at me. She said. My mother was very upset. That's why I had to open my mouth and tell her. So the divorce came through. And so then her boss, who she's been having an affair with, went to live with Linda and her whole family. Her sisters, her parents, the kids, everything at this house, which is a nice house and everything, but still. And even Michael Jr. Too moves in. Everybody's moving in. So Michael Jr. And Melanie become pretty close. He says she was a smart girl. She and her mom were very close. She was a mama's girl.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree.

[James Pietragallo]

Zoe, this thing weighs a ton.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man.

[James Pietragallo]

Santa.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Santa, did you get my letter?

[James Pietragallo]

He's talking to you britches. I'm not. Of course he did. Right, Santa?

[Jimmy Whisman]

You know my elf, Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list.

[James Pietragallo]

An elf. I'm six three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus?

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm Mrs. Claus much younger sister. And AT T Mobile, there's no trade.

[James Pietragallo]

In needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Or give it as a gift.

[James Pietragallo]

And the best part, you can make the switch to T Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber. The holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 3, 4 monthly bill credits. For what? Qualified customers plus tax and $35 vice connection charge credits and imbalance too if you pay off earlier financing agreement 256 gigs. $830 eligible for in a new line. $100 plus a month plan without our payments, taxes and fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com she did not like Michael Senior.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

As a stepfather. No. Melanie had no use for him and he was a big time disciplinarian. And Linda really wasn't. So when Melanie would mouth off, they'd have giant arguments and it would, oh boy, blow up. Michael Jr. Said she got a little out of control. There were a few heated battles. My father was very, very strict and they did not get along. Now so Melanie enters Middletown High School south and she's again great student, top of her class. One of her friends said everything came easy very easily to her. She was very smart and always an overachiever when it came to school. And so, and every weekend Michael Sr. Would, who's a service manager for Time Warner, would take the whole family to Atlantic City every weekend, takes them all there. Because if there's one thing small children love, it's gambling. They just love it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's blackjack.

[James Pietragallo]

I can't get enough. He and Linda would leave the kids in the hotel room by themselves for hours and hours while they went and played high stakes blackjack and poker. Took him to the casino and said, here you go kids, enjoy. Don't leave the room. The room service menu's over there. Order what you want. So Melanie Here in 1985, Michael Sr. Takes Linda and the kids on a vacation to Aruba. Oh, which sounds very nice. With the family of a close friend of theirs. Now, during this 13 year old, Melanie has her first sexual experience with an older boy. I don't know how much older he was. Oh, we do. We find out he's 19. Which 13 and 19 is called molesting.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure is.

[James Pietragallo]

That's called molesting.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's certainly grooming and statutory rape.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, 19, I'll give you 16 if you just graduated from high school or something. Maybe some people. 16 year old's exceptionally mature. No, I mean like if the 19 year old just graduated. They weren't in the same school together. He was a senior, she was a sophomore. If they're in the same school together, you can't keep them apart. You can't put two zoo animals in a cage. It is, but I'm just saying that I'll go, eh, I don't like it, but I'll grudgingly accept it. 16, 13 and anything above 14 is no good.

[Jimmy Whisman]

13 and maybe above 13.

[James Pietragallo]

13 and 14 is about the only grouping I have there for those two. 15 and 13 is a huge gap.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's absurd.

[James Pietragallo]

The difference between 15 and 13 is incredible.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's ridiculous.

[James Pietragallo]

Like the difference between 17 and 19 isn't that much. The difference between 13 and 15 is a two year fucking chasm that you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Can'T jump across of crazy Maturity and chemical changes.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, forget about it. So Michael Jr. Said she was fooling around with him. He said she was 13 at the time and he was 19. We would go out every night to bars in the casino. I think that's where she picked up gambling. Wow, you think? Spending every weekend in a casino. Maybe she picked it up. Melanie takes this after Aruba. She takes her newfound sexuality, or whatever you want to call it, or I don't even know if it's sexuality or trauma, depending on the girl. You know what I mean? And she takes that back to school with her and becomes, according to her stepbrother Michael, quote, she was very promiscuous.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Say, loose.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, that's what he said back then, I'm sure. Yeah, she was very promiscuous. She had a lot of boyfriends and she also had affairs while she was with them. So she had boyfriends and cheated on them. They were kind of weak and fairly timid and she got what she wanted from them. Dinners, meals, any kind of gifts.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So she has figured out how to do this because what'd her mother do?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

I mean, one day, Melanie boasted to Michael Jr. That she was. Jesus Christ, having sexual relationships with two of her married teachers. Teachers in high school. Again, not affairs. They're molesting you is what that's called.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

It's not an affair.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You're being taken advantage of.

[James Pietragallo]

A grown, married pervert is molesting you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Just because you get something out of it and you're fine with that doesn't make it.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, you feel like an adult, but you're not. And the adult should know that. That's the difference. You're not the adult. You think of yourself. Oh, yeah, this is fine. They're the adult who. They should know better. They're the ones that should go. What, are you kidding? You're a child and you probably think.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You'Re in charge, but you're not.

[James Pietragallo]

No, no. So her stepfather found out about one of the affairs and threatened to go to the school principal if the teacher didn't stop seeing his daughter. Are you kidding me? That's it. I'll go to the principal.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You don't stop this teacher from raping my child.

[James Pietragallo]

No, he went to the teacher and said that. Oh, wait, he told the teacher, I'll go to your boss and tell on you rather than I will cut you into so many fucking pieces they will never find you again. Which would be correct.

[Jimmy Whisman]

This is the police. No police.

[James Pietragallo]

Not even thought of. I'll get you fired. I'll get you fired. And the guy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

If you touch my child again, I'll have you fired.

[James Pietragallo]

I'll get you fired from your job.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure, I'll follow right up with that.

[James Pietragallo]

I'll complain to the manager if you don't stop fucking my teenage daughter. That's insane. Stop molesting my kid. Michael Jr. Said she was kind of proud of it because I made a joke about it saying, so that's how you're getting good grades? And she just smiled.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, Jesus.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is exactly what you would do if you were a brother and a sister. Yeah. You must be blowing your history teacher. Getting fucking A's. That's how siblings are. So I'm actually. They're getting along like real siblings.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's good.

[James Pietragallo]

But she does have. She gets great grades at school and always, you know, sets. She does everything she needs to in school. She does extra credit. She does anything she can. And in addition to doing all this schoolwork, having affairs with multiple teachers, she also works part time as a checkout girl at the Chapel Hill A and P supermarket as well as at a TCBY store in Red Bank. So she's busy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She's busy.

[James Pietragallo]

Boy, my God.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She doesn't have any spare time.

[James Pietragallo]

Absolutely. She also had a lot of enemies in school. Melanie does. According to Michael. She had a few. They said that she gossiped a lot and it pissed people off. She's a big gossip. Her brother said she would use her wit as a weapon against people and then they would hate her for it. Basically, he said she didn't get along with girls that much.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

If she didn't like you, she could be very cold. Even if she did like you, she would still talk about you behind your back. She'd be your best friend one day, then she'd be out with somebody else, talking behind your back. What do they call it? A bitch. That's right, yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Stabby ass bitch.

[James Pietragallo]

Technical word, I think is a bitch that normally women throw upon each other in that situation. She also had a big time temper, and he said if it was the least bit of a perceived slight, she was on somebody.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Michael Jr. Said if you made her mad, you could see the rage in her. There were a couple fist fights. I've seen her hit people. Oh yeah? She's not a big chick either. No, she'll throw hands, but academically thriving and everything else too. She's active in the school, in the theater. She does the drama program. She had lead roles in several productions including Brighton Beach Memoirs, the Neil Simon play that they did, which seems ambitious for high school kids. Neil Simon. Shit's very dialogue heavy. Like to ask, like Biloxi Blues as Neil Simon. Remember with Matthew Broderick, it's all dialogue. It's very heavy dialogue. It's like Woody Allen, kind of. So that would be interesting. Okay. Her entry in the school's 89 junior yearbook lists her as a member of the National Honor Society, treasurer of the Spanish Club, and also in school chorus as well. Her high school friends remember her fondly, the ones that she acted with. One said she was a good person, a good student. She was very bright. But he also said. Or the stepbrother said. She was a partier, though, and he would sometimes accompany her to. She liked going to metal concerts. Oh, she liked going to metal concerts and clubbing in Manhattan. She still. While in high school. Yeah. So he was older, four years older. So he would go with her to these, they would say to protect her, basically make sure nobody knocked her out. He said she had lots of boyfriends, and whenever the stepdad would try to rein her in, she'd become even more rebellious. Michael Jr. Said she'd walk out and slam the door. She'd talk back. She wasn't taking it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Mouthy.

[James Pietragallo]

Not having it. In 1990, she's a Jersey girl who's not even taking your shit. In 1990, Melanie graduated in the top 5% of her class, and she enrolled in Rutgers University for a double major in both math and psychology, which are two components, completely different sides of your brain. So that is a rare double major, I would think, math.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She's a smart girl, huh?

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, she's real sharp. She's real smart. She's acerbic. She's, you know, can be mean, she can be nice. She's manipulative. She'll be perfect, like, to be in the business world, you know what I mean? She's only five foot two and she's petite. Pretty. She's real pretty, too. So she ends up graduating from Rutgers, I guess statistics turned into her major after a while, and psychology. So she got two. But instead of going into either of those things that she just spent four years in college for, she said, I want to be a nurse, I guess. Okay. So she found a job waitressing in a seafood restaurant in Edison. She had moved back with her mother and stepfather had been dating a guy named Brian Gerber, who has a roommate named Bill McGuire. So that's how this all happened. After the restaurant closed, the staff would kind of hang out and socialize with waiters and kitchen staff from other restaurants. Because that's who's up.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, that's it. That's like. If you go to like in New York City, it's like a known thing. If you go at midnight out to the bars, all the. You'll see all the kitchen staff start to pour in. You'll see waiters come, you'll see chefs coming in their fucking industry shit. Yeah, it's industry time. That's when they're going to drink. So that's. You're up. That's the only people that are up. And one night Gerber introduced his new roommate William, who was working at Red Lobster at the time Bill was. And that was that. And she fell in love with Bill McGuire. Here we go. Now we have. Bill and Melanie are together.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure.

[James Pietragallo]

All right. By the way, we did this as a live show in a bunch of shows this year for the live shows we do. So this. I hope you're enjoying all the extra info that we have time for now.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Fascinating.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, yeah. Live shows, we, you know, obviously there's tons of info, but we don't have time for every little detail. Can't have a three hour live show.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's just union people to pay.

[James Pietragallo]

That's what I mean. You start shifting in your chair after a while. This is a great story, it's hilarious. But my ass is numb, so I gotta go home. Move it along a little bit here.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So John Rice, the friend from the Navy, said, I thought it was an excellent fit for the two of them, Bill and Melanie. He said between the two of them, you'd hear the banter. They seem like the perfect match. Yeah, because he's just like her kind of. It's not an achiever in school, but they're both like kind of ballsy and take chances and brash and do things. So that Christmas, Melanie gave. She gave a copy of a book to a friend of hers of the Stephen King novel Dolores Claiborne, which is so weird that that came up because that just came up on your stupid opinions. Yeah, that isn't out yet, everybody. But next week when you listen to your stupid opinion, Dolores Claiborne, the book came up, which is weird. I haven't thought of that book or mentioned it in ever decades. So Dolores Claiborne is about a woman who gets her abusive husband drunk and murders him. It's essentially a Dixie chick song in 700 pages. Long time ago. Yeah, long time ago. On an inside page, she wrote the inscription. Now here is a story of A woman with true strength and wisdom. You can learn a lot from her. I did love Melanie.

[Jimmy Whisman]

How about that?

[James Pietragallo]

Jesus Christ. Now, remember how William can't drive?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, he can. He just gets in trouble for it all the time.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He's fuck red lights, that guy.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he continues with that. Oddly March. He never grows out of that. No, that's the thing that, like, maturity takes that out of a lot of people. Bill's like, in his 30s going, Fuck this. I'm not doing this shit. So Bill was driving on March 1, 1996, with a suspended license in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. He stopped by a cop for speeding.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

No license, any speeding. Smart.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Does he dare him to look deeper?

[James Pietragallo]

Well, in this one. No, not this time. This time he dares Melanie or asks Melanie, switch seats with me. Oh, say you were driving. That way I won't go to jail. And later asked her to to lie under oath in court. So he ends up getting a charge for fabricating false testimony regarding circumstances surrounding a motor vehicle stop and discussing and. Or prepping such testimony with witness identified as Melanie L. Slate. He gets in trouble for trying to get her to do this. Basically, he apparently accumulated. I don't know how you do this, but his license was suspended 33 times.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Good Lord.

[James Pietragallo]

He was like, 33 years old at this point.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That is a lot.

[James Pietragallo]

One for every year of driving or one for every year of life?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Two for every year of driving.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, he received three years of probation in November of 1997 and fines of $1,550 for false tampering with a witness. Yeah, so there's that. So that's a third degree crime. So he has, like, a light felony and this going on.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He's good at crimin.

[James Pietragallo]

Now he wants Melanie to move into the apartment with his roommates.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is always trouble there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's fun.

[James Pietragallo]

He wants to move. He proposed to her, so now they're fiances, and he wants her to move into the apartment. And he's even negotiating, I'll pay more if I can get the master bedroom so we can have more room since there's two of us, blah, blah, blah. So that October, Melanie moves in with Bill and the other roommates and sharing a kitchen, a living room, and a basement with his male friend and another roommate, not the ex boyfriend of hers. Wow. He moved out. This is a different roommate. So the other roommate, the guy said, bill and I hit it off because we're both wise asses. We joke around with each other like that. Like that, and I could see how some people could think he was a little abrasive, but he really wasn't. He's a ball breaker. He's a New Jersey guy, that's all. I grew up with a million of these guys. I know that guy. I can pick that guy out from a million miles away. I know exactly what part of H Vac he's going to go into. I know that guy. You know what I mean? So anyway, soon after moving into the apartment, Melanie pissed off her roommates by saying, this place is ugly. I want to redecorate. Your furniture sucks is what she said. Literally. The roommate said, she was snobby. Bill seemed a lot more down to earth, but she was a lot more upper crust and put on airs when she came in. She wanted to change everything. This is ugly. This needs fixing. She wanted to put her stamp on the apartment even though she was sharing it with other folks.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, this place sucks.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. I think she's trying to get them to go probably too.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Probably. Yeah. She's squeezing them out by living in this live Laugh Love Palace.

[James Pietragallo]

Absolutely. So before they got married, Melanie gave Bill a photo of herself with the following inscription on the back. Bill, as we prepare to start our lives together, I just want you to know how much I love you and I couldn't have done it without you. Thank you for your undying love and support. Mel.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Mel.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, Mel. So here's some pre wedding bliss here. January 3rd. Or, sorry, June 3rd, 1999. Three days before they got married. Because, you know, she had to have a June wedding. But not late June, when it's hot.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Early June.

[James Pietragallo]

Early June. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

When it's nice, when it's warm and it's bright.

[James Pietragallo]

And I could still say it's a June wedding, but it's not hot. Okay. Apparently there's a loophole in the US Bankruptcy laws that has been changed since then. But for somehow, if you declared a bankruptcy, but then you got married, your bankruptcy would go away because now you were in with another person. There was a certain loophole that Bill found. Okay, so he claimed bankruptcy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Fascinating.

[James Pietragallo]

So. Because he found a loophole right before the marriage. Yeah. And a few months later, Melanie also filed for bankruptcy. Now, John Rice said he was embarrassed. He talked to me about it. He was always looking to either make money or get out of paying for something. Yeah, one of the two. Yep. So Bill also discussed with his former roommate that it was a good financial move to do bankruptcy. The roommate said, I don't think it was really about money problems. It was just a way of consolidating some things. He knew he was getting married soon, and it was almost a strategy, which rich people and companies, they use bankruptcy as a strategy. It's everything on the table, us normal people. When you hear you should claim bankruptcy, that means total failure.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Your life is over for your life is over.

[James Pietragallo]

You're embarrassed. You can't tell anybody you fucked it all up. You're a disaster bank. Your whole thing. Rich people don't give a fuck about claiming bankruptcy. They don't give a fuck because they know financially that's the smart thing to do. And they're worried about the end rather than what they look like. But I can't do that. I couldn't do that. I'd feel horrible. So June 1999 is when they finally get married. By 2000, they're gonna have a son. Or they have a son in 2000. So they have a kid pretty quick here. William has a job with the New Jersey Institute of Technology as a computer programmer and an adjunct professor, too.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Nice.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he graduated. That sounds good. Graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor's degree in management. From there he graduated. Cum loud. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. That's something to brag about. I don't know. It means good. At least top five. It gets top five. Because I know there's like a bunch of different titles. I don't know what they are, but one means first, one means second, one means third. So he's a senior programmer analyst at the NJIT's Department of Information Resource Development. And so he works there for a few years. Here. Melanie's job. She went through nursing school. That's what she was thanking him for, helping her get through. And she gets a job at the Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey in Morristown.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Great.

[James Pietragallo]

They help women get pregnant. Yeah, they do in vitro and fertilizations and that kind of thing. Here. Expensive shit. That shit's mad expensive.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's so much money. And people have to do it several times, too.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, man, that's brilliant.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It compounds, for Christ's sake.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, yeah. You'll end up spending tens of thousands of dollars to get that kid. And then they'd. A kid costs more money. It's crazy. It's better than the people who spend. I mean, that I understand. If you want a kid, that's the way you get it done. The people who spend. You know how much it is? People clone their dogs. Do you know that?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And it costs like, 50 grand to clone a dog.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And it's not even the same personality dog.

[James Pietragallo]

No. It's the same physical dog. It's the same vessel, but it's a completely different dog.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

So you just got a dog that looks like your old dog.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's so easy to do.

[James Pietragallo]

You could go around. Yeah, you go around and get tons of dogs that look like you're all dog. They all look the same. They're fucking dogs. They're set up the same crazy. So easy. So, yeah, that's a waste of money. So she ends up being a respected nurse. The patients love her. One patient who served as a surrogate mother for friends of hers said she was one of Melanie McGuire's now. That's her new name. One of her patients from October 2003 on, she said after a failed embryo transfer, she said that Melanie was very kind, very loving, and she said it wasn't my fault. Okay, yeah, no, you're the one who transferred it. It's not like I held it myself and stuck it in me. You guys did it. It's your fault. So parents at the clinic said that she had very cool professionalism, but also was sassy and salty.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

Which fits her personality. One woman said she was talking to me about how they give older women ultrasounds to see if they are potentially fertile. And she said, with a lot of people, you can tell right away because their ovaries are like little raisins.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That means that's good. Or is that bad?

[James Pietragallo]

Bad. Shriveled up red. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it'd be great to grow in an environment of the inside of a raisin. I just thought that was great.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Fantastic.

[James Pietragallo]

Making fun of patience, internal organs. Isn't that great?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Your wrinkly ass ovaries.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Most people in the medical profession don't talk that way. No. Because it's completely unprofessional. So bad. One time she was doing, I guess, an interview about this with somebody about this thing, and she said, this is Melanie. It's an emotional process. A good deal of the work meant. A good deal of the work means exercising delicacy and compassion. On one hand, you have to be supportive, but on the other hand, you need to be frank and honest without upsetting these people.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

She actually said without upsetting the clients, which I find a little bit disturbing. To call patients clients is weird, isn't it?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. In a medical setting. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. It's just weird. Another patient said that she could be refreshingly blunt. She said, you want someone who will tell it like it is. That's what you want. She said that, you know, she was skeptical, this woman, about her chances for success in the early stages of the process. But it was Melanie who said to her, quote, remember, the uglier the embryos, the more beautiful the babies.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I've always heard that.

[James Pietragallo]

That's, that's, that's an old idiom, I think. I think my grandfather used to tell me that all the time. Listen, he'd go, remember, don't you? The more. Yeah, the uglier the embryos, the more beautiful the babies. That's what my grandfather would say. And then he'd eat pizza. That's how he did it. It's great. 2002, they have another son now. When she became pregnant In June of 2001, Bill suspected that she was taking some fertility drugs from work. Oh, he's like, hold on a minute, we're not even trying to have a baby. You've been taking drugs, haven't you? Which if you left it in her.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's how it happens.

[James Pietragallo]

That's how it happens. Generally. Maybe she did, but also maybe not. But this caused a lot of friction. He was mad at her, he said, for not taking his wishes into consideration. Well, put something on your dick then. Buddy works.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Her friend said he was not that thrilled that she was pregnant again. I'd say everything seemed to be okay until her second child. I don't think it was the money, but he was fine with the child he had. We have a kid, we're happy with this kid. We gotta have another kid now. But he realized that he's going to be a father for the second time. So he's looking for more ways to increase income. He goes to the njit, the school he works at, and went to. He goes to their health clinic in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when he realized the need for a computer program that could cut out the time consuming nature of the paperwork.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Sure, sure.

[James Pietragallo]

So he asked a senior programmer in his office to help him develop a software program for. For it. And he said, let's form a company and develop a program. So she said that's where the idea of Javista software came into the picture. So they founded this consulting company in mid-2001, and they set up a jointed bank account with $12,000 in it to make this thing. So Bill's trying to. He's ambitious. A few months later, Bill takes a second job, working nights as a senior programmer for the Essex Cast County Health Department as well, which he made almost as much money as he did at the school. Doubled up his money, basically, yeah. So after signing off at 4:00 clock from work, he would go to South Orange until 11:00pm Then he'd go home for a few hours sleep and get up early again so he could get to work by 7:30am that's brutal. Off work at 11 o', clock, at work again by 7 o'. Clock. 7:30 is brutal. So Bill and Melanie never really saw each other at that point. And they kind of drift apart. Now their babies spend most of the time in daycare or being taken care of by the grandparents because she works all day, he's working all day and all night. And they live in this apartment in Woodbridge still. They still live in this apartment.

[Jimmy Whisman]

They're stacking cash.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, they're stacking cash. It's the Woodbridge Center Plaza Apartments. So now Bill's sister said that Bill was a caring father and took the lead of the couples of the childcare, which, while he's working two jobs. I don't know how he would do that, but when he wasn't, I guess he was the sister. Nancy said he was more of a mother than Melanie was.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Very nice.

[James Pietragallo]

Okay, so Melanie again, talking to patients at one point she talks about how she believed one of her sons might have been autistic with a patient. And at one point she was anxious about a carbon monoxide leak. That was the carbon monoxide detector went off at the house. But this patient said talking to her, you would never know something was going on with her. Except that she had complained that her husband was an idiot. Or other choice words like every woman does. Just a bad day at home kind of stuff. My husband's an idiot. Oh, mine too. They're all idiots.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Absolute moron.

[James Pietragallo]

My husband is an idiot is the female version of My wife's a pain in the ass.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, right.

[James Pietragallo]

Every husband's an idiot and every wife's a pain in the ass. That's right. That's the basis of every sitcom that's ever existed.

[Jimmy Whisman]

100%.

[James Pietragallo]

She's a nag and he's a dork. That's it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He doesn't know shit. She knows everything and she loves to tell me, so.

[James Pietragallo]

Yes. Loves to rub my fucking nose in it like a golden retriever in a pile of shit. So according to the brother or the sister, Nancy, he had a goal, Bill did, of buying a home by the time he was 40. Okay. Now they were looking for a home. According to Nancy, the sister, Melanie looked up neighborhoods and thought her children would be living among Foreigners. When they found a house they liked, it was like, don't want that. She's like, they will not live there. So finally they find their dream home. It's half a million dollars.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And there's a whole thing about it costs $515,000, but it's only appraised for $500,000. So Bill said he feels obligated to pay the difference because he's already signed on and his sister's telling him just to drop the deal and doesn't want all this type of shit. They end up meeting in the middle at 50, at 500. 7,500. Yeah. Basically is how that worked. That Thanksgiving, Bill, Melanie and her stepfather Michael attended an open house for a half million dollar property in the Asbury section of Franklin Township in Warren County. So while Melanie and her stepdad remained downstairs, the owner gave Bill a guided tour of the four bedroom house. It's got vaulted ceilings, it's on two acres and it's half a million dollars in 2004.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's a good one.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is a lot of houses. Yeah, that is so much more money in 2004. The median home price in this country was like 160 grand in 2004. So that's a lot of money. So April 28, 2004, here. By that time he's earning about $65,000 a year. She's making good money too. So they're going to, it's going to stretch them. It's a big mortgage, but they want to make it work.

[Jimmy Whisman]

If you're committed, you can make it happen.

[James Pietragallo]

You can. Yeah. I mean if you're, if he's willing to work extra jobs, if he has to and everything, then why not? So they, they're going to close on this house on April 28th is closing day. Bill has taken the next two weeks off from his job at the New Jersey Institute of Technology so he can get set up in the home, which is smart. The worst thing is moving into a place and then having to go right back to work, living among boxes. When you're at work, you're thinking about home. You can't do it. It's a mess.

[Jimmy Whisman]

So when you're home you're like, I just want out of here. I just want this all put together.

[James Pietragallo]

I want to go back to work. This place sucks. At least at work my desk is put together. This blows. So that night he returns to the Woodbridge apartment. I guess he and Melanie. Bill calls the gas Company at 5:37pm this is to transfer the account to the new house. Sure. Now they're not going to stay there yet. They're going to move in over the weekend. But he's doing all this tonight at 5:44 and 5:59. He called two friends of his to tell them excitedly that he closed on the house.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yep, I got it.

[James Pietragallo]

How cool is this? I did it. I did it. So later that evening though, the seller of the house called Bill. And they had been going back and forth communicating a lot and Bill didn't answer. And Bill, if he didn't answer, if he was at work or something, would always get right back to the guy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

This time though, he never got back to him. Bill never returned the call. So this guy was like, what the fuck is going on?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah. Where's Bill?

[James Pietragallo]

Basically after 6:10pm that night, nobody outside the house talked to Bill.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh really?

[James Pietragallo]

That night? No. Which was unusual because he's normally very active on his phones. He's got multiple phones for different jobs. This one for work. He's got a BlackBerry that he uses for everything 2004. So it's weird that he would be radio silent here. Now. The next day, Melanie says he left.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He left me. He left all of us.

[James Pietragallo]

He left last night, took off. And not only that, there was a big fight that caused this.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, and a fight.

[James Pietragallo]

Melanie says her husband began arguing with her. This is about 2:30 in the morning. And he slapped her and then stuffed a dryer cloth in her mouth. So stuff some bounce in her mouth there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, I'm out of here.

[James Pietragallo]

Bounce.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Snuggle this bitch.

[James Pietragallo]

Bounce out, bitch. Yeah, this is so slaps her and stuffs a dryer cloth in her mouth. That's her claim. And then fled in a rage after she locked herself in the bathroom.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

She couldn't take her 2:30 in the morning.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She ran away. So he left.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is an odd day to fight. The day you close on a new house.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Certainly. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

That should be a day to have a blowout. But we don't know. We're not there. So that's her story. Now he's gone, don't know where he went and she doesn't care. She's ready to break up. She says she's ready to be done with this Anyway. Yeah. So. April 30, 2004. Two days later, after the closing Williams 2002 Blue Nissan Maxima is outside. Is parked outside the Flamingo Hotel in Atlantic City. Okay, okay. Now, surveillance cameras later will capture an image of someone getting out of the car and Walking toward the boardwalk. Looks like a woman getting out of the car. Looks like her hair's up and she looks like there's some boobs there. So looks like a woman. And it's a grainy surveillance footage from 2004, but you can tell the outline of a woman. Basically, everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com Switch and now T Mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits. Plan features and taxes and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits. Credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required. So now they couldn't tell who it was. And they find out later that Bill never checked into any hotels down there. Okay, put his cars down there two days after he disappeared. Then that's April 30th. Then May 5th comes along. That is when that suitcase, that drifted out. When boaters find a suitcase. Okay, remember we left off, they had called 911. Now back to the boat. Blood is leaking out of the suitcase at this point all over the boat here. So the two men placed it at the back of the boat. Where you keep your bloody things.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Well, that's where all the fish gets to drain.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, I keep my biohazard back there usually. And they headed toward Island 4. After a half hour of circling, there's still no sign of police. So he calls 911 again and the dispatcher says, we're sorry, go to Island 2. I fucked up. Cops are on the way. Wrong island.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Maybe Island 3. I don't know.

[James Pietragallo]

We don't know. So he gets to Island 2 circles for a half hour. Nothing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Nothing.

[James Pietragallo]

Now he's pissed. Yeah, I just throw the fucking things back in the water now.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm not dragging this all over now.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he said it was more than an hour after we called and found the case. He says, I'm not real happy. The boy was traumatized. I told him there's no reason to get upset and there's nothing that's going to hurt you. It's something really bad and you don't need to worry about. But you don't want to see severed legs when you're 12. So he called 911 a third time and said, I'm going back to the Virginia Beach Marina. Meet me there if you want to. There'll be legs on my boat. If you want to grab those, I'm going home. He said this was starting to be a mess. The deck of the boat had turned pink. Blood was seeping out, and I was worried. You don't want your kids around somebody's blood.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

That's horrible. So the suitcase. Cops eventually come and they bring it. It's a medium sized Kenneth Cole reaction. Suitcase to the Virginia police Beach police headquarters to be forensically examined. The medical examiner's office. Here we go. Dr. Wendy Guenther, who's the assistant chief medical examiner, takes the legs out of the black plastic trash bags, lays them out on a surgical table. She said this was very unusual. She said, I've never before received a pair of legs from the knees down. Oh, legs are usually at the hips.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Is where they cut those. She said it was impossible to tell gender from lower legs, but she could tell they were a very hairy and had muscular calves. They look like a guy's leg. Yeah. Said you could tell right away that they were right and left, which I would fucking hope so.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. That's good news.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Imagine if you open a suitcase and it was two left. You'd be like, oh, no, there's a lot more. Yeah. So she said they looked like they'd been sawed off. And they also looked for. They had no smell like the legs of people who come from the hospital the day before. The right leg was cut through the knee, exposing the tibia. It looked like a saw mark cutting through the cartilage, and the muscle looked kind of fresh. She also noted there was no blood where the knees had been severed, although some had started to cut and suddenly stopped, started to come out. There was little else. She said she could just take the blood and hairs for DNA for later. Otherwise, their legs, there's no. There's no toe prints to match up with anybody. Yeah. So the Virginia Police Department's forensic unit supervisor, who works crime scene investigations, they started testing for more trace evidence. This person, the supervisor said, when I first saw the legs, it looked almost surreal. I thought to myself, this is the start of something that's going to be very, very bad.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Very bad.

[James Pietragallo]

Very, very bad. So May 8, 2004, three days later, that is when Bill's abandoned 2002 Nissan Maxima is towed to a police impound yard from the Flamingo because it's been there forever. So it's removed from the Flamingo Hotel by a private towing company, which eventually contacts the police after the vehicle goes unclaimed. So that's how that goes May 11, 2004.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Now let's. We'll go back one day to May 10th. A female young lady graduate student is picking up litter on Fisherman's island at a bird sanctuary when she spots on the sandy beach, just all alone by itself. Just like a big seashell. Instead, it's a large, dark green suitcase. Shit. She didn't pay attention to it. She just kept on doing what she was doing. Then she came back the next day and it was still there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

She's like, oh, that's weird. Yeah. So it's getting warm too. It's in the high 70s. It's June or it's May. She bent down and unzipped the side. She said she barely got it open when the overwhelming odor punched her in the face. Which is a. Really says a lot for these Kenneth Cole suitcases because.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, that's pretty impressive.

[James Pietragallo]

You have to open the zipper to get the smell. That's pretty.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Smell inside it. That's great. Your dirty laundry will stay in.

[James Pietragallo]

It's going to stay in. So then she saw a glimpse, just a little tiny piece of a human shoulder.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, no.

[James Pietragallo]

And screamed and ran away and called the cops, which is. Jesus Christ, man. That's a bad day of bird watching.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She saw the shoulder, though, and. Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Anything good today? Yeah, yeah. The spotted New Jersey man shoulder I found. So the large 30 inch Kenneth Cole reaction suitcase was lying face down in the sand with both zippers open, revealing the end of a black plastic trash bag. It was in worse condition than the earlier suitcase. It was waterlogged and had a lot of sand in. Had probably been on the beach for several days.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Now, after the crime scene people photographed it, they placed the case, they weighed the case. It weighed between 70 and 80 pounds.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, wow, that's a big case.

[James Pietragallo]

It's a big case. Into a body bag before putting it in a tin tub. Yeah, that'll make you pay extra at the Air Delta. Charge you for that. Shit, they may not even take that. If you pay for it, they will. There's oversized bags.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

All right. Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, right, right, right.

[James Pietragallo]

You give them money, they'll take anything.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, sure, sure.

[James Pietragallo]

You can ship a coffin if you want to, but it costs you. So they end up observing the crime scene people and detectives. They watched as they unzip the suitcase and they see the trash, the trash bags in there. And the crime scene person said it smelled like decomposing flesh, rotten fish and the actual sea or bay water, which is a horrible combination. That is not a Yankee candle that's being made right now. Bay water alone, no good decomp, rotten fish. And bay water is not the newest Yankee Candle. So they packaged it, I guess. Everything in the suitcase had been packaged into four separate trash bags. Two large industrial sized ones and two small kitchen type ones with yellow drawstrings. So they said they were doing it step by step, unzipping, photographing, starting to remove the bags away from the. All this and photograph it. So they get all the trash bags open and apart. And they said it revealed the torso of a white male, his head and arms still attached. Oh, boy, just a torso. So they were like, whoa. The torso was lying on its back in the suitcase, right arm up over the shoulder, left arm under the chest, across the belly, with three fingers curled. The first finger and thumb were in a cocked position as if pointing a gun, that type of thing, over the kitchen type bags. One of the kitchen type bags had been raised over its head, while another went from the severed part up. The two bags met in the middle of his chest. Then two larger trash bags had been placed over them from either end and sealed. The examiner said the head was attached. You didn't have to look hard to see the bullet hole in his forehead. And then there was one in his back. They stood out. So they said his eyes were closed. Let's hope he was asleep when this happened. Yeah. Now, a heavily blood stained blanket had been wrapped around the back of the head to the ears, bunching up around the chin without covering the face. When they removed it, the blanket, they immediately recognized it as hospital linen. Oh, yeah. Noting a tag that read Property of the hcsc.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Is this how they dispose you in hospitals?

[James Pietragallo]

This is how you do it. Yeah. You don't want to die in a hospital.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

Throw you overboard on the beach. Yeah. This is how you like. If a pirate's mad at you, this is how you end up.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I have heard that hospitals are murder factories and this is a dead giveaway.

[James Pietragallo]

So she made a Google search, discovering that it had come from an Allentown, Pennsylvania based medical supply company. So the head and torso are in the early stages of decomposition. The skin is discolored with gray and green marbling and pale white, green and red spots. There was also skin slippage and some hair had fallen off. This is not what you want to see.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

The hands had severe wrinkling from being in the water for so long, but there was little sign of any blood or other biological fluids. This woman said this was one of the most brutal crimes I've ever seen. This is the 17 years of CSI. Forensics lady said that. She said the fact that somebody can dismember another human being like a piece of meat is just very disturbing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

One of the detectives said, this is Detective Ray Pickle.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ray Pickle.

[James Pietragallo]

Old Ray Pickle said the insides were coming out onto the gurney.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ah, Jesus.

[James Pietragallo]

Of the torso. But I don't remember seeing a lot of blood on the body itself. There was decomposition, but no blood that was pooling or spilling onto the gurney. So they put the torso in the freezer for autopsy, I guess. So it would congeal and get less messy. Stop falling apart, I guess too. So it could be autopsied the next day. So they put everything else in bags to be tested. So now we have a human head, torso, some part of the arms, by the way, the arms are cut off too. There's the upper part of the arms are attached to the torso. So the next morning they do an autopsy on the head and torso. Because now that's something you can actually look at. The doctor noted, I saw the body of a white man beginning to decompose. He was between 30 and 40, looked healthy, muscular, not overweight. The scalp hair was brown and about a half inch long. It was beginning to slide off. I saw the entry and exit wounds on the head. Both of the bullets that killed him seem to have entered and exited the body.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow.

[James Pietragallo]

So then now if you can narrow down a crime scene, you might be able to find them, which is good.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That is a wild description of a body.

[James Pietragallo]

Isn't it crazy? Jesus, this is awful. This is why this stuff isn't like during a live show. This isn't real fun during a comedy show.

[Jimmy Whisman]

This is terrible.

[James Pietragallo]

We'll talk about gross stuff, don't get me wrong, but it's also. It's a comedy show. So this is a long description of this. She then sawed through the top of the skull, removing it to reveal the brain. Autopsy shit. She said the bullet enters on the left side of the forehead and goes through the skull, right through the frontal bone. And it goes through the parietal bone on the opposite side, through the brain, leaving little pieces of lead wipe. But the brain was so badly decomposed that it liquefied and fell apart when they tried to remove it from the skull.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, my word.

[James Pietragallo]

Ugh. That is disgusting. She said, we had a pan there waiting to catch it, so we were able to weigh it. I took my knife and made cuts through it. And as I see the bloody. The bloody decomposed rot where the bullet Must have passed through. And it goes in a straight line from where the bullet goes in and out. But if you asked me what fine structure of his brain it went through, I don't know, because it's starting to rot and go bad. She turned her attention to the lower chest and abdomen, where there's another fatal gunshot wound. This bullet had entered the abdomen just below the edge of the ribs, three and three quarter inches left of the midline. It had probably traveled through the lung before exiting out the back. Bullet not recovered. She said it was impossible to determine if he had been shot three or four times. The bullet could be. Could have been a short return, partially exiting the body, then falling back, which is something highly unusual, but not impossible. She said it was very frustrating. The bullet went right through his lung and leaves in the back after shattering his fifth rib. She described the exit wound as being a big halo of blood, proving that he was alive when he was shot, wasn't afterwards. So the doctor then retrieved two bullets still embedded in the body.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, really?

[James Pietragallo]

Now he got two. The first remove from the chest cavity was in prec pristine condition. But getting the second bullet was difficult. They had. They had to lift the torso onto a gurney, roll it onto the stomach, guts spilling out everywhere. She said, everything started shifting. The second bullet was found loose on the gurney close to the waist area. A lot of the insides fell out. The bullet was under that, damn it. So you had to move aside a pancreas to get that bullet. The bullet was covered in green fibers like the ones used in furniture upholstery.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

They said. They said there was another piece of fiber wrapped around the head. She said, I collected the DNA of the torso to see if all the body parts matched up. Let's see if these legs and these torso go together. Imagine if they did.

[Jimmy Whisman]

They fit.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, like, oh, shit. We got much bigger problem.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, no.

[James Pietragallo]

May 16, 2004. Five days after that suitcase is found, Carl and Linda Stevens are floating, hanging out off the bridge tunnel, second island. Okay. They find a suitcase floating. It's just floating. Kenneth Cole suitcase around this area. Everybody who comes here and boats and does shit now knows if you see a suitcase, don't call the police and do not open. The gossip is spread through the boating community. So, yeah, this. So they call them Virginia Beach Marine Patrol. And they tied the suitcase to the back of their patrol boat like a fucking. Like a bass to a fucking trolling motor boat like a rowboat.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And he is.

[James Pietragallo]

Dragged it back. Yeah, they dragged it back. Yeah, that's. That's fun. Anyway, it gets to ski.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So, yeah, the boater finds the suitcase, they bring it in to the lab. Yeah. They removed the blanket immediately, recognizing a small 26 inch Kenneth Cole suitcase. That is the carry on in that set, by the way.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Two biggies. It's a full set of bags. The two big ones and a carry on. It matched the other two. It was lying flat on its back with two marine patrol ropes still attached to it. The smallest of the three of the suitcases. Anyway, it was full of water and extremely heavy. They said this was probably the most potent of all the suitcases. Again, it was a strong odor of decomposing flesh, rotten fish and that nasty bay water. After photographing it, she put it in a white body bag, placed it in the same metal tub as the first one. Oh, man. So they autopsy and they said that the trash bags were covered in slimy, oily film. And they said you knew this was probably going to be the least pleasant of them all. You've got a body part that's opened at both ends. It's been out there the longest. So the rate of decomposition, decay and slippage was going to be much greater than the other two. They said they found it extremely difficult to find the trash bags openings. So they didn't want to destroy the evidence. So they removed the trash bags from the suitcase with the body part still inside so they had more space. And that's when they found the opening. They pulled it apart and again they found a smaller plastic kitchen bag with yellow drawstrings inside. They said, we parted that and that's when we discovered the midsection of a white male, lower torso to knees. It had been severed at the waist and above the left and right knee. The midsection was wearing a blood stained pair of Fruit of the Looms men's brief was in far worse condition than the others. She said there was more decomposition. The skin had a greenish tint to it. There was so much more skin slippage, especially around the wounds where it had been severed. Jesus, this is horrifying. And my favorite part, not of this, but my favorite part of doing this show is that knowing that while people are preparing Christmas dinner, they're gonna be listening to this. They're gonna be stuffing turkeys while this is hot. The mid torso had three cuts, one through the waist and the others above where the knees were. Obviously they said at each cut site there was exposed tissue and bone. Wow. So that's how that goes. Wow. So they perform an autopsy on that. And they said this was below the belly button to above the knees. It was badly decomposed. The connective tissue was exposed. The bladder was still intact. The testicles were normal. Well, thank God for that. Thankfully, at least his testicles are fine.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Why do they do.

[James Pietragallo]

I don't think it matters considering the condition of the rest of the body. Unbelievable. She then removed the bones from the flesh so they could be examined by a tool mark expert to determine what instrument had been used to cut this poor guy apart. So all in all, they found two bullets in the torso and two different exit and entrance wounds. So four shots altogether. Blankets from hospital supply company. That's going to help. Three matching suitcases. And they said, Virginia beach police said, we have no nothing. We have no motive, no suspect. We don't even know who it is.

[Jimmy Whisman]

We don't even know who it is.

[James Pietragallo]

We got nothing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow.

[James Pietragallo]

Nothing. So they don't know anything. What are you going to do? So by the way, back in Woodbridge, Melanie had left the apartment. All the furnishings have been cleaned out and the telephone was disconnected by this time. So he's gone for two weeks after they get in a fight. She's done leaves. Yeah, she's leaving. So yeah, they're going all that. And now another thing they found in the suitcases was a 5.5 pound weeder brand weight for a weight set, round weight that a bar goes through. So they found that in there too. They had a ballistics test conducted on the bullets taken from the body and determined that they are round nosed bullets fired from a.38 caliber Taurus handgun. Okay. Now the body, they said what it looked like from the tool marking experts is that the body was first cut with a scalpel, then with both a reciprocating saw.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh boy.

[James Pietragallo]

And an electric carving knife.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, my God.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, think about that while you get your turkey ready. Wow. They said that the severed everything was placed in plastic and placed in the luggage in the water. And that's how it happened. So May 21, 2004, police release a composite sketch of the man's face. This is his face that's bloated. They got to take the bullet hole out and everything like that. Now this is down in Virginia where John and Susan Rice live. Remember them? They were the people that he knew from the Navy and all that Bill was John's best man at his wedding here. So anyway, so this, the picture was distorted, but Susan said immediately looking at the picture, it looked like Bill. That looks like Bill McGuire and she doesn't even know Bill McGuire's missing. Oh, that looks like Bill.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She saw a photo, a crime scene, and said, that's your body.

[James Pietragallo]

That's him. It's not even a photo. It's a sketch.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right?

[James Pietragallo]

A sketch.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Hand drawn.

[James Pietragallo]

It all hand drawn. They followed it all closely, and they knew at this point that they haven't talked to Bill, but. So they didn't know what was going on, but they thought Bill was just cooling off from his wife there. John remarked how strange it would be if it turned out to be Bill in these suitcases and then laughed and was like, yeah, right. But sue, the wife, is looking at the sketch and she said, it's fucking Bill.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That sure looks like him.

[James Pietragallo]

I'm pretty sure it looks like Bill. She said, it was him. I was shaky and I got sick. She called Bill's older sister Cindy to see if he was still missing because they didn't even know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

Cause he could be over there having dinner right now. It's definitely not Bill. Then she didn't mention the sketch. She just said, is Bill. You guys found Bill. What's going on with Bill? And Cindy said, no, he's still missing. So then she went online and compared a recent photograph of Bill with the police sketch posted on the local news television website. She said, those eyelashes, the nose, the mouth, the crooked teeth, when you've looked at someone's face for so long, when you've looked them in the eyes, the similarities are hard to mistake. I put the two together. The sketch was very bloated, but that's what happens to anybody in water. So I'm thinking if it were shrunken. If it were shrunken in. She's trying to picture it less bloated. She said suddenly it was like 911 all over again. It was just too close. What? I get that you're 30 in 2004, 35 minutes from the city. You get that. But 911 is a very. That's a crazy comparison. Wow. So she called the Virginia beach homicide detectives and said, hey, I think I found this guy. He's missing. I think you got him over there. She tried to call her husband John, too. She couldn't reach him, though. That's when she talked to the sister and all that kind of stuff. So she called the police. She didn't get a response, so she called again. So investigators got on the phone and interviewed them over the phone. They were asked to come down and look at pictures of the body.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So they get down there, they bring them into a small room, seat them around a table, and they said they showed them color pictures and sue said he showed us the color ones and he had to prepare us because there was the slippage. The body was bloated, so you had to use your imagination. So with her hands, she masked out the hairline and the bloating to get an idea of just the features. Just to get eyes, nose, mouth in that little thing. She said it was so weird. You have to look at the eyes, the nose, the mouth. And by using my hands to block parts of the face. That was Bill. He had long eyelashes. That was still there. He had this little red mark that was still there. The nose, the mouth, the crooked teeth. That was Bill.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow.

[James Pietragallo]

Jesus Christ. The close up picture was they didn't show him the close up of the bullet wound. She didn't have see to see that, luckily. So now they think it might be Bill. So they do some tests and guess what? He has fingerprints on file from the arrests. Well, it was for they remember when they fingerprinted him and let him go for the checks thing. That's what they have there, felony. So, yep, they found out that he was that. That's the guy. Minor felony. So John, his friend, said it was like being in a daze. We were all sickened. I barely slept. So they called his sister, assuming that Cindy knew her brother was murdered. And she said at the time she thought he committed suicide. She just heard he was dead but didn't know he was murdered, which is interesting. So the three suitcases are matching. And multiple people confirmed those are Bill's suitcases.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Those are his shits.

[James Pietragallo]

Those are his. That same day, Melanie signs papers looking for a divorce. Signs divorce papers.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, really?

[James Pietragallo]

Yep. She filed. She said she was. She said this was filed three days before she was told that Bill was dead. She claimed he had a history of heavy gambling and expressed concern that he was depleting their savings. She reclaimed he withdrew $5,000 from their checking account in March without her knowledge to gamble in Atlantic City. And then they had closed on the house and all that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She kind of like a piece of shit for that.

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know. She said that the home also had become a manic obsession for Bill and his behavior turned increasingly bizarre around the time of the closing. She said there were spells of paranoia. One night he woke up in a bout of scratching. Oh, just scratching himself. She said he would go through periods of not sleeping for 48 hours. Literally spending every minute that he was not at work looking at real estate listings. That's called buying a house.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's called an addiction.

[James Pietragallo]

That's fun, but it's an addiction that you have to do if you're buying a house. That's the only way to buy a house.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Is this the right one?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, we bought a couple and that's what we did. All day, all night. We had Zillow on the tv, and we're just going through.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

God, is that still available? Who knows? You want to fucking off yourself. So, yeah. So she said that also there's. He claimed bankruptcy. He had gambling debts. He had a drinking problem. He's a terrible guy. She said that Bill told her that if she would only move to Virginia with him that all their problems would disappear, but she didn't want to. She said after she hung up the phone, Bill called back and screamed multiple obscenities into the answering machine, threatened to kill Melanie when he got home that day. Now, according to this divorce complaint, she said she argued with him and he argued with her and, quote, threatened to disappear, work under a false name and Social Security number and never provide her with any social or financial support.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'll disappear, God damn it.

[James Pietragallo]

I will disappear. I will explode into multiple pieces and throw myself in the ocean. Don't think I won't see me again. So unless you got a fishing boat, you won't. So she said following the closing of the house, her husband assaulted her and that was that. And the next day, they were arguing, he slapped her, stuffed a dryer sheet in her mouth, and he took off. And she hasn't seen him since. And she's happy and wants a divorce. Friends don't believe her stories.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

But one person that does is Marcy. As we'll talk about Marcy, the ex wife, she believes every word. Now, Susan said when we heard that, we thought it was so out of character. John said, we knew there were arguments, but they weren't ever physical. Nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors. We don't fucking know what people do. Susan said that Bill hated wife abusers. He thought they were lowlives. What's a hot take? Who says? I get it. Sometimes you gotta give her the back of your hand. I mean, who says that to their friends? You know what I mean? This is very rare, normally. Oh, yeah. Those are bad guys. Who else do you hate? Pedophiles. Any other hot takes again? Yeah. And they also said that the Rice's said they were never aware of any gambling problems indicated in the divorce papers. Instead, they said Bill was a smart gambler who had great luck. They talked about a trip to Atlantic City In October, when Bill bought the suitcases that he was found in, he won $40,000 on that trip. He did real well. He ended up paying for all their hotels and food and everything like that. So the Rice has said they last spoke to Bill in April and said there was nothing to suggest he was gonna disappear. And also not in Virginia. John Rice said if he was going to Virginia, he would have called us.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, because that's where we live and we're best friends. He'd come see him.

[James Pietragallo]

Best friend. He's my son's godfather, Rice said. I wish I could have said, hold on a second. That's a really good guy, my best friend, my son's godfather. If I needed anything, he would be there for me. Now they look into Bill's gambling to see if maybe he could owe somebody money. This looks like somebody cut somebody up, like, certainly.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Kind of a mob hit thing. But they found out that when he gambled in Atlantic City the last time, he won two or three times what he started out with. And that's what John Rhys said, too. According to the staff at the Taj Mahal, he was a very disciplined gambler.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really good at it.

[James Pietragallo]

He wasn't a wild guy. He was doing this not for fun, to make money. He knew what he was doing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He had strategy.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he had strategy. They said that. Investigators said that they checked into his gambling history, and he's a net winner in Atlantic City. Wow. So that's not it. They said he didn't have any money problems, even at work. They said he often failed to seek reimbursement for travel and other legit expenses because he didn't need the money. He's doing well. So. Melanie will not comment. She's questioned by police but has declined to comment publicly. That's it. She just told the cops he left the house on the morning of the 29th. Never heard from him again. That's all I know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

Is she sad, though? Is she? Well, one of her clients there at the. One of her patients, I should say, said she wasn't crying, but I would say she was appropriately saddened.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

How do you judge who cries when their spouse dies? That's weird. I assumed he had died of a terminal illness just because of his age. It was only a couple weeks later when somebody mentioned to me, oh, her husband was murdered, but we didn't talk about his actual death. She said, my husband passed away. I didn't feel it was appropriate to push for details. Dude, if your significant other dies in this fashion, you don't just go. They passed away anyway. Going on to the.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's appropriate at his age.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. They often dismember themselves and hop into the ocean. So she filed for divorce. She talks to the cops like we said, and they said these stuff. Statements that she made then are inconsistent with what the investigation has uncovered. So they start getting suspicious of Melanie here. September 29, 2004, the police in Virginia finally decide that he didn't die in Virginia.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

And they transfer this to New Jersey.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

They finally do that. So now New Jersey finally takes over jurisdiction and can finally look in New Jersey. Because they didn't even have the case before that, so they couldn't go around. If you have something that's not even your case and you have. You're a homicide detective, you can't investigate anything. You have actual cases. You have to work. Go tell your boss that I'm gonna work this case that's not even ours yet. He's like, get the fuck outta here.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Working on Virginia this week.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Solve the cases we have. Please don't make more.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

So that's what happens now. The investigation reveals this, and this is fun. The Jersey police reveal a lot. They find that on April 26, 2004, two days before he disappears, Melanie McGuire made a little purchase. She went to Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania, and bought a.38 caliber Taurus handgun.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, that's not good.

[James Pietragallo]

That is not good. What were Those bullets again?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.38s, right.

[James Pietragallo]

Fired from what?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Round nose. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. She used a fraudulent Pennsylvania driver's license and fake address to do this. Now, her driver's license, the one she had that she used, bore her real name, but listed her address as being in Pennsylvania. They used this for the insurance because Bill's always looking for an angle. Pennsylvania insurance rates are cheaper than Jersey, so they use that. So that's their residence, so they get cheaper insurance. So police say here that she purchased a Taurus.38 from John's gun and Tackle Room.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. That's a reputable source.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, yeah. It looks like from the outside, it looks like one of those tiny Wisconsin bars that everybody's been going to for a hundred years. Yeah. That has, like, wood paneling around it. And inside of it there's a sign that says cash only on the fucking gas register, which is. Are you joking?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

These are guns. Can we get a record, a clear record? She also made a purchase of 9.95 at the. The gun shop. The receipt didn't indicate what it was for because it's a handwritten receipt. But only two items in the store cost that much, and one of them was round nose.38 slugs, so that's not good. And the shop owner then picked Melanie McGuire out of a photo lineup as the person who purchased a.38.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And those bullets, that's who has this gun.

[James Pietragallo]

John of the gun and tackle room identified her. Now, what does Melanie have to say about that?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Tell me.

[James Pietragallo]

They said, listen, I mean, this looks bad, right? It's two days before you got shot with.38. You have a.38. You didn't report a missing. This all looks bad. She said, I can explain.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay?

[James Pietragallo]

I got this. She said, yes, I did buy a.38 caliber handgun. Absolutely true. She can't deny it. She's been picked out by John at this point. She said, but I just bought it to have it. And I bought it and immediately went and put it in a storage facility.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's good.

[James Pietragallo]

She said, now, when they said, well, where is it now? She said, well, I went back to the storage facility when I was moving and putting stuff in and it was gone. Somebody stole it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

If you could find it for me too, that'd be great.

[James Pietragallo]

Be great. I don't know. Yeah, somebody stole it, though. I don't have it. Then they start looking into her. Her digital trail.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, no.

[James Pietragallo]

That's when shit gets real interesting. Yeah. I mean, the gun thing, it's a crazy coincidence, but it could be a coincidence.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Then they look up and they find on Easter Sunday, April 11, they. I guess they, Bill and Melanie and the kids here had attended a barbecue in Brooklyn at one of the friend's houses. Bill was upbeat and chatty, walking around, talking, everybody telling everybody, we're closing on this house in two weeks. This is great. The friend said, they seemed fine. He was really excited about that house. She also said he was very mellow at that brunch. They had a couple of things that week and then they were moving. So back in Woodbridge, they believe Melanie went that night. They know because it's on the home computer. She Googled, quote, undetectable poisons, which. I've never Googled that. I don't know about that. Even for the show. I've never Googled that, which is crazy. Undetectable poisons. Then a few minutes later, she ran a search for Tomax suicide. T O M A X Tomax. I don't know. A drug probably. Undetectable poison. Probably, I would assume.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm not Googling that shit.

[James Pietragallo]

Nope. Suicide, she Googled. On Friday, April 16, she went on her home computer to investigate a little more. Here. On 7:35pm, while Bill is still at work, she typed in the words where to purchase guns without a permit on the MSN search site. That's her browser back then. That's what she's using for her homepage. Four years later, she looked up two official national or four minutes later, sorry, she looked up two official National Rifle association sites giving information about various types of weapons and state gun laws. At 7:45pm 10 minutes later, she tried another MSN search for quote, instant poisons. You ever want someone to be poisoned? But now new instant poison.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Instant poison. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Instant poisons. And a few minutes later looked up gun laws in Pa. At 5:03 on Sunday afternoon that day, Melanie went on her home computer again and conducted 18 searches. 18. She had to purchase guns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Then instant poisons, then toxic insulin levels. Oh, fatal insulin doses. Because she is a nurse and knows that is something they have to look for. Otherwise it just looks like a heart attack.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Unless they find the needle mark. Yep, that's a heart attack right there.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's good. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So they said that fatal digoxin, Digoxin doses. D, I, G, O, X, I, N. Digoxin doses. And then instant undetectable poisons. Not just instant poisons or undetectable poisons right now. And never found. At 5:41, she typed the words how to commit suicide. And then four minutes later, at 5:45, she types just the greatest search. This is small town murder in a nutshell. The greatest search in the history of small town murder. Quote, how to commit murder. You just. God damn it, don't do it. Walk outside with your hands already cuffed. You put your own cuffs. I got it, guys. I know. I taught Google how to commit murder.

[Jimmy Whisman]

How does the search not come back? It's not for you.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, you can't too easily. Don't too easily. Yeah. If I ever searched how to commit murder and then Sarah died, by any means, I would just come out with my hands behind my back. I know you're gonna find that. I know. I'm under a. I don't care if I did it or not. I'm in trouble.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So Saturday, April 24, she started contacting gun stores in Pennsylvania. First telephoning Jones Gun Shop in Allentown, then called C and D Guns in Bethlehem. At 8:20 Wednesday morning, the day of the closing, the day he's dead by the middle of the night. That night, Melanie dropped her two boys off at the Kinder Castle School on Middlesex Avenue, then drew, then drove 1.4 miles to Walgreens Pharmacy at 9:05 New Durham Road, dropping off a prescription for chloral hydrate, which is an extremely strong sedative.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Is it an instant poison?

[James Pietragallo]

It's a poison. It'll knock you out anyway. At 8:32 and then collecting it 18 minutes later and paying $9.99 in cash. Gotta love that CO pack.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So a few minutes after the closing of the house, Melanie called her boss in a panic. Her boss's name is Dr. Brad Miller. We're going to talk a lot about him. But she called in a panic and Brad said. She informed me that they had closed on the house. She sounded upset. She told me she didn't know she was going into the closing. She didn't know they were going to close that day. Today?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

She said Melanie explained that she thought they were just going to discuss the house with their lawyer. But when they walked in, they were surprised that the seller's attorney was present. Then she'd started signing the papers with Bill and it was too late. Uh oh, so you signed papers and then didn't know your. What are you talking about?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

You have some agency.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I signed something and now I own a house.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. What the fuck? I mean, I was just signing things with a lawyer. I don't understand what the deal is. I was just in a room with two attorneys present. I thought that'd be fine. So Dr. Miller said I became upset and started yelling at her. I said, you should go back in there and rip up the papers. Why do you want to buy a half million dollar house if you ultimately want to get divorced from Bill? It doesn't make any goddamn sense. What's wrong with you? So anyway, she's doing all her searches, doing all of this is happening at the same time. Then the cops find out. Speaking of Dr. Bradley T. Miller, she's been having an affair with Dr. Bradley T. Miller. No. For years.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh boy.

[James Pietragallo]

They first became friendly when she was a nurse, then when she was literally like a week away from fucking maternity leave with her second son, they had their first sexual encounter in the office.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Jesus.

[James Pietragallo]

When she's nine months pregnant.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh Lord.

[James Pietragallo]

That's when he said, I can't help. I can't take it anymore. I gotta have it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She just bent over for fuck's.

[James Pietragallo]

I gotta have it. I just have to. Jesus Christ. So that's what happened. And then it went on from there. Dr. Miller said we were always flirtatious. She had gotten me a birthday cake and bought me a small gift for Christmas. So they said that he started acting more kind of like a guy and less like a boss at that point. Melanie said he was just so kind and so very sweet. I'd come back to my desk after a long meeting with a patient and there'd be lunch sitting on my desk waiting for me. He was just very, very tender. That's why women like doctors.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He fucking seduced her.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Bill and Mel, I don't know if you have to seduce Melanie.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No. Fairly quick, fairly easy.

[James Pietragallo]

Well, I think she's up for. I think she's up for it. So it's.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Maybe a couple of compliments.

[James Pietragallo]

She.

[Jimmy Whisman]

She realizes you're into it.

[James Pietragallo]

At the same time, let's put everything else aside. You're her boss. You shouldn't be fucking her or flirting with her or trying to fuck her whether she's into it or not. You're in charge. You're literally the boss. So you're abusing your power here. So whatever. I mean, fire her and say, hey, I gotta let you go if we're gonna go out, if we're gonna do that. But otherwise, you can't just do that. So they said that they had begun. Melanie and Bill had begun bickering again, accusing each other of not putting their effort into the marriage. Dr. Miller said, I know that they argued. I heard her yelling on the phone. So she came back to work after the kid came and just continues this. This goes on through Bill, missing through everything. It even got real weird before Bill went missing. Dr. Miller said, we went together as a family. Melanie's entire family had been over to my house for cookouts.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, Jesus.

[James Pietragallo]

Even Bill even attended a poker party at the house, playing for quarters and dollars with Dr. Miller there. Cindy, Bill's sister, said they went over to the Miller's house a number of times and they also came to Bill's house. You have to be so cool to do that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Bill took all of his fucking money.

[James Pietragallo]

At least he won, you know, $8 off him. Dr. Miller said about Bill, he acted affectionate toward Melanie. He would have his arm around her or hold her hand. Melanie would also discuss her and Bill's sex life, according to Dr. Miller, and what they did in bed.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Holy.

[James Pietragallo]

He said there were three occasions that she told me after their second child were born that they had sex together.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, boy.

[James Pietragallo]

Now. So the bill or Dr. Brad and Melanie are meeting at motels. The Loop Inn is where they're meeting. And also hanging out with the families together at the same time. Melanie said, I'd take the kids grocery shopping on the weekend. He would try to meet me there. We went. He went pumpkin picking with us. He was every bit the family man, but somebody else's family. Yeah. Not yours. You're breaking up two households with this, you two idiots. So although Bill had no idea about the affair, Dr. Miller's wife had some idea about the affair. Yeah. Dr. Miller said she had questions or suspicions, but I always reassured her that nothing was going on. I always lied to her a lot.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I kept it from her. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

I kept it from. They would sneak off to hotels in the middle of the day. He would call Melanie on the phone 10 to 20 times a day, and they'd exchange as many as 50 emails a day. Wow. In March of the next year. So this is 2005, investigators approach Dr. Miller there and they want to talk to him. And he admitted, yeah, I've been having a three year affair with Melanie. He's a doctor, not a criminal. So he's like, doctors aren't good at holding up to questioning. They're not gangsters. They've always done everything right. That's how they became doctors.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And everything they do, they think about how to keep their job. So.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. How to keep their license. So he said it began when she was nine months pregnant. They were planning on divorcing their spouses, buying a house together and having children of their own, he said. Miller even said that he had an affair with Melanie from the summer of 2002 until he was approached by police. How long did it go on? He checked his watch.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Now I'm still wiping her off of me till now.

[James Pietragallo]

Or she's wiping me off of her. One of the two. Well, he might have pulled out on her. You don't know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Probably not.

[James Pietragallo]

They're married. He might want to get out.

[Jimmy Whisman]

They're trying to have kids. They don't know.

[James Pietragallo]

After they get divorced. Yeah. So Miller could not be reached, they said. So Miller told investigators he had helped move Melanie's belongings out of her apartment. Also, Dr. Miller said in a surprised way, almost, suddenly, my whole life turned upside down.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I can't believe this.

[James Pietragallo]

He said he got fired from the clinic. He said, I'm losing my job, losing my wife, losing my kids, and now I'm involved in a murder investigation.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Can't believe it.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Melanie is toxic is what that is. And you're an idiot. For a doctor, you're a fucking moron.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Jesus Christ. Now Melanie sells the House. Oh, the dream house. Yeah. Sells it. And the police never get a look at that house, by the way. Never get a look inside it. They never get to look inside the apartment either until well after she's moved, cleaned. And other people have lived there for six years.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

No, because they didn't have any idea she moved out. They didn't know it all went on like that. Now, here is what they think happened.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

Okay. This is the prosecutor's. Now that they put all this together, they have a timeline and an idea of what they think happened. And I'll read this from the book. At 6:17am Prosecutors believe Melanie began creating an elaborate alibi. First, she went on Bill's BlackBerry and sent an email to Bill's boss, Ross Ninja. His last name is Ninja with a J. Swear to God, that is the coolest name in the world. Ross Ninja. Nice to meet you, Mr. Ninja. Yes. That's awesome.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ross the Ninja dude.

[James Pietragallo]

When he was 12, he must have been the coolest guy ever. When you're 12, you want your last name to be Ninja. That's cool. Then copied his immediate superior, Tom Terry. The subject was Thursday, April 29th. I will be out sick today. But she had Tom Terry's email address wrong, and there was an immediate message from the system administrator saying it was undeliverable. Then, as they think her husband lay unconscious on the living room couch, she prepared to take the two little boys to school. As she walked past him on the way out the door, Melanie told them to. Shh. He's sleeping.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Be quiet.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. She then drove Jack and Jason to the Kinder Castle. I don't know if that's their real names or not. Kinder Castle doesn't matter to the Kinder Castle dropped them off at 8:30. Told the daycare director, Donna Todd, that she was applying for a temporary restraining order against Bill and that he had been violent toward her the night before.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, that's why he's not here.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. Just before 9am Melanie called an attorney, Melissa Brisman, saying that she would not be into work that day. Then she called Dr. Brad Miller. Oh. Called the attorney for the medical place. Okay. Dr. Miller said she sounded upset. She told me that Bill had left and went into more detail. According to Melanie, Bill Woke up about 4am and had gotten into a fight over the house. At one point, I just wake up and I'm like, God damn it, let's argue. No, you go in, you get something to eat, you go back to bed. At one point, he told her that if she Wasn't happy with him or the house he was going to leave and she could keep it. Dr. Miller continued, the dispute became physical. He pushed her up against the wall. He put a dryer sheet into her mouth, and I believe she said he was even choking her. They said the youngest son woke up crying, so she'd taken him into the bathroom and locked the door. For the next half an hour, they stayed in the bathroom, listening to, quote, activity throughout the apartment before hearing the front door slam shut. Then she came out. This is what Melanie's telling him. Melanie then asked Dr. Miller to prescribe her some Xanax to calm her down. And he said, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called in the prescription to a pharmacy near her for some Xanax. And he wrote the handwritten prescription. It said that patient complains of extreme anxiety, palpitations, nausea, difficulty concentrating. She reports that the couple closed on a new house yesterday. And later that night, the couple got into an argument, which became physical. So that's part of it, too. Now, here's what they think the actual murder was. That's that day. Now, the next day, while Bill lay unconscious in the living room, Melanie loaded the Taurus handgun that she had bought two days earlier. With the bullets, the round nose wad cutters. She aimed the powerful.38 Special at her husband's forehead and placed a green throw pillow over the barrel to dampen the noise. Remember, green fibers all in the bullet.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right through the bullet. Oh, wow.

[James Pietragallo]

Then pulled the trigger. The flat top cylindered bullet, usually used for target practice, punched a perfect round hole through Bill McGuire's frontal bone, tearing through his brain before exiting out the back of his head. She then pointed the gun at his lower chest, firing into his abdomen just below his ribcage. The second bullet ripped through his lung before exiting out his back. Then she fired two more bullets into his chest at point blank range. When the trained nurse was satisfied that her husband was dead, she began the grisly task of disposing of his remains. And with the children in daycare, she and her accomplice would have had hours to dismember the body at their leisure, leaving absolutely no traces of what she had done. Yeah, they think there's no way she could do this by herself. There's no way she could lift the bags. There's no way she could drive the car down there, because that was her getting out of the car on surveillance. How'd she get home?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Great question.

[James Pietragallo]

So someone followed her. Someone? This is pre Uber. Someone followed her. Somebody Fucking was with her. Someone was helping her. Also, it's really fucking hard to dismember this shit. She's probably pretty little, so it's hard.

[Jimmy Whisman]

To pick up a body and move a body.

[James Pietragallo]

That's the other thing. That one bag was £80.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, right.

[James Pietragallo]

So they said she first. First she prepared the shower stall in the larger of the two bathrooms on the second floor, hanging an old paint stained drop cloths around it to catch the blood. Then she blocked up the drain to stop any incriminating biological matter from getting trapped in there. Sure, sure, they'll pull your drains out quick. The shower stall, which would have provided the perfect environment for her gruesome work as it meant the cutting would be done near ground level with three walls and a shower door to contain blood spatter. Melanie utilized her medical training to create a controlled environment like a hospital mortuary before making the first cut, so it would not end up looking like something out of a horror movie. When she was ready, they undressed Bill, who weighed nearly 200 pounds. They left him only in his underpants, which were heavily soiled as he'd been unconscious for hours. Then they dragged him into the shower stall, but he was too big to fit lying down, so they placed him in a sitting position with his knees bent so the shower door would close. Melanie then produced a short bladed reciprocating power saw, plugging it into a power socket in the bathroom.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh boy.

[James Pietragallo]

After placing a hospital blanket over it to dampen the sound, she turned it on. She first began cutting straight down through his lower left knee, front to back. But although the fine toothed saw easily cut through the femur bone, it slid off the bloody flesh without cutting it. So she then cut through his flesh with a sharp bevel edged knife. Bill's severed left leg was then bled out. And before they cut off the right one below the knee in the same gruesome manner, with the lower limbs severed, there was more room in the shower stall to operate. Now. Now the prosecutors deduced that Melanie or her alleged accomplice pushed Bill's head down to the floor and started sawing through his mid backbone before hacking through his organs and flesh with the knife. Jesus. The thighs and lower body were positioned in such a way as to protect the shower fixture from being scratched by the saw. After bleeding out the rest of the body, they began parceling up Bill McGuire's body parts in plastic trash bags. First they wrapped a blue HCSC medical blanket over his face before placing a kitchen garbage bag with yellow drawstrings. Over his head and pulling it down over his shoulders and upper torso. Then they fitted a second one around the severed bottom part of his navel, pulling it up until the bags met and tightening the drawstrings. Then they wrapped the head and upper torso in three larger industrial sized heavy duty trash bags from a supply that the McGuires had used for moving before taping them shut with blue painter's tape. Then they packaged up the legs in more black trash bags before parceling the middle torso, severing at both ends and taping it shut. The New Jersey Assistant Attorney here. General. Assistant Attorney General Patty Preoccio. Sorry. Said she was meticulous. Once the body was cut and bled out and bagged, she could have simply surrounded the pieces with bags of ice. Melanie then began to clean the bathroom so no evidence of Bill's dismemberment would be found. She scrubbed and scrubbed the shower area and bathroom walls until there was no trace of blood or any biological manner. She forgot to wipe the soles of her shoes though. And later, when she placed Bill's BlackBerry and NJIT personal computer in the trunk of his Nissan Maxima, she inadvertently transferred small pieces of his flesh. What they call human sawdust.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh dear Lord. Pieces on her shoe.

[James Pietragallo]

Tiny sawdust.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh Lord.

[James Pietragallo]

Think about if you cut wood with a circular saw, what happens?

[Jimmy Whisman]

And she got that on her shoe.

[James Pietragallo]

Yep. Torn from the body by the saw. From the treads of her shoes onto the car rug. After completing the acts prosecutors believe took place place in her apartment, she drove to the family court to get a temporary restraining order against her husband. But the time was to. The line was too long so she left, spending the afternoon calling divorce attorneys instead. She called Dr. Miller several times on their private cell phones that day, although they didn't see each other. She told him that she wanted to go back to the townhouse and put away some things she needed and look for an apartment. She wanted to get to the court to file a restraining order. She wanted to get daycare. Get to daycare to make sure Bill didn't have access to the kids. At 5:30pm she picked the two boys up from daycare, driving them to her parents house where they would spend the next few days. Now let's go through the evidence. The blankets. They found those hospital blankets. Hospital Center Services Cooperative. That's the company that supplies blankets to Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So that's not good. No, the blankets from her worker there. They said that. Wow. They said it's a lot of shit here. They said that there's more evidence. They found the trash bags and determined they were from the same batch that contained Bill's body parts. Trash bag she had in her possession. A lead analyst spent weeks comparing the plastic garbage bags here from the ones from there and the ones that she had. And they said they were from the same manufacturer, made in the same place, and even on the same production line. They said, this is in the affidavit. The individual characteristics and tool markings of the bags show the bags containing the body and those that were used to pack William McGuire's belongings were made almost sequentially, very likely out of the same box.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

Additionally, they found razor stubble, hair from both Bill and Melanie on the tape used to close the bags.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Where do you keep that?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, where do you keep your stubble? I keep it in the bathroom.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Stays in my house.

[James Pietragallo]

Yep. The prosecution is saying that's gonna be a lot of evidence. Also, they found traces of nail polish they believe is the same used by Melanie on the suitcases as well. So there's that. Also. They said, well, what about this car? Yeah, that's you getting out of the car. How do you explain that? And she said very easily, oh, super easy. She said, I went out that night. He took off. I was mad at him. So I was like, I'm gonna go find him and fuck with him. So I went out into the night and just looked for his car in Atlantic City. And I literally. She said, first place I looked, there it was, hey, look. So she said, I had keys. I took his car and moved it to the Flamingo just to fuck with him. And his phone was inside the car. And I took his phones and threw them in the trunk, quote, to annoy him.

[Jimmy Whisman]

As you would.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, as who wouldn't do that? And park it at the Flamingo. So they're like, that doesn't work. Then they figured out also, she had access to Dr. Miller's prescription pads. Part of her job was calling in medications to pharmacies. So with his full permission, she would routinely copy his signature on prescriptions for drugs.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh.

[James Pietragallo]

But she started writing her self prescriptions for Xanax and other tranquilizers, which is not wonderful. So after all this happened, they found inside of his Maxima. They found Bill's Maxima. They also found a vial of pink liquid that is chloral hydrate, which is what she got from the pharmacist she was looking for.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Which is a powerful sedative. So they believe that she gave it to him, he fell asleep, then she shot Him. Which would explain the eyes closed, I hope he was asleep.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Also. So they find that. They also find two syringes. And that's an interesting thing. Oh, by the way, prescription for the chloral hydrate came from Dr. Miller's prescription pad. As if I had to tell you that. But Dr. Miller, he is not going down with this shit.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No, no, no.

[James Pietragallo]

They said, quote, Dr. Miller looked at the prescription pad and he said, that's not my signature.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I didn't write that.

[James Pietragallo]

And even said, it does appear to be Melanie McGuire's handwriting, though. Threw her right under the bus. No problem.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I would never.

[James Pietragallo]

No problem. Then there's the human sawdust. Then there's the cell phone calls and all that kind of shit there that they were finding that trail. So then they tap her phones.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

And one of her friends is. They have a recording of him going, did you do it? Did you do it? And. And her saying, no, no, no, and denying it. Then they found on May 3rd, Melanie drove overnight through Delaware, which most people with day jobs and two small kids aren't driving overnight through other states. They think that's when she was dumping the suitcases from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. She said no, she went to Delaware to shop for furniture because they didn't have sales tax.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's what I did too.

[James Pietragallo]

I went there at three in the morning to shop for furniture. That's when all the best deals are. You get them from crackheads on the side of the road. Then the state's attorney general starts getting letters. Oh, anonymous letters asserting that Melanie's being framed. Yeah. That's one package. In another package, the author of the letters sent some of Bill's personal items, including his wedding band, and said, she couldn't have done it because I did it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Some Zodiac shit, and they're out. That didn't come from the jail.

[James Pietragallo]

She's not in jail. She's not arrested.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, okay.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, she's absolutely not arrested.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, she's just under investigation.

[James Pietragallo]

She's under a lie. They're gathering evidence. Yeah. They also said they had to weed through a very, very large amount of somewhat incredible and conflicted stories from Melanie McGuire to her friends and family. What she told the cops and what she told each different friend and family member are all different.

[Jimmy Whisman]

All different.

[James Pietragallo]

There's like 30 stories of what happened, doing that. It is crazy. Yeah. Get one story, stick with it. March 7, 2005. New Jersey authorities finally get a court order obtaining to secretly record all these phone conversations. March 2005, she closes on a $300,000 house in Brick. One of her friends, a surrogate that she worked with or she helped, said she was doing awesome. She was upbeat. June 6, 2005, she drops her son off at the daycare center. And as she's coming out, literally fucking cops pop out of the bushes.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, shit. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Take her ass down. And they arrest her. The state police superintendent said the investigation over the last nine months has basically woven a very strange tale of lies, deceit, infidelity and murder. The investigators had to weave through a very large amount of somewhat incredible and conflicted stories from Melanie. So it's a lot. They say that after the slaying, she drove the car to the hotel and left it there. That way. It looks like he's gone. The one detective. This is Ray Pickle. Old Ray Pickle, he's back. He said she was always suspect number one. We had too much on her. It was obvious that the wife had something to do with this. Then he says, she thought they'd be in Davy Jones's locker forever. All right, okay, Michael Bolton, calm down. Jesus Christ. What are you talking. So she's arrested? Yeah. Also, they charge her with writing those letters to the state attorney general to throw them off the trail, which is crazy. Now, his oldest sister, Bill's sister Cindy, said she was at the breakfast table when she found out. She said, oh, thank you. I've been waiting a year to hear her be arrested. William's other sister said the family was concerned about getting custody of the children right away. She said, on one hand, I'm very happy, but at the same time, it's like finding out Billy died all over again.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, it's kind of tough.

[James Pietragallo]

So they said there may be more arrests. They said, we believe we've arrested the principal murderer. We think there are others who aided and abetted the murder and we are hotly pursuing them as well. It's not easy to cut up a body, put it in garbage bags, put those bags in suitcases, transport those suitcases over 350 miles to the Virginia beach area.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Right.

[James Pietragallo]

Her bail is set at $750,000. She posts it, oh, my God. She's released. She's released. Wow, that's wild. Now, they said they are considering the death penalty as well. Here. John Rice here, his friend, said, at first I was on her side. I didn't think she was the kind of person who could do something like that. We'd been on a couple's honeymoon. I mean, you can't honeymoon with someone. There were trips back and forth. We were hoping all along she didn't do it. I just wish I knew why. This sounds like the murder by me recently. This is.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You always want to know why.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

This is crazy. So the cops said that they. They're still searching for the murder weapon. Obviously they don't have that, but they have everything else. Ex wife. Marcy. Oh, Marcy said, quote, I know it sounds awful, but he probably got what he deserved. Dismemberment. Wow. That sounds. Yeah, Marcy. Marcy sounds just lovely. Now, if Bill beat her for years, then I understand what she's talking about. Who knows?

[Jimmy Whisman]

That's terrible.

[James Pietragallo]

We don't know. So the murder charge here is patients are like, what the fuck? All of her patients. This nice lady who helped me get pregnant killed somebody and dismembered him. One woman said, this woman, every day of her professional life, helped people having families. A woman who every day brought life into the world would not take a life. That's not our Melanie. That's not our Melanie. No. Doctors never kill nobody like that kills. One patient said, I was dealing with Melanie the exact same. Same time that this was happening. By the way, there was an online thing of this story and a bunch of comments under it. That's. One person said, I was dealing with her the exact same time all this was happening. Eeks. Scary eeks. Eeks. One said, I was just shocked. She said, I didn't believe it. That's like something out of a true crime book. It is. There's a book. I'll tell you the title later. She said, I don't see how you could take a person who's so nurturing and caring and kind and be able to turn around and be able to do something like that against a human when your whole career is based on compassion.

[Jimmy Whisman]

100%.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. I've never heard of a cop breaking the law. It's never happened. Come on, think about this. She was definitely presented to me as the guru, the one who knew everything. I never felt that she wouldn't have all the time in the world if I needed it. I really did think, literally, this is a woman the in right job, operating at the peak of her powers.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So the evidence, they're going to go to court and I'm going to lay out through the trial meticulously. Let's go, let's go through it here. This is what they have. Quote, the reports of the medical examiners, grand jury testimony, witness interviews, voluntary statements of the defendant to the police, statements defendant had made to friends and Others, records from a gun shop in Pennsylvania, business records such as telephone and pharmacy records, surveillance tapes from business locations, expert evaluations of forensic evidence gathered from the suitcases and from Bill's car, DNA identification and trace evidence, expert examination of the personal computer owned by Bill and defendant. Handwriting and linguistics analysis, consensual taping of telephone conversations, and court authorized wiretapping of the telephones of the defendant and her parents.

[Jimmy Whisman]

My God.

[James Pietragallo]

Little bit of evidence. Yeah, little bit. Also, they had evidence by anonymous communications saying that she also sent the shit to the Attorney General. Melanie's lawyer. She'll get another lawyer in a minute here. He said, naturally, in any murder investigation, the initial suspects include those closest to the victim, whether a spouse, a brother or a sister. We will have a very specific response to the state's allegations that will prove she did not commit this murder. Oh, done. So the indictments come in. Four charges of first degree murder, a charge of second degree possession of a weapon for unlawful purposes, second degree desecration of human remains, third degree perjury. Oh, her bail is raised to $2 million. She posts.

[Jimmy Whisman]

How the fuck is she doing this?

[James Pietragallo]

It's gotta be her parents. It's gotta be her parents helping her with this, I would assume. Or maybe clients I don't even know. And also they indict her, charging her with eight additional counts related to the anonymous communications during the investigation. So she's pretty. Pretty shit out of luck here. They raise her bail another $10,000. She obviously posts that she's out on $2.1 million bail at this point. November 18th. Oh, by the way, Dr. Bradley Miller, given immunity to testify.

[Jimmy Whisman]

For heaven's sake.

[James Pietragallo]

That's wild. Because who would help her with this? I don't know. I mean, let's be honest here and realistic. So November 18, she gets a new lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, who the best way I could put this is if. Okay, if the word scumbag had a pulse, it would be this man, in my opinion. I don't want to get sued, but he looks like the slimiest. Like when people go, I hate lawyers, they mean, this guy is who they hate. Not all lawyers, they hate this guy, right? He represents terrible people. He's just a scumbag, this guy. But a successful lawyer and lawyer, I mean, everybody needs a defense attorney, certainly. Yeah, gotta have it. So I don't look at defense attorneys as terrible people because they defended. Everyone has to have a defense. That's the law. That's our country. This guy just seems to really go out of his Way to represent the worst fucking people, in my opinion. Allegedly. So he said, I wouldn't have come on to this case unless I was 100% convinced of her innocence.

[Jimmy Whisman]

100% convinced.

[James Pietragallo]

She said. Our defense in this case is this. You ready?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

She didn't do it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

No.

[James Pietragallo]

That's it. That's the defense. She didn't do it.

[Jimmy Whisman]

All right.

[James Pietragallo]

He said that the police failed to consider Dr. Miller as a suspect and automatically concentrated on Melanie and gave him immunity prematurely, essentially. Once you give immunity, you can't take immunity unless they violate the conditions of the agreement. So for the trial, the prosecution called 64 witnesses. The defense called 16. All this is going on. 21 witnesses who testified were qualified as experts. Hundreds of exhibits were brought in. They had the scrub. They had a shirt with shit on it. They had the blankets. They had human sawdust. They had the guy up there with the garbage bags and a fucking jeweler's loop looking at those. It was a lot. The prosecution claims Melanie is completely responsible for the murder and argued that all the evidence points at Melanie, including going to family court two days after the disappearance. She said the real reason for being in family court, as the evidence will show, the real reasons not to get a restraining order, the real reason is to create a defense. They said she drugged him with a powerful sedative, shot him in the head and chest and dismembered him. Stuffed him in the suitcases, dumped him in the bag.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

The defense says, no, no, no, no, she didn't. Everything that lady said was bullshit. And he walked back to the desk like my cousin Vinnie. Yeah. So they called the drugging allegations sheer speculation, countering that no drugs were found in his system during the autopsy. The defense team also says that police were wrongingly focused on her at the exclusion of others, including not only Dr. Miller, but what about mobsters? Because of his massive gambling debts. The problem is he doesn't have massive gambling debts. And that's what they found.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He's a winner.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah. They brought in. It's funny, because they brought in a pit boss from one of these casinos who said, this guy wins all the time. He opened up the books and said he was up 30 grand on us last year.

[Jimmy Whisman]

He's kicking our ass.

[James Pietragallo]

He's fine. Yeah, he's doing great. John Rice here said that he was excited about purchasing the home and all that kind of thing. He said that Melanie told him that the two had an argument and became physical. And Rice said that Melanie told him William had left the house, withdrew a large sum of money and said if he came. And she said if he came back, she wouldn't be accepting. So Rice said he told her he'd try to help out any way he could. And so that's how this all started. She was getting him, too. And then the wife found the sketch. And he goes into all of that. So he also identified that he had weeder weights.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, he did.

[James Pietragallo]

He had those weights that were found. He goes, I recognize the name Weider. And they bring in the plastic bag expert, saying they were made on the same factory, the same line, within close proximity to each other, maybe even several hours, Meaning the bag the. That she had in her garage in a bag that he was wrapped in. Now, but they said there are, under cross examination, there are chances of the bags coming from two different manufacturer. 0 chance it came from two different manufacturers. But they said that the chemical compounds showed slight differences in the two bags that could indicate chemical compounds are different or it just might be environmental factors. But he's saying they're the same bag. They definitely came from the same manufacturer. They bring the suitcase in and take it out. He was in here. They stuffed him in there. They bring in Leon Serrao, who's a veteran casino supervisor at the Taj Mahal, who said that Bill gambled large sums of money and won big at Atlantic City. He said that Bill, the year before his murder, had converted $97,000 into chips and walked away with a profit of over 30 grand. He did very well. He's a smart gambler. So we kicked him out, told him never to fucking come back here again. Get the fuck out of here. We know you fucking winners have 10 drinks and fucking throw your mortgage away. That's what we're looking for.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, that's what we want.

[James Pietragallo]

So also a former nurse who testifies that she visited the townhouse weeks after the murder and Melanie would not let her go into the basement of the townhouse. Oh, she also said the townhouse quote smelled like a morgue. Oh, that's not good. Then old Dr. Brad takes the stand. Oh, boy. And he comes on, I didn't do anything. We had an affair. Taina asks him, did you have plans to live together? And Dr. Miller said, no, sir, not at that point. Later on, they said, and did you know that she did not want a divorce because she was concerned about the kids growing up without a father? And he said, no, I wasn't aware of that. He admitted to Dr. Miller that he waited more than a year before telling investigators he was even having the affair.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I didn't want to look like I.

[James Pietragallo]

Had anything to do with it. Yeah, I wanted to stay away from this shit. He also acknowledged lying to a state grand jury when he told the panel that the affair had ended in March 2025. You know, when the cops contacted him, in reality, it continued until the day she was arrested. They told him, fuck, she killed this guy, and we think you helped. And he went, I gotta fuck her more. Yeah, this is getting me hot. Holy shit. So they said, so you were not truthful to the grand jury. And he said, yes, sir. That was a lie. Also, a toxicologist here saying, yes, they didn't find chloral hydrate in his system because they didn't test for chloral hydrate in his system. They tested. They found a small amount of alcohol in his blood and urine. That's what they were testing for. They weren't testing for everything because they figured the cause of death was goddamn bullet holes and being cut up, not poison. So they didn't test for everything. And then it was too late by the time they came up with the chloral hydrate. So also the medical examiner, the sawdust guy. Verdict comes in three days of deliberation.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Really?

[James Pietragallo]

Three days. That is a lot.

[Jimmy Whisman]

What are they hung up on?

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know. But they come back and find her guilty on all four charges of the first indictment, which are all murder and weapons and all that kind of thing, so. But she is acquitted of the second indictment of sending the letters to the attorney general because they have no proof that was her. It's obviously her, but there's no proof.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Seems like it, yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

So it seems like that's what they were arguing over, was that they probably had them. They probably had the murder done in 15 minutes. And they were like, okay, now to this other thing. Well, you don't know if she sent that. And they argued about that.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Probably sent that. Yeah. Well, we don't. We already.

[James Pietragallo]

We don't know. During sentencing. Here we go. The judge says this. And this is not. This first line is not what you want to hear when you're about to be sentenced by somebody who has the power to put you away forever. Quote, history is replete with evildoers. Yeah, that's a bad start. Oh, shit. You're about to compare me to Hitler. This is not good. You're about to compare me to Pol Pot. This is bad. Replete with evildoers who have done some good deeds, and they also have had their supporters. She callously murdered her husband and even joked about his Death and intercepted phone calls. He called the crime especially heinous, cruel and depraved. He said, the depravity of this murder simply shocks the conscience of the court. You, ma', am, may fuck off. Life plus 15 years for the other charges. Life is with parole, though. But due to the provisions of the no Early Release act, that means that she is ineligible for parole for 63 years and nine months.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ooh wee.

[James Pietragallo]

On the murder charge. And then fucking 40.40ish at this point. And then, yeah, 63 and 3 quarter years she has to serve, which is bad. This would make her 101 years old when she's eligible to get out.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Wow. Be 38.

[James Pietragallo]

Bye bye.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Convicted of that. That's crazy.

[James Pietragallo]

See ya. They got Tacopina outside the courtroom and he said she was disappointed. You don't really? Was she? He said, we all took it real hard. You could just see this guy like, you know, I'm full of shit. While he's saying, like, we all took it real hard. Wink, wink.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm pretty upset. Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

When you believe in someone's innocence, you take it real hard.

[Jimmy Whisman]

You too.

[James Pietragallo]

Real hard. She appeals on jury taint and other things. There is people that think she is innocent. There are people that think she's innocent. They exist. There's these two people that do a podcast. I'm not gonna give the name of it because this is. It's fucking asinine. So stupid. Their whole premise is asinine. They basically interview Melanie and have a whole thing of Melanie's innocent.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh. They take her word for it.

[James Pietragallo]

And they take a couple of very specific tiny things. They said, this is Melanie. There were five lands and grooves that my weapon was said to have made based on the company's website. The bullets that came out of my husband had six lands and grooves.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I don't care. Until we find your gun.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, get the gun. What'd you do, throw it in a fucking river? Not only that, your hair is in the tape and you say, what are you talking about?

[Jimmy Whisman]

How's your bikini line hair in the tape?

[James Pietragallo]

There's no murder case, no matter how perfect, that doesn't have a couple of bent tines in it. It's like they always say it's a puzzle. It's like ordering a puzzle where all the pieces are made of glass and then you get it and there's a few broken pieces in there that you can't put in there, but you still see the picture. Winnie the Pooh. You know what I mean? What are we talking about? Here.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, look, there's Piglet. This is pretty sure you're it.

[James Pietragallo]

Hey, look, it's Rue back there. So, yeah, that's what she said. She said that the search is also. She said, I didn't do those searches.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, really? Who did? Yeah, the boys.

[James Pietragallo]

She said, I am a nurse, or I was a nurse and I don't need to look up for things like that. If I wanted to look up something like that. I have a physician's desk reference, I have a book that I can look in that doesn't leave an Internet history. But it was also 2004. You might not have known that shit left in Internet history, number one. Number two, you might have been able to look up poisons in there, but I don't think in the physician's desk book there is a. In the index, it's undetectable poisons.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I don't think under age, there is how to commit murder.

[James Pietragallo]

That's. And then how do you explain how to commit murder? That's the point. You search that too stupid. There's also a pet. There was pet hair found, animal hair found on the body. But they said, it's a fucking blanket. It could have been on the blanket. Throw a blanket on the floor, it'll pick up everything. So someone might have had that on their shoe. Who knows? So these podcast idiots said they looked high and low to connect Melanie to some pet. And once they found out there was no way to connect them to the the pet hairs, it became not of evidentiary value anymore. Their whole podcast episode is summed up well in a Reddit post by a user named petetherawdog. So, peterawdog, he said, all right, I just finished this series, and the points the two podcasters made at the end were so weak, I don't see why this case was rehashed for them. The gun's website contained an error that said 5 lands and grooves instead of 6. The webmasters wouldn't have noticed a simple error on their site until something brought it to their attention. So it's really not that sketchy. And they fixed it after the case. It was a typo, not a major thing. The garbage bags aren't really what nailed her coffin. So it isn't significant to me that they didn't verify every test to make sure they came from the exact same role. No, that is not the thing. And the animal hairs also not being tested because Melanie didn't have pets or the fact that they never found it doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter. That's the thing. It doesn't matter at all. September 20th of 2020, they did a 2020 story on her as well. And her excuse. This is how she found the car. She said, I'm driving down, I take the first pass on this. On this highway, I see a dark sedan and lo and behold, there it is. There he is, there's the car. And she said she stumbled upon the car. And then she said that in the past, when they're angry at each other, it's a way of messing with. Is moving their cars.

[Jimmy Whisman]

We've done it a lot. We always stumble upon each other's car and we move it a couple blocks away.

[James Pietragallo]

She said, it sounds ridiculous sitting here saying it, and I acknowledge that, but it's the truth. Yeah, right. The prosecutor said this also requires two drivers, so certainly someone helped her. Someone's getting away with this shit anyway. They also did a dateline on her. All this type of shit. She said, the killer is out there and it's not me. After all these years, I still feel hurt. I still feel bothered. Like, how could someone think that I did that?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Great question.

[James Pietragallo]

And the book is to have and to kill nurse Melanie McGuire. An illicit affair and the Gruesome Murder of Her Husband. If I told you that title, that's.

[Jimmy Whisman]

The whole show, why would you read.

[James Pietragallo]

Save Yourself Three Hours. Yeah. By John Glatt. It was also a 2022 Lifetime movie as well. She will be considered for parole in May 2073.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Okay.

[James Pietragallo]

She's at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton Township. And that everybody is Woodbridge Township, New Jersey. Gotta bust through the end very quickly here. Hope you enjoyed that and hope you enjoyed it when we did it live, too. Number one, shut up and givememurder.com get your tickets for live shows all ready for 2026. Nashville, Durham, Atlanta, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver, Buffalo, Royal Oak, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Dallas, San Jose, Sacramento, Tarrytown and Boston. Come get your tickets. Salt Lake City sold out. Buffalo's damn close. So get your. Get your tickets. Also Phoenix. Get tickets for both those shows because that is. It's almost gone. And that's a club. It's our smallest place. We play. It's going to sell out fast, so get in there and do that. Shut up and give me murder dot com. Listen to the other two shows, Crime and Sports and your stupid opinions because we do them and they're fucking hilarious. Sorry, but they are. God damn it. That's our Christmas wish that you do for us.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Please do that.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, that's the Game. So do that for sure. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all of the bonus material. $5 a month or above. You get hundreds of episodes. You can binge immediately of bonus stuff. You've never heard new ones every other week. This week we're gonna have a poll whether it will be old timey murders or this mall collapse that killed a bunch of people. You decide. In addition to that, you get all the shows. We make ad free as well. And you get a shout out at the end of the show, by the way. Smalltown Murder on Instagram, Smalltown Pot on Facebook. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the people who would never, ever, ever, ever leave human sawdust by our remains. Hit me with them right fucking now.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Executive producers are Ashley Williams, Cindy Morante, Liz Vasquez, Peyton Meadows. Gary. Gary Howard is in King, Hillary Idaho. How about that, Gary?

[James Pietragallo]

That's far trip for you, Gary. Be careful, bud. I saw he was driving in the snow the same night I was driving. I thought that was funny. I saw that. Terrible shit.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah. Tiffany Gonzalez, man. Sanjah Sanja. Remember him?

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Eight years later, still don't know how to pronounce his name.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he's one of our first patrons ever.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah, he really is.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Talena Johnson. Jensen. Talana Jensen.

[James Pietragallo]

I know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Talena. Dorothy Katz, Janice Hill.

[James Pietragallo]

Thank you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

And Robin Baldos, thank you all so much for what you're doing.

[James Pietragallo]

Thank you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Other producers this week are. Ryan Bender, Happy Hour in Jeffersonville, Ohio.

[James Pietragallo]

Oh, boy.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yikes. The poor bastard. Nicole with no last name. Dolores Barfield, Jessica Mascarenius, Stephen King.

[James Pietragallo]

Novel. Novel. Dolores Barfield.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Is that a person? Is that.

[James Pietragallo]

No, it's Claiborne.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Oh, okay. Zach Fisher.

[James Pietragallo]

Don't make literary references to Jimmy. Note to that. I'll go. What are they of any kind? Even pop culture? Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, I've got Andrea Borer, MK, Valerie Kinsella, Joe Bob, Bo Diddley, Flavor Aid McGee, whatever that means.

[James Pietragallo]

Wow.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Jeffrey Jones, Liam Posa, Marty Johnson, Sarah Greentree, Tiffany Hayes, Heather Little, Scott Whitlaw, Val, Doggy Dog. Val Doggy Dog. Get it?

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Because it's new. Do you do the doggy dog?

[James Pietragallo]

All right.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Jay Slam, David Colander, Angie Griggs, Bridgman, Richard Woolley, Taryn Barker, Mary Bertram, Ava Laderman, Mel with no last name. Grace with no last name. Kimberly Valduza, Joe Portman, Sean Lauer, Kristen Day, Beatriz Rojas, Lindsey Do Haniwek Daohenu. All right. Jenny Beach. What is this? Mira Nalika Mira. Nalika Singh. Dave, I think maybe not Jax.

[James Pietragallo]

That would be amazing.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That'd be the most incredible.

[James Pietragallo]

He psyched for you.

[Jimmy Whisman]

I'm so proud to happen today.

[James Pietragallo]

He's so proud of you, honestly.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Amanda Herbert. Amanda Briss. Amanda Bree. Perhaps Keith Maggart. Frank with no last name. Anna Boontonhoff, whatever that is. Kate MTC arena with no last name. And this is where it's gonna get weird and I'll tell you why. Bridger White, Adam Wolf, Emily Mace, Tiffany Albrecht. Albright perhaps Tim Crone. Philip Arena. There's never been arena in this ever. And I've got several, so I imagine they are all related.

[James Pietragallo]

I hope so.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Ben with no last name.

[James Pietragallo]

Family Arena.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Yeah, yeah. Ty B era. Cole. Book Cole. Booch Ash Maynard, Jillian Arena. There's another arena. Katie would know last name. Ben would know last name. Ty Wood. Ann Marie Schultz. Jesse Rose, Brooks Friedland. Shelby Patrick Lauren. Husky kj. Johnny o'. Mara, Johnny o'. Meara. Shannon Anderson. Baca Cruiz, Basketball player, perhaps Ashley Marshall. I don't know. Morgan with no last name. Regina Falange.

[James Pietragallo]

What?

[Jimmy Whisman]

Like the fingers, right? Those are phalanges.

[James Pietragallo]

Yeah.

[Jimmy Whisman]

This is with the ph though, so perhaps not. Donna Dorn Doernbos. April Young, Christopher Leopardi. Rachel Bramer. Anna with no last name. Beth Sparrow. Lindbergh. Linderborg Marin with no last name. Bob Van Westenberg. Jay with no last name. Tony Dodson, Ben Folla. Justine would know last name. Josh Oaks. Justine Marie. Zero Stars. If I could could. Jared Simmons. Krista Ziembo. Caitlin Newhart. Erica Stevens Live with no last name. Jen with no last name. Anna Caballero, I believe. Is that cowboy? What is caballero? Boot.

[James Pietragallo]

It's something.

[Jimmy Whisman]

It's Spanish for something Western.

[James Pietragallo]

Tori Skater, back in the day.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Steve Caballero. Yeah. And then there was Richie. Max is the lead singer. Soul Fly. But that's Cavallaro. Cavallaro? Never mind.

[James Pietragallo]

I don't know.

[Jimmy Whisman]

That doesn't Sepultura Gun to my head. Chris Coates. Cassandra Griffin. Monster Cock McGillicuddy. Torianne Britt. I said that Roger would know last name.

[James Pietragallo]

With a big ass Dick. Huge one.

[Jimmy Whisman]

Stephanie Dalton. Glenn Kading. Joanne would know last name. Judd would know last name. Jimmy Anuzawiski. Alexandra Mac Maka. Macagon Makogan. Jill Alder. Tennille. Tenille Whitten. Marissa with no last name. Marlisa with no last name. Jewel with no last name. Noel Royer. And all of our patrons. You guys are the best. Thank you.

[James Pietragallo]

Thank you so much, everybody. You wonderful people. We appreciate what you've done for us in our lives in this run and all year. Thank you so much. Just thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for coming to live shows. Thank you for everything you do do for us. Can't wait to see everybody next year. You want to follow us on social media, you can go to the website and find that there. Just thank you so much. Enjoy your families this holiday season. Merry Christmas, everybody. Thank you so much. And until next week, everybody, it's been our pleasure. Bye. Sam.